COVID-19

23 results back to index


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Department of Defense, Operation Inherent Resolve, 18; Hollie McKay, “ISIS Launched More Than 100 Attacks in Iraq in August, a Sharp Uptick from Previous Month,” Fox News, September 3, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/world/isis-launches-more-than-100-attacks-in-iraq-throughout-august-a-sharp-uptick-from-previous-month.   49.  “Amid COVID-19, ISIS Supporters Step Up Efforts to Reestablish Presence on Social Media,” Memri, May 15, 2020, https://www.memri.org/jttm/amid-covid-19-isis-supporters-step-efforts-reestablish-presence-social-media; Hollie McKay, “How ISIS Is Exploiting the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Fox News, May 20, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/world/how-isis-is-exploiting-the-coronavirus-pandemic; David Choi, “Fake N95 Face Masks Were Being Sold on This ISIS-Linked Website—and It Shows How Terror Groups Are Using COVID-19 as a Propaganda Tool,” Business Insider, August 29, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-face-mask-website-isis-2020-8.   50.  

For a timeline of the various closures and actions between Russia and China during COVID-19, see Ivan Zuenko, “The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Russo-Chinese Border,” ASAN Forum, May 9, 2020, http://www.theasanforum.org/the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-the-russo-chinese-border/.   70.  Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, “China to Russia: End Discriminatory Coronavirus Measures Against Chinese,” Reuters, February 26, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-moscow-letter/china-to-russia-end-discriminatory-coronavirus-measures-against-chinese-idUSKCN20K1HU.   71.  Tommy Yang, “Unease at the Border: Russia and China Seek to Downplay Covid-19 Outbreak in Suifenhe,” The Guardian, April 18, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/18/unease-at-the-border-russia-and-china-seek-to-downplay-covid-19-outbreak-in-suifenhe.   72.  

“Peru Records First Confirmed Case of Coronavirus, President Vizcarra Says,” Reuters, March 6, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-peru/peru-records-first-confirmed-case-of-coronavirus-president-vizcarra-says-idUSKBN20T1S9.   79.  Linnea Sandin, “Covid-19 Exposes Latin America’s Inequality,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 6, 2020, https://www.csis.org/analysis/covid-19-exposes-latin-americas-inequality.   80.  Will Feuer, “South America Is a ‘New Epicenter’ of the Coronavirus Pandemic, WHO Says,” CNBC, May 22, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/22/south-america-is-a-new-epicenter-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-who-says.html.   81.  Ryan Dube, “Coronavirus Hits Peru Hard Despite Strict Lockdown,” Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-hits-peru-hard-despite-strict-lockdown-11592146800; Diego Quispe, “Decretan estado de emergencia para frenar el coronavirus” [State of emergency declared to stop the coronavirus], La República, March 16, 2020, https://larepublica.pe/sociedad/2020/03/16/coronavirus-en-peru-decretan-estado-de-emergencia-para-frenar-la-epidemia/; Marco Aquino, “Peru Calls Up 10,000 Army Reserves to Enforce Quarantine,” Reuters, April 1, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-peru-army/peru-calls-up-10000-army-reserves-to-enforce-quarantine-idUSKBN21J69A; Reuters Staff, “Peru Looks to Restart Economy After Months-Long Lockdown,” Reuters, July 1, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-peru/peru-looks-to-restart-economy-after-months-long-lockdown-idUSKBN2427CP.   82.  


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

Gilbert Welch, argued that we were probably previously treating too many minor issues—everything from mammographic irregularities (which might disappear on their own) to mild heart attacks (which often have better outcomes without medical care than with it—since patients are often subjected to risky procedures driven more by the financial exigencies of the hospitals and specialists than by the patients’ needs).50 The pandemic forced hospitals to increase the threshold for admitting sick patients so as to keep beds available for COVID-19 patients. Similarly, doctors order billions of dollars of unnecessary tests and procedures every year, but the coronavirus pandemic provided a lesson in their lack of utility. So, just like the pandemic gave us a glimpse of a world with less traffic, it also gave us a glimpse of a world with less medical injury. It’s a lesson the medical system is likely to internalize, because health-care workers certainly do not want to harm people. Once detailed studies of the vast natural experiment provided by COVID-19 are analyzed in the post-pandemic period, thresholds for the treatment of a host of conditions are likely to be reconsidered.

Out of the U.S. population of 330 million, about 3 million people die each year, for a crude death rate of 9.1 people per thousand. If, for the sake of argument, we assume that over a year, the coronavirus pandemic causes one million deaths in the United States, the crude death rate would rise to 12.1 per thousand. The average person’s absolute risk of dying from the virus would remain small—roughly a three-out-of-a-thousand chance (1,000,000 extra deaths from COVID-19 divided by 330,000,000 people). That seems low, but this level of mortality would still far surpass all of the threats to life an average person faced that year, making COVID-19 the number-one cause of death. One careful analysis of weekly mortality data from Sweden compared deaths per day in 2020 to prior years, quantifying the excess deaths and assessing the impact on mortality across all ages (using the method invented by William Farr in the nineteenth century, discussed in chapter 2).

Kindhauser, “Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever in Angola—Fighting Fear and a Lethal Pathogen,” New England Journal of Medicine 2005; 352: 2155–2157. 34 D. Cyranoski, “Profile of a Killer: The Complex Biology Powering the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Nature, May 4, 2020. 35 J. Howard, “Novel Coronavirus Can Be Spread by People Who Aren’t Exhibiting Symptoms, CDC Director Says,” CNN, February 13, 2020. 36 T. Subramaniam and V. Stracqualursi, “Fact Check: Georgia Governor Says We Only Just Learned People without Symptoms Could Spread Coronavirus. Experts Have Been Saying That for Months,” CNN, April 3, 2020. 37 Z. Du et al., “Serial Interval of COVID-19 among Publicly Reported Confirmed Cases,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 2020; 25: 1341–1343. 38 W.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Google’s system was 94.4 percent accurate and “outperformed all six radiologists” in cases in which a prior CT scan for the patient was not available, and “was on-par with the same radiologists” when a previous image was available for comparison.45 Likewise, radiology AI systems were employed on an emergency basis in some cases as the coronavirus pandemic threatened to overwhelm hospitals. Amidst a shortage of tests for COVID-19, chest X-rays that showed evidence of the pneumonia often caused by the virus became an important alternative diagnostic technique. Some hospitals experienced backlogs resulting in delays of six hours or more as radiologists struggled to analyze the images.

Semantic Scholar offers AI-enabled search and information extraction across more than 186 million published research papers in virtually every scientific field of study.82 In March 2020, the Allen Institute joined with a consortium of other organizations including Microsoft, the National Library of Medicine, the White House Office of Science and Technology, Amazon’s AWS division and others to create the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, a searchable database of scientific papers relating to the coronavirus pandemic.83 The technology enables scientists and healthcare providers to rapidly access answers to specific questions in a broad range of scientific areas, including the biochemistry of the virus, epidemiological models, and treatment of the disease. As of April 2021, the database contained more than 280,000 scientific papers and was being heavily used by scientists and doctors.84 Initiatives like these have enormous potential to be crucial tools in accelerating the generation of new ideas.

And as things have become ever more unequal, the mechanism that distributes the income that powers consumer demand is eroding, and that in turn is undermining economic growth and dampening down the sustained rise in productivity that is crucial to future prosperity. The pandemic has completely upended things and plunged us into an unprecedented economic crisis, but all these trends remain in place and will likely produce headwinds that will make it even more challenging to recover from our current predicament. POST COVID-19 AND RECOVERY The coronavirus pandemic has unleashed a global economic crisis of unprecedented ferocity. In the United States and in countries throughout the world, millions of jobs have been lost very nearly overnight, entire sectors have been virtually shut down and the economy has plunged into the deepest downturn since the Great Depression in the 1930s.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

., p.475. 19 Elisabeth Zerofsky, ‘How Viktor Orbán Used the Coronavirus to Seize More Power’, New Yorker, 9 April 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-europe/how-viktor-orban-used-the-coronavirus-to-seize-more-power; Amy Goodman and Natashya Gutierrez, ‘As Virus Spreads in Philippines, So Does Authoritarianism: Duterte Threatens Violence Amid Lockdown’, Democracy Now, 3 April 2020, https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/3/coronavirus_asia_philippines_rodrigo_duterte; Maya Wang, ‘China: Fighting COVID-19 With Automated Tyranny’, Human Rights Watch, 1 April 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/01/china-fighting-covid-19-automated-tyranny; Isaac Chotiner, ‘The Coronavirus Meets Authoritarianism in Turkey’, New Yorker, 3 April 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-coronavirus-meets-authoritarianism-in-turkey; Kenneth Roth, ‘How Authoritarians Are Exploiting the COVID-19 Crisis to Grab Power’, Human Rights Watch, 3 April 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/how-authoritarians-are-exploiting-covid-19-crisis-grab-power. 20 R. Hortulanus, A.

With that definition in mind, ask yourself: when did you last feel disconnected from those around you, whether family, friends, neighbours or your fellow citizens? When did you last feel uncared for or unheard by your elected politicians, or that no one in a position of authority cared about your struggles? When did you last feel powerless or invisible at work? You are not alone. In the years preceding the coronavirus pandemic two-thirds of those living in democracies did not think their government acted in their interests.38 Eighty-five per cent of employees globally felt disconnected from their company and their work.39 And only 30% of Americans believed that most other people could be trusted, a very substantial drop since 1984, when around 50% did.40 When it comes to feeling disconnected from each other, can you remember a time when the world has felt this polarised, fractured and divided?

But we must go back further to fully understand how we became so disconnected, siloed and isolated. For the ideological under-pinnings of the twenty-first century’s loneliness crisis pre-date digital technology, the most recent wave of urbanisation, this century’s profound changes to the workplace and the 2008 financial crisis, as well as, of course, the coronavirus pandemic. They go back instead to the 1980s when a particularly harsh form of capitalism took hold: neoliberalism, an ideology with an overriding emphasis on freedom – ‘free’ choice, ‘free’ markets, ‘freedom’ from government or trade union interference. One that prized an idealised form of self-reliance, small government and a brutally competitive mindset that placed self-interest above community and the collective good.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

The WHO requests verification: Bollyky and Patrick, “Improving Pandemic Preparedness,” 36, 38. China announces its first virus death: Taylor, “Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic.” first case outside of China in Thailand: “Archived: WHO Timeline—COVID-19,” April 27, 2020. United States confirms its first case: Taylor, “Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic.” infected more than 570: Taylor, “Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic.” global death toll reaches at least 360: Taylor, “Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic.” outside of China in the Philippines: “Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Situation Report—13,” World Health Organization, February 2, 2020, https://who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200202-sitrep-13-ncov-v3.pdf?

no travel history to an outbreak area: Schumaker, “How Coronavirus Got Started”; Erin Schumaker, Morgan Winsor, and Ivan Pereira, “Latest American Infected with Coronavirus Has No Relevant Travel History: CDC,” ABC News, February 26, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-military-coronavirus-patient-cases-surge-italy-south/story?id=69225004. reports its first COVID-19 death: Taylor, “Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic.” died from it earlier: Stephanie Soucheray, “Coroner: First US COVID-19 Death Occurred in Early February,” Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, April 22, 2020, https://cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/coroner-first-us-covid-19-death-occurred-early-february. declares COVID-19 a “pandemic”: Chappell, “Coronavirus: COVID-19 Is Now Officially a Pandemic, WHO Says.” Thirty-eight Americans have died: “March 11 Coronavirus News,” CNN, March 12, 2020, https://cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-03-11-20-intl-hnk/index.html.

Here’s What It Really Knew and When,” Time, May 19, 2020, https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid19/; “News Scan for Dec 31, 2019,” Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, accessed September 29, 2020, https://cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/12/news-scan-dec-31-2019. first COVID-19 death: Derrick Bryson Taylor, “A Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” The New York Times, August 6, 2020, https://nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-timeline.html. no new cases since January 3: Bollyky and Patrick, “Improving Pandemic Preparedness,” 37. virus sprang up in Thailand: “Archived: WHO Timeline—COVID-19,” World Health Organization, April 27, 2020, https://www.who.int/news/item/27-04-2020-who-timeline---covid-19. spread to Japan and South Korea: “Coronavirus Timeline: Tracking the Critical Moments of COVID-19,” NBC News, accessed September 23, 2020, https://nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-timeline-tracking-critical-moments-covid-19-n1154341.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

And Lorena’s death was a reminder that the full measure of what she’d been enduring, and what she’d meant to her familia, had been obscured for some time. * * * In the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic, many writers understood that it was going to exacerbate the dangers that members of the underclass already faced with other pathogens. Even before any COVID-19 vaccine was in production, strains on the supply chain for medical resources like syringes were already affecting millions of people around the world living with tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria. Researchers estimated that the interruptions to HIV care caused by COVID-19 would result in an additional four hundred thousand AIDS deaths worldwide in 2020.

While Michelle Perdue says she can get “very creative” in helping such people, they might just give up. They might inject alone, or inject with unsterilized syringes—placing themselves and their social circle at higher risk for both viruses and overdose death. The coronavirus pandemic made all this worse. Perdue told me that in the six months after the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, the Cabell-Huntington Harm Reduction Program started seeing about half as many people as it had before the pandemic, and not because rates of addiction and drug use were decreasing—which likely means more risk of HIV and HCV transmission and overdose deaths.

By using cheaply paid, enslaved firefighters, California was saving one hundred million dollars a year, and Harris’s office argued that it would be too “dangerous” to let these firefighters go—not because they would pose a danger to their communities, but because it would be “a difficult fire season” without enslaved labor. California wasn’t the only state using enslaved labor during the coronavirus pandemic. During a shortage of hand sanitizer, New York governor Andrew Cuomo bragged about bottling it in Empire State prisons, and Texas paid incarcerated workers just two dollars an hour to move the corpses of people killed by COVID-19. When Harris accepted her nomination for the vice presidency the same week her home state burned, she said there was “no vaccine for racism.” This made me think about how, as attorney general, she could have released the kinds of prisoners who made excellent firefighters years before.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The UNHCR received some 174 reports from migrants and refugees who suffered sexual and gender-based violence in the island hotspots.51 The excruciating confinement and compounding traumas, which many refugees describe as “psychological war,” also severely impact mental health.52 MSF provides emergency care to an average of one person a day for attempted suicide and self-harm at the Lesbos hotspot.53 The crisis for refugees contained in the Greek island hotspots came to a head during the coronavirus pandemic, with conditions in the overloaded and unsanitary camps creating an ideal breeding ground for transmission of the virus. In the Vial camp on Chios Island, refugees set fire to parts of the camp’s administrative buildings to protest the death of an Iraqi woman whom they believed to have died of Covid-19.54 Along with the EU-designated hotspots, the EU–Turkey deal is a cornerstone of border policy along the eastern route and turns refugees into tradeable commodities.

Laster Pirtle, “Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States,” Health Education and Behavior, April 26, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198120922942. 15.Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Making Abolition Geography in California’s Central Valley with Ruth Wilson Gilmore,” interview by Leopold Lambert, The Funambulist, February 2019, https://thefunambulist.net/making-abolition-geography-in-californias-central-valley-with-ruth-wilson-gilmore. 16.UN High Commissioner for Refugees, “Beware Long-Term Damage to Human Rights and Refugee Rights From the Coronavirus Pandemic: UNHCR,” April 22, 2020, www.unhcr.org/news/press/2020/4/5ea035ba4.html. 17.Chris Scicluna, “Malta Refuses to Let Ship Carrying 57 Rescued Migrants Dock,” Independent, May 1, 2020, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/malta-migrant-rescue-ship-dock-eu-mediterranean-a9494536.html; Patrick Kingsley and Haley Willis, “Latest Tactic to Push Migrants from Europe?

Without valid social security numbers, many are ineligible for federal relief stimulus checks or adequate health insurance,25 trapped in the American dream of choosing to sell one’s labor for a wage under deadly conditions or death by unemployment and destitution. Meanwhile, the US billionaire class has experienced a wealth surge of $434 billion during the coronavirus pandemic.26 The horrific exploitation of migrant and undocumented workers and the cruel expulsion of migrants and refugees is justified through dehumanizing far-right rhetoric scapegoating racialized bodies as “infectious” and “diseased.” Trump referred to coronavirus as “the Chinese virus,” ignoring the web of capitalist industrial food production extending from China to the US; he also linked the need for a border wall to the threat of disease transmission from migrants.27 Trump’s racist fearmongering echoes a long and xenophobic history of vilifying Irish, African, and Asian people for outbreaks of cholera, Ebola, and SARS.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

But, as Scotland’s homelessness laws and changes to private tenancies in recent years show, a Housing First approach which encapsulates the right to housing is completely doable. No Going Back If this all sounds Pollyanna-ish, consider what happened in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The path from idealism to reality is neither as romantic nor as winding as we might have been led to believe. In early 2020, as Covid-19 spread, it reminded us that our society – for all the technological advancements of the last few centuries – was only the sum of its fleshy parts. Far from being invincible, we were still as susceptible to natural disasters as we ever were and, like us, our free market, capitalist economy and the structures we had built on it were fallible.

Luxembourg faces a crisis: Thomas Klein and Yannick Lambert, ‘Luxembourgers flock across borders for cheaper housing’, Luxembourg Times, 31 May 2021, www.luxtimes.lu/en/luxembourg/luxembourgers-flock-across-borders-for-cheaper-housing-60b3859dde135b92368cf04e Part Two: Squalor with a very different perspective from the rest of us: Clair Thorstensen-Woll, ‘Poor housing can no longer be swept under the carpet’, The King’s Fund, 22 September 2020, www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2020/09/poor-housing-covid-19 overcrowded housing actually helped to spread Covid-19: Adam Tinson and Amy Clair, Better Housing Is Crucial for Our Health and the COVID-19 Recovery, The Health Foundation (2020). Available at www.health.org.uk/publications/long-reads/better-housing-is-crucial-for-our-health-and-the-covid-19-recovery 7 No Nails It is one of hundreds of thousands: Lord Richard Best, ‘Conversion of private rented homes to social housing could help turn the tide of this crisis’, Inside Housing, 8 April 2021, www.insidehousing.co.uk/comment/comment/conversion-of-private-rented-homes-to-social-housing-could-help-turn-the-tide-of-this-crisis-70325 it gives tenants the right to take them to court: Karen Buck, ‘My Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill becomes law’, 30 January 2019, www.karenbuck.org.uk/campaigns/2019/01/30/my-homes-fitness-for-human-habitation-bill-becomes-law/ A ‘non-decent’ home: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, English Housing Survey 2017 to 2018: Private rented sector, National Statistics (2019).

But home was not a safe place for everyone to be. We now know that poor housing likely led to deaths which could have been avoided (more on that in chapter 9). Historically, ruptures – pandemics, wars, revolutions – have encouraged humans to break with the past and reimagine their society. The coronavirus pandemic, wrote the Indian novelist and political campaigner Arundhati Roy, ‘is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.’ As lockdowns were imposed, all of us occupied a unique position. Janus-like, we were able to see forwards and backwards, assessing life before and after the rupture happened.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

It was one of those moments, just a reminder that they see me as somebody who is obviously doing this work. ” Those connections were especially valuable to her students in the middle of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, during the coronavirus pandemic, and in the upswell of protest after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. For her, all of these issues were intertwined, and they all underlined the question of sanctuary at school. When the schools shut down to prevent further spread of COVID-19, Jimenez’s school managed to distribute a number of laptops to students, but, she noted, it was still incredibly difficult to translate classroom teaching to virtual learning.

The popularity of the concept of “burnout”—for what is burnout but the feeling experienced when one’s labor of love is anything but—reminds us of this. Repeated cycles of layoffs, steady low wages, and cutbacks to the private sector have made jobs harder and harder to love. The conditions under which “essential” workers had to report to the job during the coronavirus pandemic revealed the coercion at the heart of the labor relation. We are being punished for all the choices we have made even as we have continued to do what we are told—racking up student debt, working longer hours, answering work emails on our phones from parties, funerals, and bed, and doing more, always, with less. 24 Neoliberalism relies on the labor of love ideology to cover up the coercion that was in fact required to push people into the workplace at the origin of capitalism.

In Part One, we will follow the labor of love as it moves from women’s unpaid work in the home through paid domestic work, teaching, retail work, and the nonprofit sector. Other forms of work that could just as easily have gone into this section include nursing, grocery store work, restaurant work, and call center jobs. It is worth noting that much of this work is the “essential” or “key” work of the coronavirus pandemic: these workers are the people expected to risk their lives to keep going to work in order for the rest of us to survive. In these jobs workers are expected to provide service with a smile or genuine, heartfelt care; they are expected to put themselves second to the feelings and needs of their customers or charges.


pages: 101 words: 24,949

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City by Jack Brown

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Etonian, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, knowledge economy, lockdown, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, post-war consensus, quantitative easing, remote working, Richard Florida, sceptred isle, superstar cities, working-age population, zero-sum game

This book attempts to untangle some of these strands, however briefly, to try to better understand them. It begins with an overview of the facts, before undertaking a historical review of past attempts to address London’s perceived dominance within the UK. Next, it explores public perceptions and the relationship between rhetoric and reality. In closing, it considers the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which arrived between this book’s conception and its delivery, and some possibilities for the future. This book This addition to Haus’s Curiosities series draws heavily on my research for a report entitled London, UK, conducted in 2018 for Centre for London. I am extremely grateful to Centre for London for the opportunity to spend time getting to know this subject and for its support – particularly that of Richard Brown (no relation).

While the reality is of course complex and multifaceted, a little more understanding about the capital itself – from its historical origins to its place in the UK economy today – is important. So, too, is an understanding of the much-maligned people who live there. Londoners At the start of 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic, London was home to nine million people, and this figure was expected only to increase. London’s growth has been driven primarily by ‘natural change’ (births exceeding deaths), but also by new arrivals from overseas. In terms of domestic migration (that is, movement within the UK), more people tend to leave London for elsewhere in the country than arrive each year, with over half moving to the neighbouring southeast or east of England regions, often when reaching their thirties, perhaps to start families outside the city.1 Somewhat relatedly, the average Londoner today is almost five years younger than the UK average, although the number of Londoners over the age of sixty-five is also increasing.2 Today’s Londoners are also incredibly diverse, in every sense of the word.

One leader of a northern city council described London to me as ‘a place, but it’s also a code word for a lot of things – parliament, judiciary, the media… it’s code for, in effect, the pillars of our state.’7 Regional politicians and commentators alike have repeatedly criticised national government as ‘London-centric’ in recent years; this criticism has only become more prevalent in response to the regional approach to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. For others, ‘London’ can mean the national media. In early 2019, journalist Helen Pidd observed that ‘too many people who are making the news, and reporting on the news, live in London, and that really affects your world view. Sometimes it really does feel like a different country down there.’8 The idea that London-based institutions dominate national life is widespread, particularly in the arena of politics and policymaking but also in the national conversations that inform these processes.


pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

Perhaps the pandemic will open the door to more of these efforts, on other denialist topics, in the future. Lessons from Coronavirus: Unify and Conquer One of the most fascinating aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the chance to see what a denialist campaign looks like in real time, and learn what it may teach us about how to fight science denial in general. Many have noted, for instance, the startling parallels between COVID-19 denial and climate denial.41 In the coronavirus pandemic, we have a microcosm of the threat from global warming: it is an existential threat to the entire planet that portends fairly drastic economic impact and requires worldwide cooperation to address it.

Emphasizing scientific consensus works    Empirical research by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Sander van der Linden, and others shows that appealing to the fact of a scientific consensus is one of the most compelling ways to get someone to change their mistaken empirical beliefs.49 Yes, of course there will be those who deny that there is a consensus. But research shows that even deniers—and, notably, especially conservative ones—can be compelled by scientific consensus.50 The work cited here was done before the coronavirus pandemic, and mostly involved the acceptance of consensus on climate change, but there is no reason to think that this would not also apply to COVID-19 and other forms of science denial. With COVID-19, we saw this play out in real time through Trump’s evolving view on wearing masks, one of the most effective public health measures for fighting the virus. On April 3, 2020, the CDC made its first recommendation to start wearing cloth face masks when out in public.

They needed someone to respect and listen to them—which in turn built trust—and as a result that trust was returned. Contrast this with the situation involving anti-maskers and other deniers around the coronavirus pandemic in the US. The political division and partisan context seems intractable, but is it? As Warzel points out, most people—even Republicans—still trust science.60 So what is the problem? Perhaps it lies not just with COVID-19 deniers but with the way we have been communicating with them. Consider the fact that this is a novel coronavirus. We’ve never seen it before, which means that we don’t know everything about it.


pages: 82 words: 24,150

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

From the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s to modern-day Greece, the long arm of the imperial creditor has been used many times to subject peripheral states to the discipline of capital. The coronavirus pandemic will only deepen these relationships of imperial extraction. 4 Reconstruction It is often said that, in the midst of a crisis, everyone is a socialist. With massive state intervention now the only thing standing between economies battered by the coronavirus pandemic and global economic meltdown, few politicians or economists are calling on governments to step back, let businesses fail, banks go bust and homeowners default on their mortgages – even if some countries have attempted to extricate themselves from lockdown and return to ‘business as usual’ before getting the virus under control.1 In normal times, neoliberals have a knee-jerk reaction against any interference in the operation of supposedly free, competitive markets.

Some use anti-competitive practices designed to penalise their rivals, most use various accounting mechanisms to avoid taxation in order to boost their profits, and almost all have cosy relationships with local and national governments, which often allow them to access preferential treatment denied to their competitors.15 States stood by as these companies became ever more powerful, often providing them with subsidies, turning a blind eye to regulatory arbitrage and competing with one another to attract their investment. As the coronavirus pandemic has deepened, the big tech companies have emerged as some of the greatest beneficiaries. Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook now make up a fifth of the entire value of the S&P 500 Index, and Jeff Bezos is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.16 Part of the reason these companies’ stocks are doing so well is that their business models, to varying extents, render them immune from the impact of the virus-induced lockdown.

Barry, ‘The Single Most Important Lesson From the 1918 Influenza’, New York Times, 17 March 2020. 2 Kim Moody, ‘How “Just-in-Time” Capitalism Spread COVID-19’, Spectre, 8 April 2020. 3 James Politi, ‘Fed’s Bullard Says Risk of Financial Crisis Remains’, Financial Times, 2 June 2020. 4 Stephen Morris, George Parker and Daniel Thomas, ‘UK Banks Warn 40%–50% of “Bounce Back” Borrowers Will Default’, Financial Times, 31 May 2020. 5 OBR, Fiscal sustainability report 2020, Office for Budget Responsibility, 2020. 6 Sergei Klebnikov, ‘How Bad Will Unemployment Get? Here’s What the Experts Predict’, Forbes, 31 March 2020. 7 Phillip Inman, ‘UK Economy Likely to Suffer Worst Covid-19 Damage, Says OECD’, Guardian, 10 June 2020. 8 International Labour Organization and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ‘The Labour Share in G20 Economies’, report prepared for the G20 Employment Working Group, Antalya, Turkey, 26–27 February 2015. 9 Shawn Donnan, ‘Globalisation in Retreat: Capital Flows Decline since Crisis’, Financial Times, 21 August 2017; Susan Lund, Eckart Windhagen, James Manyika, Philipp Härle, Jonathan Woetzel and Diana Goldshtein, ‘The New Dynamics of Financial Globalization’, McKinsey Global Institute, August 2017. 10 Chibuike Oguh and Alexandre Tanzi, ‘Global Debt of $244 Trillion Nears Record Despite Faster Growth’, Bloomberg, 15 January 2019. 11 For a discussion of these forecasts, see Grace Blakeley, ‘The Next Crash: Why the World Is Unprepared for the Economic Dangers Ahead’, New Statesman, 6 March 2019. 12 Ibid. 13 Tithi Bhattacharya and Gareth Dale, ‘Covid Capitalism: General tendencies and possible “leaps”’, Spectre, 23 April 2020. 14 See IMF, Policy Responses to Covid-19: Policy Tracker, Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2020. 15 In full, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility, Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility, Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, Primary Dealer Credit Facility and Municipal Liquidity Facility. 16 Scott Minerd, ‘We Are All Government-Sponsored Enterprises Now’, Global CIO Outlook, Guggenheim Investments, 10 May 2020. 17 Philip Turner, ‘Containing the Dollar Credit Crunch’, Project Syndicate, 18 May 2020. 18 Robert Brenner, ‘Escalating Plunder’, New Left Review 123, May-June 2020, p. 22. 1 The Last Days of Finance Capitalism 1 BEA, ‘GDP by State’, Suitland, MD: US Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2020, bea.gov. 2 Drew DeSilver, ‘For Most U.S.


pages: 286 words: 92,521

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy by F. Perry Wilson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive bias, Comet Ping Pong, confounding variable, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, personalized medicine, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, sugar pill, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes

., “Coronavirus Vaccine Development: From SARS and MERS to COVID-19,” Journal of Biomedical Science 27, no. 1 (December 20, 2020): 104, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12929-020-00695-2. 7 But the facts most commonly misinterpreted: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), accessed February 16, 2022, https://vaers.hhs.gov. 8 This has resulted in some humorous: Harriet Hall, “Reality Is the Best Medicine: Diving into the VAERS Dumpster,” Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2018, https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/11/diving-into-the-vaers-dumpster-fake-news-about-vaccine-injuries. 9 As of June 13, 2022: United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Public Health Service (PHS), Centers for Disease Control (CDC) / Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) 1990–06/03/2022, CDC WONDER Online Database, accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html on June, 13, 2022, 1:12:10 PM. 10 But the political divide with regard to: Ashley Kirzinger et al., “KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: July 2021,” Kaiser Family Foundation, August 4, 2021, https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-july-2021. 11 As of this writing, these approaches: Matthew E. Oster et al., “Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US from December 2020 to August 2021,” JAMA 327, no. 4 (January 25, 2022): 331–40, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.24110. 12 Compared to the risk of death from COVID-19: Anirban Basu, “Estimating the Infection Fatality Rate Among Symptomatic COVID-19 Cases in the United States,” Health Affairs 39, no. 7 (July 2020): 1229–36, https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00455. 13 Doctors’ predictions were almost always: E.

While we can increase our chances of leading long, healthy lives by exercising, eating well, and not smoking, we all know someone who was the very picture of a healthy lifestyle and yet got struck down by cancer, heart disease, or infection. A virus that can be asymptomatic in some people and fatal in others, as is the case for COVID-19, is terrifying on its face. The conclusion “An invisible bundle of nucleic acid may kill me in the next few months” is untenable, and so we all use motivated reasoning to find some other conclusion that we can live with. More acceptable conclusions range from “I am healthy enough that if I get COVID-19, I’ll be fine” to “The cure for COVID-19 is in the vitamin aisle” or “COVID-19 doesn’t even exist.” I have heard them all, they are all comforting, and they are all wrong. The truth is, unfortunately, we are not in total control of our health—we can only hedge our bets.

If you feel that unrestricted gun purchasing poses a public health threat and encourages more violence, you are likely to interpret the link between gun ownership and homicide as strong evidence that guns cause people to hurt others. Same fact, different interpretation. That is motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning about medical topics is nothing new, but in the summer of 2021, the death toll associated with it began to rise significantly. Motivated Reasoning and Vaccine Hesitancy The coronavirus pandemic had raged throughout 2020, keeping my hospital full and my colleagues and me in a near-constant panic around our own safety and that of our families. But by December 2020, the first vaccines received emergency use authorization by the FDA. I likened it, in a live CNN segment, to J. R. R.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Mathiesen, “How the EU’s Green Deal Survived the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Politico, December 17, 2020. 42. Oroschakoff and Mathiesen, “How the EU’s Green Deal Survived the Coronavirus Pandemic.” 43. “Investment Report 2020/2021,” European Investment Bank, 2020; www.eib.org/attachments/efs/economic_investment_report_2020_2021_en.pdf. ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/economy-finance/assessment_of_economic_and_investment_needs.pdf. 44. S. Haroutunian, S. Hauptmeier, and S. Osterloh, “Draft Budgetary Plans for 2021: A Review in Times of the Covid-19 Crisis,” ECB Economic Bulletin, August 2020. 45.

“Editorial: Coronavirus Epidemic Poses Test for Rule of Law.” 44. Che, Du, and Chan, “Unequal Pain: A Sketch of the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Migrants’ Employment in China.” 45. R. McMorrow and N. Liu, “Chinese Shun People from Centre of Coronavirus Outbreak,” Financial Times, February 12, 2020. 46. S. Fan and F. Yingzhe, “Fewer Than a Third of China’s Nearly 300 Million Migrant Laborers Have Returned to Work,” Caixin, February 18, 2020. 47. M. Funke and A. Tsang, “The People’s Bank of China’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic: A Quantitative Assessment,” Economic Modeling 93 (2020): 465–73. 48. T. Mitchell, D.

“Emerging Markets’ Experiments with QE Have Not Turned Out Too Badly,” Economist, October 29, 2020. 34. G. Beningo, J. Hartley, et al., “Credible Emerging Market Central Banks Could Embrace Quantitative Easing to Fight COVID-19,” VoxEU, June 29, 2020. 35. OECD Policy Responses to Coronavirus (COVID-19), “COVID-19 and Global Capital Flows,” July 3, 2020. 36. OECD, “COVID-19 and Global Capital Flows.” 37. A. W. Akhlas, “Bank Indonesia in Talks with US, China on Currency Swaps,” Jakarta Post, April 2, 2020. “Indonesia Central Bank Says in Talks with U.S. Fed, China on Swap Lines,” Reuters, April 2, 2020.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

., “How to Recognize and Understand the Century’s Great Changes [如何认识和理解百年大变局].” 41Ibid.Zhang Yunling [张蕴岭] et al. 42“Deeply Understand the Big Test of Epidemic Prevention and Control [深刻认识疫情防控这次大考],” People’s Daily [人民日报], April 23, 2020. 43Chen Qi [陈琪], “The Impact of the Global Coronavirus Pandemic on the Great Changes Unseen in a Century [全球新冠疫情对百年未有大变局的影响],” Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China [中华人民共和国商务部], April 22, 2020, http://chinawto.mofcom.gov.cn/article/br/bs/202004/20200402957839.shtml. 44“Peking University Center for American Studies Successfully Held an Online Seminar on U.S. and China Relations under the Global Pandemic [北京大学美国研究中心成功举办‘全球疫情下的美国与中美关系’线上研讨会],” School of International Studies, Peking University [北京大学国际关系学院], April 13, 2020, https://www.sis.pku.edu.cn/news64/1324227.htm. 45Chen Jimin, “COVID-19 Hits International System,” China-US Focus, April 27, 2020, https://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/covid-19-hits-international-system. 46Wu Baiyi, “American Illness.” 47“Deeply Understand the Big Test of Epidemic Prevention and Control [深刻认识疫情防控这次大考].” 48Yuan Peng [袁鹏], “The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Great Changes Unseen in a Century [新冠疫情与百年变局],” Contemporary International Relations [现代国际关系], no. 5 (June 2020): 1–6. 49Shi Zehua [史泽华], “Why Has American Populism Risen at This Time [美国民粹主义何以此时兴起],” U.S.

One article published on the Ministry of Finance and Commerce website argued, “the epidemic shows that the United States and Western countries are increasingly unable to carry out institutional reforms and adjustments, and are caught in a political stalemate from which they cannot be extricated.”43 Similarly, the editor of a major CASS journal on American studies argued, “The shortcomings of the US federal government’s bureaucratization and ‘small government’ tendency over the past half century have been very evident in this major public health crisis response,” and that dysfunction would reproduce “political radicalization.”44 A professor at the Central Party School noted, with apparent pleasure, that COVID-19 would bolster Western nationalism and further damage the liberal order. “Before the COVID-19 outbreak, nationalism had become a trend [supporting China’s] rejuvenation. The Trump administration and Brexit delivered star performances,” he argued, and COVID-19 would “further strengthen” these in ways that benefited China.45 According to Wu Baiyi, the economic calamity, social unrest, and poor COVID-19 response meant that “the country that has bragged about being ‘a light on a hill’ has sunk into sustained social unrest. . . .

From China’s perspective—which is highly sensitive to changes in its perceptions of American power and threat—these two events were shocking. Beijing believed that the world’s most powerful democracies were withdrawing from the international order they had helped erect abroad and were struggling to govern themselves at home. The West’s subsequent response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and then the storming of the US Capitol by extremists in 2021, reinforced a sense that “time and momentum are on our side,” as Xi Jinping put it shortly after those events.3 China’s leadership and foreign policy elite declared that a “period of historical opportunity” [历史机遇期] had emerged to expand the country’s strategic focus from Asia to the wider globe and its governance systems.


Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

Jenkins, “Wuhan Lab Theory a Dark Cloud on China,” Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2021. 42.US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories, 6th Edition,” June 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/labs/BMBL.html; and Nicoletta Lanese, “Only One Lab in China Can Safely Handle the New Coronavirus,” Live Science, January 22, 2020. 43.Ping Liu, Wu Chen, and Jin-Ping Chen, “Viral Metagenomics Revealed Sendai Virus and Coronavirus Infection of Malayan Pangolins (Manis javanica),” Viruses 11, no. 11 (2019): 979. 44.David Quammen, “Did Pangolin Trafficking Cause the Coronavirus Pandemic? The Elusive Animals’ Possible Involvement in the Origins of COVID-19 Gives Them a Weird Ambivalence: Threatened and, Perhaps, Dangerous,” New Yorker, August 24, 2020. 45.Kangpeng Xiao et al., “Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-Related Coronavirus from Malayan Pangolins,” Nature 583, no. 7815 (2020): 286–9; Tao Zhang, Qunfu Wu, and Zhigang Zhang, “Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak,” Current Opinions in Biology 30, no. 7 (2020): 1346–51; Lam, Jia, and Cao, “Identifying SARS-CoV-2-Related Coronaviruses in Malayan Pangolins”; and Quammen, “Did Pangolin Trafficking Cause the Coronavirus Pandemic?”

., “Clinical Features of Patients Infected with 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Wuhan, China,” Lancet 395, no. 10223 (2020): 497–506. 4.Abutaleb et al., “The U.S. Was Beset by Denial and Dysfunction as the Coronavirus Raged.” 5.Michael Shear et al., “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19,” New York Times, April 1, 2020. 6.Bandler et al., “Inside the Fall of the CDC.” 7.Ibid. 8.Jennifer Hansler, Curt Merrill, and Isaac Yee, “The Many Times Trump Has Praised China’s Handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” CNN, May 19, 2020. That same day, I published an op-ed for CNBC stating that “the epidemic in China is likely much broader than official statistics currently suggest. A lot of mild cases probably remain unrecognized.

., “The Inside Story of How Trump’s Denial, Mismanagement and Magical Thinking Led to the Pandemic’s Dark Winter.” 5.Dareh Gregorian, “Brazilian Official Who Met Trump at Mar-a-Lago Tests Positive for Coronavirus,” NBC, March 12, 2020; and Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History. 6.Lisandra Paraguassu and Anthony Boadle, “As Bolsonaro Flouts Warnings, Coronavirus Spreads in Brazil,” Reuters, March 24, 2020. 7.Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, “Woodward Book: Trump Says He Knew Coronavirus Was ‘Deadly’ and Worse than the Flu While Intentionally Misleading Americans,” Washington Post, September 9, 2020. 8.CBS News, “Transcript: Scott Gottlieb on ‘Face the Nation,’ March 8, 2020,” March 8, 2020. 9.Facher, “President Trump Just Declared the Coronavirus Pandemic a National Emergency.” 10.Meridith McGraw and Caitlin Oprysko, “Inside the White House During ‘15 Days to Slow the Spread,’” Politico, March 29, 2020. 11.Lawrence Gostin and Lindsay Wiley, “Governmental Public Health Powers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Stay-at-Home Orders, Business Closures, and Travel Restrictions,” JAMA 323, no. 21 (2020): 2137–8. 12.President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America, “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” US Department of Justice, March 15, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/doj/page/file/1258511/download. 13.Ibid. 14.Jeff Mason and Steve Holland, “Trump Urges U.S. to Halt Most Social Activity in Virus Fight, Warns of Recession,” Reuters, March 16, 2020. 15.Benjamin Siegel, “How Anesthesia Machines Can Help Hospitals with Ventilator Shortages Fight Coronavirus,” ABC News, March 27, 2020; and Kathleen Moore, “Local Anesthesiologists Converting Machines to Ventilators,” Post Star, March 26, 2020. 16.Jessie Yeung et al., “Pence Announces 4,000 Ventilators Will Be Shipped to New York,” CNN, March 24, 2020. 17.Sean O’Kane, “How GM and Ford Switched Out Pickup Trucks for Breathing Machines,” Verge, April 15, 2020. 18.Kirsten Korosec, “GM, Ford Wrap Up Ventilator Production and Shift Back to Auto Business,” Tech Crunch, September 1, 2020. 19.Tamara Keith et al., “How 15 Days Became 45: Trump Extends Guidelines to Slow Coronavirus,” National Public Radio, March 30, 2020. 20.Foege commented, “In retrospect it seems clear—we didn’t know how to eradicate smallpox when we started.


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Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

The government defines an “unemployed” person as someone who has actively looked for work in the previous four weeks, but this definition excluded many throughout the pandemic, including over four million workers who reported in February 2021 that they did not look for work “because of the coronavirus pandemic” and over seven hundred thousand workers who were absent from their job “because their employer closed or lost business due to the coronavirus pandemic.” All told, by the summer of 2021, nearly ten million children had lived in a home where one or more adults had lost paid work because of the pandemic.41 This overwhelming wave of pandemic unemployment came with dire consequences.

Lantz, and Renuka Tipirneni, “Association of Social and Demographic Factors with COVID-19 Incidence and Death Rates in the US,” JAMA Network Open 4, no. 1 (January 29, 2021): e2036462, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.36462. 9. Sojourner and Yang, “Effects of Union Certification.” 10. Chen, Chevalier, and Long, “Nursing Home Staff Networks and COVID-19.” 11. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, “COVID-19 Nursing Home Data,” March 8, 2022, https://data.cms.gov/covid-19/covid-19-nursing-home-data; “AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard,” AARP Public Policy Institute, www.aarp.org/ppi/issues/caregiving/info-2020/nursing-home-covid-dashboard.html. 12.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Tracking the COVID-19 Economy’s Effects on Food, Housing, and Employment Hardships, August 9, 2021, www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/tracking-the-covid-19-recessions-effects-on-food-housing-and. 42. Mathieu Despard et al., “COVID-19 Job and Income Loss Leading to More Hunger and Financial Hardship,” Up Front (blog), Brookings, July 13, 2020, www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/07/13/covid-19-job-and-income-loss-leading-to-more-hunger-and-financial-hardship/. 43. Stefani Milovanska-Farrington, Job Loss and Food Insecurity During the COVID-19 Pandemic, IZA Institute of Labor Economics, April 2021, www.iza.org/publications/dp/14273/job-loss-and-food-insecurity-during-the-covid-19-pandemic. 44.


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The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

But think about it for a moment and you realize that the distinction between a baby and a fetus is anything but simple—it’s a deep ethical question that underlies one of the most acrimonious divides in US politics. The statisticians have to draw the line somewhere. If we want to understand what is going on, we need to understand where they drew it. The coronavirus pandemic has raised similar questions. As I write these words, on April 9, 2020, the media are reporting that in the past twenty-four hours, 887 people died with COVID-19 on the British mainland—but I happen to know that number is wrong. Data detective work from the Scottish statistician Sheila Bird tells me that the true figure is more likely to be about 1,500.5 Why such a huge disparity?

We would find that behind each claim—true, false, or borderline—was a fascinating world to explore and explain. Whether we were evaluating the prevalence of strokes, the evidence that debt damages economic growth, or even the number of times in The Hobbit that the word “she” is used, the numbers could illuminate the world as well as obscure it. As the coronavirus pandemic has so starkly illustrated, we depend on reliable numbers to shape our decisions—as individuals, as organizations, and as a society. And just as with coronavirus, the statistics have often been gathered only when we’ve been faced with a crisis. Consider the unemployment rate—a measure of how many people want jobs but do not have them.

For a long time, researchers into muscle-derived stem cells were baffled by why they sometimes regenerated and sometimes didn’t. It seemed entirely arbitrary, until it occurred to someone to check whether the cells came from males or females. Mystery solved: it turned out the cells from females regenerated, while those from males did not. The gender blind-spot has yet to be banished. A few weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, researchers started to realize that men might be more susceptible than women, both to infection and to death. Was that because of a difference in behavior, in diligent handwashing, in the prevalence of smoking, or perhaps a deep difference in the biology of the male and female immune systems?


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The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Sometimes they can galvanize the public brilliantly to avoid catastrophes, as in the mobilization during World War II against sudden existential enemies after December 7, 1941, or during the post-Sputnik space program of the 1960s, or during the same decade when the government and larger culture mobilized to address the threat of smoking, or in spring 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic when the United States recalibrated entire industries to meet medical supply demands and successfully created a commercial landscape to hasten a viable COVID-19 vaccination in less than a year. Sometimes, the speed at which 51 percent consensus is reached and minority views are discredited is also frightening. Transgenderism, climate change, females in frontline combat units, and gay marriage, between 2008 and 2020, were transformed from topics of legitimate discussion and debate into rigid, politically correct orthodoxies—often more by regulators than legislators.

An allegiance to the world, in the zero-sum game of fidelity and time, implies some diminishment of commitment to one’s particular homeland. During the COVID-19 outbreak, both former First Ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush spoke at an international symposium titled “One World: Together at Home,” a well-meaning global-citizen effort designed to support and help fund the World Health Organization. But WHO is a United Nations–affiliated health group that from the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic mouthed Chinese propaganda that the virus was not transmissible between humans, that China had already contained it, and that national travel bans were unnecessary.

Certainly, eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia have had a different sort of historical experience with ethnic tensions and immigration than has western Europe. Eastern European countries especially currently favor border enforcement rather than the abolition of European national border controls under the protocols of the 1990 Schengen Agreement, which, in fact, was suspended for a time during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.10 America, which survived a gory civil war among political and geographical factions, has become so far one of history’s few exceptions. The ultimate rationale of America’s unique Constitution led Americans eventually to define themselves by their shared values, not by their inconsequential appearances.


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Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

., 2007, ‘The human/animal interface: emergence and resurgence of zoonotic infectious diseases’, Critical Review in Biology, Vol. 33, No. 4. 11 The Economist, 2021, ‘The pandemic’s true death toll’. 12 For a full discussion of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, see Goldin, I., 2022, Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World (Sceptre). 13 Kharas, H. and Dooley, M., 2021, ‘Long-run impacts of Covid-19 on extreme poverty’, Brookings Institution (brookings.edu). 14 Sánchez-Páramo, C., et al., 2021, ‘Covid-19 leaves a legacy of rising poverty and widening inequality’, World Bank (worldbank.org). 15 Kharas and Dooley, ‘Long-run impacts of Covid-19 on extreme poverty’. 16 UN Women, 2022, Ukraine and the food and fuel crisis: 4 things to know, unwomen.org. 17 Hayward, E., 2021, ‘Covid-19’s toll on mental health’, Boston College (bc.edu). 18 The Economist, 2022, ‘Covid learning loss has been a global disaster’. 19 World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF, 2021, ‘The state of the global education crisis: a path to recovery’ (worldbank.org). 20 The Economist, ‘Covid learning loss has been a global disaster’. 21 Ibid. 22 Harper, K. and Armelagos, G., 2010, ‘The changing disease-scape in the third epidemiological transition’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Vol. 7, No. 2. 23 Kenny, The Plague Cycle, p. 177. 24 World Bank Data, 2022, ‘Air transport, passengers carried’ (data.worldbank.org). 25 Davenport, R., 2020, ‘Urbanization and mortality in Britain, c. 1800–50’, The Economic History Review, Vol. 73, No. 2. 26 O’Neill, A., 2022, ‘Child mortality rate (under five years old) in the United Kingdom from 1800 to 2020’, Statista (statista.com). 27 Kenny, The Plague Cycle. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Jones, K., et al., 2008, ‘Global trends in emerging infectious diseases’, Nature, Vol. 451. 31 Morand, S. and Walther, B., 2020, ‘The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread’, Working paper. 32 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021, ‘Zoonoses’ (cdc.gov). 33 Greger, ‘The human/animal interface’. 34 Ibid. 35 UNFAO, 2022, ‘State of the world’s forests’ (fao.org). 36 Young, R., 2014, ‘Take bushmeat off the menu before humans are served another Ebola’, The Conversation (theconversation.com). 37 Cawthorn, D-M. and Hoffman, L., 2015, The bushmeat and food security nexus: A global account of the contributions, conundrums and ethical collisions, Food Research International, Vol. 76. 38 Maxmen, A., 2022, ‘Wuhan market was epicentre of pandemic’s start, studies suggest’, Nature.com. 39 Kenny, The Plague Cycle. 40 Smitham, E. and Glassman, A., 2021, ‘The next pandemic could come sooner and be deadlier’, Center for Global Development (cgdev.org). 41 Barnes, O., 2022, ‘Just where and when will the next pandemic strike?’

We next widen our aperture, in Chapter 7, to consider cities in poorer countries, including the unique challenges that arise from the speed with which they are growing, and the risk of urbanization without prosperity as the traditional manufacturing-led development path becomes increasingly difficult to follow in light of the accelerating pace of automation. Finally, we consider two existential risks confronting humanity – infectious diseases and climate change – and what they mean for cities. In Chapter 8, we look back at the relationship between infectious diseases and cities through history, reflect on the learnings from the coronavirus pandemic and define how cities can help make us more resilient against future pandemics. In Chapter 9, we explore the potential disruption that cities will face from climate change in the decades ahead, the actions that need to be taken to protect populations from the rising impact and frequency of flood, drought and heat extremes, and the role that cities must play in helping to accelerate decarbonization and slow climate change.

Still, for all its flaws, the London system is far superior to car-centric cities in the US like Los Angeles or Atlanta, where a distinctive lack of public transit options acts as a poverty trap for any resident unable to afford a car. In the next chapter, we ask if and how this story might change as a result of the surge in remote working following the coronavirus pandemic. Are we at the start of a new cyclical process of well-off workers fleeing urban centres for greener pastures? 5 Remote Work: The Threat to Cities Enthusiasm for the idea of remote working is nothing new. The first to systematically explore its potential in the modern world was the US physicist Jack Nilles, who in 1976 published a book titled The Telecommunications–Transportation Tradeoff.1 Writing against a backdrop of soaring oil prices and growing excitement about the personal computer, Nilles argued that society was approaching a tipping point.


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The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Petersburg.94 Through this process of information laundering, what started as an utterly noncredible allegation has now gained wider traction. A partisan operative may tweet, “Did Hillary commit child molestation?” A cable pundit wonders, “Is there any truth to the rumors that the American military originated the coronavirus pandemic?” Before you know it, a message hatched in the troll farms of St. Petersburg or the intelligence agencies of Tehran has migrated from the fever swamps of the Internet to the nightly news, legitimizing insidious narratives crafted to divide Americans and discredit democracy. It’s frightening to watch.

Chinese assets have included Candace Claiborne, a former State Department employee who passed internal documents to Chinese intelligence, and Dongfan Chung, a former Rockwell and Boeing engineer who became the first American ever convicted of economic espionage. Chapter 5 THE HILL AND THE VALLEY Mr. Bezos, I believe you’re on mute.”1 It was July 29, 2020, and Congress was in session. Remotely, that is. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the hotly anticipated hearing into the antitrust practices of the tech industry was taking place partly by videoconference. On one coast sat the solons of Congress. On the other, the titans of tech—Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Republicans, convinced that tech was secretly censoring and “shadow banning” conservative voices, began holding contentious hearings, featuring sinister names like Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse.34 Devin Nunes, then the chairman of the House intelligence committee, sued Twitter for defamation.35 Several Republican senators demanded that the Federal Trade Commission look into social media companies’ content decisions.36 In mid-2020, after Twitter had the temerity—for the first time—to affix a gentle fact-check to a tweet from Donald Trump, the president issued a legally questionable executive order threatening to revoke legal protections for social media companies.37 By the summer of that year, amid the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests for racial justice, a poll found that more than half of Americans had “very little” confidence in social media platforms. Positive opinions of these companies even ranked below Congress, typically one of the least admired bodies in America.38 Ahead of those antitrust hearings in July, the Washington Post’s Tony Romm compared the showdown to past congressional battles with the big banks and Big Tobacco.39 Tech, once the darling of DC, was now spoken of in the same breath as the peddlers of pulmonary poison.


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The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Neither Merkel nor: “Why Germany’s Low COVID-19 Death Rate Might Be a Mirage,” CBC News. On March 22: Posaner, “Germany’s Merkel Bans Meetings of More Than 2 People to Slow Coronavirus.” Germany had a testing system: “Combating the Coronavirus Pandemic: Bosch Develops Rapid Test for COVID-19,” Bosch Global. Robert Koch Institute: Robert Koch Institute, “Navigation and Service.” spending growth has slowed: McWilliams et al., “Medicare Spending after 3 Years of the Medicare Shared Savings Program.” The COVID pandemic created: Goldstein, “Trump Administration Says It Will Pay Hospitals for Treating Uninsured Covid-19 Patients.”

Library & Information History 33, no 2 (April 2017): 123–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/17583489.2017.1299427. Collins, Sean. “The Anger behind the Protests, Explained in 4 Charts.” Vox, May 31, 2020. www.vox.com/2020/5/31/21276004/anger-police-killing-george-floyd-protests. “Combating the Coronavirus Pandemic: Bosch Develops Rapid Test for COVID-19.” Bosch Global. Accessed December 25, 2020. www.bosch.com/stories/vivalytic-rapid-test-for-covid-19. “Common Core Math Fails to Prepare Students for STEM.” Pioneer Institute, October 1, 2013. https://pioneerinstitute.org/news/lowering-the-bar-how-common-core-math-fails-to-prepare-students-for-stem. Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Birds are thought: World Health Organization, “Influenza (Avian and Other Zoonotic).” Smallpox was circulating: Spinney, “Smallpox and Other Viruses Plagued Humans Much Earlier Than Suspected.” AIDS emerged in the Congo: Sample, “HIV Pandemic Originated in Kinshasa in the 1920s, Say Scientists.” COVID-19 had only: Taylor, “The Coronavirus Pandemic: A Timeline.” Domesticated animals are generally: “Eastern Equine Encephalitis Virus (EEEV): The Role of Diagnostics,” American Society for Microbiology. The Northeast of the US: Levine et al., “Mice as Reservoirs of the Lyme Disease Spirochete.” US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Lyme Disease.”


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Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Big numbers can be difficult to process, but for comparison, according to my employer, The Economist, which developed a tracker of “excess deaths,” roughly eighteen million people were probably killed worldwide in total by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021. So outdoor air pollution kills half as many people each year as coronavirus did—year in and year out—and yet we shut down our economies to prevent COVID-19 from spreading, but with air pollution we often carry on as though it is normal—an acceptable risk. The reason is partly that the vast majority of deaths happen in the poorest countries. A map of PMI 2.5 levels worldwide—that is, the tiniest sort of soot particles that can penetrate deeply into a human being’s lungs—shows that they are highest almost entirely in the poorest countries.

From 2010 to 2018, the number of people using bikes daily to get around Paris, including in the suburbs, increased by 30 percent. In the past twenty years, the proportion of Parisian households (in the city proper) who own a car has fallen from 60 percent to 35 percent. Air pollution, which peaked in 2016, has been gradually falling. And since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the transformation has accelerated dramatically. When the city shut down in March 2020, Hidalgo quickly realized that with public transport off limits for safety reasons, the city needed to make sure that Parisians did not all get back into their cars. Pretty much overnight, it installed 60 kilometers of new bicycle lanes, quickly nicknamed coronapistes by locals.

The reason bikes are so common in Amsterdam or Copenhagen “is not a question of genetics, or the fact that they are flat cities,” Najdovski told me. “It is that at a time in the 1970s and 1980s, these cities gave priority to active mobility instead of giving space to motorized traffic.” In Copenhagen, as in Paris with the coronavirus pandemic, it took a crisis. In 1973, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil-producing states introduced an embargo on oil shipments in protest of American and European support for Israel. The price of a barrel of oil quadrupled from $2.90 to more than $11. With it, the price of gasoline shot up, and the world plunged into an economic crisis.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Pepinsky, “Partisanship, Health Behavior, and Policy Attitudes in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” SSRN, March 30, 2020, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3562796. (Note: This study, and those by Painter and Qiu and Allcott et al. below, has not been peer-reviewed.) 86 less likely to shelter in place: Marcus Painter and Tian Qiu, “Political Beliefs Affect Compliance with COVID-19 Social Distancing Orders,” SSRN, July 3, 2020, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3569098; Hunt Allcott, Levi Boxell, Jacob Conway, Matthew Gentzkow, Michael Thaler, and David Y. Yang, “Polarization and Public Health: Partisan Differences in Social Distancing During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” SSRN, June 2020, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3574415. 86 thirty incidents of arson or vandalism: Adam Satariano and Davey Alba, “Burning Cell Towers, out of Baseless Fear They Spread the Virus,” New York Times, April 10, 2020. 86 “motivated reasoning”: Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 98, 104. 87 “high-information voters”: Ezra Klein, “Why the Most Informed Voters Are Often the Most Badly Misled,” Vox, June 8, 2015. 87 “rationalizing voters”: Christopher H.

Azar II, “Secretary Azar Delivers Remarks on Declaration of Public Health Emergency for 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” White House, January 31, 2020, https://www.hhs.gov/about/leadership/secretary/speeches/2020-speeches/secretary-azar-delivers-remarks-on-declaration-of-public-health-emergency-2019-novel-coronavirus.html. 79 stop performing non-urgent care: Alice Park and Jeffrey Kluger, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Forcing U.S. Doctors to Ration Care for All Patients,” Time, April 22, 2020. 79 heart attack patients: S. J. Lange, M. D. Ritchey, A. B. Goodman et al., “Potential Indirect Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Use of Emergency Departments for Acute Life-Threatening Conditions—United States, January–May 2020,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MMWR Morb Mortal Weekly Report 69 (2020):795–800; and Will Feuer, “Doctors Worry the Coronavirus Is Keeping Patients Away from US Hospitals as ER Visits Drop: ‘Heart Attacks Don’t Stop,’ ” CNBC, April 14, 2020. 80 swine flu could kill 65,000 in Britain . . . some 450 Britons died: Jonathan Ford, “The Battle at the Heart of British Science over Coronavirus,” Financial Times, April 15, 2020; David D.

Price, “A Coronavirus Quarantine in America Could Be a Giant Legal Mess,” Atlantic, February 16, 2020. 46 90,126 units: Editorial Board, “Federalism Explains Varied COVID-19 Responses,” Columbus Dispatch, May 8, 2020, https://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20200508/editorial-federalism-explains-varied-covid-19-responses. 47 and even fax: For inadequacies of America’s Covid-19 test reporting, see Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, “Choke Point for U.S. Coronavirus Response: The Fax Machine,” New York Times, July 13, 2020. 47“health cards”: On Taiwan’s near-real-time “health cards”: tracking of Covid-19 patient data, see Jackie Drees, “What the US Can Learn from Taiwan’s EHR System and COVID-19 Response,” Becker’s Hospital Review, July 1, 2020, https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/what-the-us-can-learn-from-taiwan-s-ehr-system-and-covid-19-response.html; and Ezekiel Emanuel in conversation with Fareed Zakaria, Fareed Zakaria GPS: Global Public Square, CNN, July 12, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/07/12/exp-gps-0712-emanuel-on-us-covid-19-response.cnn. 47 18,000 separate police departments: Duren Banks et al., “National Sources of Law Enforcement Employment Data,” US Department of Justice, October 4, 2016, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/nsleed.pdf. 48 former British colonies: Michael Bernhard, Christopher Reenock, and Timothy Nordstrom, “The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival,” International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 2004): 225–50, https://academic.oup.com/isq/article-abstract/48/1/225/2963246. 49 seventeen “layers” of appointees: Paul Light, “People on People on People: The Continued Thickening of Government,” The Volcker Alliance, October 2017, https://www.volckeralliance.org/sites/default/files/attachments/Issue%20Paper_People%20on%20People.pdf. 49 long blog post: Marc Andreessen, “It’s Time to Build,” Andreessen Horowitz, https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/. 50 Pennsylvania Station: Marc J.


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Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

A Year of Uncomfortable Questions Epilogue Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes Index _142549205_ INTRODUCTION The interviewer on the April 9, 2020, webcast had a simple question for the chair of the Federal Reserve: How much support could the central bank provide to businesses and households using its emergency powers? Markets were flailing and people were suddenly losing their jobs as the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation and the world. America was looking to Jerome Powell for help. “There is no limit on how much of that we can do,” Powell sternly explained, dark eyebrows knitted below his silver hair. “Other than that it must meet the test under the law.” Central banking doesn’t offer a lot of mic-drop moments, but that was one.

But after tense days in which the corporate bond market had been essentially shut, it was a headline-grabbing miracle that a handful of America’s largest companies had managed to issue at all. “The opportunities to bring new offerings have been few and often far between,” Bloomberg reported. The coronavirus pandemic had made investors take a warier look at the massive debt pile sitting on corporate balance sheets. Even for the companies with the highest ratings and the lowest chance of default, spreads—the premium corporations were paying to borrow relative to rates on government bonds—had roughly doubled since the start of March.

He negotiated massive tax cuts, began to defang financial oversight, and brought his former OneWest colleagues into other top government and regulatory positions. He failed to hire a full staff for Treasury, but he nevertheless managed to work his way through a sort of libertarian wish list. Now the coronavirus pandemic threatened the very growth he had pledged to unleash. Mnuchin had scrambled to come up with a package that would protect the administration’s prized economy. Once the legislation passed, he was dead set on being seen as a good steward of the cash. Elizabeth Warren had made a habit of calling the pot of money for the Fed a “slush fund,” miffing many at Treasury.


pages: 432 words: 143,491

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

Abrahamson, Elkan 402, 403 Academy of Medical Sciences 237, 336, 338, 353 action plan, UK government (‘contain, delay, research, mitigate’ strategy) 152–66 All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus 396, 398 ambulance service 95, 190, 224, 237, 243, 247, 264, 265–7, 268, 269, 270, 273, 274–5, 282, 294, 290, 291, 392, 416 Arcuri, Jennifer 127–31, 310–11 Ardern, Jacinda 153–4, 308, 337 Ashton, John 100, 190 Ashworth, Jon 74–5, 143, 286 asymptomatic spread, Covid-19 135, 142, 144, 237–8, 332–3 Attwood, Peter 51–2, 55 austerity policies, UK government 7, 87, 88, 101, 104, 105 Austin, Raymond 243–6, 247, 249, 252, 296 Australia 18, 155, 180, 230, 231, 302, 308, 325, 337–8, 365, 394 Blair, Tony 77, 78, 87, 128 Bradshaw, Ben 316–17 Brexit 4, 5, 10, 76, 78, 81, 87, 90, 91, 101, 115–16, 138, 148, 153, 172, 230, 261, 383, 391, 397; Boris Johnson/UK government fixation with and appreciation of danger posed by Covid-19 4, 5, 6, 8, 15–16, 56–7, 64–5, 71–5, 76, 78, 87, 110–12, 115–16, 122–4, 132, 153, 383, 397; Brexit day 71–2; Cummings and 72, 111–13; Hancock and 68–9; Leave Campaign 57, 112, 213; lockdown and 61, 74, 302, 390–1; ministers’ approach to views of scientists and 103–4; no-deal 8, 78, 87, 90, 110, 111, 113, 390; pandemic planning/preparation and 6, 7–8, 15–16, 56–7, 64–5, 68, 72–3, 87, 90, 91, 101, 103–4, 105, 122, 123–4, 132; withdrawal treaty 5, 57 Brown, Gordon 78–9, 88 Buckland, Jane 51, 52 Cain, Lee 184, 213 Cameron, David 66, 77–8, 88, 155, 199, 200–1, 213 care homes/sector 7, 10, 105, 203, 214, 269, 280–4, 366, 384; Boris Johnson lays blame for crisis in on workers 332–3; death toll within 238–9, 263–4, 267, 284, 290; government advice to in early days of pandemic 141, 161; House of Commons’ public accounts committee report into care home crisis 333; lockdown and 280–1; patients discharged from hospital into 90, 203–4, 280–2; residents rejected for hospital admission 269, 282–4; staff 96, 141, 281–2, 290, 291, 310, 332–3 Charles, Prince 230 Cheltenham Festival 167, 168–71, 172, 183, 417 Chequers 115, 149, 151, 199, 216, 277, 295, 329 China 7, 8, 385; Covid-19 death toll in 70, 308–9; Covid-19 imported into UK from 63–4, 70, 72–3, 142; Covid-19 origins in 9, 15–29, 15; Covid-19 outbreak in and cover-up of 9, 30–52, 30, 56–7, 58, 59, 61, 62–3, 70, 75; economy, swift lockdown policy and 308–9; personal protective equipment (PPE) and 71, 85, 86, 122–3, 145; Sars (Sars-CoV-1) pandemic (2002) and 16, 17–20, 21; success of dealing with Covid-19 401; see also Wuhan Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention 22, 34 Churchill, Winston 2, 4, 397 Cobra (national crisis committee) 8, 55–6, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 70, 71, 75–80, 89, 99, 102, 106, 107, 124, 126, 127, 147, 148–9, 152, 153, 154, 174, 190, 196, 199–200, 212–13, 214, 220, 285, 286, 384; Boris Johnson fails to attend first five meetings of during Covid crisis 8, 55–6, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 70, 71, 75–80, 102, 106, 107, 124, 126, 127, 147, 148–9, 285, 286, 384 Conservative Party 60, 65–6, 84, 88, 106, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 143, 249, 288; austerity policies 7, 87, 88, 101, 104, 105; Black and White Ball 119, 134–5, 137, 138, 141, 142, 150; Brexit and 4, 110, 111–12; general election victory (2019) 4, 57, 71–2, 76, 111–12, 116, 138, 319; leadership contest (2019) 68–9, 111, 189, 203, 401; lockdown and 296, 302, 319, 322, 329, 339, 340, 359 Conte, Giuseppe 192–3 Corbyn, Jeremy 76, 127, 137, 138, 240 Coronavirus Act (2020) 226–7 Coronavirus Clinical Characterisation Consortium 396 Cosford, Paul 64, 109 Costello, Anthony 181, 369 Covid-19 (Sars-CoV-2): asymptomatic spread of 135, 142, 144, 237–8, 332–3; first British deaths 51–2, 55, 159–60; first recorded cases in Britain 50–2, 55, 64, 72, 81–3, 107, 108–9, 140–1, 148, 150–1, 165; infectivity rate 60–1, 62, 71, 74, 109, 146, 287, 393, 394; long Covid 365; name 16; origins 15–29, 15; outbreak and cover-up of in China 30–52, 30; reproduction (R) rate 60–1, 139, 296–7, 303, 304, 306, 320, 325, 335, 336–7, 338, 339, 340, 346, 350–1, 354, 359, 363, 365, 387, 400, 403; second wave 11, 176, 183, 184, 310, 328, 330–1, 336, 338, 340–1, 344, 347, 350, 352, 353, 355, 359, 360, 363, 364, 366, 373–4, 376, 402–3, 417; vaccines 11, 27, 106, 178, 349, 353, 357, 387, 391, 393, 394; variants 144, 335, 386, 389, 393 Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group 402 Covid-19 Clinical Information Network (Co-Cin) 249–50 Covid Symptom Study app 50 Crabtree, David 281, 282, 283 Cummings, Dominic 72, 106, 111–14, 120, 126, 138, 139, 140, 153, 171, 195–6, 208, 209–10; Boris Johnson, breakdown of relationship with 363; Covid infection 234–5, 277–8; flouts lockdown rules 234–6, 277–8, 311–16; lockdown measures, becomes believer in swift and decisive (‘Domoscene conversion’) 195–6, 363, 399 Cygnus pandemic rehearsal (2016) 88–90, 95, 104 Daszak, Peter 27–8, 29, 41–2, 45–6 Davey, Ed 149, 299, 322 Davies, Nicholas 140, 184–5, 349, 370, 373 Davis, David 112, 115, 261 De Angelis, Daniela 160, 219, 366, 373 deaths, UK Covid-related 6, 7, 9–10, 11, 59, 61–2, 70, 73, 88, 89, 114, 133, 136, 140, 142, 148, 150, 154, 155, 161, 164–5, 169, 170, 175, 177, 178, 185, 187–8, 191–2, 193, 195, 196, 197, 201, 206, 211, 231–2, 256, 276, 277, 278–9, 280, 284, 287–8, 295, 297, 301–2, 305, 306, 324, 336, 337, 352, 356, 357, 359, 360, 361, 365, 366, 368, 369, 372–3, 376, 378, 385, 386, 391, 394–5, 401–2, 404, 405; deaths at home 263–73, 264, 290, 291; death rate/lethal potential of Covid-19 55, 75, 191–2, 378; European record high death rate 220, 287, 301–2, 305, 320, 307–8, 395, 396; first UK deaths 51–2, 55, 159–60; late lockdown in UK and 9–10, 220, 287–8, 307–10, 320–1, 358, 364–6, 379, 394–5, 397, 401, 404 Department of Health 71, 85, 92, 95, 100, 105, 149, 151, 155, 174, 180, 196, 260, 281 Diamond Princess 83–4, 124–5, 140, 148 Doctors’ Association UK 208, 217, 241, 261, 379 Dorries, Nadine 156, 180, 196–8, 226, 287, 347 Eat Out to Help Out scheme 333–4, 339, 344–5, 349, 375 Ebola 18, 26, 90, 92, 96, 189 Ebright, Richard 43–4, 47–9 economy, UK 4–5, 399; annual borrowing 306–7; Brexit and 4, 73–4, 148, 391; budget (2020) 105, 180–1; Eat Out to Help Out 333–4, 339, 344–5, 349, 375; false dichotomy between health of the nation and that of the economy, UK government offers 340, 379, 400–1; financial markets 146–7, 148, 172, 210; ‘furlough’ scheme 99, 105, 214, 306, 333; G7 group of developed nations, UK economy suffers more than any other 10, 333, 396; GDP, fall in 307–10, 395–6, 401; herd immunity and 177; lifting of lockdown measures and 279, 306–7, 319–20, 328–9, 333–8, 339, 340, 343–5, 371, 398, 399, 400–1; lockdown measures and 9, 61, 74, 156–7, 161, 177–8, 199, 204, 279, 296–7, 304–5, 306–10, 319, 333, 343, 350–1, 352–3, 354, 355–6, 337–8, 359, 360, 364–5, 368, 371, 372, 374, 376, 377, 379, 396, 398, 399, 400–1, 403; pandemic planning and 87, 88, 89, 96, 105, 114; return to offices, government encourages 335–6, 343–4; Sunak and, see Sunak, Rishi; total cost of combating effects of the pandemic 306–7; Treasury support packages 181, 204–5, 214, 306–7, 333–4, 339, 344–5, 350; unemployment 279, 319, 333, 350; World Bank: ‘The Sooner, the Better: The Early Economic Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions during the COVID-19 Pandemic’ report 307, 360, 368 Edmunds, John 132, 139, 140, 159, 160, 184–5, 327, 357–8, 362, 363–4 Edwardes, Charlotte 119–20 Elizabeth II, Queen 210, 230, 240, 241, 256, 295, 298 European Union (EU) 4, 5, 57, 65, 71, 72, 85, 90, 103, 124, 126, 309, 333, 391 facemasks 8, 10, 22, 84, 86, 94–5, 122, 123, 141, 145, 177, 179, 180, 182, 208, 276, 281, 334, 335–6, 374 Farrar, Sir Jeremy 63, 102, 108, 139, 220 Ferguson, Neil 59, 61, 71, 139, 159, 185, 205, 220, 300–1, 320, 321 Fetzer, Thiemo 344–5 financial crisis (2007–08) 88, 172 financial markets 146–7, 148, 172, 210 ‘following the science’, UK government claims to be 7, 153, 157–8, 163, 174, 181–2, 183, 194, 213 foot and mouth disease 79, 80, 167 France 1–2, 9, 33, 83, 86, 144, 149–50, 166, 191, 194, 195, 198, 209, 212, 217, 219, 297, 303, 310, 344, 376, 390 ‘gain-of-function’ experiments 26–7, 48 Gallagher, Mick 290–1 Germany 4, 9, 70, 90, 93, 98, 99, 162, 194, 198, 217, 219, 224, 297, 302, 307, 310, 364, 376 Ghebreyesus, Tedros Adhanom 70, 71, 83–4, 133 Good Morning Britain 104, 301, 315 Gove, Michael 78, 110, 212–13, 236, 256, 285–6, 339, 353, 358, 368, 376, 377, 399 Greater London Authority (GLA) 129, 130, 311 Grove, Betty 272–3 Gupta, Sunetra 254–5 Halpern, David 184, 192 Hammond, Philip 76, 110, 113 Hancock, Matt 55, 61–2, 65–6, 198–9, 249; background 65–7; big claims, propensity for making 141, 198, 238–9; Boris Johnson Covid infection and 256; Brexit and 68–9; care homes and 280; Christmas restrictions and 388; circuit breaker lockdown and 353, 368; Cobra committee and 106; contact tracing app and 325; Covid infection 233, 238; Covid variants and 389; Eat Out to Help Out and 339; Edwardes and 120; government decisions presented to public as if based on scientific advice, role in 157; herd immunity and 193, 198; hospital capacity and 203, 252–3; Italian travellers/airports and 142–4; late lockdown, on 220; masks and 336; Nightingale hospitals and 227; 100,000 tests per day target 239, 288, 298–9, 317; Operation Cygnus and 104–5; Operation Moonshot and 349–50; personal protective equipment (PPE) and 84–5, 93, 96; procurement practice and allegations of cronyism 288; restrictions to limit the spread of the virus, pushes for 363, 368, 398; testing and 97, 99, 239, 288, 298–9, 317 Hanks, Tom 180, 230 Harries, Jenny 181–3, 186, 214, 312, 317, 336 Heneghan, Carl 355–6, 359 herd immunity 106, 156, 164–5, 171, 174–9, 183–5, 187, 191–3, 194–5, 196–8, 200, 302, 354, 355, 356–7, 365, 394 Hibberd, Martin 43, 46, 47, 48, 63, 98–9, 101, 102–3, 287 High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) 207–8 Hillier, Meg 105, 333 Horton, Richard 62, 101, 102, 225–6, 286–7 Imperial College London 9, 42, 59, 61, 108, 109, 131, 132, 136, 139, 149, 154, 156, 159, 160, 170, 176, 184, 185, 186, 193, 199, 200, 205, 211, 216, 242, 297, 300, 322, 346, 361, 377, 386, 393 Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) 128, 130–1, 310–11 Iran 58, 136, 137, 153 Ireland 165, 187, 188, 191, 305 Italy 9, 33, 64, 70, 119, 131, 132, 135–6, 142–5, 148, 151, 153, 161, 162, 165, 171, 172–3, 178, 187–8, 190, 191, 192–3, 194, 195, 200, 205–6, 210, 217, 219, 224, 225, 297, 301–2, 310, 344 Japan 59, 70, 125, 132, 178, 364 Javid, Sajid 72, 111, 112, 113, 119, 138 Jenrick, Robert 208, 289, 301 Johnson, Boris: action plan (‘contain, delay, research, mitigate’ strategy’) and 152–66; Arcuri and 127–31, 310–11; Brexit fixation and appreciation of danger posed by Covid-19 4, 5, 6, 8, 15–16, 56–7, 64–5, 71–5, 76, 78, 87, 110–12, 115–16, 122–4, 132, 153, 383, 397; cabinet reshuffle (2020) 110–11, 113–15; care workers, blames for crisis in care sector 332–3; Chevening and 114–15, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–7, 131, 137; child (Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas) 298; childhood 2; China and 56–7, 123–4; Christmas restrictions and 387–90, 404; circuit breaker lockdown and 352–80, 386; civil claims for negligence and violation of human rights against UK government, responsibility for 402–3; Cobra meetings, chairs 148–9, 152, 153, 154, 174, 196, 199–200, 212–13, 214, 220; Cobra meetings, fails to attend first five meetings of during Covid crisis 8, 55–6, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 70, 71, 75–80, 102, 106, 107, 124, 126, 127, 147, 148–9, 285, 286, 384; Conservative leadership contest and 68–9, 111, 189, 401; Covid infection and illness 10, 233–4, 235–6, 239–40, 241, 244, 247, 254–5, 262–3, 276–7, 295–7, 403; Cummings and 112, 113, 114, 235–6, 311–16, 363–4, 369, 370; EU, misses chance to pool resources with 126; ‘following the science’, UK government claims to be and 7, 153, 157–8, 163, 174, 181–2, 183, 194, 213; foreign newspapers criticise 302; general election victory (2019) 4, 57, 71–2, 116, 138; government decisions presented to public as if they were entirely based on scientific advice 157; Harries Twitter broadcast 181–3; herd immunity concept and 164–5, 174–6, 183–4, 187, 192–3, 194–5; holidays 57–8, 76, 109, 110, 114–17, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–7, 131, 135, 137, 341, 342, 383; ‘irrational’ panic of Covid-19, dismissive of 4, 107–9, 204; lockdown measures and, see lockdowns, UK Covid-19; love affairs and children 116–121, 127–31; marriage 117, 118–19, 120–1; Mothers’ Day mixed message 214–15, 216; NHS surcharge for foreign health and social care workers and 310; Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich speech (2020) 5–6, 73–4, 84, 147, 204; popularity/public confidence in 6, 7, 284, 310, 315, 324–5; prorogues parliament (2019) 68, 69; public gatherings, attitude towards 165–6, 167–8, 181, 187; rewriting of timeline of Covid crisis 102; school closures and, see school closures; school meal vouchers and 323–4, 344–5; scientific advisers, split with 360–4; scientists, lays blame for crisis with 148, 321–2; shaking hands, proudly refuses to stop 162–4, 166, 175, 233; ‘Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives’ plan launched 213–15, 216, 305; Storm Dennis and 126–7; Storm Jorge and 171–2; Symonds and, see Symonds, Carrie; This Morning, appearance on 163–5, 175; travel corridors and 334–5; vaccines and 349 Johnson, Stanley 123, 262, 263 Kerslake, Lord 77–8, 154–5 Khan, Sadiq 200, 208–10, 213, 214, 217 King, Sir David 77, 155, 170–1, 219, 400–1 Labour Party 57, 66, 74–5, 76, 87, 105, 111–12, 127, 137, 143, 216, 240, 289–90, 316, 325, 329, 338, 368, 371, 389 Lancet, The 34, 55, 62, 101, 225–6, 286, 364 Lee, Phillip 89–90, 200–1 Li Wenliang 34–5, 81 Liu Xiaoming 56–7, 123, 124 lockdowns, UK Covid-19: behavioural fatigue concept and 201–2; Christmas and New Year restrictions (2020–21) 356, 385–95, 404; curfews 362–3, 369; dither and delay over, UK government/Boris Johnson 4–5, 9–10, 152–7, 160–1, 167–220, 218, 223, 224, 260, 261, 263, 287, 296–310, 319–21, 323, 325–7, 333, 334–5, 342, 345, 346, 348, 349, 350–1, 352–80, 387, 388–9, 390, 391, 393, 394, 396, 397–8, 400, 404–5; economic costs of, see economy; first (20 March 2020) 2–4, 8, 9, 10, 217–18, 223–327; first, discussed within government 61, 139–40; first, lifting of (4 July 2020) 325–51; Johnson lockdown speech (23 March 2020) 2–4, 9, 10, 217–18; local lockdowns 327, 338–9, 367–8; London lockdown first discussed 208–10, 217; public gatherings and 3–4, 149, 156–7, 159, 164–6, 167–70, 171, 174–5, 181, 182–3, 187, 189, 199, 213, 218, 327, 335, 348; second/circuit breaker begins (16 December 2020) 377–80, 386; second/circuit breaker, UK government delays 352–80; ‘Stay alert, control the virus, save lives’ advice 305; ‘Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives’ advice 213–15, 305; third (6 January 2021) 386, 393–4, 398, 404–5; tier system of restrictions 369–70, 371, 386, 388–9, 390, 393–4 London: Covid-19 in 108–9, 190, 200, 205–6, 236, 237, 246–8, 254, 256, 265, 266, 267–8, 272, 274–5, 283, 385–6, 388, 389, 390, 391–2, 393, 394; first lockdown and 205–6, 208–10, 212, 217 London Ambulance Service 190, 237, 265 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) 43, 63, 71, 97, 98, 101, 132, 139, 140, 158, 159, 160, 184–5, 287, 349, 364 long Covid 365 Macintyre, Helen 118, 130 Macron, Emmanuel 212 May, Theresa 68, 76, 79, 88, 115, 199 Medley, Graham 63, 139, 146, 160, 163, 174, 372 Michie, Susan 163, 171, 188–9, 234 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome 16 Military World Games, Wuhan (2019) 32 modelling, Covid-19 9, 59, 61, 63, 71, 92, 103, 108, 131–2, 136, 139, 140–1, 146, 151, 154, 155, 158–61, 163–5, 170, 175, 176, 177–8, 184–5, 186, 193, 194, 195, 199, 205, 211, 216, 219, 220, 240, 297, 300, 321, 327, 336, 342, 343, 348–9, 366, 370, 372, 373, 376 Montgomerie, Tim 113–14, 121 Montgomery, Hugh 392 Montgomery, Sir Jonathan 211, 228, 229 Moral and Ethical Advisory Group (Meag) 211–12, 227, 228, 242, 243, 258 Morrison, Vivien 243, 244, 245–6, 247 Mostyn-Owen, Allegra 117 Nagpaul, Chaand 265, 273, 274, 275–6 National Health Service (NHS) 7; candle-lit vigil held by staff outside Downing Street 331–2; clapping for 10, 231, 239, 247, 275; critical care capacity figures, publication of suspended 225; Hancock and, see Hancock, Matthew; hospital capacity 84, 89–90, 145–6, 150, 151, 155–6, 161–2, 173–4, 177, 186, 192, 195, 196–8, 201, 202, 203–4, 206–7, 208, 211, 225, 226, 227–8, 241–54, 251, 252, 256–7, 258, 261, 265, 267, 268, 273–4, 280–1, 297, 337, 373–5, 377, 378–9, 391–2, 394, 396–7, 398, 401–2, 403–5; intensive care capacity/selection of patients for 3, 140, 145–6, 173–4, 195, 199, 211–12, 224–5, 227–9, 241–61, 251, 252, 256–7, 262–91, 296, 396–7; national pandemic stockpile 93–5; NHS England 85, 269; Nightingale hospitals 227, 246–7, 280, 377; pandemic planning/preparedness and 7, 8, 62, 74–5, 84–97, 122–3, 145, 285; personal protective equipment (PPE), see personal protective equipment (PPE); procurement practice 288–9; secrecy culture imposed on during Covid crisis 224–5, 227–9, 247–9, 260–1, 284, 373–4; staff deaths 290–1, 331–2; staff sickness and shortages 236, 237, 374; staff testing for virus 206–7, 236–9, 288; surcharge for foreign health workers 310; triaging dilemmas 173–4, 211–12, 224–5, 227–9, 241–61, 262–91, 373–5, 392, 396–7; ventilators and 3, 89, 126, 136, 146, 169, 200–1, 246, 255, 263, 274, 286, 296, 392, 397 Nature 26, 39–40, 42, 49, 50, 89 New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) 71, 95, 132, 161, 201 New Zealand 153–4, 155, 277, 308, 319, 337–8, 364, 365, 394, 395 News2 265, 266 Noon, Brian 270–2, 273 Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow 206, 289 No. 10 Downing Street, Covid-19 within 226, 232–3 Openshaw, Peter 132, 201 Osborne, George 65, 149 Oxford University 9, 65, 70, 108, 109, 131, 136, 144, 149, 154, 156, 158, 170, 186, 193, 199, 202, 203, 205, 211, 216, 237, 387, 391 Pagel, Christina 173–4, 254 pandemic planning 7–8, 84–101, 104, 122, 182, 208, 285, 290; Brexit and 6, 7–8, 15–16, 56–7, 64–5, 68, 72–3, 87, 90, 91, 101, 103–4, 105, 122, 123–4, 132; Cygnus pandemic rehearsal (2016) 88–90, 95, 104; stockpile, national pandemic 7–8, 87, 88, 93–6, 122, 182, 208, 285; Winter Willow pandemic rehearsal (2007) 87–8 parliament, UK 61, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 84, 85, 96, 105, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116, 180, 181, 203, 204, 205, 210, 220, 225–6, 234, 237, 262, 281, 282, 289, 290, 315, 317–18, 321, 332, 333, 340, 351, 368, 390, 396, 398 Parmar, Rinesh 217, 261, 379 Patel, Priti 110, 399–400 personal protective equipment (PPE) 7, 8, 63, 71, 85–91, 92, 93–7, 100–1, 104, 105, 122–3, 145, 169, 179, 181, 182, 207–8, 214, 217, 219, 226, 232, 247, 248, 249, 276, 281, 284, 285–6, 288, 290, 291, 297, 333, 336, 384; donation of to China from UK stockpile 101, 122–3, 285–6 Pillay, Deenan 27, 43 Powis, Stephen 139, 237, 238, 260–1, 397 public gatherings, UK government attitudes towards 3–4, 149, 156–7, 159, 164–6, 167–70, 171, 174–5, 181, 182–3, 187, 189, 199, 213, 218, 327, 335, 348 Public Health England (PHE) 64, 72, 83, 88, 94–5, 98, 99–100, 109, 122, 131, 132, 139, 141, 149, 150–1, 182, 187, 207, 238, 313 public inquiry, UK Covid-19 crisis 102, 189, 340, 379, 395, 402–3 quarantine 64, 70, 73, 97, 125, 142, 197, 226, 278, 316, 335, 399 Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham 248–9 Raab, Dominic 104, 110, 115, 254–6, 279, 286, 287, 289–90, 297, 303, 307, 322 Rashford, Marcus 324 reproduction (R) rate, Covid-19 60–1, 139, 296–7, 303, 304, 306, 320, 325, 335, 336–7, 338, 339, 340, 346, 350–1, 354, 359, 363, 365, 387, 400, 403 Ricciardi, Walter 136, 205–6 Riley, Steven 176–9, 343 Ross, David 116, 135 Scally, Gabriel 100, 180, 186, 192 school closures 83, 139, 140, 143–4, 145, 156, 159, 164, 181, 187, 188, 189, 191, 205, 304, 316, 318, 323–4, 339, 341–2, 343, 344–5, 346–7, 350, 353, 356, 372, 375, 384, 392–3, 394, 404 school meals, free 323–4, 344–5 Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) 42, 59–60, 61, 63, 71, 75, 92, 102, 108, 131, 138–40, 141, 146, 151, 158–9, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 171, 175, 176, 179–80, 184, 185, 189, 193, 201, 202, 205, 220, 232, 237, 249–50, 278, 300, 309, 321, 322, 323, 327, 331, 333, 334, 336, 338, 339–40, 345, 350, 352, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 360, 362, 369, 370, 372, 374, 392–3, 396–7, 398, 416 Scotland 89, 142, 166, 191, 213, 230, 258, 305, 315, 330, 335, 341, 365–6, 367, 388, 393 second wave, Covid-19 11, 176, 183, 184, 310, 328, 330–1, 336, 338, 340–1, 344, 347, 350, 352, 353, 355, 359, 360, 363, 364, 366, 373–4, 376, 402–3, 417 Second World War 2, 4, 68, 110, 225, 226, 240, 284, 307, 394 Sedwill, Sir Mark 58, 196, 233–4, 256 self-isolation 83, 140, 142, 143, 153, 154, 174, 180, 201, 205, 207, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237, 291, 325, 374 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) (Sars-CoV-1) pandemic (2002) 16–17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 33, 34, 35, 40, 43, 45, 49, 63, 75, 106, 156 Shapps, Grant 78, 312 Shi Zhengli (‘Bat Woman’) 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27–8, 29, 30–1, 34, 37, 39–40, 41, 42–3, 49, 50 Singapore 63, 82, 83, 102–3, 109, 132, 139, 156, 178, 190, 325, 364 social distancing 72, 139, 140, 142, 159, 188, 194, 201, 204, 205, 214, 216, 226, 230, 233, 234, 261, 296, 301, 303, 313, 318, 323, 326, 327, 329, 330, 335, 337, 341, 348, 369, 387 Soleimani, General Qasem 58, 137 South Korea 98, 154, 155, 156, 178, 189, 191, 202, 308, 319, 364 Spain 9, 83, 144, 170, 194, 195, 198, 217, 219, 225, 297, 310, 335, 344, 364, 366 Spanish flu pandemic (1918) 15, 55, 61, 287, 330, 344 Spectator, The 69, 117, 120, 260, 277, 278 Spi-B (behavioural group) 92, 162, 188 Spi-M (modelling committee) 63, 92, 140–1, 154, 160, 176, 219, 343, 348–9, 366, 370, 372, 373, 376 Sridhar, Devi 58–9, 136, 186, 192, 316, 330–1, 335, 347 Starmer, Keir 240, 289–90, 305, 306, 325, 338, 368, 370–1, 388–9 Stevens, Sir Simon 202–3, 260, 376–7 Stewart, Rory 110, 189–90, 401 Storm Dennis 122, 126–7 Storm Jorge 152, 171–2 Sturgeon, Nicola 213, 214, 305, 367, 388 Sunak, Rishi 113, 135, 180–1, 204–5, 213–14, 256, 279, 287, 306, 319, 323, 328, 329–30, 333, 334, 344, 353–4, 355, 357, 359, 368, 371, 372, 376, 398, 400 Sunday Times, The 6–7, 8, 40–1, 49, 67, 77, 81, 85, 101, 102, 122–3, 126, 127–31, 196, 225, 260, 285, 286, 322, 353, 378, 399–400 superspreaders 82–3, 107, 144, 186–7, 238, 333 Sweden 309, 356–7 Symonds, Carrie 72, 114, 116, 117, 119, 121, 150, 199, 216, 236, 256, 262, 277, 298, 329, 341, 342 testing, Covid-19 63, 93, 109, 122, 157, 185–6; airport 64, 143, 151, 190; antibody 19–20, 43; capacity 63, 92, 93, 97–100, 103, 109, 122, 156, 157, 179, 185–7, 191, 198, 203, 206–7, 211, 219, 226, 232, 236–9, 260, 273, 280, 281, 283, 284, 288–9, 296–9, 320, 321, 333, 346–7, 349–50, 384, 386; care sector and 203, 237, 280, 281, 283, 333; contact tracing 97, 98, 99–100, 103, 108, 109, 131–2, 152, 156, 159, 174, 175, 185–7, 199, 206, 211, 238, 316–17, 325, 346–7; contact tracing app 325; diagnostic kits 97; Gove blames shortage of chemical agents 236–7; medical staff and 206–7, 236–9, 288; 100,000 tests per day target 239, 288, 298–9; Operation Moonshot 349–50; pandemic planning and 92, 93; self-isolation and 83, 140, 142, 143, 153, 154, 174, 180, 201, 205, 207, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237, 291, 325, 374; widespread testing dropped by UK government 185–7, 191, 232 travel: airports and 64, 141–5, 151, 226–7; French border with UK 1–2, 390–1; Italy, travellers to UK from 131–2, 142–5, 151, 153–4; travel bans 226–7, 390–1; travel corridors 334–5, 343; UK borders kept open 131–2, 142–5, 151, 153–4, 226–7 Treasury, UK 105, 111, 112, 113, 204–5, 213, 279, 306, 328–9 Trump, Donald 44, 58, 70–1, 233, 256, 262, 295, 302, 324–5 universities 339, 346, 350, 366–7, 375 vaccines, Covid-19 11, 27, 106, 178, 349, 353, 357, 387, 391, 393, 394 Vallance, Sir Patrick 59, 60, 139, 155, 157, 158, 161, 167–8, 176, 187, 191, 192, 196, 205, 220, 320, 321, 322, 326, 329, 336, 346, 348, 352, 353, 360–2, 370, 373, 399 variants, Covid-19 144, 335, 386, 389, 393 ventilators 3, 89, 126, 136, 146, 169, 200–1, 246, 255, 263, 274, 286, 296, 392, 397 Vernon, Martin 203, 269 Wakefield, Mary 120, 277 Walsh, Steve 82–3, 97, 107, 238, 333 Wang Yanyi 34, 42, 47 Wellcome Trust 63, 139 Wheeler, Marina 117, 118–19, 120–1 Whitty, Chris 59, 62, 71, 81–2, 91–2, 106, 139, 147, 155, 157, 158–9, 161, 174, 185–6, 187, 188, 189, 196, 202, 211, 227, 228, 233, 243, 282, 321, 322, 326, 329, 339, 342–3, 348, 352, 360, 361, 362, 370, 388, 399 Williamson, Gavin 318, 342 Winter Willow pandemic rehearsal (2007) 87–8 World Bank: ‘The Sooner, the Better: The Early Economic Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions during the COVID-19 Pandemic’ report 307, 360, 368, 398 World Health Organization (WHO) 17, 35, 38, 39, 57, 70–1, 77, 83–4, 133, 136–7, 178, 181, 185, 322, 364, 369 Wuhan, China 9, 15, 17–18, 19, 22, 23, 24–9, 30–49, 30, 50, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 70, 72, 73, 82, 85, 91, 92, 98, 102, 139, 142, 154, 158, 160, 164, 225, 227, 285, 390, 395 Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (WCDCP) 34, 47 Wuhan Institute of Virology 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25–9, 38, 39, 40, 41–4, 45, 46–7, 48–9 Wyatt, Petronella 117–18, 341 Xi Jinping 56, 123 About the Publisher Australia HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty.

One of the key arguments in Johnson’s biography is that Adolf Hitler would have won the war and Nazism would have prevailed throughout Europe had it not been for his hero prime minister. This was now Johnson’s moment to rally the nation in its darkest hour. Could he summon his inner Churchill and save Britain from the threat of the coronavirus pandemic? Twenty-eight million people tuned in to watch Johnson’s address from Downing Street that evening. The camera had framed the doorway of the White Drawing Room – the great state reception overlooking the No. 10 gardens, which has hosted US presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama and was once used by Churchill himself as his bedroom.

‘Therefore, you stockpile, you prepare, you refresh that stockpile and you have incredibly good health care logistics. So, you put the stuff that’s getting to expiry back into the NHS sector and then you buy again.’ The UK’s national pandemic stockpile had been established in 2009 following the swine flu outbreak, with around £500m being spent on protective equipment. By the time the coronavirus pandemic began, the stockpile was mostly housed in a 370,000-square-foot distribution centre in Merseyside that had been built specifically for the purpose. But supplies had been allowed to significantly dwindle over the intervening years. An analysis of official financial data by the Guardian found that the value of the stockpile reduced from £831m in 2013 to £506m by March 2019 – a drop of almost 40 per cent.4 Leaked lists of the stocks showed that by 30 January 2020 the stockpile held 10 per cent fewer respirators, 19 per cent fewer surgical masks and 28 per cent fewer needles and syringes than it had in 2009.5 The remaining stock had not been replenished and was in a worrying state of decay.


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Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science 22 (2019): 129–46, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051117-073034; Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 3 (September 2012): 405–31, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfs038. 7 Levi Boxell et al., “Affective Polarization Did Not Increase during the Coronavirus Pandemic,” working paper no. 28036 (October 2020), National Bureau of Economic Research, https://doi.org/10.3386/w28036. 8 Sebastian Jungkunz, “Political Polarization During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Frontiers in Political Science 3 (March 2021): 622512, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.622512; Hunt Allcott et al., “Polarization and Public Health: Partisan Differences in Social Distancing During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Journal of Public Economics 191 (November 2020): 104254, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104254; Christos Makridis and Jonathan T.

Wittmann, “Reward and Novelty Enhance Imagination of Future Events in a Motivational-Episodic Network,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 11 (November 2015): e0143477, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0143477. 13 Pema Chödrön, “Smile at Fear,” The Best Buddhist Writing 2012 (Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala, 2012). 14 Ibid. 15 National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, March 2021, https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalTrends_2040.pdf. 16 Recommendations for learning more about these future forces: Antonio Regalado, “The Next Act for Messenger RNA Could Be Bigger Than COVID Vaccines,” MIT Technology Review, February 5, 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/05/1017366/messenger-rna-vaccines-COVID-hiv/; Bill McKibben, “Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap,” New Yorker, April 28, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/renewable-energy-is-suddenly-startlingly-cheap; Kaitlin Love, “Majority Favors Social Progress over Economic Growth in the Wake of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Ipsos, September 10, 2020, https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/Majority-Favors-Social-Progress-over-Economic-Growth-in-the-Wake-of-the-Coronavirus-Pandemic; Matthew Shaer, “Soon, Your Doctor Could Print a Human Organ on Demand,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/soon-doctor-print-human-organ-on-demand-180954951/; Amos Zeeberg, “Bricks Alive!

Jobs Recovery,” Bloomberg News, May 7, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-07/women-leaving-workforce-again-shows-uneven-u-s-jobs-recovery. 13 Till von Wachter, “Lost Generations: Long-Term Effects of the COVID-19 Crisis on Job Losers and Labour Market Entrants, and Options for Policy,” Fiscal Studies 41, no. 3 (September 2020): 549–90, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5890.12247; Kenneth Burdett, Carlos Carrillo-Tudela, and Melvyn Coles, “The Cost of Job Loss,” Review of Economic Studies 87, no. 4 (July 2020): 1757–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaa014. 14 “The Impact of COVID-19 on Student Equity and Inclusion: Supporting Vulnerable Students during School Closures and School Re-openings,” OECD, November 19, 2020, https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/the-impact-of-COVID-19-on-student-equity-and-inclusion-supporting-vulnerable-students-during-school-closures-and-school-re-openings-d593b5c8/. 15 “UN Report Finds COVID-19 Is Reversing Decades of Progress on Poverty, Healthcare and Education,” United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, July 7, 2020, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/sustainable/sustainable-development-goals-report-2020.html; “America’s Huge Stimulus Is Having Surprising Effects on the Poor,” Economist, July 6, 2020, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/07/06/americas-huge-stimulus-is-having-surprising-effects-on-the-poor; Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah, “COVID-19 Is Increasing Multiple Kinds of Inequality. Here’s What We Can Do about It,” World Economic Forum, October 9, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/covid-19-is-increasing-multiple-kinds-of-inequality-here-s-what-we-can-do-about-it/. 16 Davide Furceri et al., “COVID-19 Will Raise Inequality If Past Pandemics Are a Guide,” VoxEu, Centre for Economic Policy Research, May 8, 2020, https://voxeu.org/article/COVID-19-will-raise-inequality-if-past-pandemics-are-guide. 17 Goldin and Muggah, “COVID-19 Is Increasing Multiple Kinds of Inequality,” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/covid-19-is-increasing-multiple-kinds-of-inequality-here-s-what-we-can-do-about-it/. 18 Jack P.


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The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

We would not have developed farms, cities, nation states, multinational companies, without this ability to define and maintain a group. Self-realisation, the scientific revolution and indeed modernity are all premised on it. But it has served its purpose and now become a problem. The time has come to leave it behind. How? Just as it has brought the world to a halt, the coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity to pause and take stock of the complexities of our present and the causal link between phenomena – specifically economic growth, energy consumption, (im)mobility, (in)equality, environmental degradation, the rise of religious extremism, nationalism and populism. And to recognise that the prosperity and open-minded, pro-immigration stance of the relatively mobile few is predicated on the relative lack of prosperity and mobility of the many,8 rather than on moral virtue.

The clue is in the ‘digital’ – these workers tend to be highly skilled and part of the knowledge economy. Though it might be technically possible, there are no YouTube channels promoting the benefits of moving around the world working from a factory in China one day, and one in Brazil the next. During the coronavirus pandemic, a new kind of passport privilege has emerged. For most of 2020, as a US citizen, it was very hard to travel out of the country. But if you were a dual citizen, you could simply use your other passport to get out, which had many Americans scrambling to try to get a different passport based on foreign ancestry (countries like Ireland with rich histories of migration to the US actually suspended the process which allowed Americans to use their Irish heritage to claim citizenship).

But it comes at a cost: you might end up with a parody of diversity around the table; a lack of willingness to talk about the real issues at hand; as a consequence, the consensus you reach may be weak and meaningless, and can end up alienating human societies at large. This is precisely what has happened to Davos and the UN. In March of 2020, as we sat in confinement in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Abdi and I got together on Zoom. We brought in many other new nomads, too, and started talking about that phrase we’ve all heard so many times since the beginning of the pandemic it has almost lost its meaning: ‘This changes everything.’ We had both read articles and essays by the great minds of our time along those lines, and in the months that followed, we realised that this literature didn’t age well.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

(New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 251.   38   “we’re way closer … people’s brains” : Matthew Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change,” Wired , February 15, 2021, https:// www .wired .com /story /billionaires -use -vr -avoid -social -change /.   38   “It is not possible … you wanted” : Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change.”   39   “Yes, we are in a pandemic” : David Zweig, “$25,000 Pod Schools: How Well-to-Do Children Will Weather the Pandemic,” New York Times , July 30, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /30 /nyregion /pod -schools -hastings -on -hudson .html.   41   legions of Amazon workers : Joey Hadden, “Amazon Delivery Drivers Share What It’s Like to Be on the Front Lines of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Including Not Having Time to Wash Their Hands and Uncleaned Vans,” Business Insider , April 2, 2020, https:// www .businessinsider .com /why -amazon -delivery -workers -feel -exposed -and -vulnerable -to -coronavirus -2020 -3.   41   Amazon avoids taxes : Matthew Gardner, “Amazon Has Record-Breaking Profits in 2020, Avoids $2.3 Billion in Federal Income Taxes,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, February 3, 2021, https:// itep .org /amazon -has -record -breaking -profits -in -2020 -avoids -2 -3 -billion -in -federal -income -taxes /.   41   anti-competitive practices : Mark Chandler, “Amazon Accused of Anti-Competitive Practices by US Subcommittee,” Bookseller , October 8, 2020, https:// www .thebookseller .com /news /amazon -accused -anti -competitive -practices -us -subcommittee -1222115.   41   abuses labor : Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford, “Power and Peril: 5 Takeaways on Amazon’s Employment Machine,” New York Times , June 15, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /06 /15 /us /politics /amazon -warehouse -workers .html; Casey Newton, “Amazon’s Poor Treatment of Workers Is Catching up to It during the Coronavirus Crisis,” Verge , April 1, 2020, https:// www .theverge .com /interface /2020 /4 /1 /21201162 /amazon -delivery -delays -coronavirus -worker -strikes.   42   more people opened online trading : Annie Massa, “Pandemic-Fueled Day Trading Is Overwhelming Online Brokers—and the Traders Are Fuming,” Fortune , December 9, 2020, https:// fortune .com /2020 /12 /08 /day -trading -online -brokers -tech -failure -crashes -outages /.   42   Shares of Zoom went up : Shanhong Liu, “Price of Zoom shares traded on Nasdaq Stock Market in 2020 and 2021,” Statista , August 9, 2021, https:// www .statista .com /statistics /1106104 /stock -price -zoom /.   42   Jeff Bezos’s fortune rose : Chase Peterson-Withorn, “How Much Money America’s Billionaires Have Made During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Forbes , April 30, 2021, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /chasewithorn /2021 /04 /30 /american -billionaires -have -gotten -12 -trillion -richer -during -the -pandemic.   42   five biggest U.S. tech companies : The staff of the Wall Street Journal , “How Big Tech Got Even Bigger,” Wall Street Journal , February 6, 2021, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /how -big -tech -got -even -bigger -11612587632.   42   Netflix’s share price : Jonathan Ponciano, “5 Big Numbers That Show Netflix’s Massive Growth Continues during the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Forbes , October 20, 2020, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /jonathanponciano /2020 /10 /19 /netflix -earnings -5 -numbers -growth -continues -during -the -coronavirus -pandemic /.   43   “Many creatives, startups, and techies” : Jen Murphy, “Remote Workers Flee to $70,000-a-Month Resorts While Awaiting Vaccines,” Bloomberg , February 15, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -02 -15 /remote -workers -flee -to -luxury -beach -resorts -while -awaiting -vaccines.   43   “It’s been great here” : Julie Satow, “Turning a Second Home into a Primary Home,” New York Times , July 24, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /24 /realestate /coronavirus -second -homes - .html.   43   Each 1 percent increase : Mary Van Beusekom, “Race, Income Inequality Fuel COVID Disparities in US Counties,” Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota, January 20, 2021, https:// www .cidrap .umn .edu /news -perspective /2021 /01 /race -income -inequality -fuel -covid -disparities -us -counties; Tim F.

(New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 251.   38   “we’re way closer … people’s brains” : Matthew Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change,” Wired , February 15, 2021, https:// www .wired .com /story /billionaires -use -vr -avoid -social -change /.   38   “It is not possible … you wanted” : Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change.”   39   “Yes, we are in a pandemic” : David Zweig, “$25,000 Pod Schools: How Well-to-Do Children Will Weather the Pandemic,” New York Times , July 30, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /30 /nyregion /pod -schools -hastings -on -hudson .html.   41   legions of Amazon workers : Joey Hadden, “Amazon Delivery Drivers Share What It’s Like to Be on the Front Lines of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Including Not Having Time to Wash Their Hands and Uncleaned Vans,” Business Insider , April 2, 2020, https:// www .businessinsider .com /why -amazon -delivery -workers -feel -exposed -and -vulnerable -to -coronavirus -2020 -3.   41   Amazon avoids taxes : Matthew Gardner, “Amazon Has Record-Breaking Profits in 2020, Avoids $2.3 Billion in Federal Income Taxes,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, February 3, 2021, https:// itep .org /amazon -has -record -breaking -profits -in -2020 -avoids -2 -3 -billion -in -federal -income -taxes /.   41   anti-competitive practices : Mark Chandler, “Amazon Accused of Anti-Competitive Practices by US Subcommittee,” Bookseller , October 8, 2020, https:// www .thebookseller .com /news /amazon -accused -anti -competitive -practices -us -subcommittee -1222115.   41   abuses labor : Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford, “Power and Peril: 5 Takeaways on Amazon’s Employment Machine,” New York Times , June 15, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /06 /15 /us /politics /amazon -warehouse -workers .html; Casey Newton, “Amazon’s Poor Treatment of Workers Is Catching up to It during the Coronavirus Crisis,” Verge , April 1, 2020, https:// www .theverge .com /interface /2020 /4 /1 /21201162 /amazon -delivery -delays -coronavirus -worker -strikes.   42   more people opened online trading : Annie Massa, “Pandemic-Fueled Day Trading Is Overwhelming Online Brokers—and the Traders Are Fuming,” Fortune , December 9, 2020, https:// fortune .com /2020 /12 /08 /day -trading -online -brokers -tech -failure -crashes -outages /.   42   Shares of Zoom went up : Shanhong Liu, “Price of Zoom shares traded on Nasdaq Stock Market in 2020 and 2021,” Statista , August 9, 2021, https:// www .statista .com /statistics /1106104 /stock -price -zoom /.   42   Jeff Bezos’s fortune rose : Chase Peterson-Withorn, “How Much Money America’s Billionaires Have Made During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Forbes , April 30, 2021, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /chasewithorn /2021 /04 /30 /american -billionaires -have -gotten -12 -trillion -richer -during -the -pandemic.   42   five biggest U.S. tech companies : The staff of the Wall Street Journal , “How Big Tech Got Even Bigger,” Wall Street Journal , February 6, 2021, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /how -big -tech -got -even -bigger -11612587632.   42   Netflix’s share price : Jonathan Ponciano, “5 Big Numbers That Show Netflix’s Massive Growth Continues during the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Forbes , October 20, 2020, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /jonathanponciano /2020 /10 /19 /netflix -earnings -5 -numbers -growth -continues -during -the -coronavirus -pandemic /.   43   “Many creatives, startups, and techies” : Jen Murphy, “Remote Workers Flee to $70,000-a-Month Resorts While Awaiting Vaccines,” Bloomberg , February 15, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -02 -15 /remote -workers -flee -to -luxury -beach -resorts -while -awaiting -vaccines.   43   “It’s been great here” : Julie Satow, “Turning a Second Home into a Primary Home,” New York Times , July 24, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /24 /realestate /coronavirus -second -homes - .html.   43   Each 1 percent increase : Mary Van Beusekom, “Race, Income Inequality Fuel COVID Disparities in US Counties,” Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota, January 20, 2021, https:// www .cidrap .umn .edu /news -perspective /2021 /01 /race -income -inequality -fuel -covid -disparities -us -counties; Tim F.

(New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 251.   38   “we’re way closer … people’s brains” : Matthew Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change,” Wired , February 15, 2021, https:// www .wired .com /story /billionaires -use -vr -avoid -social -change /.   38   “It is not possible … you wanted” : Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change.”   39   “Yes, we are in a pandemic” : David Zweig, “$25,000 Pod Schools: How Well-to-Do Children Will Weather the Pandemic,” New York Times , July 30, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /30 /nyregion /pod -schools -hastings -on -hudson .html.   41   legions of Amazon workers : Joey Hadden, “Amazon Delivery Drivers Share What It’s Like to Be on the Front Lines of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Including Not Having Time to Wash Their Hands and Uncleaned Vans,” Business Insider , April 2, 2020, https:// www .businessinsider .com /why -amazon -delivery -workers -feel -exposed -and -vulnerable -to -coronavirus -2020 -3.   41   Amazon avoids taxes : Matthew Gardner, “Amazon Has Record-Breaking Profits in 2020, Avoids $2.3 Billion in Federal Income Taxes,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, February 3, 2021, https:// itep .org /amazon -has -record -breaking -profits -in -2020 -avoids -2 -3 -billion -in -federal -income -taxes /.   41   anti-competitive practices : Mark Chandler, “Amazon Accused of Anti-Competitive Practices by US Subcommittee,” Bookseller , October 8, 2020, https:// www .thebookseller .com /news /amazon -accused -anti -competitive -practices -us -subcommittee -1222115.   41   abuses labor : Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford, “Power and Peril: 5 Takeaways on Amazon’s Employment Machine,” New York Times , June 15, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /06 /15 /us /politics /amazon -warehouse -workers .html; Casey Newton, “Amazon’s Poor Treatment of Workers Is Catching up to It during the Coronavirus Crisis,” Verge , April 1, 2020, https:// www .theverge .com /interface /2020 /4 /1 /21201162 /amazon -delivery -delays -coronavirus -worker -strikes.   42   more people opened online trading : Annie Massa, “Pandemic-Fueled Day Trading Is Overwhelming Online Brokers—and the Traders Are Fuming,” Fortune , December 9, 2020, https:// fortune .com /2020 /12 /08 /day -trading -online -brokers -tech -failure -crashes -outages /.   42   Shares of Zoom went up : Shanhong Liu, “Price of Zoom shares traded on Nasdaq Stock Market in 2020 and 2021,” Statista , August 9, 2021, https:// www .statista .com /statistics /1106104 /stock -price -zoom /.   42   Jeff Bezos’s fortune rose : Chase Peterson-Withorn, “How Much Money America’s Billionaires Have Made During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Forbes , April 30, 2021, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /chasewithorn /2021 /04 /30 /american -billionaires -have -gotten -12 -trillion -richer -during -the -pandemic.   42   five biggest U.S. tech companies : The staff of the Wall Street Journal , “How Big Tech Got Even Bigger,” Wall Street Journal , February 6, 2021, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /how -big -tech -got -even -bigger -11612587632.   42   Netflix’s share price : Jonathan Ponciano, “5 Big Numbers That Show Netflix’s Massive Growth Continues during the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Forbes , October 20, 2020, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /jonathanponciano /2020 /10 /19 /netflix -earnings -5 -numbers -growth -continues -during -the -coronavirus -pandemic /.   43   “Many creatives, startups, and techies” : Jen Murphy, “Remote Workers Flee to $70,000-a-Month Resorts While Awaiting Vaccines,” Bloomberg , February 15, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -02 -15 /remote -workers -flee -to -luxury -beach -resorts -while -awaiting -vaccines.   43   “It’s been great here” : Julie Satow, “Turning a Second Home into a Primary Home,” New York Times , July 24, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /24 /realestate /coronavirus -second -homes - .html.   43   Each 1 percent increase : Mary Van Beusekom, “Race, Income Inequality Fuel COVID Disparities in US Counties,” Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota, January 20, 2021, https:// www .cidrap .umn .edu /news -perspective /2021 /01 /race -income -inequality -fuel -covid -disparities -us -counties; Tim F.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Sullivan, adapted for ebook Cover design: Will Brown ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Preface: Pandemics, Promise, and Peril Chapter 1: The New Social Age Chapter 2: The End of Reality Chapter 3: The Hype Machine Chapter 4: Your Brain on Social Media Chapter 5: A Network’s Gravity Is Proportional to Its Mass Chapter 6: Personalized Mass Persuasion Chapter 7: Hypersocialization Chapter 8: Strategies for a Hypersocialized World Chapter 9: The Attention Economy and the Tyranny of Trends Chapter 10: The Wisdom and Madness of Crowds Chapter 11: Social Media’s Promise Is Also Its Peril Chapter 12: Building a Better Hype Machine Dedication Acknowledgments Notes Illustration Sources About the Author The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was a “black swan” event, the repercussions of which were felt throughout the world’s health systems, economy, and the very fabric of everyday life. Everyone on earth remembers where they quarantined, who they longed to see, and how they coped with the tremendous mental and physical strain the virus exacted. But another dramatic, albeit subtler, consequence of COVID-19 was the rather abrupt shock it delivered to the world’s global communication system—the central nervous system of digital connections that links our planet.

It wouldn’t be hard for foreign adversaries to seed false material into the American social media ecosystem, made to seem like real material from the successful Burisma hack, to create a scandal designed to derail the Biden campaign before anyone can debunk it. As we’ve seen, this is the signature of a fake news crisis: it spreads faster than it can be corrected, so it’s hard to clean up, even with a healthy dose of the truth. The threat of election manipulation in 2020 is even higher due to the chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic. With uncertainty around the viability of in-person voting, questions about voting by mail, and calls to delay the election, there can be no doubt that foreign actors will look to leverage the confusion caused by the coronavirus to disrupt our democratic process. While some claim fake news is benign, during protests and confusion, amid the smoke, fire, and foreign interference, months from the most consequential election of our time, it is a real threat—not only to the election, but to the sanctity and peace of the election process.

The weaponization of misinformation and the spread of fake news are problems for democracies worldwide. Fake News as Public Health Crisis In March 2020, a deliberate misinformation campaign spread fear among the American public by propagating the false story that a nationwide quarantine to contain the coronavirus pandemic was imminent. The National Security Council had to publicly disavow the story. And that wasn’t the only fake news spreading about the virus. The Chinese government spread false conspiracy theories blaming the U.S. military for starting the pandemic. Several false coronavirus “cures” killed hundreds of people who drank chlorine or excessive alcohol to rid themselves of the virus.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Only now they will employ more expansive rhetoric, acknowledging grievances among their constituents that are ordinarily ignored or naming and thus perhaps fueling the aspirations that are only beginning to emerge. Even the threat of defections that jeopardize a majority can prompt electoral leaders to make the pronouncements that contribute to the climate of change and possibility that nourish movements.”61 Indeed, the coronavirus pandemic and the shutting down of our economy, schools, and social activities, and the collective economic and psychological effects on our society, created an environment ripe for exploitation. And that exploitation has occurred both in the halls of power, with far-reaching legislative and executive actions, and in the streets, where organized violence is becoming all too common.

Moreover, since the institution of the federal income tax over a century ago, at the birth of American progressivism, redistribution of wealth through the heavy taxation of labor, income, and wealth, supported by Marxist-like class-warfare political propaganda, is a central objective of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, it resonates today with a significant portion of the population. Indeed, under the guise of the coronavirus pandemic, the Democratic Party has widely expanded the scope and reach of the welfare state, not only doling out trillions of dollars to shore up its political and ideological base, but also ensnaring an ever-larger pool of individuals to government subsidies and transfer payments. The educational transformation has led, in many ways, to the societal transformation intended by the early progressive intellectuals.

A hard lesson has been learned, particularly in the last year, that Big Tech is, in fact, an oligopoly of its own, in which a few billionaires censor, suspend, ban, and edit the postings, videos, and comments that offend or challenge the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, the various Marxist movements, the coronavirus pandemic authoritarians, etc. Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg even contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in grants during the last election to increase turnout in Democratic Party strongholds in key battleground states.21 What can be done about these assaults on our liberty, families, and country?


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

The most common are viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. Stanley Qi Nathan and Cameron Myhrvold CHAPTER 54 CRISPR Cures The development of vaccines—both the conventional sort and those employing RNA—would eventually help to beat back the coronavirus pandemic. But they are not a perfect solution. They rely on stimulating a person’s immune system, always a risky thing to do. (Most deaths from COVID-19 came from organ inflammation due to unwanted immune-system responses.)1 As vaccine makers have repeatedly discovered, the multilayered human immune system is very tricky to control. In it lurk mysteries. It contains no simple on-off switches, but instead works through the interaction of complicated molecules that are not easy to calibrate.2 The use of antibodies from the blood plasma of recovering patients or made synthetically also helped fight the COVID plague.

Before he decided to edit the gene for HIV receptors in the CRISPR babies he created, He Jiankui was studying ways to use CRISPR to make germline edits in the PCSK9 gene of embryos to produce designer babies with far less risk of having heart disease.13 At the beginning of 2020, there were two dozen clinical trials for various uses of CRISPR-Cas9 in the pipeline. They included potential treatments for angioedema (a hereditary disease that causes severe swelling), acute myeloid leukemia, super-high cholesterol, and male pattern baldness.14 In March of that year, however, most academic research labs were temporarily shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. An exception was made for labs that were engaged in fighting the virus. Many CRISPR researchers, Doudna foremost among them, would shift their focus to creating detection tools and treatments for the disease, some of them making use of the tricks they had learned from studying how bacteria developed an immune response to ward off new viruses.

* * * By pondering the question of height, we can make another distinction that is useful: the difference between an absolute improvement and a positional improvement. In the first category are enhancements that are beneficial to you even if everyone else gets them. Imagine there was a way to improve your memory or your resistance to virus infections. You’d be better off with it, even if others got the same enhancement. In fact, as the coronavirus pandemic shows, you would be better off especially if others had that enhancement as well. But the advantages of increased height are more positional. Let’s call it the standing-on-tiptoes problem. You’re in the middle of a crowded room. To see what’s going on in the front, you stand on your tiptoes.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

In the fourteen years before the book was published, black swan appeared 16,569 times in a Factiva search (usually in reference to a piece of choreography in Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake called “the Black Swan pas de deux”). In the fourteen years after its publication, it appeared 92,561 times. Black Swans filled the skies. In the wake of Covid-19, Lloyd’s of London proposed a Black Swan insurance plan for governments to protect themselves against pandemics and other extreme events. “Despite rampant uncertainty in 2020 stemming from the Black Swan effects of the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. ferrous scrap pricing finished the year strong,” Platts Daily Briefing opined. “Trump was a classic black swan event,” Lionel Shriver observed in the Telegraph. There’s a Black Swan wine, a Black Swan publisher, Black Swan yoga, even an exceedingly eccentric comic strip called Black Swan Man that portrays Taleb as a muscle-bound, costumed figure battling the evils of bitcoin and the Federal Reserve and tossing off advice such as “We must always be vigilant against the problem of induction.”

On January 20, 2022, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at one hundred seconds to midnight—exactly where it had stood since ticking closer to Armageddon in January 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic exploded across the planet. While the election of Joe Biden as U.S. president had eased tensions, it wasn’t enough to reverse civilization’s death dance with catastrophe, the atomic scientists said. Tense relations between the U.S., China, and Russia, North Korea’s nuclear expansion, the frightful military standoff on the border of Ukraine, the expanding pursuit of biological weapons, the coronavirus pandemic and the threat of future pandemics, unchecked emissions of greenhouse gases that caused global warming, a plague of toxic disinformation on the Internet that had persuaded millions of Americans that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was fraudulent, among a host of other existential risks—all put the world on the edge of a cliff.

—occurred in a different world, a world without widespread international air travel, without United Airlines and Lufthansa, without multiple highly congested urban centers of tens of millions. Today’s über-networked global society makes the extreme risk of the ruin problem more of a threat than ever. All hope is not lost, if humanity learns the lesson of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Taleb and his coauthors. In future outbreaks, the response needs to match the threat. The world needs to act as if everything is on the line. That means applying the “precautionary principle,” which, according to the memo, “delineates conditions where actions must be taken to reduce the risk of ruin, and traditional cost-benefit analyses must not be used.”


pages: 595 words: 143,394

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

Official biographers and historians have claimed one or both states would have been won by Nixon in a fair election.14 If concerns about election integrity were valid from at least 1960 through 2016, then surely those concerns were even more valid in 2020, an election year unlike any other in American history. In the lead-up to the election, thanks in part to the coronavirus pandemic that gripped the world, wide-ranging electoral reforms were implemented. Across the country at the state, local, and federal levels, political actors rammed through hundreds of structural changes to the manner and oversight of elections, resulting in what Time magazine would later call “a revolution in how people vote.”15 Some of these changes were enacted by state legislatures, some by courts, and others by state and county election officials.

The area has a mix of recent college graduates and senior citizens, such as those in the large retirement community The Villages. It has immigrants from different countries and migrants from the north. Seniors were a serious worry for the Trump campaign, as polling showed them to be the most susceptible to the Biden team’s focus on the approaching “dark winter” for Americans, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Momentum had shifted, though, and the Trump team felt confident. Sure enough, the I-4 results came in great. Trump was doing well with seniors, with women, and with non-Cuban Hispanics, too. In 2016, Trump had won Florida by 1.2 percent, the first of many races that went his way.95 Republicans in Florida had won statewide in 2018, but much more narrowly.

Marc Elias, “We Are Not Counting Every Vote,” Medium, January 13, 2020, https://medium.com/@marceelias/we-are-not-counting-every-vote-e3b91b4a96f1. 79. Marc Elias, “How to Fix Our Voting Rules before November,” The Atlantic, April 5, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/how-fix-voting-right-now/609454/. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Quinn Scanlan, “Here’s How States Have Changed the Rules around Voting amid the Coronavirus Pandemic,” ABC News, September 22, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/states-changed-rules-voting-amid-coronavirus-pandemic/story?id=72309089. 84. Ibid. 85. Ronna McDaniel, “RNC Chairwoman: Democrats Don’t Want to Play by the Same Voting Rules,” Washington Post, August 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/27/ronna-mcdaniel-rnc-chairwoman-poll-watchers-voting/. 86.


pages: 197 words: 53,831

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

In all these thematic chapters we’ll look at some of the high-profile investors backing these ideas, the entrepreneurs coming up with the solutions, and ways that you can get involved, depending on your appetite for risk. Finally, in the conclusion, we’ll look at what still needs to be done by regulators and governments to make it easier for investors both big and small to support climate change solutions. We’ll also look at how sustainable investments have held up during the coronavirus pandemic, and examine the case for building back better. A note before we begin: it’s important to say that this book isn’t trying to tell you what to do. It assumes that you want to know more about how to invest with climate change in mind, but it also aims to help you understand the potential risks involved and make informed decisions.

One of the directors sent her something from the communications department that had ‘very debatable’ ideas in it. ‘Obviously my aspirations are for them to go a lot further and faster and deeper but the dialogue is open,’ she says. Interestingly, Jenny was speaking before Shell announced in April 2020 that it was introducing a net zero emissions target even amid huge financial pressures from the coronavirus pandemic. Emboldened, Jenny then went to the Marks & Spencer annual general meeting. AGMs are notorious for having a certain class of retired investor rock up to hear their own opinions and sample the free tea and biscuits. She knew that a long line of these regulars would want to get their questions in first – which tend to be the same every year – and the directors took their time answering.

Sales of meat-free food grew 40 per cent over the five years to 2020, and Mintel expects UK sales to rise by another 34 per cent at least by 2024. The proportion of meat-eaters who reduced or limited the amount of meat they consumed rose from 28 per cent in 2017 to 39 per cent in 2019. There were also signs that the coronavirus pandemic would prove a boon for plant-based alternatives. With meatpacking factories shut down across the US and labour shortages affecting production, plant-based factories, where production is more automated, saw less disruption in their supply chains. US sales of plant-based meat substitutes jumped by 265 per cent over an eight-week period, according to consumer data group Nielsen, compared with rises of just 39 per cent for fresh meat.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Deagel’s proposal, on the other hand, proposed the collapse of the United States through the implosion of the financial markets and the destruction of the medical system, two areas that could be seen as not just possible but probable. A dark analysis and one few people took seriously – until January 2020 revealed the Wuhan bats and rats virus, and the world went crazy. Arguably, the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic has announced the beginning of the end of the American Empire, as well as the Old Word Order. The public have been so brainwashed with Zombie Apocalypse preprogramming through television and movies that it is the end of the world as we know it but we feel fine. Move along everyone, nothing to see here.

Think of the Romans, the Russians, the Brits; there is little sympathy for those that were harmed because the observer sees the signs clearly and assumes that the people must have been willfully ignorant to their impending doom. The end of the American Empire has launched a long time ago. It is not an accident and it was not left to random chance. The Coronavirus pandemic is merely the final trigger for the pre-planned explosion. In the end, those that review how it all ended will feel the same way, have the same lack of empathy, and wonder the same things: how did they not see it coming, the signs were everywhere – starting with the flashing neon red arrows pointing out rogue governments all over the world.

The censorship of these thoughts has migrated from the real world into the cyber world, as internet censorship has been ramped up in recent years because the controlling power structure has noticed that most people are moving online to source their news and information. It does beg the question, do flat-Earthers believe in globalism? Internet Censorship Never before have Americans seen the internet censorship in action as much as during the Coronavirus pandemic. Facebook, YouTube, even the comments sections on news sites have blocked and removed anything that opposes their mainstream paid-for narrative with alarming alacrity. Censorship is what happens when powerful people get nervous, so the rise in online censorship is both a good thing and a horrible thing.


pages: 416 words: 124,469

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet Archive, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, obamacare, pets.com, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, too big to fail, yield curve

Mnuchin knew how to manage sensitive situations and how to deal with problematic investors and clients. He also had a preternatural ability to blend into the background of the Trump administration while also retaining influence. Mnuchin could do this, in part, because he excelled at doing what Trump hated doing most, which was getting involved in details. When the coronavirus pandemic crushed the American economy, it was Mnuchin, not Donald Trump, who took the lead role in negotiating with Congress on behalf of the White House. This was a delicate job, since the House was controlled by Democrats and the Senate controlled by Republicans. Mnuchin talked frequently with Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House, building a bridge between the White House and the opposition party.

“The day we jointly announced that transaction—and the commitment to it—that unlocked the entire corporate bond market,” Mnuchin later said. These actions, as dramatic as they were, directly benefited only a small group of people: those who owned assets or those who made a living trading them. But the financial crisis the Fed was fighting was a different thing than the much broader crisis of the coronavirus pandemic. The virus was inflicting incalculable damage across American society, in areas the Fed could not address. The hospital system was overwhelmed. Emergency room nurses wore improvised protective gear made out of garbage bags. The virus spread more quickly because many workers who got sick did not have paid sick leave, so they stayed on the job and infected others.

That view was outdated, she suggested, in part because the financial system had become so dominated by hedge funds, private equity firms, or other entities that were sometimes referred to as the “shadow” banking system. The Fed was there to back them all up, in times of crisis. “This is why the Fed was invented and this is what they’re doing now,” Yellen said. She portrayed the coronavirus pandemic as something like a bank panic that went beyond the banks and affected the entire American economy. The Fed was now the lender of last resort for everyone. “When [the coronavirus] came along and people realized how very serious it was going to be, there was just a huge, broad-based flight from risky assets of every type.


pages: 398 words: 96,909

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, defund the police, Donald Trump, epigenetics, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, Internet Archive, Joi Ito, Lyft, meta-analysis, neurotypical, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, phenotype, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

Public policy has also begun to move in favor of parent advocates like Lutz and Solotaroff. In 2017, CMS under the Trump administration gave states until 2022 to show they are complying with the new rule when they were initially meant to comply in 2019. In 2020, CMS again extended the compliance deadline until March 17, 2023, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Then in 2019, CMS released new guidance on the settings rule. While it kept the rule in place, it changed the criteria—which it claimed it streamlined—for settings that isolate and removed the list of specific settings that isolate. Most notably, it also said, “Settings located in rural areas are not automatically presumed to have qualities of an institution, and more specifically, are not considered by CMS as automatically isolating to HCBS beneficiaries.”

For example, if I get excited talking about a subject, I worry I am dumping all the information I know on my partner (and if it’s a topic on which my date is an expert, I absolutely do not want to condescend to her by overexplaining). If we are seated across from each other, I worry she will take offense at me not making eye contact. Online dating during the coronavirus pandemic had definitely sucked, but one good thing about it was that it made eye contact almost a nonissue and I could fidget with my keys or a pen as a stim. In short, masking and blending my autism makes dating difficult. I am used to hearing people say, “You don’t seem autistic.” When I was younger, I took it as a compliment.

But his approach did support phasing out subminimum-wage labor and asking the U.S. Justice Department to review guardianship laws and promote alternatives like supported decision-making. Biden also released an entirely separate platform specifically focused on people with disabilities during the coronavirus pandemic. But at the same time, when Biden—who has been known for making verbal gaffes that range from the benign to the outright nonsensical—was rolling out his disability plan, he said that “everybody has some form of disability,” which is patently not true. While it is true that disability affects everyone’s lives (disability rights advocates often say that it’s one of the few minority groups you can join), saying everyone has some form of disability flattens the experiences of people whose disabilities prevent them from living their lives.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

The crowd in the United Palace roared its approval. Moviegoing, one of the oldest rituals in American cultural life, had officially returned after the depths and deprivations of the coronavirus pandemic. The atmosphere in the theater turned celebratory, even giddy, a mood uncannily matched by the high-spirited film itself. The premiere of In the Heights was kicking off the twentieth annual Tribeca Film Festival, the first festival in North America to feature in-person screenings since COVID-19 hit in early 2020. “Before COVID,” Tribeca cofounder De Niro said before the lights went down, “the simple act of going out to a movie theater was something that you would take for granted.

Working with other execs with traditional backgrounds, among them indie film veteran Ted Hope, Berney tried to carve out a path for Amazon in which it would marry its tech muscle and resources with old-fashioned cinematic tastemaking. It worked well for a time, but then the hot streak cooled. The company paid lavish sums to acquire festival titles like Late Night and Brittany Runs a Marathon, which fizzled in commercial release but performed well in streaming, the company said. Even before the coronavirus pandemic made specialty theatrical releases a major question mark, Amazon began to adjust course and started to favor bigger, splashier titles that could make waves even without theaters. Annette, a not-entirely-coherent musical directed by an auteur’s auteur, Leos Carax, which starred Adam Driver and Marianne Cotillard and had opened the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, was acquired for North America by Amazon Studios.

He immediately seized on its potential, and then took our black-and-white 4:3 idea and showed us how it could be rendered in full CinemaScope. We are forever grateful for his vision, guidance, and friendship. The home Daniel found for the book, William Morrow, turned out to be ideal. Our sage, shrewd, and companionable editor, Mauro DiPreto, retained every bit of his original enthusiasm for the project even as the coronavirus pandemic blew it—and publishing, and civilization—sideways. We benefited at every step from his equanimity and wisdom. Grazie mille, Mauro! Our sincere thanks also go to Morrow’s Vedika Khanna for keeping the many editorial elements on track, and to Aja Pollock, our sharp-eyed copy editor, whose thoroughness and flair for culture high and not-so-high are an exceedingly rare combination.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

By the time I was finally able to step back from it all, and seriously reflect on my international journey in the world of genetic medicine, these cutting-edge medical technologies were losing luster. Public sentiments about high-tech medicine and biotech futures had undergone a historic shift. I was corresponding with Donna Haraway about CRISPR ventures at a moment when the coronavirus pandemic had just upended the modern world. I was experiencing what seemed like mild COVID-19 symptoms myself, but even in my position of relative privilege I was unable to access a test through normal channels—like millions of other Americans. “I see CRISPR technologies inside capitalist and individualist medicine that distracts healers (and investment) from the medicine we need,” Donna Haraway wrote.

“Under other conditions, I can imagine CRISPR technologies enhancing collective well being and even as tools of personal experimentation,” she added. But, she concluded, “genetic modifications should get a demotion in ideology and take their mundane place among flawed tools for coping with aspects of well being and suffering.” The coronavirus pandemic was making it clear that humanity needed robust public health services, not exorbitantly priced genetic medicine. As millions were infected with the novel virus, the desire for a cure was strong. “The world is clamoring for fine-tuned vaccines and mass-produced genetic as well as serological tests,” Haraway observed.

“All these require the latest innovations in genetic medicine—the machines, the workers, the ways of knowing, the habits of trust in science.” We are still in Haraway’s world of the cyborg, full of potent and ironic contradictions. On Facebook, some people joked about CRISPR rescuing us from the coronavirus pandemic. One friend made a post on my wall about ACE2, the receptor that the virus uses to get into cells. “We just need to get rid of ACE2 receptors!!!” she wrote. “Why didn’t they tell us this before!? Life saver! I’ll go cut mine off now!” During the pandemic, the American public watched as the latest scientific knowledge and technological devices failed to protect them.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Some of you may have read my first, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, which was published in 2007.28 If so, thank you; I’m hugely grateful to all of you who have read my four previous tomes. If not, thank you for taking a chance with this book; I hope you find it stimulating and useful. Why, though, do I need to write another book on immigration? For a start, the political context has changed so much since 2007. The financial bubble has burst, the coronavirus pandemic has struck, nationalists are on the march and liberals are on the back foot. A silver lining of the increased controversy about immigration is that it has stimulated plenty of new academic research, providing better insights into its impacts. While Them and Us is aimed at a much wider audience, it draws on this deep well of knowledge and scholarship.

By some measures, that makes me a temporary migrant. Yet my shortest stay in the country was only two days. Does that really make me an immigrant? What if I stayed for a few weeks as a consultant assisting local businesses? Or was seconded to a local organisation for several months? Where does one draw the line? While the coronavirus pandemic has brought most of the world to a halt, mobility will resume once it passes. Until recently, more people were on the move than ever before – and no doubt many will soon be moving again. Most move temporarily, often for only a few months. But official statistics count as migrants only those who stay longer than a year.

Even though many people could work remotely and sometimes do, people still tend to cluster together in offices and big cities, where they spark off each other and engage in office politics to try to get ahead. There is also much more to university than lectures, not least mixing with other students. While the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital working, it has scarcely extinguished the desire for human contact. Moreover, all sorts of services will continue to need to be delivered locally for the foreseeable future. Old people cannot be cared for from afar. Offices and hotel rooms have to be cleaned on the spot.


pages: 236 words: 73,008

Deadly Quiet City: True Stories From Wuhan by Murong Xuecun

Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, global pandemic, lockdown, megacity, Ponzi scheme, QR code, social distancing, TikTok

Australia’s proposal for an international inquiry into the origins and responses to the coronavirus pandemic is gathering international support, with the EU collecting signatures for a motion establishing an inquiry at the meeting of the World Health Authority. The performance of the WHO will also be investigated. More than 100 million residents of north-east Chinese province Jilin are put into lockdown after outbreaks of COVID-19. On 19 May, the World Health Assembly adopts without opposition a resolution to establish an inquiry into the origins and responses to the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 cases exceed five million globally, with 340,000 dead.

Everyone has a personal QR code which is required to prove you are legal and uninfected just to be able to take subway journeys, enter restaurants, or shop at supermarkets. No one cares anymore about privacy or rights because they disappeared long ago in China. In the foreseeable future, COVID-19 prevention policies that treat people with contempt will continue. When the day comes that COVID-19 is no longer a pandemic, Xi Jinping will not relinquish ruling by QR code. It will shackle China for a long time to come because the QR codes report people’s movements; and when required it can be changed to ensure that ‘petitioners’ and dissidents, as well house church congregants, have no options to seek justice.

You will hear the inner voices of people who were unable or too scared to speak out. You will share their torments. But bear in mind that these tragedies are just the beginning of an even greater tragedy. * On 27 July 2022, while living in Australia, I became infected with COVID-19, but unlike my compatriots I did not feel fear or concern. Instead, I felt relieved. I wrote a book about Wuhan, detailing many stories about COVID-19 but I had not actually experienced the illness myself. That had been on my conscience. ‘It’s all right,’ I could now whisper to myself. ‘I finally know what it’s like.’ My symptoms were very mild, like a light cold with a slight fever and aching muscles.


How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

But it would be naive and, quite frankly, silly of us to give a celebratory Mary Tyler Moore beret-toss when we know that, actually, things are still unequal. We shouldn’t exactly be grateful that we’re no longer only relegated to secretary or assistant positions, or thrilled that we’re even ‘allowed’ to be at work. In fact, during the coronavirus pandemic, it became alarmingly clear that women are indeed the backbone of our economy and what keeps our societies functioning. The New York Times reported in April 2020 that while normally men make up the majority of the American workforce, during the pandemic when everything was stripped back to the bare necessities – one in three jobs held by a woman was designated as essential.6 From nurses and pharmacy technicians to supermarket cashiers, the New York Times wrote that this ‘unseen labor force’ whose work is often ‘underpaid and undervalued’ is actually what ‘keeps the country running and takes care of those most in need, whether or not there is a pandemic’.

What I’m trying to say is that none of that is authentic – it’s performative and even reductive. Because at the heart of the troubles many of us have with ‘adulting’ is a real, generational issue. It’s not laziness, sensitivity or a deficiency – it’s a symptom of a wider cultural problem. Our culture of burnout and over-productivity was laid bare as the coronavirus pandemic progressed. ‘We’re not working from home in a pandemic,’ we were told by different people in various ways, ‘You’re at home, in a pandemic, trying to work.’ Instead of hustling, the popular thing to do was to encourage others to look after themselves, to remind us all that self-care mattered more than ever, and that rest was important too.

You shouldn’t be left on your own to just figure it out and hope your next rating is better. You should also never feel that, if someone goes to your manager with some gossipy tittle-tattle, they will take it as gospel and put you in a position of having to defend yourself. Managing in a crisis As the coronavirus pandemic gathered pace, the businesses and companies impacted were sent very quickly into full-blown crisis mode across every aspect of their business. From ill members of staff to remote working to IT issues with everyone working remotely to furloughing or laying off staff and closing entire departments or completely shutting down – managers and those in leadership positions were very quickly forced to deal with issues and situations that most had never had to tackle before – and certainly not all at once, during something as intense and as threatening as a global pandemic and threatened economic collapse.


pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Email: info@allenandunwin.com Web: www.allenandunwin.com ISBN 978 1 76087 946 4 eISBN 978 1 76106 236 0 Index by Puddingburn Internal design by Midland Typesetters Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia Cover design: Philip Campbell Design Cover photographs: Shutterstock (headphones, bag); iStock (shoes) CONTENTS Prologue 1 Rags to Riches 2 Asset Strippers 3 Lay-by 4 Touch Point 5 Little King 6 Going Public 7 The Unsuspected Secret 8 Mickey Mouse and Marijuana 9 Broker Wars 10 Short on Time 11 House of Cards 12 Taking Credit 13 The Cub Club 14 Going Viral 15 Standing Down 16 Trending 17 Once in a Lifetime Epilogue Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index PROLOGUE ‘TREPIDATION’ IS THE word we both had scrawled and underlined in our notepads after a half-hour Zoom call with Anthony Eisen and Nick Molnar, the founders of Afterpay. The call was held on Tuesday, 19 January 2021, when most of Australia was enjoying a summer holiday after a traumatic 2020, which had seen the world ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Nick dialled in from ‘Nicko’s iPhone’. He was unshaven and crouched under a staircase in his holiday house in Byron Bay. The scheduled time of 1 pm coincided with the nap time of his second child, who was only a few months old. Anthony logged on from his desk at Afterpay’s Melbourne office, in a Collins Street tower with views of the city in the background.

Many big brands—not to mention the share market—had come to appreciate that. By the end of 2020, the combined share-market value of Scentre Group, which operates the Westfield shopping centres in Australia and New Zealand, and Unibail Westfield, which owns its US and UK malls, was roughly equal to that of Afterpay at $30 billion. The coronavirus pandemic had moved the scales: at the start of the year, the malls had been worth $50 billion, while Afterpay was valued at $8 billion. With the virus receding, Sydney was opening up for business and events, and Australian fashion was getting the spring back in its step. It had survived the worst of the pandemic, and before that the hordes of foreign, ‘fast fashion’ invaders such as Zara, H&M and Uniqlo, which had opened stores in iconic locations in a challenge to local brands.

Long-term bond rates were rising, not falling, and the pace at which they headed higher was accelerating. The US ten-year bond rate—the discount rate for almost every asset—lingered at around 0.8 per cent at the start of 2021. It gradually drifted north, but in February it accelerated to 1.7 per cent. The reason was that the rollout of vaccines to tackle the coronavirus pandemic meant it was only a matter of time before economies reopened at full capacity. Already the data pointed towards a better-than-expected recovery. The consequence of that was that workers’ wages across the economy would eventually rise, and prices for goods and services would begin to rise.


pages: 372 words: 98,659

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

Calculating an overall economic cost is hugely difficult, but one study by the London-based World Obesity Forum, which gathers scientific expertise on the subject, estimated that by 2025 the total global bill connected to obesity would be around £950 billion.20 The association of excess weight with generally poorer health outcomes has been highlighted anew by the coronavirus pandemic. To reiterate, this book is being written during the period of its peak in the UK, and many of the public health lessons are only emerging. But one repeated feature of studies both in China and Europe has been the greater probability of obese patients to require hospital treatment for the Covid-19 virus, and also to die. The energy balance How did the world get to this point? The answer in its broadest terms was expressed with great eloquence more than sixty years ago by one of the first experts to warn about the then-nascent obesity crisis.

Even though its consequences have been well known for decades, inactivity is what you might call a normalised catastrophe. Governments rarely pass laws, or hold urgent press conferences to pledge action, instead focusing on generally ineffective public information campaigns. Until now, perhaps. By coincidence, this book is being written while the UK and many other countries are in lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. And here, as the world has seen, a swift and coherent response to health emergencies is very much politically feasible. Ministers have not hesitated to close whole sections of their national economies and severely restrict individual freedoms to save lives. For the most part, at time of writing, the public have supported these actions.

Does this mean countries like the UK are condemned to limp on with an ever-growing personal and societal burden connected to immobile living? For all Pukka Peska might dismiss the idea of the Finns being special, can other countries change? The answer for now is that we don’t know. But one thing is clear: other countries have shown they are able to act decisively. A lesson from the coronavirus pandemic has been that when it comes to governments interfering directly in the lives of their populations to keep them healthy, things can change very quickly indeed. Next steps: If a lot of countries, like the UK, are not as motion-friendly as Finland or Slovenia, that can in part be because MPs and councillors don’t really consider it an issue.


Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It is the only country among the world’s twenty wealthiest to not provide affordable universal health care to its citizens.8 Among forty-one developed nations, the United States is the only country to still not guarantee its citizens—mothers or fathers—any paid parental leave at all.9 In March 2021, after a year of economic crisis during which unemployment doubled because of the coronavirus pandemic that by then had killed half a million people in the United States, President Joe Biden signed into effect a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that was set to create the largest expansion to the social safety net in a generation. Among the policies introduced was an expanded child tax credit that would provide families up to $3,600 a year per child.

The effects of this draining emotional labor seep into her private life, where she is trying to complete a graduate degree while providing a steady, loving environment for her sixteen-year-old daughter. “People say whatever happens at work stays at work. That doesn’t work with me,” she says of the supposed clear separation between work life and private life, a complaint that became nearly universal to working women with families during the initial years of the coronavirus pandemic. At home, as a single mother of a dark-skinned Black female teenager, Bri, Ashley doesn’t just juggle all of the domestic duties and bills; she is also sole counselor to and champion for her daughter, whose basic needs she feels the system is failing. After some boys started bullying her for her looks, Ashley noticed her young daughter internalizing more and more negative messages about herself.

“Men Have Now Recouped Their Pandemic-Related Labor Force Losses While Women Lag Behind,” National Women’s Law Center, February 4, 2022, accessed February 12, 2022, https://nwlc.org/resource/men-recouped-losses-women-lag-behind/. 15.  “Low-Paid Women Workers on the Front Lines of COVID-19 Are at High Risk of Living in Poverty, Even When Working Full-Time,” National Women’s Law Center, April 2, 2022, accessed February 13, 2022, https://nwlc.org/press-release/low-paid-women-workers-on-the-front-lines-of-covid-19-are-at-high-risk-of-living-in-poverty-even-when-working-full-time/. 16.  Gus Wezerek and Kristen R. Ghodsee, “Women’s Unpaid Labor Is Worth $10,900,000,000,000,” The New York Times, March 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/04/opinion/women-unpaid-labor.html. 17.  


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

ad hoc manner: Julian Borger, “ ‘Trump thought I was a secretary’: Fiona Hill on the president, Putin and populism,” Guardian, June 12, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/12/fiona-hill-trump-putin-populism-interview. four hundred thousand Americans: “COVID-19 United States Cases by County,” Johns Hopkins University and Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center, accessed April 29, 2021, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map. close to two hundred thousand: “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” New York Times, updated April 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html. Urgent action: Joe Davidson, “GAO report slams Trump administration response to the coronavirus pandemic,” Washington Post, February 3, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gao-trump-covid-biden/2021/02/02/38f0a0a8-65a4-11eb-bf81-c618c88ed605_story.html.

In the United States, the political agenda for developing the economy is usually initiated at the federal level. As a result, it changes with every new administration. But state and local problems remain the same—their development issues persist irrespective of who is in the White House. To create and restore the infrastructure of opportunity after the coronavirus pandemic, the United States will have to balance a place-based and local- and state-driven development agenda with national-level programs. America’s towns and cities and rural areas need continuity of policy. And this modest goal is within their reach. After four years of the Trump administration, the government agencies dealing with economic development issues were hollowed out and their career staffs demonized like other public servants.

America has long been a world leader in individual philanthropy. In December 2020, for example, MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, donated more than $4 billion to a wide range of long-established but underresourced entities in direct response to the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. These included historically Black universities and colleges and nonprofits with programs targeted at working-­class Americans, alleviating economic hardship and promoting upward mobility. Ms. Scott’s focus was on “no strings attached” philanthropy. Although she and others acknowledged that her donations could not substitute for government funding, they would make a significant difference.


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Here are some of the indicators Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020), 81. Economists estimate that 42 percent Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, “COVID-19 Is Also a Reallocation Shock,” National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2020. One in six Americans Megan Leonhardt, “1 in 10 Americans Are Struggling to Afford Enough Food amid the Pandemic,” CNBC, Sept. 10, 2020; Claire Hansen, “1 in 5 Young Children Don’t Have Enough to Eat During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” U.S. News & World Report, May 6, 2020. Thirty percent of Americans missed Igor Popov, Chris Salviati, and Rob Warnok, “Missed Payments Stabilize in June—at Alarming Levels,” Apartment List, June 9, 2020.

One in six Americans struggled to get enough food to eat in 2020. Thirty percent of Americans missed their housing payments in June 2020. By the summer, the economy became a significant source of stress for 70 percent of Americans. Thirty-three percent of Americans experienced clinical signs of anxiety, depression, or both after the coronavirus pandemic began. Meanwhile, companies have used the pandemic as a catalyst to invest in more automation. Half of companies indicated that they were going to increase their investments in labor-replacing technologies due to the pandemic. News reports have cited everything from Google’s AI replacing call center workers to robot janitors in Sam’s Club locations to robot butchers at Tyson Foods processing plants.

Let’s move this country of ours—the one we love and will leave to our children—Forward. AFTERWORD I wrote this book while I was deciding to run for mayor of New York City. It was both an easy and a hard decision. Seeing New York City hollowed out by the COVID-19 pandemic was heartbreaking. Thousands of restaurants and small businesses closed, Fifth Avenue was partially boarded up, and Broadway’s lights went out. More than 30,000 New Yorkers died from COVID-19, and, according to one estimate, more than 200,000 left the city’s metro area in 2020. The coronavirus devastated New York and made living among millions of other people a drawback instead of a strength.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Around 50 preprint services now work to accelerate the diffusion of academic knowledge.40 These preprint servers are so powerful because they remove the boundaries to academic research. They let ordinary people access cutting-edge ideas for free. And that widens the groups who can participate in the scientific process. This was never truer than in the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The first academic paper on the virus was published on a preprint server on 24 January 2020. By November 2020, more than 84,000 papers about Covid across disciplines were available on preprint servers and other open-access sources.41 And Laura O’Sullivan is another example of the power of the preprint server in speeding up the spread of new ideas.

Exponential technologies also facilitate the local production of energy and food, in a way that would have been prohibitively expensive until recently. And new technologies, and the businesses built on them, often need large numbers of people interacting with each other in close proximity – something only cities can offer. As the twenty-first century unfolds, the localising potential of technology will only become more powerful. The coronavirus pandemic which began in 2020 showed how fragile global supply chains could be. But if it was a virus in 2020, it could be war or extreme weather – exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change – in the future. The result is an era in which, once again, geography matters – with economic activity set to become increasingly local.

., Trends in Online Influence Efforts (Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, 2020) <https://esoc.princeton.edu/publications/trends-online-influence-efforts> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 36 Gregory Winger, ‘China’s Disinformation Campaign in the Philippines’, The Diplomat, 6 October 2020 <https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/chinas-disinformation-campaign-in-the-philippines/> [accessed 3 January 2021]. 37 Jack Stubbs and Christopher Bing, ‘Facebook, Twitter Dismantle Global Array of Disinformation Networks’, Reuters, 8 October 2020 <https://www.reuters.com/article/cyber-disinformation-facebook-twitter-idINKBN26T2XF> [accessed 24 March 2021]. 38 Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, ‘Russian Facebook Trolls Got Two Groups of People to Protest Each Other In Texas’, VICE, 1 November 2017 <https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kvvz3/russian-facebook-trolls-got-people-to-protest-against-each-other-in-texas> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 39 ‘How Covid-19 Is Revealing the Impact of Disinformation on Society’, King’s College London, 25 August 2020 <https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/how-covid-19-is-revealing-the-impact-of-disinformation-on-society> [accessed 3 January 2021]. 40 ‘Coronavirus: “Murder Threats” to Telecoms Engineers over 5G’, BBC News, 23 April 2020 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-52395771> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 41 Wesley R. Moy and Kacper Gradon, ‘COVID-19 Effects and Russian Disinformation Campaigns’, Homeland Security Affairs, December 2020 <https://www.hsaj.org/articles/16533> [accessed 23 April 2021]. 42 Simon Lewis, ‘U.S.


pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

“Then it was like five articles a day,” appearing in the media about the phenomenon, he told me. “Then you get to 2016, and it’s between fifty and one hundred a day.” Even as president, Trump inspired conspiracy-minded distrust of the government he led. His handling of the coronavirus pandemic provided just one example. Every day for months, he minimized the coronavirus pandemic, promoted quack cures, and politicized the government’s response, until its every aspect drew skepticism and partisan resistance. As deaths mounted, he used his online platform to blame the machinations of an imagined “Deep State” for the leadership failures that led voters to reject him for a second term.

In April 2020, Jaselskis was sentenced to four years in federal prison.[11] Burning along the same social media fuse, and sparking on new platforms, Pizzagate begat QAnon, a new, more virulent mass delusion. QAnon, some of whose adherents see Trump as an avenging hero in a child-trafficking scheme led by Democratic politicians and Hollywood liberals, first appeared on 4chan around 2017, grew steadily, then surged during the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, Times technology columnist Kevin Roose described lurking[12] in QAnon Facebook groups and watching them “swell to hundreds of thousands of members,” spreading misinformation about the coronavirus along with the claim that Hillary Clinton and liberals drink the blood of children.

Welch had just been released, and Alefantis thought he was still living in North Carolina. “I don’t think he’s coming back to Washington,” Alefantis told me in a tone suggesting he hoped he was right. We sat in the parking lot behind Comet, which Alefantis and his staff had transformed during the coronavirus pandemic into an outdoor dining area, with a bar and firepit, picnic tables for families, and an arbor space for quieter groups. Alefantis told me he had chosen not to live his life in fear. But at one point during our conversation, two men sat down nearby and Alefantis, eyeing them, asked that we move out of earshot.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

To reframe this in a crude way, someone interested in gaining a place on a corporate board must ask themselves: Who from the management team would call me for advice, and when and why? Diversity is just one of the many major issues facing boards today. I conceived this book, and wrote most of it, well before the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. But the first months of the pandemic only reinforced my conclusions about the importance of functional, decisive, and wisely run boards. The coronavirus may have amplified the challenges facing today’s global companies, but I believe now more than ever in the positive role these corporations—and their boards—can play in society.

Leaving a good legacy is becoming harder, however, as the corporate board’s oversight role becomes ever more challenging and baseline notions about shareholder value and social responsibility shift with the changing times. Twenty-first-century companies are buffeted by unprecedented economic headwinds. Particularly after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the global economy is facing a deep and protracted recession, adding to already slowing long-term economic growth trends. Furthermore, de-globalization—in the form of new trade tariffs, capital controls, and increased barriers to immigration—threatens to harm global commerce and limit investment flows and the movement of labor, thereby worsening an already dire economic outlook.

According to a forecast by the Congressional Budget Office, the United States will face increasing challenges over the next decade due to rapidly expanding health-care and social security entitlement obligations. The US deficit, which as of this writing is projected to hit $1 trillion in 2020, is forecast to reach $1.3 trillion in 2030. US public debt, meanwhile, is expected to rise from 81 percent of GDP in 2020 to 98 percent in 2030—its highest level since 1946. In the wake of COVID-19, advanced economies were revising their debt-to-GDP ratios to surpass 100 percent in 2020. In this scenario, it seems inevitable that US political leadership in the coming years, Democrat or Republican, will have to seriously consider raising taxes on corporations. The smartest boards are already looking at the implications of such a scenario for their businesses.


pages: 372 words: 101,678

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

., whose training on how to be a humble but curious analyst, doting father, and thoughtful human being helped shape him into the person that he is today. Rob is grateful for the support of his family throughout the project. Weekend editing sessions provided an opportunity to show the kids that the process of writing, rewriting, and doing it all again is not just something taught in school. INTRODUCTION Even before the coronavirus pandemic exposed flaws in government planning and tested the limits of modern medicine, the world had already become frighteningly out of balance. Tweets had taken over from substantive conversation and “news” had become unapologetically biased. High debt levels and rising leverage risk was something only old people talked about.

The most common explanation by the pundits is disruption, which is exceedingly hard to predict and most likely a convenient excuse. The reality is more complex and humbling. Companies usually fail because of the incompetence and arrogance of a complacent management team, not because they struggled to predict the future. Predicting the future may itself just be an exercise in futility. The coronavirus pandemic is a clear example of the random walk we take each day. And this is not a new phenomenon. When we were growing up in the 1980s, futurists predicted the widespread adoption of electric cars by the late 1990s. In fact, GM launched a concept electric car with the EV1 all the way back in 1996.

Sadly, these actions were lost in the noise of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which only two months into Calhoun’s tenure called the company’s future into question. To continue to produce MAX aircraft during the grounding, Boeing took on billions of dollars in debt and swung from a position of net cash to a position of net debt for the first time since the 787 crisis earlier in the decade. Funds supported ongoing MAX production in the supply chain and payments to customers for delivery delays. The company essentially made a bet that when recertification occurred, cash would quickly begin to flow and debt could be repaid. The COVID-19 outbreak put unprecedented pressure on global air travel.


pages: 399 words: 118,576

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Easter island, epigenetics, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, lone genius, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, precautionary principle, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell, TED Talk, zero-sum game

By alleviating mortality in childhood and young adults, many of us now live long enough to experience the immune decline of ageing, and more than 90 per cent of deaths from infectious disease are in people over the age of 60. The substantial extra risk to older people from infectious disease has been laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic, whose toll in terms of hospitalisation and death is much higher among the elderly. While dying from flu or COVID-19 isn’t ageing per se, the massively increased risk with age means that ageing bears ultimate responsibility for most of these deaths. What’s worse is that a key tool of modern medicine – vaccination – is less effective in the elderly because vaccines rely on the failing immune system for their effectiveness.

It’s also worth following standard advice to avoid infections: wash your hands thoroughly and regularly, cook food thoroughly and take time off work if you’re unwell – this won’t just improve your colleagues’ healthy lifespans, but could have a much wider impact if it stops them passing the disease on to others, and so on. Of course, there could be no better example of the importance of basic hygiene and nipping transmission chains in the bud than the coronavirus pandemic. It might even be worth avoiding infections to optimise your ageing more generally. There’s evidence that historical progress fighting infectious diseases in youth had additional, indirect effects on life expectancy, with children who faced fewer infections growing up being at less risk of diseases like cancer and heart disease in old age.

The company is also trialling the drug for other age-related diseases, including Parkinson’s and, at the time of writing, a new study of RTB101 has just been announced to test whether it can reduce the severity of COVID-19 in nursing home residents. Given that there are several at various stages from development to trials, and that many of these are natural compounds or existing drugs repurposed, DR mimetics are racing senolytics to be the first actual anti-ageing treatment deployed in clinical care. (If metformin or RTB101 prove effective against coronavirus, they may win!) In common with senolytics, these drugs will probably first be used to treat a particular condition, whether that be COVID-19, or diseases where loss of autophagy is particularly relevant – neurodegenerative conditions seem a likely contender.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

In Philadelphia between 1948 and 1952, scholars found black men died from homicide at twelve times the rate of white men.63 A national survey found the same difference in 1950.64 Today, black Americans are seven to eight times more likely to die from homicide than white Americans.65 In 2019, the homicide rate for white people was 2.3 per 100,000 whereas it was 17.4 for black people.66 And in 2020, in the wake of summer protests against police violence, the homicide rate increased on average by more than one-third in America’s 57 largest cities. Homicides rose in 51 cities and declined in just 6 of them. Homicides rose 35 percent in Los Angeles, 31 percent in Oakland, 74 percent in Seattle, 63 percent in Portland, 60 percent in Chicago, and 47 percent in New York City.67 The coronavirus pandemic may have played a role. “Gangs are built around structure and lack thereof,” noted a Fresno, California, police officer. “With schools being closed and a lot of different businesses being closed, the people that normally would have been involved in positive structures in their lives aren’t there.”68 But there had been a similar spike in homicides in 2015 when there was no coronavirus pandemic.

In response, the leadership of the legislature, where Democrats hold a supermajority, moved Wiener out of any leadership role on housing legislation. A group of seven legislators formed a moderate alternative to Wiener and the YIMBYs on one side and NIMBY legislators on the other. The goal was to build consensus around policy that could pass in 2020. YIMBY leaders were optimistic in spring 2020, even after the coronavirus pandemic had begun, that they would pass legislation. “COVID has revealed the fragility of housing scarcity and has made it more urgent for us to not exacerbate it,” a pro-housing leader who asked to remain anonymous told me. “Something inspired by [Wiener’s legislation] SB50 will ram through.”62 But nothing of significance did.

Newsom appeared to make good on his commitment in April 2020 by helping San Francisco and other California cities use federal stimulus funding to rent hotel rooms for the homeless to shelter in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, an initiative called Project Roomkey. Doing so was an obvious win-win-win for hotel owners who could have been bankrupted by the pandemic, for the homeless who were uniquely vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19, and for the public. Jennifer Friedenbach of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness praised Newsom, whom she had criticized fiercely over the years, telling National Public Radio, “I’m a big believer in redemption.”6 Newsom appears to understand that addiction and mental illness are core drivers of homelessness, and to genuinely care about the problem and the people impacted by it.


pages: 334 words: 91,722

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To) by Chris Grey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, game design, global pandemic, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, lockdown, non-tariff barriers, open borders, post-truth, reserve currency, Robert Mercer

But just as they were about to begin, something entirely unexpected and unprecedented was emerging which was to push Brexit from the headlines and to colour the entire negotiating proceedings: the global pandemic of a new and deadly virus. THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC AND BREXIT There is no doubt a book to be written just on the way that the coronavirus – or Covid-19 – pandemic and Brexit intersected. For one thing, it meant that the future terms negotiations often took place by video conference, rather than face to face, which may have inflected them differently. It also meant that, at key times, members of the negotiating teams were in isolation and for a while the British Prime Minister was actually hospitalised.

That meant that the inevitably adverse consequences of a trade deal (compared with EU membership) could more easily be concealed. On the other hand, it potentially made a no-deal Brexit more politically viable. However, neither was risk-free since both meant a double hit from Brexit and from coronavirus. At all events, from March onwards the Brexit process and the coronavirus pandemic became inextricably intertwined. THE QUESTION OF TRANSITION PERIOD EXTENSION Rationally, the pandemic ought to have caused the government to extend the transition period, which was already considered by most experts to be too short to undertake a negotiation of such complexity. And, after all, its end date was only an artefact of the original Theresa May deal, struck at the time when the leaving date was still set as 29 March 2019.

It also seems likely that for some time to come the identities of ‘remainer’ and ‘leaver’ will continue to be significant features of the political and cultural landscape, very possibly inflecting traditional voting patterns as, to an extent, happened in the 2019 election. The bigger legacy of that would seem likely to be a moving culture war, taking in new issues apart from Brexit but always reflecting the divisions that Brexit both laid bare and magnified. That could already be seen in the way that, during the coronavirus pandemic, overlaps emerged between ‘lockdown sceptics’ and Brexiters, as discussed in Chapter Six. Indeed, Nigel Farage pivoted from making Brexit his main preoccupation to criticising the coronavirus restrictions (as well as treading his familiar territory of stoking panic about asylum seekers).


pages: 199 words: 48,162

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest by Ted Seides

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, business cycle, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, diversification, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fake news, family office, fixed income, high net worth, hindsight bias, impact investing, implied volatility, impulse control, index fund, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Lean Startup, loss aversion, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, zero-sum game

However, the biggest risk to portfolios is an unforeseen tail event. As the late Peter L. Bernstein said, “risk means you don’t know what will happen.” Financial setbacks over my career, which started a few years after the crash in 1987, included the dot.com bubble in 2000, the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and many smaller sell-offs along the way. Each of these were shocks to the system. Doctors referred to SARS-CoV-2 as a “novel” coronavirus. The sudden stop to economies around the world was indeed novel – it had never happened before. Each tail event reminds CIOs of the problems of assumptions that underpin models.

Part 2 discusses the frameworks modern CIOs employ in managing the money entrusted to them. The sequence from high level to the ground is as follows: Governance Investment strategy Investment process Technological innovation The section closes with a case study on how CIOs handled the uncertainty presented by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Chapter 6: Governance “You can’t have investment success with a bad governance structure.” – Karl Scheer A few years ago, a money manager I knew was preparing for its sixth meeting with a major endowment. They had met junior analysts, asset class specialists, and senior staff at the endowment’s office and their office, and they had spent a full day visiting portfolio companies together.

To learn more Podcasts Capital Allocators: Steve Galbraith – In the Boardroom (Ep.48) White Papers Best Governance Practices for Investment Committees, Greenwich Roundtable37 Principles of Investment Stewardship for Nonprofit Organizations, Commonfund Institute38 * * * 33. The timing of the removal of the hedge just before the Covid-19 crisis in March 2020 looked horrible. Six months later with the market fully recovered, Meng’s rationale of the undue cost of a hedge over the long term would have sounded a lot better. 34. “CalPERS board wrestling with how to delegate,” Pensions & Investments, September 21, 2020. 35.


pages: 367 words: 97,136

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation by Sebastien Page

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Cal Newport, capital asset pricing model, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, iterative process, loss aversion, low interest rates, market friction, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, oil shock, passive investing, prediction markets, publication bias, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs, TSMC, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

See Jack Treynor (1961), Bill Sharpe (1964), John Lintner (1965), and Jan Mossin (1966). 2. “Professor William Sharpe Shares Nobel Prize for Economics,” gsb.stanford .edu. 3. As I finalize this book at the end of March 2020, equity markets have suffered one of their worst and fastest sell-offs in history due to the coronavirus pandemic, combined with a major oil shock. The Federal Reserve has aggressively lowered rates, and the three-month US Treasury bill is at zero. These are unusual circumstances. In this context, expected returns across asset classes should be about 1–2% lower due to lower rates, compared with those of 2018.

There was a bubble in cryptocurrencies, but it’s been deflating somewhat slowly and, so far, without systemic consequences. However, we do worry about latent risks such as the unprecedented levels of government debt and 0% interest rates outside the United States. As the events related to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 continue to unfold, pundits like to compare this crisis with the 2008 financial crisis. Yet there are important differences. The 2008 crisis involved a speculative bubble in real estate. Systemic risk was high, in great part because banks owned structured products linked to this bubble.

Sector weights for industrials and materials have gone down over this period as well.5 Therefore, not only will the next crisis be different (as crises always are), but the sensitivity of US stocks to that new crisis will be different as well. They should be more resilient to an economic downturn that affects mostly cyclicals. Recent market performance during the coronavirus pandemic proves this point. Large technology companies have protected the S&P 500 from the much larger drawdown it would have experienced if it still had a 31% weight in financials and energy. These changes in sector weights also make time series analyses of valuation ratios on the S&P 500 less reliable.


pages: 309 words: 121,279

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

In Britain, as in Europe, landfills have a lousy reputation as being archaic, foul and polluting. As a result, waste companies, always keen to show off their latest recycling facilities, are reluctant to let anyone on a landfill, and particularly not a journalist. In fact, for more than a year, every waste company that I ask refuses to grant me access to one, citing either the coronavirus pandemic or unspecified safety concerns (while at the same time, insisting that landfills are perfectly safe). SUEZ, the French waste and sanitation giant named for its involvement in digging the Suez Canal, is the one exception. It is more than happy to show me around. In the office, I meet my chaperones: Victoria Pritchard, SUEZ’s regional manager for the North East of England, and Jamie McTighe, the regional operations manager.

When clothes leave exporters like Pink Elephant bound for West Africa, this is where the lion’s share will end up. From here, the clothes will spread across Ghana and across borders, into Côte D’Ivoire, Togo, Niger, Benin and beyond. ‘Obroni!’ ‘Hey, Obroni!’ Foreigner! White person! The traders laugh and gossip, offering greetings and high fives. The coronavirus pandemic has meant fewer tourists passing through Accra for a while, and so our group stands out. I am being accompanied by Sena Mpeko, a British-Ghanaian journalist helping me in Accra; we in turn are being shown around by Yayra Agbofah and Kwamena Dadzie Boison, the co-founders of The Revival, a Ghanaian fashion brand that specialises in upcycling second-hand clothing.

Sewage, like trash, can tell you a lot about a city’s population: its eating habits, its flushing habits, and even its health. Several cities around the world monitor sewage to detect diseases, including cholera; shit will normally tell you about an emerging outbreak before hospital admissions do. During the coronavirus pandemic, London, like many cities, began testing the viral load in their sewage in real time to track cases and detect the emergence of new variants. In 2022, sewage testers detected polio virus in the city’s sewage, triggering a hurried vaccination drive – shit as early-warning system. We walk along the lanes.


pages: 413 words: 115,274

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Before you know it, the parking lot belongs to the birds and the bugs. It was a Pizza Hut; now it’s all covered in daisies. I wished for others to share my epiphany, to recognize the tremendous potential of all the land that lay hidden beneath the chassis of a thousand parked cars. And then the monkey’s paw part: As I began to write this book, the coronavirus pandemic shut down half the world. But for the ambulances, traffic vanished, and the air cleared. Some lucky few had fled to the country, but most urbanites were left with the unsettling experience of an empty city. The cramped feeling of an apartment without public life; the silence of streets without cars.

Other excellent histories that helped inform my perspective on the development of the American city include Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson, Building Suburbia by Dolores Hayden, Mall Maker by Jeffrey Hardwick, Down the Asphalt Path by Clay McShane, Voices of Decline by Robert Beauregard, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles by Richard Longstreth, The Big Roads by Earl Swift, Dingbat 2.0, edited by Therman Grant and Joshua Stein, and The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago by Dana Caspall and Joseph Schwieterman. The first place I ever read a critical word about parking lots was, of course, in the chapter on “border vacuums” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I did the reporting during the coronavirus pandemic and I am especially grateful to everyone who took the time to share some of their time in person: Ginger Hitzke, José Trinidad Castañeda, Nathan Carter, John Hammerschlag, Mark Lawrence, Lori Droste, Michael Manville, Mott Smith, John Van Horn, Sam Schwartz, Jane Wilberding, Lindsay Bayley, Chrissy Mancini Nichols, Mark Vallianatos, Victor Pontis, Howard Yarus, Christophe Najdovski, Clay Grubb, Matt Parkerson, Susan Holgren, Greg Anderson, and others.

Chapter 13 How Americans Wound Up Living in the Garage At the start of 2020, José Trinidad Castañeda was living with his mom. Reluctant to drain his savings in a rental market where a one-bedroom apartment went for north of $1,500 a month, Trinidad Castañeda shared a small house with his mother and two sisters. This made him typical of his generation: Even before COVID-19, 46 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds lived with their parents. After COVID-19, that figure rose to 52 percent—the highest mark since the Great Depression. What made José atypical was that the hypothetical apartment that was out of his reach was not one in Boulder, Colorado, or Washington, DC, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, to name just a few cities where high rent has forced young people into cramped, shared quarters.


Belgium - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Bernadett Varga

Airbnb, Black Lives Matter, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, high-speed rail, lockdown, Peace of Westphalia, trade route, women in the workforce, work culture

Despite the fact that most households own a car, online shopping is very popular for both personal and household items. On average people in the Charleroi area have a higher preference for shopping by car and favor hypermarkets such as Cora or the other big supermarket-chains. Others in the Louvain/Leuven area also prefer shopping by car and tend to patronize smaller chains such as Delhaize. The coronavirus pandemic, however, has changed the shopping behavior of many—a quarter of Belgians have been prompted to use a different retailer, store, or Web site, and approximately 60 percent have tried something new when shopping. Cash payment is still available in most stores; however, card payment is well established in every supermarket and store.

However, it is a polarized city, containing both the richest and the poorest districts in all Belgium, and has higher unemployment than either Flanders or Wallonia. The COVID Pandemic COVID-19 arrived in Belgium in the middle of the period of political stasis. The first cases were reported in February 2020 and transmission within the country was confirmed in early March, by which time Belgium had the third-highest number of COVID-19 deaths per head of population in the world. Later in March the authorities ordered the closure of schools, cafés, and restaurants and canceled all public gatherings for sporting or cultural purposes.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

: the dynamics of COVID-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook’, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, November 2020. 8. Nina Burleigh, ‘How The Covid-19 Vaccine Injected Billions Into Big Pharma—And Made Its Executives Very Rich’, www.forbes.com, 14 May 2021. 9. As discussed in earlier chapters, even Facebook’s own internal research highlighted this issue for the world’s largest social network. This is a good YouTube example: Katie Dowd, ‘We ran a YouTube test. The results horrified us’, www.sfgate.com, 21 May 2021. 10. Or people who identified as journalists, at least. 11. ‘The Truth Behind the Coronavirus Pandemic, Covid-19 Lockdown & the Economic Crash – David Icke’, https://freedomplatform.tv, 18 March 2020. 12.

The far-right shock jock Rush Limbaugh said in February 2020 that Covid-19 was the common cold, ‘weaponised’ by the media and others to bring down Donald Trump40 – a view Trump himself then endorsed.41 QAnon influencers resolved that Covid-19 had been deliberately made in a lab and released, possibly as part of an effort by China to prevent Trump’s re-election (why China would first release the pathogen in their own country is left unexplained). Other pro-Trump conspiracists suggested that Britain might be behind the plot to take down Trump’s ‘roaring economy’.42 As Covid-19 spread in the US, conspiracists ended up focusing on one man in particular: the wizened seventy-nine-year-old director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci.

In the US, a poll taken by YouGov as early as May 2020 found that 44 per cent of Republican voters believed Bill Gates was plotting to use Covid-19 as a pretext to plant tracking microchips in billions of people around the world. Only 26 per cent disagreed with the statement.67 The pandemic also provided many more avenues in conspiratorialism. Previously relatively mainstream figures like Russell Brand or Joe Rogan would promote Covid-19 conspiracies to their large followership, while celebrities including Jim Carrey, Lisa Bonet and tennis pro Novak Djokovic all received coverage for their refusal to take the Covid-19 vaccine. By July 2021, when the vaccine was a reality and adult Americans were being urged to get their free jab, a further YouGov survey found that 51 per cent of people who had refused the vaccine believed it contained a microchip.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Mark Cuban has always been a showman and is a popular media personality on the highly rated Shark Tank. He’s also a billionaire, an effective entrepreneur, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. He dabbles in politics and has been mentioned on occasion as a potential presidential candidate. One thing I know about Cuban. He understands the big gesture. When I interviewed him early in the coronavirus pandemic, he had just announced that he was paying all hourly employees of the Dallas Mavericks their normal wages, even though the Mavericks’ home arena was closed, and the NBA was shut down for the foreseeable future. He explained, “It’s not going to cost me nearly as much as it would cost the hourly employees to go without.”5 He added that he was rich and could afford it.

The serious contenders, in my view, were the companies who were actually trying to make a measurable difference, either for their employees or in the COVID-19 fight. Target announced an investment of more than $300 million in added wages, paid leave, and backup childcare. Allstate offered free coverage to those who were using their vehicles to deliver food and medicine. MassMutual offered free life insurance to frontline health care workers. Jack Dorsey dedicated $1 billion in Square stock for coronavirus relief. The list went on. COVID-19 has presented an opportunity for CEOs to do more than pay lip service to change. Paul Polman, who became CEO of consumer goods giant Unilever back in 2009 (retiring in 2019 and handing the reins to Alan Jope) and steered it toward a new kind of capitalism, expressed the view of many: “Governments in this world right now have a little bit of a hard time, and global governance is broken,” he said.6 “Populism, xenophobia, nationalism… all these things are going in the wrong direction.

Classification: LCC HD58.8 .M874 2022 | DDC 658.4/06—dc23/eng/20211116 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047539 ISBNs: 9781541789081 (hardcover); 9781541789104 (e-book) E3-20220314-JV-NF-ORI CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Foreword: The Redesign Is Underway Prologue: God and Manna Part One: Raising the Stakes Chapter 1: The Big Change Chapter 2: The Bastion Shakes Chapter 3: Whiplash Chapter 4: The COVID-19 Redemption Part Two: What Do Stakeholders Want? Chapter 5: An Empowered Workforce Chapter 6: Innovation from Diversity Chapter 7: Climate Commitment Chapter 8: What’s Good for the Community Part Three: The Soul of a Corporation Chapter 9: The Activist CEO Chapter 10: The Purpose of Business Chapter 11: The Accountable Era Chapter 12: Confronting the Skeptics and the Critics Acknowledgments Discover More About the Author Notes Praise for Tomorrow’s Capitalist To the women who gave me life and gave my life meaning: My mother, Catherine; my daughters, Lucyann and Amanda; and my life’s partner, Lori.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

He succeeded in reforming the bankrupt pension system, which allowed government employees to retire early—in some circumstances, at fifty-six for men and fifty-three for women—and further opened up Brazil to the global economy and international investment. These developments restored confidence in Brazil’s prospects. But further reforms of the energy sector have been hampered by turbulent politics and a congress with more than twenty political parties. The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 hit Brazil hard, adding further to the political turbulence. Still, substantial new investment has been going into Brazil’s highly prospective offshore, and those waters are now one of the most active areas in the global oil industry.3 AMLO and Bolsonaro, coming to the presidencies of the two largest Latin American countries within a few weeks of each other, are leading their nations in opposite directions.

Yet, even with the slowdown, the United States had become the world’s number one oil producer. By February 2020, it had reached the highest level of production ever—thirteen million barrels per day—more than Saudi Arabia and Russia and on the way to tripling the level of 2008. At that moment struck the calamity of 2020—the coronavirus pandemic and the shutdown of the globalized world economy, which slammed shale as it did most industries. As a result of a drastic cutback in investment, shale output will go in reverse and decline. When growth returns, it will be at a slower pace. But, whatever the trajectory, shale is now established as a formidable resource

What was thought would be over in weeks, if not months, became a long war. The conflict has killed many civilians, displaced millions of people, put even more at risk of starvation, disrupted basic services like water and electricity as well as the medical system, precipitated cholera and diphtheria epidemics, and then COVID-19—altogether adding up to what the United Nations has described as a major humanitarian crisis.23 The Saudi-led air campaign has been criticized for indiscriminate targeting that was killing civilians, a critique extended to the United States, which has been supplying ordnance to the Saudis. For their part, the Houthis have been brutal and repressive in Yemen.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

It’s 4 March 2020, and Britain is in the midst of an increasingly unsettling interlude: less than three months since Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party suffered electoral obliteration at the hands of Boris Johnson’s Brexit populists, and less than three weeks before Johnson’s government, belatedly recognizing the threat of the coronavirus pandemic, would impose a national lockdown. As I cycled to Mandelson’s offices, England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, was warning journalists that ‘some deaths’ were likely. A storm was coming, but as yet it remained rumblings of thunder in the distance. The old world was still intact, and it was ruled by a Conservative government drunk on triumphalism, rolling around in its newly acquired power, seemingly oblivious to everything else.

It nurtured a new ecosystem of think tanks, economists and intellectuals who are seriously engaged in debating what a new world could look like, brimming with ideas such as the four-day working week, a Green Industrial Revolution, and the democratization of the workplace and the economy. Just over three months after the 2019 election, British society was shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic. ‘Boris must embrace socialism immediately to save the liberal free market,’ boomed the Telegraph, as the age of coronavirus dawned. Undoubtedly, the Conservative government had no choice but to enact the most dramatic expansion of the state in peacetime, which included paying the wages of half the country’s workforce.

Today, many of Corbyn’s opponents remain conceptually frozen in the late 1990s, when Tony Blair triumphed in Britain alongside like-minded political torchbearers in Western Europe and the United States. Simply through the process of laying claim to the mantle of Blairism, they believe both that they inherit a magical election-winning political formula, and that Blairism is an answer to today’s challenges. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic detonated like a bomb at the heart of the global economic system, the late 1990s felt like a different, faraway political universe – and a fantasy one at that. One in which the bubble of financialized capitalism seemed to guarantee an eternity of economic growth and living standards; or, so the mantra went, a rising tide that would lift all boats.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Instacart’s bootstrapping owner, Apoorva Mehta, was often admiringly cited in the press as an “immigrant founder” who provides “essential services,” giving “jobs and a lifeline to many,” but the astronomical valuation of his company contrasted sharply with how pinched the contractors’ personal budgets were. Mehta, “the serial entrepreneur” behind Instacart, was, by June 2020, according to Forbes, “leading a $13.7 billion unicorn after demand for grocery delivery skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic,” writing approvingly that Mehta’s grocery delivery service was tamping down the efforts of “rebellious workers.” The CFOs and CEOs had their individualistic mantras, yet in truth these potentates depended on masses of people like her. Bain, when I first spoke to her, was working a gig job that is sometimes referred to as a “hustle,” or a “side hustle,” if it takes up a smaller slice of a person’s overall hours.

One study published in March 2022 in the Review of Economics and Statistics found that the more individualistic counties in the United States, many of them formerly frontier areas, engaged less in social distancing and were also less willing to receive COVID-19 vaccines. In another paper entitled “Rugged Individualism and Collective (In)action During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” from 2020, by a different set of researchers, economist Samuel Bazzi among them, also found that counties “with greater total frontier experience (TFE) during the era of westward expansion” had a “weak collective response to public health risks.” The researchers concluded, “Frontier culture hampered the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.” This data made it even harder to accept the romanticization of the rugged individualism of the past.

“These words have gained a strange kind of prestige from downwardly mobile, college-educated tech workers”: John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019). 30 percent of Americans who do something else for pay in addition to their full-time jobs, according to an NPR/Marist survey: “A Close-Up Look at Contract Workers,” NPR, January 22, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/01/22/579629353/a-close-up-look-at-contract-workers. according to a survey conducted in 2020 by the Pew Research Center: Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Anna Brown, “About Half of Lower-Income Americans Report Household Job or Wage Loss Due to COVID-19,” Pew Research Center, April 21, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/04/21/about-half-of-lower-income-americans-report-household-job-or-wage-loss-due-to-covid-19/#many-adults-have-rainy-day-funds-but-shares-differ-widely-by-race-education-and-income. “a knot in your stomach, a rash on your skin, are losing sleep, and losing touch with your wife and kids”: Nitasha Tiku, “The Gospel of Hard Work, According to Silicon Valley,” Wired, June 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/06/silicon-valley-still-doesnt-care-work-life-balance/.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

If you find a hack—a way of following the letter of the law that seems to violate the spirit—it’s not your fault that the law wasn’t well written. This is the sort of argument that you hear from tax avoidance proponents everywhere. And laws are hacked everywhere. In 2020, the Federal Reserve implemented an emergency loan program for companies affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Even though only US companies were officially allowed to participate, foreign companies figured out how to turn themselves into US companies and hack the regulation. The Pacific Investment Management Company, based in Newport Beach, California, runs a hedge fund registered in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying US taxes.

Basically, that sentence extended by two years another piece of legislation that benefited students still in teacher training programs, including Teach For America recruits. In 2020, Congress passed the $2 trillion CARES Act, a COVID-19 stimulus bill. On page 203 of the 880-page bill, there was a change in how real estate investors could offset their losses. This tax break profited real estate moguls, such as then president Donald Trump, $17 billion annually—$17 billion in potential tax revenue. It didn’t matter that the provision had nothing to do with COVID-19, or that the retroactive tax break covered a period long before COVID-19 arrived. Speed and stealth aided in sneaking this passage through. The text of that bill was finalized less than an hour before the vote, and Republican staffers added the provision at the last second to the final text of the bill.

One prevents the host cell from sending out signals to the immune system that it’s under attack. Another encourages the host cell to release the newly created virions. And a third helps the virus resist the host cell’s innate immunity. The result is the disease that has dominated our lives since 2020: COVID-19. COVID-19 is a hacker. Like all viruses, SARS-CoV-2 is a clever exploitation of our body’s immune system, subverting the normal operation of that system at the expense of our general health and the lives of over 6 million people worldwide. HIV is another hacker. It infects T-helper white blood cells in our body, inserting its own DNA into the cell’s normal DNA, and then replicating inside the cell.


pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The Windrush scandal of 2018, which saw black British citizens being terrorised by government bureaucracy and threatened with deportation (an effect of the ‘Hostile Environment’ immigration policy introduced in 2014), revealed a disregard for judicial norms that few had imagined the British state was capable of, at least within its own borders. Within two months of Britain’s departure from the European Union, the political establishment had been engulfed in the unprecedented chaos and horrors of the coronavirus pandemic. Johnson was forced to rein in his jocular nationalism, in an effort to look statesmanlike, serious and deferential to experts. But even then, the government couldn’t resist resorting to deceptive communications tactics, as the prime minister struggled to adopt the necessary gravitas. While the crisis emerged with little warning, ultimately to do far more economic damage to Britain than Brexit, it arrived at a time when trust in the media and politicians was already at a dangerously low ebb.

At the same time that small businesses were disappearing at a terrifying speed, Amazon took on tens of thousands of new workers. Social life became even more dependent on the social infrastructure of platform capitalism. The same platforms that were destabilising social and political life prior to the appearance of COVID-19 became virtually preconditions of society, placing a kind of wide-ranging constitutional power in the hands of private corporations. These are just some of the ways in which the credit derivative and the platform have transformed our political world in the twenty-first century. But there is more to it than this: they share a common logic, which eats away at integrity of public institutions.

Considerable uncertainty hovered around Johnson’s domestic agenda and his own political vision, which appeared to change depending on what was the easiest or most entertaining line to take from one moment to the next. In the event, Johnson enjoyed the shortest of honeymoons before an even bigger crisis than Brexit appeared in March 2020. Things were about to get a lot less normal. Once the scale and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic had become clear, the tone of the Johnson leadership became dramatically different. The bluster, recklessness, humour and optimism which his supporters adored were suddenly absent. At the very historical juncture when Britain had witnessed a popular revenge against unelected technocrats and liberal institutions, an emergency arrived that placed huge public demands on scientists and administrators, throwing statistics into the media spotlight for weeks on end.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

The report urges these countries to reassess and “take account of the importance of voluntary and mutually agreed commercial partnerships or arrangements.” The coronavirus pandemic is a chance to interrogate the meaning of “voluntary and mutual” in a monopoly system. The countries that imposed TRIPS on the world and maintain TRIPS Plus define these words differently than their weaker counterparts in “commercial partnerships or arrangements.” The COVID-19 vaccine economy also serves as a reminder that often there is no partnership or arrangement to begin with, because one side cannot afford the monopoly price or because the monopolist does not consider some markets as worth their time, effort, and proprietary technology.

When Gilead Sciences quietly tried to extend its monopoly on remdesivir in mid-March, after the drug developed with federal funds showed promise as a treatment for severe COVID-19, public pressure forced the company to rescind the application. Two days after Gilead’s retreat, on March 25, the Swiss drug giant Roche announced a similar surrender to public outrage in the Netherlands, where it had initially refused an emergency request by the Dutch government to share its proprietary ingredients and specifications for a COVID-19 test. When Israel announced plans to order generic versions of an AbbVie Inc. HIV drug that showed promise in treating severe COVID-19, despite ongoing patent protections that limit its noncommercial distribution in that country, there was no talk of lawsuits or “Special 301.”

The history of drugs is full of accidental discoveries resulting from screening candidates organized by a long series of numbers. Albert Hofmann discovered LSD-25 through a chance mishandling of the twenty-fifth molecule in a series of experimental treatments for uterine bleeding during childbirth. In the first months of COVID-19, it was a government screening of Gilead’s molecular vault that led NIH scientists to flag GS-5734, later named remdesivir and trademarked as Veklury, as a possible therapy for COVID-19. The postwar years witnessed a growing sophistication in molecular chemistry that resulted in greater opportunities for this kind of collaboration. The NIH conducted research and hired drug companies to help classify and identify promising molecules.


pages: 442 words: 85,640

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help by New Scientist, Helen Thomson

Abraham Wald, Black Lives Matter, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Flynn Effect, George Floyd, global pandemic, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lock screen, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, TED Talk, TikTok, ultra-processed food, Walter Mischel

It might seem like some new-age mumbo-jumbo, but this simple act is backed by plenty of studies that show how writing about good experiences increases people’s life satisfaction, with the benefits lingering for at least two weeks after the task.4 It doesn’t have to be a long diary entry. During the coronavirus pandemic, this was the first tool I turned to, using Instagram to write about one positive thing that I experienced each day with the hashtag #littlebitoflovely. It not only helped me feel happier while I was posting, but I also felt it had an influence on my general well-being throughout the day, making me more mindful of the good aspects of my life as they were occurring.

The WHO goes so far as to class it as a group 1 carcinogen, because of a strong link between alcohol consumption and cancer, and says there is no safe level of consumption. And, of course, excessive alcohol consumption increases the risk of death from accidents and violence. While there seems to be a downward trend in drinking among younger people in the UK, we may expect to see fluctuations in this pattern as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. Deaths from liver disease rose in the United States after the 2008 financial crisis, with a particularly sharp rise in alcohol-related cirrhosis among young people, a reverse of the previous decade where deaths from cirrhosis were falling. Because of the timing of the upswing in deaths, the researchers suspected it could be connected to unemployment and other economic factors resulting from the financial crisis.

HOW TO STOP OVEREATING If you feel like your diet has completely gone to pot during a year of coronavirus lockdowns in which you’ve struggled to find your regular food, and been stressed and bored – known risk factors for overeating – then you’re not alone. Emerging evidence suggests that many people, in the UK at least, are struggling to resist the comforts of food more than ever. Weight gain and its negative impact on our health might be an unforeseen consequence of the coronavirus pandemic. An unhealthy diet is often blamed on poor choices and a lack of willpower. We’ve already looked in Chapter 6 at some ways you can train your brain into choosing healthier foods. But new research reveals another line of attack specifically if you find that you are consistently overeating.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

“The Federal Reserve would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy,” it read. The Fed and the Treasury rarely quarreled in public. Such fights didn’t inspire confidence in global markets. But Powell didn’t want anyone to mistake Mnuchin’s decision as a signal that the Fed thought the economy was out of the woods or that it might soon pull back its other stimulus. Date 2020 Covid-19 Cases Covid-19 Deaths Dow Jones Average VIX Fear Index Thursday, November 19 11,726,284 244,180 29,483 (↑ 45) 23.11 (↓0.73) Democrats called on Powell to stiff Mnuchin’s request for returning the unspent funds, which Powell rejected out of hand.

Rajan, “Central Banks Are the Fall Guys,” Project Syndicate, July 31, 2019. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/central-bank-fall-guys-by-raghuram-rajan-2019-07 7. Author’s interview. 8. Author’s interview. 9. Author’s interview. 10. Orla McCaffrey and Shane Shifflett, “During Covid-19, Most Americans Got Ahead—Especially the Rich,” The Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2021. https://www.wsj.com/articles/during-covid-19-most-americans-got-richer-especially-the-rich-11624791602 11. Author’s interview. 12. Transcript of Federal Reserve Board “Fed Listens” Event: How Is Covid-19 Affecting Your Community? May 21, 2020, 43. https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/fed-listens-transcript-20200521.pdf 13. Transcript, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell at the WSJ Jobs Summit. https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-fed-chairman-jerome-powell-at-the-wsj-jobs-summit-11614889342

For weeks, markets had paid close attention to daily case counts in Wuhan, but otherwise brushed off worries about the virus. Starting in late February, however, a simple dashboard of daily reports illustrated how investors were rapidly bracing for a global event that would be far more menacing: Date 2020 Covid-19 Cases Covid-19 Deaths Dow Jones Average VIX Fear Index Tuesday, February 25 10 0 27,081 (↓879) 27.85 (↑ 2.82) At a press conference the next night, Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence would head up the administration’s coronavirus task force. But if this was an effort to project level-headed composure, the president quickly walked all over that message.


pages: 296 words: 118,126

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle

augmented reality, clean water, climate anxiety, climate change refugee, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, decarbonisation, digital map, Donald Trump, energy transition, four colour theorem, gentrification, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, longitudinal study, McMansion, off-the-grid, oil shock, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, smart cities, tail risk, Tipper Gore, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Columba, and by the time they returned to the Keys it was clear that housing would be the defining challenge of the next few years. “Everybody’s house was destroyed,” she told me. “That’s what people would need the most.” We were speaking in the church’s open-air pavilion, where Maconaughey had been delivering outdoor sermons even before the coronavirus pandemic. Irma had weakened the timbers that supported the roof of the chapel, forcing the church to move outside. In the first week Maconaughey was back, she helped transform St. Columba’s campus into a massive shelter for boaters who had lost their homes in the storm, cramming two dozen air mattresses into a loft that had previously been used for an after-school program.

This time firefighters controlled the blaze before it reached the city itself, but the fire still took out close to two hundred homes in the suburbs of Healdsburg and Geyserville, putting additional pressure on the housing market. Around the same time, a large homeless encampment emerged on a bike trail in central Santa Rosa, becoming a sanctuary where people who had been unhoused for years slept alongside those who had lost their homes during the scramble that followed the fires. When the coronavirus pandemic began the following spring, and white-collar remote workers beat a retreat from San Francisco, rents in the area surged even higher, pushing more low-income families out of the housing market. A few months later, yet another fire gnawed away at the region’s already depleted housing stock: the Glass Fire shot the gap between the burn scars of two previous blazes, destroying more than six hundred homes in a section of the hills that had been spared by the Tubbs event.

The couple no longer had their mortgage payment to worry about, but they had emptied their savings on the flood recovery, so they couldn’t even afford to get a lease on a new apartment, let alone a house that would accommodate the twins and the dogs. They stuck it out at Becca’s mother’s house for another six months, and then another year, and then another two years, praying that Sergio’s franchise would start to gain some momentum. The coronavirus pandemic pulled the rug out from under them once more as Sergio’s clients vanished and his usual sales route turned into a ghost town. Becca picked up a little money from an independent yoga practice, but it wasn’t enough to make up the difference. Four years after the storm, Becca and Sergio were no closer to finding a permanent home.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Both developments mirrored long-established practices in the supposedly more open White House press room, where the TV cameras are quickly switched off and the named briefer magically turns into ‘a senior administration official speaking on conditions of anonymity’. But such is the scale of mistrust in an age of partisan and populist politics that by 2020 traditional White House briefings had almost ceased to exist until the coronavirus pandemic left Donald Trump and his officials no choice but to deal again with the ‘fake media’ they had ruthlessly denigrated. A similar Covid-19 adjustment was required in Downing Street, where Boris Johnson’s Svengali, Dominic Cummings, had started to follow Trump’s aggressive media marginalisation, to the point of hiring No. 10 its own photographer and TV crew, who were able to provide tame ‘interviews’ with no awkward questions.

<Hannah-Jones, Nikole. ‘The Problem We All Live With – Part One.’ This American Life podcast, 31 July 2015. <https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-one> Harris, John. ‘The experts are back in fashion as Covid-19’s reality bites’. The Guardian, 15 March 2020. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/experts-fashion-covid-19-reality-bites-trump-johnson> Hasan, Mehdi. ‘Dear Bashar Al-Assad Apologists: Your Hero Is a War Criminal Even If He Didn’t Gas Syrians’. The Intercept, 19 April 2018. <https://theintercept.com/2018/04/19/dear-bashar-al-assad-apologists-your-hero-is-a-war-criminal-even-if-he-didnt-gas-syrians/> Hastings, Max.

Some news outlets – initially, at least – seemed unable to imagine the scale of what was happening: it was easier to report on what videos Boris Johnson was watching in his hospital bed than on the hundreds dying every day all around. The newsrooms that had jettisoned their health or science correspondents struggled. The idiots who suggested that 5G phone masts could be spreading the disease encouraged arson and trashed their own brand. So, it was a mixed picture. Covid-19 could not have announced itself at a worse time in terms of the question about whom to believe. Survey after survey has shown unprecedented confusion over where to place trust. Nearly two-thirds of adults polled by Edelman in 2018 said they could no longer tell a responsible source of news from the opposite.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

almost all of them in China: “Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Report—43,” World Health Organization, March 3, 2020, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200303-sitrep-43-covid-19.pdf. “risk to most Americans is low”: “An Emerging Disease Threat: How the U.S. Is Responding to COVID-19, the Novel Coronavirus,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 3, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/washington/testimony/2020/t20200303.htm. effective against Covid-19: “List N: Disinfectants for Coronavirus (COVID-19),” United States Environmental Protection Agency, https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-registration/list-n-disinfectants-coronavirus-covid-19.

I thought I was there to write about an obscure but, to me, important topic: how things get from the factory, mostly in Asia, to the front doors of the homes and offices in the biggest consumer economies in the world, and specifically my own country, the United States. But why go to Southeast Asia and not China, which is still, by volume, the number one producer of countless goods? Long before the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe, suppliers to Apple, Nike, and dozens of other multinationals had set up factories in Vietnam that are copies of their factories in China. Their reasoning, as one shipper confided to me, was simple: if tariffs or a shooting war suddenly made it impossible to get goods out of China, these companies need to be able to shift their manufacturing within days.

along with globalization: Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis, Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). polarization of wealth and wages: Christopher Mims, “Covid-19 Is Dividing the American Worker,” Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-is-dividing-the-american-worker-11598068859. “Hopefully automation kicks in”: Margot Roosevelt, “As L.A. Ports Automate, Some Workers Are Cheering on the Robots,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-11-07/port-automation-dockworkers-vs-truckers.


pages: 535 words: 103,761

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

It seeks to justify itself on the basis of expertise and process rather than political vision. It self-consciously eschews politics and attempts to de-politicise controversial issues by outsourcing their management and decision making to expert institutions, courts and international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund. Except in unusual circumstances, such as during the coronavirus pandemic, when politicians explicitly gave way to scientists, technocratic governance rarely exists in a pure form. And with good reason: on its own, technocratic governance cannot motivate or inspire people. This is why a technocracy relies for its credibility on policies and ideals that are external to itself.

Their leaders advocate ‘technoscientific means to achieve happiness, a total control of emotions, and an improvement of human character’.755 Moral neuroenhancement, unlike previous forms of moral engineering, ‘operates by altering brain states or processes directly’, through the application of drugs or the use of brain modulation techniques.756 Although occasionally there are outcries against the influence and power of experts, technocratic and therapeutic governance itself is rarely a focus of political dispute. During the coronavirus pandemic the different sides of the argument over the efficacy of lockdown and quarantine measures sought to legitimate their argument by justifying it on the ground of their mental health impact. All sides of the debate appeared to have internalised the fundamentals of the therapeutic ethos but drew different political conclusions from it.

Technocrats are constantly asking the question ‘which nudging techniques can we use to further increase awareness?’764 They believe that through psychological manipulation they can create public awareness that ensures that ‘very large numbers of people form powerful groupings, like a “swarm”, to produce massive social outcomes’.765 The extensive use of nudging and behavioural economics during the coronavirus pandemic illustrates how the engineering of people’s ‘decision making’ rapidly displaced open politically informed guidance and leadership. The ethos and practice of raising awareness is based on the unstated and often unacknowledged assumption that behavioural change is important for both the individual and for society.


pages: 556 words: 95,955

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted by Daniel Sokatch

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, indoor plumbing, Live Aid, lockdown, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, one-state solution, Salesforce, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, traveling salesman, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Tag Meir hosts solidarity meetings and events that bring Jews and Arabs together: marches, candle lighting during Chanukah, and joint iftars.* We operate student chapters at several universities. The students engage in Tag Meir activities, like giving out dates to break the Ramadan fast, helping out families of foreign workers, and assisting elderly people during the coronavirus pandemic. During the first COVID-19 lockdown, we handed out tens of thousands of masks in Bnei Brak.** Our representatives visit sites of hate crimes as promptly as possible to stand in solidarity with the victims and to offer emotional, financial, and moral support. For example, in Sakhnin, in northern Israel, two large Christmas trees outside one of the largest churches in the city were set on fire.

-facilitated normalization of relations with two tiny, wealthy, not particularly democratic Persian Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. In March 2020, after yet another inconclusive election, Netanyahu once again managed to remain prime minister (and, he hoped, avoid criminal prosecution while in office) by forming a coalition government with his chief rival, the centrist Blue and White Party, ostensibly to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Bibi’s political wizardry is unmatched in Israeli history. But all this has come at a price—and the price has been the quality and character of Israel’s democracy. For the last decade or so, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Democracy Index” has consistently ranked Israel as a “flawed democracy,” not a full one.

A few months later, in January 2020, the Trump administration released its “Peace to Prosperity” plan for Israel and the Palestinians, which seemed to offer Israel a green light to annex territory on the West Bank. In March 2020, Israel held a third inconclusive election. Once again, Bibi pledged that, if elected, he would begin to annex. In April 2020, Netanyahu and opposition leader Benny Gantz announced their intention, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world, to form a unity government, with the two men rotating the prime ministership; they would be committed to working together on just two issues: fighting the virus and beginning to annex land in the West Bank. In August, the United Arab Emirates, a tiny, oil-rich Gulf state, and Israel announced that they would normalize relations; this announcement was followed by the news that Bahrain, another small, oil-rich Gulf state, would follow suit.


pages: 383 words: 105,387

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

They pour reinforcements into a certain area for, say, twelve hours, then overwhelm a government army outpost, before disappearing again.’ One of the worst cases came in December 2019, when an attack on an army base in Niger killed seventy-one soldiers. In January 2020 another eighty-nine were killed, and then in late March, as the world’s attention fixated on the coronavirus pandemic, Boko Haram ambushed a military encampment of Chadian soldiers near Lake Chad. In a seven-hour battle they killed at least ninety-two heavily armed troops, making it the deadliest attack ever suffered by the Chadian military. Questions began to be asked about how the country can hold together.

Battle has commenced. Australia is the largest aid donor to the Pacific Islands, but China has been increasing financial aid and loans and, as it did elsewhere, was quick to move in when the Covid-19 virus struck. In April 2020 a Royal Australian Air Force plane carrying aid to the island of Vanuatu was approaching Port Vila airport when it spotted a Chinese plane on the single runway which had arrived carrying PPE and other Covid-19-related equipment. Despite being cleared to land, it turned round and flew the 2,000 kilometres back home. Everyone argues about whether it was, or was not, safe to land, but the point remained – the Chinese were on the ground.

Australia is still a long way from anyone who might come to its physical assistance but technologically the world has moved closer. Covid-19 made Australia more aware of the limitations of the ‘just in time’ economic system, and, like many countries, has hardened its attitude towards being China-dependent and allowing China into critical infrastructure projects, freezing out China’s Huawei company from Australia’s 5G network – a bold move. The relationship can be fragile. In the summer of 2020, when Prime Minister Morrison called for an international inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 virus, this was seen in Beijing as an attack on China. Within days Chinese customs officials noticed ‘issues’ with the labelling on some imported Australian beef products and imposed a ban on supplies.


pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

In September 2019, he was busted with a smuggled recording device, an infraction for which he was placed in solitary confinement for three months and then transferred to a low-security prison in Ohio. From time to time I’ll get an email or a call from someone claiming to be his cellmate offering me information about him, but other than that it’s been pretty quiet. But then his name started popping up again in early April 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic swept across the United States. According to the New York Post, McFarland had started a project from behind bars to crowdfund money to cover the fees associated with making phone calls in prison. He was calling it Project-315. To announce the initiative, McFarland published a twelve-paragraph letter, ten of which were dedicated to a discussion of his own personal growth as a man and as a CEO.232 “I’d like you to know that I know how badly I messed up,” he wrote.

Prosecutors also pointed out that not only had McFarland never mentioned health problems before, but in a recent medical exam, he indicated he had no allergies or respiratory or cardiovascular problems. But Elkton, the Ohio prison to which McFarland had been transferred, reportedly had an outbreak of COVID-19 so bad the National Guard had to be called in. On July 4, McFarland tested positive for coronavirus. “Tested positive for COVID today,” McFarland told a New York Post reporter. “Being put in isolation in a big room with 160 other people who have it at this jail.”234 Like many things after COVID-19, McFarland’s status was no longer funny. But for such a serious ordeal, it would seem not much was learned. In October, McFarland was sent back to solitary confinement, this time for launching a podcast from prison, which had been recorded over the phone.

Rebecca Rosenberg, "Fyre Fest’s Billy McFarland Shouldn’t Be Freed Amid Outbreak: Prosecutors," Page Six, April 28, 2020, https://pagesix.com/2020/04/28/billy-mcfarland-shouldnt-be-freed-amid-coronavirus-prosecutors/. 234. Doree Lewak, "Fyre Fest Fraudster Billy McFarland Contracts COVID-19 in Prison," New York Post, July 4, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/07/04/fyre-fest-fraudster-billy-mcfarland-contracts-covid-19-in-prison. 235.Sarah Tulloch, "Jamie Dornan Addresses Backlash Over ‘Cringeworthy’ Celebrity Cover of John Lennon’s Imagine," Belfast Telegraph, April 8, 2020, https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/news/jamie-dornan-addresses-backlash-over-cringeworthy-celebrity-cover-of-john-lennons-imagine-39113711.html.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

About 150 students ages five to ten attend the school, which was built more than a century ago in the Victorian style, with a brick facade and high arched windows. A modest playground adjoins a church. Many of the parents are on public assistance—or, as the English say, on the dole—and the free lunch and midmorning snack that the school provides are often their children’s only meals. Even as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the area in 2020, blitzing through public housing and terraced apartments where students’ families slept four to a room, the school stayed open, its masked teachers rearranging chairs to preserve as much social distance as possible. On a shoestring budget, in a building that’s showing its age, the school gives the children a solid education and helps them adjust to English life and culture.

For example, they continued to target manufacturers of medicines and equipment vital to treating COVID-19 patients. They rejected Lawrence’s request for a cease-fire on drugmakers, whom they scorned as profiteers exploiting the crisis. “[Pharma] earns lot of extra on panic nowdays, we have no any wish to support them,” DoppelPaymer said. DoppelPaymer, which had been the first gang to accept Lawrence’s proposal, attacked Boyce Technologies, Inc., a company producing three hundred ventilators a day for desperately ill COVID-19 patients in New York hospitals. The gang encrypted Boyce’s files and posted stolen documents such as purchase orders.

But in recent years, hundreds of strains, with odd names like Bad Rabbit and LockerGoga, have paralyzed the computer systems of millions of companies, government offices, nonprofit organizations, and individuals. Exploiting society’s near-total dependence on computers, criminal hackers demand thousands, millions, or even tens of millions of dollars to restore operations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a wave of cyberextortion crippled hospitals and other vital services, shuttered businesses and schools, and further isolated people from relatives, friends, and coworkers. Matthew saw a parallel between the two epidemics. “It was kind of ironic, the computer virus at the same time as the real virus,” Matthew said.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

When a mobile app Democrats used to report results from their Iowa primary caucus imploded in public view in February, I watched as Russian trolls retweeted and stoked Americans who falsely believed the app was a ploy by Hillary Clinton’s inner circle to wrest the election from Bernie Sanders. When the coronavirus pandemic took hold, I watched those same Russian accounts retweet Americans who surmised Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon or an insidious plot by Bill Gates to profit off the eventual vaccine. And as the world stood still waiting for that vaccine, Russian trolls worked overtime to legitimize the vaccination debate, just as they had during the worst of Ukraine’s measles outbreak one year earlier. They retweeted Americans who challenged official Covid-19 statistics, protested the lockdowns, and doubted the benefits of wearing a mask.

We’ve caught Iranian hackers rifling through our dams. Our hospitals, towns, cities, and, more recently, our gas pipelines have been held hostage with ransomware. We have caught foreign allies repeatedly using cyber means to spy on and harass innocent civilians, including Americans. And over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, the usual suspects, like China and Iran, and newer players, like Vietnam and South Korea, are targeting the institutions leading our response. The pandemic is global, but the response has been anything but. Allies and adversaries alike are resorting to cyberespionage to glean whatever they can about each country’s containment, treatments, and response.

Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer. But that winter of 2019, most agreed that NotPetya was the Kremlin’s boldest work to date. There was not a single person I met in Kyiv over the course of those two weeks who did not remember the attack.


pages: 312 words: 108,194

Invention: A Life by James Dyson

3D printing, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, coronavirus, country house hotel, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Indoor air pollution, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, mittelstand, remote working, rewilding, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, uranium enrichment, warehouse automation, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The Corrale uses battery power, so users are free to style their hair without needing to be near a power socket, convenient at home but also in the car, at work, or perhaps glamping. Although batteries do add weight and cost, there is not the tugging weight of the power cord. I was about to launch the Dyson Corrale straightener in New York in early March 2020. The venue was ready but then the coronavirus pandemic struck. Since I was in Paris at the time, the next day I did an online launch at our new Paris store facing the exuberant Paris Opéra. A camera followed me inside the shop while I explained how the Dyson Corrale straightener worked by gathering the tress and providing even tension, and how it worked using a much lower temperature than existing hair straighteners.

Now, it will be a headquarters open all hours for Dyson engineers and scientists to focus on power electronics, energy storage, sensors, vision systems, embedded software, robotics, AI, machine learning, and connected devices. St James Power Station Architect’s drawing, Maple Tree Construction work on the power station slowed during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, delaying our move. Our factories had to stop work, too, and our stock around the world ran down rapidly. We first saw the effects of lockdown in China as early as late January 2020 and could see the recession looming large on the horizon. We knew what we had to do: change everything. Over the past three years we had already been striving to sell more products direct to customers ourselves, either online or through Dyson Demo stores.

Since we are now selling direct and are not dependent on the retail buyers, we can offer special products. Online we can do one-on-one demonstrations. In a Dyson Demo store, you can see special demonstrations, buy special versions, and even have your hair styled for free. In early February 2020, therefore, when shops around the world were closing as a result of Covid-19, we accelerated direct sales on our websites and continued to open Dyson Demo stores. Early on with the Sea Truck, I found it fascinating to explain and discuss products, their technology and their performance with potential customers, and ones using them. That is why I enjoy doing product launches so much, as does Jake.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

Die means recruiting great developers, but more important, putting faith in those developers, turning to them not just for code but for creative problem-solving. In other words, Ask Your Developer. As I was finishing the book something happened that made this transformation far more urgent. The coronavirus pandemic that struck in early 2020 forced the world to reconfigure itself in real time as cities shut down, children learned at home, companies sent workers home, hospitals were overwhelmed with patients, and more. Suddenly digital transformation projects slated to take place over several years were happening in days or weeks.

Like everyone else, Twilio sent our employees home and kept the company running with everyone working remotely. That was especially challenging because our business didn’t drop off during the global shutdown. Our customers asked their developers to invent solutions to the onslaught of problems that COVID-19 brought them. Instead of taking it easy, our three thousand–plus Twilions were running harder than ever to handle a surge of demand from our existing customers and thousands of new customers who needed help—right away. From our front-row seat, we saw innovation that demonstrated so many of the principles I’ve written about in this book.

The experience left me humbled—and grateful to have such amazing colleagues. To every single Twilion I cannot say this enough: thank you. These quick rollouts also taught us a few things. First was how great things can happen when people stop worrying about making mistakes or not getting everything perfect the first time around. During the COVID-19 crisis, change was free. There were no alternatives, no office politics, and no fear of mistakes—because the alternatives were far worse. It’s what happens when management doesn’t have time to hold a bunch of meetings, to send requests and approvals up and down the chain of command or to insist on huge master plans that never end up being what you build anyway.


pages: 375 words: 102,166

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Even before the novel coronavirus pandemic, life spans for White7 Americans without a college degree were actually getting shorter.8 This historically unusual decline in life span, unique among high-income countries, was driven by an epidemic of “deaths of despair,” including overdoses from opioid drugs, complications from alcoholism, and suicides.9 The coronavirus pandemic made things worse. In the US, people with a college education are more likely to have jobs that can be done remotely from home, where they are more protected from exposure to a virus—and more protected from layoffs.10 In addition to living longer and healthier lives, the educated also make more money.

Households (SHED),” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, accessed July 24, 2020, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2020-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2019-financial-repercussions-from-covid-19.htm; “Hispanic Women, Immigrants, Young Adults, Those with Less Education Hit Hardest by COVID-19 Job Losses,” Pew Research Center (blog), accessed July 13, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/09/hispanic-women-immigrants-young-adults-those-with-less-education-hit-hardest-by-covid-19-job-losses/. 11. David H. Autor, “Skills, Education, and the Rise of Earnings Inequality among the ‘Other 99 Percent,’ ” Science 344, no. 6186 (May 23, 2014): 843–51, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1251868. 12.

Now, take the Rawlsian thought experiment about the veil of ignorance seriously, and consider: What sort of society would you want if you didn’t know what the outcome of the genetic lottery was going to be? Conclusion As I write the last chapter of this book, my university and my children’s school have shut down, in an attempt to slow the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. Sarah Bessey, an author and pastor, summarized the various recommendations given by public health officials as all being versions of the same message: “Love the vulnerable with your choices.” As a physically healthy woman in her thirties, with good access to medical care in a highly resourced urban area, I might not be particularly vulnerable to serious illness from coronavirus.


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Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

One 2018 analysis estimated a full guarantee for US workers would cost $543 billion per year, or 3 percent of GDP.28 In exchange, we’d have everyone who wanted a job but couldn’t otherwise get one working to make society better, adding to community stability and purpose. To put that into context, US government spending in response to just the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 is estimated at over $6 trillion,29 about twelve times as much, of which substantial portions are going straight into billionaires’ pockets via stock buybacks, special dividends, executive bonuses, and service on debt that’s held by the company’s investors, who borrowed from the company to pay themselves dividends that will worsen inequality at the public’s expense.

Libraries, meanwhile, have seen mounting costs and onerous conditions for the electronic materials they buy from major publishers, even as electronic materials account for an ever larger share of their collections. Amazon long refused to license the titles it publishes to libraries on any terms at all. In 2020, however, as the COVID-19 pandemic spotlighted the crucial importance of remote access to books, some US states passed legislation to require publishers to license titles to libraries on reasonable terms, and Amazon was finally forced to bend. Some publishers, like Hachette, make their books available to North American libraries but refuse to license them to libraries throughout the UK, Australia, and New Zealand on any terms at all.

The answer is that we want to convince you that the resulting chokepoints are problematic even if antitrust regulators disagree, and that there are a whole bunch of remedies outside of antitrust that can and should help widen them out. That’s what the whole second half of this book is about. We’ve seen how impossible the current economics of streaming are for all but the most popular acts. Artists have been told not to worry, though, because they can always make a living from gigs! When COVID-19 canceled everything we saw that event income actually cannot be relied on. And even before that, such airy assurances elided the brutal grind of touring life—the physical toll of performing, regular adrenaline crashes, poor food and sleep, long-term separations from family and community. Still, pre-pandemic, it was not uncommon for musicians to make 95 percent of their income from live events.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

The business case for service robots is obvious—they do not need to be paid, to sleep, or to be motivated to stay on task. So long as there are tourists looking for a bargain or business travel departments looking to cut down expenses, hoteliers will want robot cleaners, receptionists, doormen, and concierges. All those jobs may become as obsolete as elevator operators. The coronavirus pandemic has created even more pressures to reduce human interactions in service industries. Lockdowns of indefinite duration made the case for robotics better than any business guru. When warehouse operators, meat packers, and farmworkers fear catching a deadly virus at work, robotization of their roles may appear outright humanitarian (if paired with some plausible promise of basic income provision and future jobs).

See also unions colleges and universities: aims of, 63–64; for caregivers, 192; citizens entitled to four years of, 175; content of (intrinsic vs. instrumental), 178–179; costs of, 85, 87; evaluation in, 141–142; for-profit, 134; free, 135; making students “robot-proof,” 173–174; online, 84–86; STEM training at, 173. See also student debt conspiracy theories, 94, 98, 113 consumer protection, 15, 58, 201; and deceptive marketing, 102 contact tracing, 11 content moderation, 91, 95, 96, 107, 117–118 copyright infringement, 165 coronaviruses. See COVID-19 pandemic; pandemics “cost disease,” 171–172, 186–190, 196, 198, 299n68 COVID-19 pandemic, 100, 166, 191, 194; and data deficiencies, 243n3; and essential workers, 172–173; preparedness for, 159–160, 184–185; and recovery of jobs, 185–186, 195; and universities, 62 Crary, Jonathan, 217 credit and credit scoring, 10, 30, 131–136, 140, 282n83.

By focusing the technology on routine questions, Goel and his team are committing to a human-respecting near term, where software primarily aids existing educators.5 On the other hand, whatever the intentions of computer scientists, strong political and economic currents will push innovations like JW in another direction—toward replacing teachers and constant monitoring of students. Georgia was one of many states to slash funding for public education in the wake of the Great Recession. The COVID-19 crisis has pressured universities to cut costs further and put more material online. Powerful players in education policy, ranging from globally influential foundations to top level bureaucrats in Washington and Brussels are also fixated on cost cutting. Instead of raising taxes to expand existing universities, California in 2016 deployed a poorly thought out set of online courses to make up for a lack of slots in its colleges.6 AI (to teach) and robotics (to monitor testing) are a plausible next step, given the need for such courses to monitor students in order to prevent cheating and discipline inattention.


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Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Darrell Etherington, “Pinterest CEO and a team of leading scientists launch a self-reporting COVID-19 tracking app,” TechCrunch, April 2, 2020, https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/02/pinterest-ceo-and-a-team-of-leading-scientists-launch-a-self-reporting-covid-19-tracking-app/. 16. Rob Copeland, “The Secret Group of Scientists and Billionaires Pushing a Manhattan Project for Covid-19,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2020, https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/scientists-and-billionaires-drive-manhattan-project-seeking-to-combat-covid-19. 17. Alex Philippidis, “COVID-19 Drug & Vaccine Candidate Tracker,” Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, May 18, 2020, https://www.genengnews.com/covid-19-candidates/covid-19-drug-and-vaccine-tracker/. 18.

Alex Philippidis, “COVID-19 Drug & Vaccine Candidate Tracker,” Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, May 18, 2020, https://www.genengnews.com/covid-19-candidates/covid-19-drug-and-vaccine-tracker/. 18. T. R. Abbott et al., “Development of CRISPR as a prophylactic strategy to combat novel coronavirus and influenza,” bioRxiv, March 14, 2020, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.991307v1. 19. Jennifer Doudna, “Biochemist Explains How CRISPR Can Be Used to Fight COVID-19,” Amanpour, March 30, 2020, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/biochemist-explains-how-crispr-can-be-used-to-fight-covid-19/. 20. Lorrie Moore, “Bioperversity,” New Yorker, May 12, 2003, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/19/bioperversity. 21.

Her whistleblower experience inspired a play, The King of Hell’s Palace, which premiered in London. Wang publicly called out the pressure placed on her family in China from authorities to call off the production. Twenty-five years later, China again showed its disdain to the medical whistleblowers of the coronavirus pandemic. II. Also my birthplace, it should be noted. CHAPTER 16 BREAKING THE GLASS In March 2016, Michael Deem visited Shenzhen to speak at a small symposium on “Biodynamical Systems.” In the official group photo, Deem stands tall in the center of the group. His smiling protegé, He Jiankui, is easily recognizable.


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When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

McKinsey hastened to add that the conference had nothing to do with contract procurement, “so we hope it will be fine.” * * * — McKinsey closed out the last year of the Trump administration capitalizing on a dire health-care emergency—the coronavirus pandemic that as of March 2022 had killed more than 900,000 Americans. With the country convulsing from the pandemic, protests over police violence, and a bitter presidential election, McKinsey sought to stay in the spotlight by relentlessly churning out COVID-19 position papers, focusing less on how people should protect themselves and more on how companies could use lessons from the pandemic to improve their competitive standing.

But the takeover was a fait accompli. The COVID-19 epidemic provided a major test of the country’s retooled health-care system. Prime Minister Boris Johnson entrusted the all-important test-and-trace effort to the former McKinsey consultant Dido Harding, now Baroness Harding. She and the country’s top health officials turned to private companies, not the NHS, to run the program. McKinsey alone charged £563,400 to provide a “vision, purpose and narrative” of the Harding-led program. Test and trace was a disaster. More than a quarter of people exposed to COVID-19 were not aware that they needed to self-quarantine, a serious shortcoming that contributed to the country’s failure to control the spread of the coronavirus.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT killed more than 900,000: “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” New York Times, April 7, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “From surviving to thriving”: Kevin Sneader and Bob Sternfels, “From Surviving to Thriving: Reimagining the Post-COVID-19 Return,” McKinsey & Company, May 1, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT his five Rs: Ibid. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Within months of the pandemic’s arrival: Ian MacDougall, “How McKinsey Is Making $100 Million (and Counting) Advising on the Government’s Bumbling Coronavirus Response,” ProPublica, July 15, 2020.


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The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

This is certainly true sometimes: Impossible Foods is an example. On the other hand, video games and social media promote screen addiction and fake news, even as they entertain, inform, and allow Grandma to admire pictures of her distant grandchildren. The gap between VC rhetoric and VC practice is easily mocked. In April 2020, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proclaimed that it was “time to build.” “Where are the high-speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?” he demanded.[37] The following month Andreessen’s partnership invested in Clubhouse, an invitation-only social-media app.

Toward the end of the 2010s, Sequoia began to lay on workshops for entrepreneurs: an event called Base Camp gathered founders for weekends in the mountains, featuring campfires, wigwam tents, and speakers on everything from technology to architecture. Another offering called the Company Design Program featured courses taught by the firm’s partners. Amid the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the partnership launched a founders’ app called Ampersand. Sequoia-backed entrepreneurs used it to stay in touch with one another and test management ideas. Should they adjust compensation when workers went remote? How to help team members whose mental health deteriorated?[25] Three years after Goetz and Botha had been informally promoted, at the start of 2012, Leone got a strange message from Moritz.

The recent bankruptcy of a hardware-based communications software company, Avaya, suggested that the cloud’s moment was arriving. The hedge funders duly made three cloud-communications bets: Twilio, RingCentral, and the videoconferencing company Zoom. The first two generated 4x and 5x over the next two years. Assisted by the coronavirus pandemic, Zoom emerged as one of the breakout tech companies of 2020, generating 9x. Meanwhile, Sequoia’s hedge fund was short legacy telecom companies that would lose out from the transition to the cloud. One thematic insight had generated multiple winning positions. By the beginning of 2021, Sequoia Capital Global Equities had $10 billion under management.


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Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System by Colin Yeo;

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, G4S, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, lump of labour, open immigration, post-war consensus, self-driving car, Shamima Begum, Skype, Socratic dialogue

Because of the net migration target discussed in Chapter 2, and by means of the hostile environment policies discussed in Chapter 3, we have seen the introduction of a raft of policies actively encouraging race discrimination in day-to-day life. Meanwhile, other aspects of immigration policy discussed in this book have deliberately dampened the life outcomes for migrants who settle here, in a vain attempt to deter them from coming in the first place. The twin shocks of Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic that was taking hold as this book went to press give us an opportunity to change direction and embrace a more equal, fair and respectful approach to those migrants who make this country their home. NOTES 1 See Winder, Bloody Foreigners, pp. 279–81 and ‘Nicholas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children from Holocaust, Dies at 106’, New York Times, 1 July 2015. 2 See for example Randell Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Goodfellow, Hostile Environment. 3 See Will Somerville, Immigration under New Labour (Bristol: Policy Press, 2007), p. 14 and Winder, Bloody Foreigners, pp. 330–31. 4 ‘Papers released under 30-year rule reveal full force of Thatcher’s fury’, The Guardian, 30 December 2009. 5 Winder, Bloody Foreigners. 6 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, pp. 57, 59. 7 Ibid. 8 Gary Freeman, writing in Cornelius, Tsuda, Martin and Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 9 See for example ‘Dutch woman with two British children told to leave UK after 24 years’, The Guardian, 28 December 2016.

For the past twenty years, the discussion of economic migration has centred around skilled migration. However, with the end of European Union free movement rules following Brexit, the next twenty years may focus more on how to meet the needs of the British economy for unskilled labour. At the time of writing, just as the coronavirus pandemic was starting, the unemployment rate was approaching an historic low of just 3.8 per cent. With workers therefore in short supply, failing to provide a lawful source of labour to fill low-skilled vacancies could result in driving up wages (and therefore prices) or increasing productivity or both.

The decision was reversed some six weeks later after a media outcry, but she died a year afterwards.49 There are also reports of very ill patients wrongly being turned away by hospitals and pregnant women being afraid to seek antenatal care for fear of the immigration consequences, with obvious risks to their own health and the health of their babies.50 As has been starkly illustrated by the coronavirus crisis, other illnesses are contagious and have wider public health implications. It is critically important that vaccination rates are very high amongst the public, for example, and that transmissible conditions such as HIV, tuberculosis or new diseases like Covid-19 are identified and treated. By denying healthcare to afflicted people and making them scared of going to the doctor, it can be argued that the hostile environment represents a risk not just to individuals but to public health in general. Inculcating a fear of the authorities is problematic in policing, as well as in public health.


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Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

Regardless, it is abundantly clear that for the foreseeable future, the gushing inflows into traditional index funds and ETFs are going to continue—even though the impact on markets, the investment management business, and the finance industry as a whole is also becoming more apparent. Chapter 16 THE NEW CAPTAINS OF CAPITAL TESLA’S STOCK WENT ON A wild ride in 2020, powered by the devotion of the electric car company’s army of ordinary investors, who were suddenly stuck at home and day-trading their stimulus checks to pass time while the coronavirus pandemic raged. But in November, the rally received another huge jolt that would help make Elon Musk’s company one of the most valuable in the world. Despite its dramatic stock market gains over the past decade, S&P Dow Jones Indices—one of the biggest providers of financial benchmarks—had long refrained from adding Tesla to its flagship index, the S&P 500, for one simple reason: To be included, a company has to be consistently profitable, a requirement that Tesla had struggled to meet.

BlackRock, fearful that the debacle might harm the image of the broader ETF universe, put out an unusually bluntly worded statement: “Inverse and leveraged exchange-traded products are not ETFs, and they don’t perform like ETFs under stress. That’s why iShares does not offer them.”10 Many inverse, leveraged, and otherwise derivatives-based ETPs suffered another blow in the market mayhem that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Over forty—most of which linked to commodity indices—were quickly aborted by their sponsors, while others had their wings clipped, but not before causing some ructions.11 For example, USO, an ETF that invests in oil derivatives, contributed to the remarkable sight of US crude prices in April 2020 briefly falling into negative territory for the first time in history.

Most major tracts of industry real estate are now utterly and likely permanently controlled by a handful of big players, chiefly BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Most major and minor niches likewise. There will undoubtedly be more product innovation in the index fund industry, of varying usefulness and value. Yet it is revealing that there has been a steady uptick in ETF closures in recent years. The shakeout caused by COVID-19 has lifted the population of the ETP graveyard to well over the thousand-casualties mark. More are undoubtedly coming. Some industry insiders are therefore more excited by what they think could be the next big iteration in the indexing revolution: direct indexing. Netzly is not alone in wanting more customizable index funds—for example, ones that screen out coal companies or arms manufacturers.


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Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

In 2011, artist Jesse Hemmons felt that the statue of fictional boxer Rocky Balboa outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art was too touristy, so she knitted him a pink sweater emblazoned with the words: ‘Go see the art’. The same year, a graffiti artist transformed a bas-relief of soldiers on the Soviet Army memorial in Sofia, Bulgaria, into painted figures of Superman, Father Christmas and Ronald McDonald. Hundreds of statues around the world were adorned with face masks in 2020 and 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic, while a projection on Rio de Janeiro’s enormous Christ the Redeemer statue transformed it into a doctor with a stethoscope. A fallen statue is a powerful symbol, and can be kept that way. The French conceptual artist Daniel Buren once asked whether ‘a statue lying flat – for example, one that is knocked down during a revolution – automatically becomes a sculpture’.2 After the 1966 coup that overthrew Ghana’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, his image and works were banned, and his statue in Accra was beheaded.

It is the story of a community’s long and bitter fight over civic identity and who gets to control it. As 2020 began, a novel coronavirus spread across the world. On 11 March, the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. In early April, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, George Perry Floyd Jr – African American, forty-six years old, a father of three – came down with the symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. He was ill for several weeks, and was laid off from his job as a restaurant doorman.1 On 25 May 2020, just before 8 p.m., Floyd walked into a grocery store and bought a pack of cigarettes with a $20 bill. The cashier believed the bill was fake. The police were called.

W. 199 Breker, Arno 15 Bristol 175, 176 Colston statue 1, 174, 179–190 Reid statue 189–90 Bristol City Council 189 British Empire Film Institute 141 British South Africa Company 136–7, 137 Brooks, Rayshard, killing of 196 Brown, Michael, killing of 167 Brown, Thomas J. 172 Brownstein, Rhonda 168 Bruce, Tammy 17 Brumidi, Constantino 194 Brussels 93–4, 98–9, 100, 101, 215 Budapest Memento Park 52–3, 114 shoes sculpture 214 Stalin Statue 45–51 Stalin’s boots statue 52–3 Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan 9 Buren, Daniel 212 Bush, George W. 119–20, 130, 131–2 Bush, George Washington 198 Butzmann, Manfred 212 Cabot Lodge, Henry 194, 201 Calvino, Italo 14 Cape Town, Rhodes Memorial Monument 141 Cape Town, University of, Rhodes statue 134–5, 142, 143, 145–7 Carlyle, Thomas 13, 133 Cassá, Roberto 67, 68 Cassidy, John 182 Castro, Fidel 61, 62 Cattier, Felicien 91 Chakaredza, Lawrence 144 Charlottesville, Virginia, Lee statue 170, 171–2 Cheere, John 32–3, 34 Cheere, Henry 32–3 Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Lenin statue 116 Chigudu, Simukai 144, 147, 148, 150 China 14, 16–17 Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro 212 Churchill, Winston 1, 17, 76, 211, 215 Citizens for a Decolonized Public Space 99 citizenship, sense of 207 civic identity 173, 181 classical style statuary 11–12 Clive, Robert 72, 211 Coe, Alexis 192 Coe, Henry Waldo 195–6 Colombino, Carlos 212 Colossus of Rhodes 133–4 Colston, Edward 173–90 Man of His Time argument 210 statue inauguration 182 statue plaques 184–6 statue proposal 179, 180–3 statue toppled 1, 174, 186–9, 190 statue vandalism 183–4 Columbus, Christopher 1, 197 commemoration 13, 213–14 Commission for the Immortalization of Lenin’s Memory 108, 109 Commonwealth Relations Office 81–2 Communism, fall of 52 Confederate Veteran (magazine) 163 Congo, Democratic Republic of the 87, 96–8, 101–2 Congo, Republic of 94, 94–6 Congo Free State 87, 88, 89–93, 95 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 89–90 Copenhagen, Denmark, Little Mermaid 1–2 Coppini, Pompeo 195 Covid 19 pandemic 173, 212 creative interventions 212 Cuba 61, 62, 63 Culloden, Battle of 29, 30, 31, 32, 35 cultural vandalism 18 culture wars 3, 4–5, 216–17 Cumberland, William, Duke of 29–39 atrocities 30, 30–1, 31–2, 33 first statue 30 London statue 34–7 Parsonstown statue 33, 37–8 soap statue, 2012 38–9 Curzon, Lord 74, 134, 135 Davis, Jefferson 153, 157–8, 163, 168, 170, 171, 195 Davis, Robert 39 De Stoeten Ostendenoare 98 debate 211, 217–18 Degas, Edgar 13 Demnig, Gunter 214 destroying statues, arguments against 16–20, 216–8 Domínguez-Trujillo, Ramfis 61–4, 68–9 Dominican Republic 55–70 Donatello 12 Douglass, Frederick, Rochester statue toppled 1–2 Dublin 33, 81 Dzerzhinsky, Felix 108, 111–12, 216 Eddy, Richard 184–5, 188 Edward VII, King 73, 80–1 Eiffel Tower 215 eikons 11, 14 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 62, 78–9 Ekeren, Belgium, Leopold II statue 88, 98 El Socialista (newspaper) 61 Eleöd, Ákos 52–3 equestrian statues 12, 22–3, 121, 141 Erasure of History argument 16–17, 27–8, 64–6, 67–70, 81–2, 148, 171–2, 188, 209, 210 Evans, Richard J. 207 Fenner, Charles E. 154, 160, 160–1, 162, 164 First World War 93, 141, 142 Floyd, George Perry 173–4, 177, 190, 196 Forward Statue, Madison, Wisconsin, toppled 1 French Revolution 1, 9–10, 106 Gagarin, Yuri 12 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 76, 78, 80, 83, 83–4, 142 Garrison, William Lloyd 193, 205 Gateshead, Angel of the North 215 George II, King 30, 31, 33 George III, King, New York statue 21–8, 33, 35 George III, King, London statue 27 George IV, King 35 George V, King, statue, New Delhi controversy 77–8, 79 decay 71, 83 dedication 75–6 origins 72–5 relocation 81–2 size 76, 84 Germany, Nazi 14–15, 68 Ghana 212–13 Ghent, Leopold II statue covered in paint 1 Giraud, Théophile de 98–9 Gobert, Sébastien 116 Godse, Nathuram 84 GoldenEye (film) 113 Gone With the Wind (film) 157 González Castillo, Luis 56 Good Bye, Lenin!


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It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

In the years that followed, Hehir would go on to direct a series of award-winning sport documentaries for ESPN’s 30 for 30 franchise. And in 2020, he would create The Last Dance, a multipart series about the Chicago Bulls for ESPN and Netflix, which would become the most watched documentary in ESPN’s history—and one of the biggest cultural hits in America during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. For years, first under Bewkes, then Albrecht, HBO Sports had grown less and less central to the network’s mission. Now, thoroughly marginalized, HBO Sports was driving a budding star into the arms of a rival. “HBO Sports was at the time the antithesis of forward-thinking HBO,” Hehir says.

Fellow members of the tribe offered their congratulations. “Scary for us to have you there,” Netflix’s Hastings wrote on Twitter. “But great for the world that HBO will be strong.” On May 1, 2020, Kilar took the reins of WarnerMedia at a particularly challenging time. Much of the country was in pandemic lockdown, hoping to slow the spread of COVID-19. Most of WarnerMedia’s thirty thousand–plus employees were working from home. Movie theaters were shuttered. Production of films and TV shows were at a standstill. Sports leagues were on hiatus. And HBO Max was set to debut before the end of the month. That spring, WarnerMedia launched a new advertising campaign to try to clarify the coming changes to the reformulated, hypermaximized HBO.

Six months earlier, when Disney had uncorked its long-awaited streaming service Disney+, the new entrant enticed subscribers with an original new big-budget sci-fi series called The Mandalorian, which was yet another spin-off from the beloved Star Wars franchise. Right out of the gate, subscriptions to Disney+ soared. For the past year, WarnerMedia executives had been pinning their hopes on the Friends reunion special. But then COVID-19 disrupted the production, and it wasn’t ready to go. Without it, there wasn’t any major new attraction to woo curious customers to check out the service. With HBO Max’s lack of “quality noise,” sign-ups were sluggish, confusion about how to sign up ran rampant, and market watchers were underwhelmed.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

“From my perspective,” Osterholm said, “we pray, plan, and practice … We have to plan as if this will happen tonight.”3226 Just as past experience with SARS may have helped countries like Singapore and Taiwan better deal with COVID-19, hard lessons from the coronavirus pandemic will hopefully translate into global readiness for the next one. Pandemic planning needs to be on the agenda of every institution, including every school board, every food distributor, every mortuary, every town hall, and every legislature.3227 The corporate world seemed to have been the first to have awakened to the pandemic threat long before COVID-19 erupted. Corporations from Boeing to Microsoft to Starbucks started mobilizing continuity plans back in 2005,3228 though details were considered “privileged company information.”3229 Microsoft reportedly distributed bottles of hand sanitizers to all of its sixty-three thousand employees worldwide.3230 The national U.S. preparedness plan, however, still remained to be employed across the country.

Of the home’s 130 or so residents, 101 became infected, and more than a third lost their lives.2755 On autopsy, the respiratory surface of the lung under a microscope appears obliterated by scar tissue.2756 Pulmonary fibrosis (lung scarring) is expected to become one of the long-term complications among survivors of serious COVID-19 infection.2757 A six-month follow-up of SARS survivors found about one in three showed evidence of scarring on chest x-rays, and one in six suffered a significant impairment in lung function.2758 Death from COVID-19 comes from progressive “consolidation” of the lung, meaning your lungs start filling up with something other than air. In the case of regular pneumonia, it’s largely pus. In COVID-19 pneumonia, postmortems show you drown in lungs that are “filled with clear liquid jelly.”2759 How to Treat COVID-19 At the time I am writing this in April 2020, there is no specific, proven therapy for COVID-19.

Walker PGT, Whittaker C, Watson O, Baguelin M, Ainslie KEC, Bhatia S, Bhatt S, Boonyasiri A, Boyd O, Cattarino L, et al. 2020 Mar 26. Report 12. The global impact of COVID-19 and strategies for mitigation and suppression. MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Imperial College London. [accessed 2020 Apr 8]. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-12-global-impact-covid-19/ 138. American Hospital Association. 2020 Feb 20. Coronavirus update: register for AHA members-only webinars on Feb. 21 and Feb. 26 related to novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Chicago: AHA; [accessed 2020 Mar 30]. https://www.aha.org/advisory/2020-02-20-coronavirus-update-register-aha-members-only-webinars-feb-21-and-feb-26-related. 139.


pages: 221 words: 59,755

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Donald Davies, double helix, Hernando de Soto, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, negative emissions, ocean acidification, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Lackner and Christophe Jospe, “Climate Change Is a Waste Management Problem,” Issues in Science and Technology, 33 (2017), issues.org/climate-change-is-a-waste-management-problem/. “Such a moral stance”: Lackner and Jospe, “Climate Change Is a Waste Management Problem.” global CO2 emissions were down: Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis, and John Muyskens, “Global Emissions Plunged an Unprecedented 17 Percent during the Coronavirus Pandemic,” The Washington Post (May 19, 2020), washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/05/19/greenhouse-emissions-coronavirus/?arc404=true. How long, exactly, is a complicated question: Individual carbon molecules are constantly cycling between atmosphere and oceans and between both of these and the world’s vegetation.

They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago, it would have started then. But they had no chance.” * * * — I was contemplating another trip to Greenland, where Steffensen and his colleagues were drilling a new ice core, when COVID-19 hit. Suddenly everyone’s plans were upended, including my own. As borders closed and flights were canceled, travel to the ice sheet—or, for that matter, pretty much anywhere—became impractical. Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn’t finish the book.


pages: 282 words: 63,385

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan

Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator

ByteDance would be able to partially allocate advertising inventory to its own suite of products, accurately targeting and acquiring new users across the globe with speed and minimal cost without having to hand over money and data to the online advertising duopoly gatekeepers of Facebook and Google. As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the world in early 2020, people found themselves quarantined inside their homes for weeks, leading into months. While airlines, hotels, and restaurants went bankrupt, demand for online entertainment skyrocketed, causing downloads of TikTok to hit all-time highs. The app was the perfect fix for those desperate for distraction, locked inside suffering from the cruel combination of stress and boredom.

active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=ALL&impression_search_field=has_impressions_lifetime&q=tiktok&view_all_page_id=153080620724&sort_data[direction]=desc&sort_data[mode]=relevancy_monthly_grouped What a difference a year makes . The world in which I began writing this book and the world we find ourselves in today seem so very distant. The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our lives upside down. Working from home, travel bans, and mask-wearing became a part of daily life. A military border clash between India and China led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers. 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok found themselves subsequently removed from Indian app stores.


pages: 206 words: 68,757

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them. And if our relationship to our limited time has always been a difficult one, recent events have brought matters to a head. In 2020, in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, with our normal routines suspended, many people reported feeling that time was disintegrating completely, giving rise to the disorienting impression that their days were somehow simultaneously racing by and dragging on interminably. Time divided us, even more than it had before: for those with jobs and small children at home, there wasn’t enough of it; for those furloughed or unemployed, there was too much.

This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management: What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count? The Great Pause Sometimes this perceptual jolt affects a whole society at once. I wrote the first draft of this chapter under lockdown in New York City, during the coronavirus pandemic, when, amid the grief and anxiety, it became normal to hear people express a sort of bittersweet gratitude for what they were experiencing: that even though they were furloughed and losing sleep about the rent, it was a genuine joy to see more of their children, or to rediscover the pleasures of planting flowers or baking bread.

From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards; or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy. Or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves. Furthermore, it means that if what we learn from the experience of the coronavirus pandemic is to become just a little more attuned to the needs of our neighbors, we’ll have learned something valuable as a result of the “Great Pause,” no matter how far off the root-and-branch transformation of society remains. Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Strong Seven: “As Vulgar as GDP” Eight: Exporting Shangri-La Nine: $33 Trillion Man Ten: Stern Lessons Eleven: “Nothing Is More Destructive of Democracy” Epilogue: Unfinished Revolution A Note on Symbols Acknowledgments Bibliography Index About the Author Copyright PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION The world of 2021 seems barely recognizable from 2016 when the first edition of this book (under its original title The Great Invention), was published in the United States. As I write this (at the start of 2021), the coronavirus pandemic has taken close to 2 million lives and infected nearly 100 million people, and continues to decimate economies. Most of the world, with the exception of East Asia, is in some form of lockdown. Hundreds of millions, especially the lowest-paid workers in service industries, have become jobless.

The industrialization of the past few centuries has pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to put the world on track to dangerous global warming. At the same time, a sixth mass extinction3 is becoming more likely as humans continue to encroach into nature to build more homes, new railways, and entire new cities—simultaneously increasing the risks of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19.4 All of this means that economic recovery needs to be greener if climate change, biodiversity loss and future pandemics are to be avoided. But the problem with measuring economic activity using GDP is that it rewards traditional, fossil fuel-powered economic development. In contrast, greener development takes longer and cannot be achieved in the time it takes for governments to sanction what are called ‘shovel-ready’ projects that can deliver faster growth.


Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, centre right, charter city, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Peace of Westphalia, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, three-masted sailing ship, urban renewal

Expected to stay out of the limelight, Wilmès instead found herself grappling with the nation’s greatest crisis since WWII when the coronavirus pandemic claimed thousands of lives and the economy cratered – with GDP shrinking by 6.2% in 2020. Wilmès herself contracted the disease and spent nearly a week in intensive care. The political fighting finally came to an end in October 2020, when the 44-year-old Flemish Liberal Alexander De Croo became prime minister. The same day De Croo was sworn in, Belgium crossed the harrowing milestone of 10,000 COVID-19 deaths – then one of the highest per capita mortality rates in the world. The complicated arrangement that secured De Croo’s position is called the Vivaldi Coalition, named after Antoni Vivaldi and, more importantly, his composition the Four Seasons, which symbolises the four different viewpoints of coalition members: the socialists, liberals, greens and Christian democrats.

Belgium & Luxembourg Contents Plan Your Trip Welcome to Belgium & Luxembourg Belgium & Luxembourg’s Top Experiences Need to Know First Time Belgium & Luxembourg Month by Month Itineraries Family Travel Regions at a Glance On The Road Brussels Sights Tours Sleeping Eating Drinking & Nightlife Entertainment Shopping Information Getting There & Away Getting Around Bruges, Ghent & Northwest Belgium Bruges Damme Belgian Coast Knokke-Heist De Haan Bredene Zeebrugge & Lissewege Ostend (Oostende) Nieuwpoort Oostduinkerke De Panne Beer Country Veurne Diksmuide Poperinge Ypres (Ieper) Ypres Salient Kortrijk Oudenaarde Geraardsbergen Ghent Antwerp & Northeast Belgium Antwerp (Antwerpen) Around Antwerp Westmalle Turnhout Lier Mechelen Leuven Hageland Diest Hasselt Haspengouw Tienen Zoutleeuw Sint-Truiden Tongeren Wallonia Western Wallonia Tournai Pipaix Aubechies Ath Lessines Enghien Mons Binche Nivelles Waterloo Battlefield Louvain-la-Neuve Charleroi Thuin Aulne Botte de Hainaut Philippeville Mariembourg & Nismes Chimay The Ardennes Namur Crupet Dinant Han-sur-Lesse Rochefort St-Hubert Bouillon Orval Arlon Bastogne Achouffe La Roche-en-Ardenne Durbuy Huy Liège Verviers Spa Coo Stavelot The Eastern Cantons Luxembourg Luxembourg City Moselle Valley Schengen & Remerschen Müllerthal Region Larochette Echternach Beaufort Éislek Bourscheid Diekirch Vianden Esch-sur-Sûre Wiltz Clervaux UNDERSTAND Understand Belgium & Luxembourg History Belgian Beer Arts & Architecture The Belgian People Creative Cuisine SURVIVAL GUIDE Directory A-Z Accessible Travel Accommodation Activities Climate Customs Regulations Discount Cards Electricity Food Health Insurance Internet Access Legal Matters LGBTIQ+ Travellers Money Opening Hours Post Public Holidays Safe Travel Telephone Time Toilets Tourist Information Visas Work Transport Getting There & Away Air Land Sea getting AROUND Air Bicycle Boat Bus Car & Motorcycle Hitching & Ride Sharing Local Transport Train Language Behind the Scenes Our Writers COVID-19 We have re-checked every business in this book before publication to ensure that it is still open after the COVID-19 outbreak. However, the economic and social impacts of COVID-19 will continue to be felt long after the outbreak has been contained, and many businesses, services and events referenced in this guide may experience ongoing restrictions. Some businesses may be temporarily closed, have changed their opening hours and services, or require bookings; some unfortunately could have closed permanently.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

While most of the comments were forgotten, they and some very tangible actions against his perceived media enemies have collectively “dangerously undermined truth” and chilled critical reporting, as a 2020 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists concludes.36 According to a lawsuit filed by PEN America, a nonprofit association of writers and media professionals, about one-third of its members avoided reporting on certain topics out of concern over potential retaliation, and more than half believed criticism of the administration would put them at risk.37 Disfavored reporters such as CNN’s Jim Acosta were barred from the White House; threats to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks were made for airing an ad that highlighted the deficiencies of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic; actions were taken to raise postal rates to target Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the majority shareholder of the Washington Post; and an antitrust action was filed to challenge a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, whose subsidiary is CNN. The full impact of such efforts will take time to gauge.

A 2018 Reuters investigation found that despite Facebook’s commitment to combat hate speech against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, hundreds of such items remained, some of which called them dogs, maggots, or rapists, and suggested they be exterminated.66 When far-right American extremists used Facebook to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to promote a race war, Facebook was unable to prevent such pages from proliferating.67 This is not surprising, given that as of January 2020, Facebook’s third-party fact checkers were reviewing a paltry two hundred to three hundred articles in the US per month out of millions posted each day.68 Its other content moderators, who number in the thousands worldwide, are often poorly trained to enforce Facebook’s porous and opaque standards, which result in much hateful content remaining on the platform.

There is little chance the law will not be used to suppress dissent—not in a country Reporters Without Borders ranks 151st out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom. Human Rights Watch called the law a “disaster for online expression by ordinary Singaporeans, and a hammer blow against the independence of many online news portals.”90 The Egyptian law was again put to use during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, when the government arrested foreign and domestic journalists for spreading “false” rumors—that is, correct reports—about the virus’s spread. Egypt isn’t alone in its use of such laws. Turkish authorities arrested at least eight journalists for “spreading misinformation” about the virus, while a Cambodian teen was arrested for her fearful social media posts about the virus in her area, and a Thai man was threatened with five years in prison for complaining online about inadequate preventive measures at Bangkok’s airport.


pages: 627 words: 89,295

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

The threat of the next binary election continues to outweigh at times the pressing concerns of the day when it comes to proactive lawmaking in Congress. Finally, as with the Cold War, 9/11, and the Great Recession, there will be American children who remember where they were when the news of the coronavirus pandemic first broke and what happened to their families during the nation’s response to it. The pandemic and its aftermath will define generations. But it could also redefine our politics. When a new normal comes, there will be a moment; a window for big, sweeping change. For the good of all Americans, and to honor those we will have lost and the sacrifices made by so many, we pray that enough of us will put country over party and invest in the political innovation that can revivify our politics with healthy competition—and make sure we don’t get caught unprepared again.

We’re excited about the possibilities. This book arrives not a moment too soon. Please engage—we owe it to our extraordinary country to do so. Authors’ Note Pandemic 2020 As publishing deadlines pass for The Politics Industry, the world is racing to beat back a nationless, faceless, dangerous adversary: the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Currently, one in four Americans have been ordered to “shelter in place.”1 Metropolitan hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, medical supplies are running short, and getting infected appears to be easier than getting tested. Many predict a trailing economic depression, with impacts that could be more painful for our country than those of the virus itself.2 It is surreal.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

A Pew poll in 2019, for example, found that 73 per cent of Americans, including 62 per cent of African-Americans, say that colleges should refrain from taking race or ethnicity into account when making decisions about student admissions.5 Meritocracy straddles the East–West divide. In his address to the National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2017 President Xi urged the Party to select officials ‘on the basis of merit regardless of social background’.6 His acolytes never miss an opportunity to point out that China’s relative success in fighting the Coronavirus pandemic compared with the West is proof of its superior ability to choose its leaders. Singapore pays top civil servants more than $1 million a year in salary and performance bonuses. South Koreans worship the American Ivy League even more fervently than Americans do themselves. And the divide between the public and private sectors too: successful civil services the world over have introduced elite streams and merit-based promotion; successful firms, such as McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, sell themselves on the basis of their brain power; the tech industry regards itself as meritocracy incarnate.

They have also spent lavishly on hiring the best teachers and providing the best facilities: schools such as Eton and Marlborough boast Olympic-sized swimming pools, brand-new laboratories, professional-quality theatres, Mandarin teachers and learning-disabilities specialists. During the pandemic several public schools purchased £35,000 Covid-19 testing machines so that they could continue with elite-preparation as normal. They pour some of these additional resources into gaming the system. They are more successful than state schools in gaining additional time in exams for their pupils to compensate for dyslexia and other learning difficulties.

In Britain, Michael Gove unleashed a tide of educated fury when he said, on 21 June 2016, that ‘Britons have had enough of experts.’ He later led government criticism of civil servants and leading lawyers on the grounds that they were all members of a London-based elite who – whatever their brainpower and qualifications – viewed the world through the same metropolitan filter. THE FUTURE OF POPULISM The Covid-19 crisis destroyed Trump’s chances of re-election not just because it slowed the previously roaring US economy but because it highlighted his incompetence. Trump ignored the advice of medical experts and eventually sacked his chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci. He sidelined global institutions and withdrew America from the World Health Organization.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

A combination of Trump-type policies, populism, barriers to migration and now the coronavirus pandemic has now defanged that threat to workers. The balance of bargaining power is now swinging back to workers, away from employers; current, more socialist, political trends are reinforcing that. Following the recovery, whenever that happens, wage trends will change. The likelihood is that wage demands will then match, or even perhaps exceed, current inflation, despite the inevitable pleas for moderation in the context of a ‘temporary blip’ in inflation. The coronavirus pandemic, and the supply shock that it has induced, will mark the dividing line between the deflationary forces of the last 30/40 years, and the resurgent inflation of the next two decades.

Our main thesis is that such demographic and globalisation factors were largely responsible for the deflationary pressures of the last three decades, but that such forces are now reversing, so that the world’s main economies will, once again, face inflationary pressures over the next three, or so, decades. The question, which we have been most frequently asked, is ‘Just when will the point of inflexion from deflation to inflation occur?’ When we were writing this book in 2019, we had to answer that we did not know to within five years, or so. That was, of course, before the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020; the occurrence of such a pandemic being a ‘known unknown’. The overall impact of the pandemic will be to accelerate the trends we have outlined in this book. China will become more inward-looking and less deflationary globally, and inflation itself will rise much earlier and faster than we had anticipated.

In practice, it has not been so much the medical implications, serious though they were, but rather the (necessary and correct) policy responses that has had the major, even if hopefully short-run, impact on our economies. Indeed, if one was a cold-hearted economist, whose sole aim was to maximise GDP, or even better GDP per head, then one’s advice on the best way to respond to the coronavirus pandemic would have been to do absolutely nothing, to ignore it entirely and let it take its course. It primarily affects the elderly; the average age of death so far in the UK has been about 80; and even then the younger deaths are mainly amongst those with other severe medical problems, co-morbidity in the jargon.


pages: 302 words: 100,493

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business logic, business process, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, microservices, Minecraft, performance metric, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, web application, why are manhole covers round?

Classification: LCC HF5548.32 .B795 2021 | DDC 381/.14206573—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037477 eISBN 9781250267603 Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com. First Edition: 2021 *  In his shareholder letter of April 16, 2020, shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Jeff Bezos did address Amazon’s impact on multiple fronts. He described the company’s efforts to answer the increased demand on Amazon’s services by people in lockdown. He described safety measures at fulfillment centers, an accelerated Amazon program to ramp up testing, and the partnership of Amazon Web Services with the WHO and other health organizations.

Unless you have a regular process to independently validate the metric, assume that over time something will cause it to drift and skew the numbers. If the metric is important, find out a way to do a separate measurement or gather customer anecdotes and see if the information trues up with the metric you’re looking at. So, a recent example would be testing for COVID-19 by region. It is not enough to look at the number of positive tests in your region as compared to another region with a population of a similar size. You must also look at the number of tests per capita performed in each region. Since both the number of positive tests and the number of tests per capita in each location will keep changing, you will need to keep updating your audit of the measurements.* Analyze This stage has been given many different labels by different teams—reducing variance, making the process predictable, getting the process under control, to name a few.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Although building on a number of public lectures given between 2012 and 2020, the material has been updated and set in a narrative arc illustrating the significant changes in economics that have occurred during the past decade. The book is aimed at general readers, not just economists. This is not only to focus attention on real challenges for economics rather than the straw man critiques, but also because the public appetite to understand the economy is intense. This is an extraordinary time in world history. The coronavirus pandemic means that people in every country have been experiencing an unprecedented economic shock, more sudden and severe than the Great Depression. It has galvanised the economics community, prompting a vast amount of new research and policy analysis, and stimulating many economists to engage with epidemiology and the biomedical sciences (Coyle 2020a).

Current events make this a pressing question. Is the disruptive technological transformation we are all living through helping or hindering human progress, taking into account both the tremendous convenience of online services and the evident dark side of social media? What might ‘building back better’, a common slogan, after the coronavirus pandemic mean? The economic consequences of the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns exposed the fractures and pathologies of society—the inequalities, the poor working conditions in so many jobs, underfunded public services, institutional weaknesses in responding to the emergency, so many people’s lack of access to parks for the balm of green space or to unpolluted air to breathe.

Political economy is reawakening: an analytically robust, empirically grounded, historically aware, outward-looking and engaged discipline, making a positive contribution to society—as all social sciences should. This is what so many of us wanted economics to be when we chose to study it. There are some promising signs, in addition to the change that has already taken place within economics. The profession’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been extraordinarily fast and constructive. This includes in the UK the creation of the Economics Observatory, ECO, which synthesises all the research evidence (and gaps) relating to questions policy-makers and the public ask about the pandemic. From first discussions in April, it was launched on 1 June and had posted 100 articles summarising a vast amount of old research and new Covid19-related research by mid-August.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Nevertheless, during the last two centuries, we may discern a great wave in the North Atlantic and its offshoots, and in the last half-century also increasingly beyond – from regulation and corporation (households, estates, guilds and so on) in the ancien régime, to deregulation and decorporation in the first half of the nineteenth century, to reregulation and recorporation in the century thereafter and, finally, to another period of deregulation and decorporation since the end of the twentieth century.109 Prepared by the banking crisis of 2008, the pendulum may now be swinging in the opposite direction, influenced by the coronavirus pandemic, although it is unclear for how long. Incidentally, the development of decorporation warrants an observation with respect to households, where we do not find any recorporation from the late nineteenth century. As a nuclear work unit, the household eventually and definitively lost power.

The stagnation of remuneration and job security in especially the rich countries in recent decades (summarized in concepts such as flexibilization and precarization) can also be counted as types of reactions.2 Or, in that context, the recent massive Keynesian state aid to companies and working people following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic – something that prior to this seemed absolutely unthinkable. Secondly – and previous examples already point in this direction – the nature and vehemence of these reactions are not easy to predict; at least, not as easy as, say, a strike resulting from a massive cut in wages. Take, for example, the contradiction between the emergence of the workers’ movement, which peaked one hundred years ago, and the current lack of successful collective actions to improve working conditions.

This is in contrast to ‘the trust-starved climate of modern business [which] spells trouble and has recently made many people deeply unhappy by wiping out their savings’.37 One of the causes of this lack of trust are the long lines between management and the people who actually do the work, examples of which we have already seen. In this regard, whether that person is a wage worker or a lone freelancer no longer matters. The large experimental medical and social science laboratory that we have all been living in since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has meant that many more people, including those with better labour contracts, have experienced this deeply. Grateful for the opportunity that digital resources provide to work from home, and by turning households into workplaces again after more than a century (think of the abuses of the ‘sweating industry’), we are now becoming ‘zoombies’, according to the organizational behaviourist Gianpiero Petriglieri: ‘any professional used to working face to face is deprived of subtle cues that they have learnt to process implicitly.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

But then population growth rates in America’s suburbs started outpacing those in cities again. “The ‘back to the city’ trend seen at the beginning of the decade has reversed,” noted William Frey of the Brookings Institution in 2019. In retrospect the global financial crisis of 2007–9 may simply have delayed some young Americans’ entry into the housing market. The coronavirus pandemic has also increased the appeal of suburbs relative to city centers. One of the chief drawbacks of suburbs—the need to commute—goes away if you can work from home, which about half of American workers can. And staying at home is more pleasant if you have more space. A shift toward working remotely, some if not all of the time, is likely to be an enduring legacy of the pandemic.

Even some people within the industry now acknowledge that the world is now at, or has passed, “peak car”—the point at which car ownership and use level off and start to decline. Car production may never exceed its level in 2017. “It could well be that we passed the peak in global automotive production,” said Volkmar Denner, chief executive of Robert Bosch, the world’s largest maker of car parts, in January 2020. And that was before the coronavirus pandemic whacked car sales. China has been the driver of car sales in the early twenty-first century, with the number of vehicles sold rising from 5 million in 2004 to 29 million in 2017. But sales have since slowed, spurred in part by a switch to ride hailing, which is an enormous industry in China.

Travel-planning apps also make public transport a more attractive option, by showing when buses, trains, or trams will arrive, and how to combine them to complete a journey. But the arrival of those alternatives seems merely to have accelerated what was, in Western countries at least, an existing trend that had been going on for some years. The coronavirus pandemic seems likely, on balance, to accelerate it further. Fear of contagion has discouraged use of public transport and prompted some people to commute by car instead. But this seems unlikely to herald a global boom in car sales. Evidence from Asia suggests that the risk of transmission on public transport can be managed with appropriate use of masks, thermal scanners, and staggering of journeys to reduce crowding.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Measuring Performance My measure of performance was the change in the value of equity raised in a startup’s first major funding round: Did the value of this equity increase, stay roughly the same, or decrease—at the extreme, going to zero? Specifically, the founder/CEOs of startups still operating were asked, “As of December 31, 2019, before news of the coronavirus pandemic became widespread, how much would someone have paid for your startup’s first round equity/convertible notes?” The multiple-choice options were 1) >150 percent of the amount originally invested; 2) 50 percent to 150 percent; or 3) <50 percent. Respondents were also told, “We know that first round equity and convertible notes cannot normally be sold—but imagine that they could.

When a venture fails, our first instinct is generally to try to figure out what mistakes were made and who made them. But failures can usually be attributed to some combination of misfortunes that were outside the control of responsible parties and mistakes made by those parties. Misfortune: Sometimes, a startup’s demise is due mostly to misfortunes, rather than mistakes. When Covid-19 started paralyzing the U.S. economy, thousands of otherwise healthy new ventures couldn’t raise funds and saw sales dry up; the same thing happened during the Great Recession of 2008. Other misfortunes are less universal, impacting only a single industry sector. During the 2000s, for example, clean tech startups were often predicated on rising fossil fuel costs, but the unexpected growth of fracking and the commensurate decline in fuel costs derailed many of those ventures.


pages: 352 words: 98,424

Cathedrals of Steam: How London’s Great Stations Were Built – and How They Transformed the City by Christian Wolmar

Ascot racecourse, British Empire, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Crossrail, driverless car, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, pneumatic tube, railway mania

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-920-2 E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-921-9 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-922-6 Map artwork by Jeff Edwards Endpaper image: Detail from The Railway Station by William Powell Frith, 1862. (Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo) Printed in Great Britain Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ www.atlantic-books.co.uk Dedicated to my wife, Deborah Maby, with whom I was in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic for nearly the whole period of writing this book, and who put up with me dodging the housework. Also to Sir John Betjeman, whose writing I sadly cannot match, but whose enthusiasm I can. CONTENTS List of Illustrations Maps Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Starting slowly 2.

Instead, by and large – with the odd exception – London’s terminuses have been greatly enhanced, even much unloved London Bridge, by refurbishments and additions, most notably the new side entrance to King’s Cross. This has been a happy book to write, a positive story for these hard times and one that John Betjeman, who features strongly in the last chapter, would greatly appreciate. The prospects for the future have only been darkened by the coronavirus pandemic sweeping through the country as I write. The effect on the railways has been devastating, with the government and the railway companies urging people not to use the railways, which until then had enjoyed more than two decades of almost uninterrupted growth, reaching record passenger numbers.

APPENDIX I Timeline for the opening of London’s terminus stations: London Bridge 1836 Euston 1837 Fenchurch Street 1840 Waterloo 1848 King’s Cross 1852 Paddington 1854 Victoria 1860 Charing Cross 1864 Cannon Street 1866 St Pancras 1868 Liverpool Street 1874 Marylebone 1899 APPENDIX II Passenger numbers in the year to 31 March 2019 at the London terminuses (before the coronavirus pandemic): (millions) Waterloo 94 Victoria 75 Liverpool Street 69 London Bridge 61 Euston 46 Paddington 38 St Pancras 36 King’s Cross 35 Charing Cross 30 Cannon Street 21 Fenchurch Street 19 Marylebone 16 Source: Office of Road and Rail SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY THIS IS A highly selective bibliography focusing on the London terminus stations rather than on the capital’s railway system generally, on which there is a vast bibliography.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The question is whether the BRI will add to China’s power or detract from it. That hinges on China having the discipline to choose the right projects and walk away from the wrong ones. In the BRI’s first six years, its mission has not merely creeped but cascaded. Mistakes were surfacing even before the coronavirus pandemic paralyzed the global economy in 2020, exacerbating the BRI’s preexisting conditions and revealing how the very connections it aims to strengthen carry both promise and peril. As the following chapters show, the BRI is an imperial project in the rewards that China could reap as well as in the risks it faces.

If the BRI was magically paused and no more projects were announced, its current footprint would still take years to unfold. Ultimately, China’s economy will determine how long the BRI continues and in what form. China’s foreign reserves have dropped substantially since the BRI was launched, and it faces rising costs and shrinking revenues at home. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, there were indications of a pullback on BRI-related projects, suggesting that project announcements could be slimmed down in the coming years. That is bad news for China’s massive state-owned firms, but scarcity may also make oversight easier and encourage Beijing to increase the quality of its projects.

Early mistakes along the BRI occurred in a relatively forgiving global economy, and as Warren Buffet is fond of saying, “you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”33 The risks are probably greater than Chinese officials appreciate. Most infrastructure booms have gone bust. The coronavirus pandemic is laying bare the BRI’s flaws, even as it creates new needs that China could exploit. Developing and emerging economies that borrowed heavily are being pushed beyond the brink. The same instinct for secrecy that hides the terms of China’s deals along the BRI concealed the outbreak. Most troubling for Xi’s vision, China shared the virus with the world through the very connections the BRI aims to strengthen.


pages: 194 words: 54,355

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

We know too well the Internet’s trickle-down effects on our daily existence, from the screen we tap rather than the button we press when we wake in the morning; from what we do upon rising from bed to what we worry about as we drift off at night; from the particulars of our commute and what happens once we get to work and how we gather as a family when we return home. The ways in which we negotiate the school day and the summer vacation. How we see ourselves and treat one another; how we grow up and how we grow old. All this we know. Less remarked upon is what we used to do instead. I started writing this book well before the coronavirus pandemic hit, already feeling the ways the Internet was navigating where my brain wandered, occasionally startled and at other times lulled by what didn’t always feel like a choice, yet unaware how much deeper the quarantine would plunge me—like everyone else—into a world that was “online only.” And thank goodness the Internet was there!

You can sync and seamlessly integrate personal and professional agendas. Everyone knows where you are and where you will be, when you’re available and when you’re not. In other words, your personal agenda is no longer strictly personal. I, for one, would rather live a life of a thousand missed appointments. Only during the coronavirus pandemic did I find myself sending Google invites of necessity, attending prearranged Zooms. All was nonetheless double entered into my companion Levenger. My new one. Of course I went and bought another one—online—right away. Few retail shops sell such items anymore. In 2020, the mega-chain Papyrus went bankrupt.


pages: 210 words: 62,278

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

Be grateful for: The ways that the struggles and challenges you’ve faced have shaped you into the person you are and have made you stronger Every bit of luck, circumstance, and privilege that you’ve benefited from in your life that have enabled you to have the time to learn, read, and grow Living now rather than at any other time when violence, poverty, disease, and injustice were even worse than they are today and when so many marvels of science and progress, however unequally distributed, didn’t even exist yet The miraculous, improbable, impossible blessing that is human existence—the result of billions of years of evolution And don’t stop there. Gratefulness is like love: the more you give, the more you get. The more gratitude you feel in a day, the more you’ll have to be grateful for. Always look for the positive even when it’s hard to see The lessons I learned leading during the coronavirus pandemic When the coronavirus pandemic first hit, I was going to work every day in Compass’s eleven-story office building in Manhattan, riding elevators, meeting with hundreds of people a week, flying to Seattle twice a month to meet with the leaders of our West Coast technology hub, and visiting other Compass offices in other cities.


pages: 565 words: 134,138

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas, Jack Farchy

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, Great Grain Robbery, invisible hand, John Deuss, junk bonds, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

What’s more, much of the time, commodity markets are either over- or under-supplied. The traders, ever nimble and flexible, are always ready to take a commodity off a producer’s hands as long as the price is right, or to supply it if a consumer is willing to pay. For an example of how that works in practice, look no further than the oil price crash of 2020. As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the world, grounding flights and forcing people to stay at home, the price of oil spiralled lower and lower, briefly trading below zero for the first time ever. And so the traders stepped in, buying oil at dirt-cheap prices, and then storing it until demand recovered. Some even bought a few barrels at negative prices, meaning that producers had to pay them to take it off their hands.

As commodity demand tumbled in the wake of the financial crisis, oil traders like Vitol made a killing buying up unwanted oil and storing it – doing a version of the deals that Andy Hall had done nearly twenty years earlier. It was a trade they would repeat to great profit every time the market was oversupplied – not least in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic struck. Aluminium traders were also cashing in enormous profits by funnelling surplus metal into warehouses. ‘We milked the cow every day,’ recalls one top aluminium trader of his profits in that period. 20 The commodity traders were enjoying a bounty, but for a world that was suffering from hunger and recession, their success was an affront.

The industry is still able to turn a healthy profit – many traders made a killing as oil prices plunged in 2020 – but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that another meaningful step up in profitability is out of reach. In part that’s because the great engine of the commodity boom, China, is slowing down. The Chinese economy, which was growing at a rate of more than 14% in 2007, had slowed down to just 6% even before the coronavirus pandemic knocked it further off course. Commodity prices have fallen sharply from the records many hit in 2007–2011. The profits of the trading industry as a whole have flatlined. But the economic slowdown in China is only part of the reason why commodity traders’ earnings are no longer growing.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

We want our governments to face up to the reality of the crisis at hand. But then we have to figure out just how we change everything to create a better society that works for people and planet. XR is a recognition of emergency. We have learned a lot about emergencies over the past year, with the rise of the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic joined us in a mass of shared vulnerability, and we had to move quickly and make difficult decisions in order to protect humanity – to protect life. The fact that most countries managed to do this is a fairly hopeful sign. It shows what we can achieve when we take a crisis seriously.

Rather than assuming that all sectors must grow, for ever, regardless of whether or not we actually need them, let’s talk about what we want our economy to deliver. What industries are already big enough and shouldn’t grow any larger? What industries could be usefully scaled down? What industries do we still need to expand? We have never asked these questions. During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, we all learned the difference between ‘essential’ industries and superfluous ones; it quickly became apparent which industries are organised around use-value, and which ones are mostly about exchange-value. We can build on those lessons. * This is not meant to be an exhaustive list.


pages: 297 words: 89,292

2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman, James Admiral Stavridis

coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, digital map, loose coupling, mutually assured destruction, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, undersea cable

Before Chowdhury could reach any conclusions, Lin Bao was again on the line. “Have you considered our offer?” Chowdhury thought of his own larger questions. Ever since the mid-2020s, when Iran had signed onto the Chinese “Belt and Road” global development initiative to prevent financial collapse after the coronavirus pandemic, they had helped project Chinese economic and military interests; but what was the scope of this seemingly new Sino-Iranian alliance? And who else was a party to it? Chowdhury didn’t have the authority to trade an F-35 for what would seem to be a Chinese spy ship. The president herself would decide whether such a swap was in the offing.

Like a child who can tell whether he is in trouble from the inflection of a parent’s voice, Chowdhury could tell immediately that Wisecarver was upset with him for speaking out of turn in the meeting. Chowdhury began to equivocate, apologizing for his outburst and making assurances that it wouldn’t happen again. More than a decade before, Wisecarver’s young son had perished in the coronavirus pandemic, an event many attributed to Wisecarver’s hawkish political awakening and that made him adept at projecting fatherly guilt onto those subordinates he treated as surrogate children. “Sandy,” repeated Wisecarver, though his voice was different now, a bit softer and more conciliatory. “Take a break.


pages: 493 words: 98,982

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

SANDEL Liberalism and the Limits of Justice Liberalism and Its Critics (editor) Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering Justice: A Reader (editor) Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets Encountering China: Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy (co-editor) For Kiku, with love Prologue When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, the United States, like many other countries, was unprepared. Despite warnings the previous year from public health experts about the risk of a global viral contagion, and even as China contended with its outbreak in January, the United States lacked the ability to conduct the widespread testing that might have contained the disease.

Rather than deduct a certain amount of each worker’s earnings, the government would contribute a certain amount, in hopes of enabling low-income workers to make a decent living even if they lack the skills to command a substantial market wage. 51 A dramatic version of the wage subsidy proposal was enacted by a number of European countries when the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 locked down their economies. Rather than offer unemployment insurance to workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic, as the U.S. government did, Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands covered 75 to 90 percent of wages for companies that did not lay off workers. The advantage of the wage subsidy is that it enables employers to retain workers on their payroll during the emergency, rather than fire them and force them to rely on unemployment insurance.


pages: 112 words: 34,520

Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to Happiness: THE FEELGOOD BOOK OF THE YEAR by Bill Bailey

coronavirus, COVID-19, happiness index / gross national happiness, lockdown, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

To my family and friends, and all those who have shared in these adventures CONTENTS Foreword 1 Crazy Golf 2 A Clear-out 3 Wild Swimming 4 Little Things 5 Music 6 Caring for Plants 7 Restraint 8 Singing 9 Sport 10 Art 11 Personal Reflection 12 Swearing 13 The Unexpected 14 Playing the Gamelan 15 Laughing 16 Equations 17 Paddleboarding 18 Reading 19 Trees 20 Confronting Your Fears (Part 1) 21 Dogs 22 Confronting Your Fears (Part 2) 23 Birdsong 24 Dancing 25 Pleasure 26 Jogging 27 Cycling 28 Being Someone to Rely On 29 Walking 30 Letter Writing 31 Generosity 32 Belonging 33 Being in Nature 34 Speaking Another Language 35 Simplicity 36 Love About Bill Bailey Thank you FOREWORD This book was written during the coronavirus pandemic, largely while we were in lockdown. During this unexpected quiet time at home, I finally got around to archiving my comedy shows, and I was struck, firstly by how much longer my hair was back in the day, and secondly by how much happiness has been a subject that I have explored in my sketches and gigs over many years, to the point that it appears as a constant thread running through it all.


pages: 470 words: 107,074

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt

An Inconvenient Truth, benefit corporation, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, call centre, commoditize, confounding variable, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, forensic accounting, Google Earth, high-speed rail, junk bonds, lock screen, market clearing, market design, off-the-grid, price stability, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, vertical integration

In that case, PG&E would either have to go back to the drawing board or persuade Montali to approve the plan anyway, something he would have been disinclined to do. “It’s not the voting day for you and thousands of other people,” Montali said. “And if they vote the plan down, there are consequences.” * * * By mid-March, circumstances had changed in a way few could have foreseen. The coronavirus pandemic had closed the courthouse and upended the stock market. Shares in PG&E fell from about seventeen to seven dollars and plateaued from there. Its value had rarely been lower. By then, PG&E had come up with a $59 billion plan to finance its exit from bankruptcy. It would emerge with $38 billion in debt, up from $22 billion when it first appeared in front of Montali, a remarkable use of the restructuring process.

One prominent law firm that had once supported the deal decided that it could no longer do so. It advised its clients—several thousand victims—to shoot it down. “Unfortunately, the hedge funds that have hijacked these bankruptcy proceedings (all to their significant financial benefit), did not care about your concerns BEFORE the coronavirus pandemic, nor do they care about them now,” the firm wrote in a letter to clients. “Your concerns MUST be kept in the forefront of this case.” * * * Watts, meanwhile, was leading a relentless campaign pushing his sixteen thousand clients—and anyone else within earshot—to vote in favor of the settlement.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

If so, the world’s reaction to the swine flu pandemic did us all a disservice when Covid-19 arrived. The WHO was also worried that governments would somehow conflate pandemic and flu. That’s one reason flu matters so much to the story of Covid-19. When Covid-19 hit, most governments with pandemic plans had based them around flu: many are actually entitled “influenza pandemic plan.” Covid-19 is not flu, and that caused problems. Containment, where you isolate cases and trace and quarantine their contacts, was the WHO’s main recommendation for Covid-19 early in the pandemic. But that is not possible with flu because the virus spreads faster than Covid-19, so it wasn’t a part of these pandemic plans.

Until then, horrific as it has sometimes been, we can be grateful it hasn’t been worse. Covid-19 does not have a massive death rate—best guesses as I write this are that it’s less deadly than we initially feared, but still maybe ten times more deadly than ordinary flu. SARS was ten times deadlier than that. Fortunately, it never learned to spread like Covid-19—and, with luck, Covid-19 will never learn to kill like SARS. Think about what this pandemic would have been like with ten times the death rate. And as many of us have painfully learned, Covid-19 mostly kills older people. Speaking as one myself, I don’t wish to be cavalier about this, but the brutal fact is that losing people in old age does not cause as much economic or social disruption as losing people of working and childbearing age.

By August 2014, when the WHO declared an emergency, the epidemic curve was exponentially headed for unthinkable heights. Finally, the world—and the WHO, with a revamped effort led by Bruce Aylward, who later led its Covid-19 mission to China—responded and contained the epidemic with the same tools used for Covid-19: isolation, contact tracing, and quarantine. Also, as with Covid-19, changes in ordinary people’s behavior were crucial. Friends stopped embracing, and families stopped touching virus-laden corpses at funerals. As with Covid-19, there were no drugs or vaccines for Ebola. After the US anthrax scare in 2001, there was some funding to develop them, as Ebola was considered a potential bioweapon.


pages: 106 words: 33,210

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again by Richard Horton

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

As a group of Chinese doctors involved in the organisation and delivery of care to patients with COVID-19 noted, ‘By embracing Fangcang shelter hospitals, many countries and communities worldwide could boost their response to the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as future epidemics and disasters.’ Sadly, many countries afflicted by COVID-19 were unable to respond in such agile and creative ways. * While the epicentre of the pandemic was Wuhan, the virus quickly spread to other Asian nations. Singapore confirmed its first imported case of COVID-19 on 23 January. Inbound flights to the city-state were banned. Several clusters of disease were identified and close contacts were quarantined.

Contents Cover Dedication Title Page Copyright Preface Acknowledgements 1 From Wuhan to the World Notes 2 Why Were We Not Prepared? Notes 3 Science: The Paradox of Success and Failure Notes 4 First Lines of Defence Notes 5 The Politics of COVID-19 Notes 6 The Risk Society Revisited Notes 7 Towards the Next Pandemic Notes End User License Agreement Dedication For those whose lives were lost to COVID-19 The COVID-19 Catastrophe What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again Richard Horton polity Copyright © Richard Horton 2020 The right of Richard Horton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First, much attention was given to the celebrities who contracted SARS-CoV-2 – Marianne Faithful, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Idris Elba, Sophie Trudeau, Prince Albert of Monaco and Prince Charles in the UK. It was easy to think the virus was a threat to everyone equally. But that was not the case. COVID-19 overwhelmingly affected those who were poorer, less able and sicker. There was a steep social gradient to this disease. And it seemed to affect black and minority ethnic communities especially badly. Those on the frontlines of care were particularly vulnerable and often unprotected. COVID-19 exploited and worsened already existing inequalities in society. Second, before COVID-19, the idea of a ‘key worker’ was probably a rather obscure notion in the public’s mind. No longer. Just as ‘first responders’ after 9/11 – firefighters, police officers and emergency medical workers – became heroic symbols of a country under terrorist attack, so key workers came to embody the commitment of those without whom society really would have collapsed.


pages: 89 words: 27,057

COVID-19: Everything You Need to Know About the Corona Virus and the Race for the Vaccine by Michael Mosley

Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, lockdown, microbiome, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social distancing

It is adults over the age of 65 and children under the age of five who are at the greatest risk of developing severe complications from the flu, being hospitalized, and dying. You don’t see this with Covid-19. In fact, unless you have a preexisting condition, the odds of dying from Covid-19 if you are under 30 are less than 1000 to one. One of the most striking things about Covid-19 is that, unlike the flu, or most other infectious diseases, there have been remarkably few cases of children with Covid-19 getting sick. That said, there have been reports of a new life-threatening inflammatory condition that appears to be linked to Covid-19 and that has, understandably, been worrying a lot of families. Children with this condition develop a fever, pain in the stomach, and often a rash.

Below is a comparison between intensive care patients in an average flu year and Covid-19.7 Covid-19 Flu (2017–2019) Average age 59 years 58 years White 66% 88% Biracial 2% 1% Asian 15% 6% Black 11% 3% Other 6% 2% What is striking is that while the percentage of white, black, and Asian patients who end up in intensive care during a flu epidemic reflects their percentages in the UK population, things are very different when it comes to Covid-19. If you come from a black or Asian ethnic background you are much more likely to end up in intensive care if you get Covid-19 than if you are white. Why? Although people from a BAME background are more likely to live in poor, crowded housing and have worse health (higher rates of hypertension and type 2 diabetes), that does not explain why Covid-19 impacts this group so much worse than the flu does. A study by the UK Office of National Statistics, which looked at the ethnic background of those who died from Covid-19, came to similar puzzling conclusions.8 They found that men and women from a black ethnic background are four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than those who are white.

Since then scientists have identified four types of coronaviruses that can cause a mild cold, and three types that are deadly—those that cause SARS and MERS, and now Covid-19. How Is This New Virus Different from the Coronaviruses That Cause SARS or MERS? One of the key differences is that when you get infected with Covid-19 you can soon be shedding lots of viruses without knowing you are infected. Viral shedding seems to occur early on in an infection (typically two to three days after getting infected), and most people (roughly 80 percent) get such mild symptoms that they ignore it. At least 40 percent of people who get Covid-19 have no symptoms at all. That is what allowed Covid-19 to spread so far and so fast. Early on in the pandemic there were a lot of people getting on planes and going out to work blissfully unaware that they were infected.


pages: 244 words: 78,238

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith, Jonathan Franklin

airport security, Boeing 747, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Port of Oakland, Snapchat, social distancing, Suez canal 1869

Intense negotiations were under way in Sydney, Bangkok, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Washington. Although his team had been tracking COVID-19 outbreaks for eight weeks, Dr. Tarling rarely used the C-word in public communications. In one of his five-minute-long videos, he did mention COVID-19. Within days, the video was edited down to three minutes, and all mention of COVID-19 was gone. Some crew aboard the Zaandam, especially those with access to medical decision makers, began to question whether the big bosses back in the United States were trying not to detect COVID-19. “We had crew that were deathly ill and none of them got tested. I don’t think they were trying to find it.

She was sure Holland America had warned in an email that it would be examining every passenger’s passport to see where each person had traveled. COVID-19 was spreading massively in China and more recently in Italy. Surely, they would want to flag people who had been to those places recently, at least for a tougher medical screening. “Yes,” Jorge replied. “They didn’t even go through the pages.” The couple had worried about COVID-19, even thought about canceling the trip. Jorge tracked the Zaandam online, and he was relieved to see the ship had been in South America since the fall. Together, they watched the news, and prior to leaving their home in California, they noted with calm that just one COVID-19 case had been logged in Brazil, and it was someone who had traveled through Italy.

Internal emails show that Tarling had followed the disease’s deadly advance closely for months, even disseminating detailed “Instructional Notices” with the latest science and advice on preventing and controlling COVID-19 aboard the corporation’s huge fleet of ships. Tarling was well aware of how vulnerable cruise ships were to a deadly and contagious virus like COVID-19. In 2017, he coauthored a study in the Journal of Travel Medicine that demonstrated how difficult it is to prevent and combat viruses in the close quarters of a cruise ship. On January 20, 2020, when Tarling informed Carnival CEO Arnold Donald of his concern, the two talked. Tarling warned that COVID-19 was spreading fast and could be transmitted from person to person, emails show.


pages: 368 words: 106,185

A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine by Gregory Zuckerman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Jenner, future of work, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork

., “Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine,” New York Times, November 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine.html. 4. “Pushing Boundaries to Deliver COVID-19 Vaccine Across the Globe,” AstraZeneca, February 2021, https://www.astrazeneca.com/what-science-can-do/topics/technologies/pushing-boundaries-to-deliver-covid-19-vaccine-accross-the-globe.html. 5. Jenny Strasburg and Joseph Walker, “Astra-Zeneca-Oxford Covid-19 Vaccine Up to 90% Effective in Late-Stage Trials,” Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/astrazeneca-oxford-covid-19-vaccine-up-to-90-effective-in-late-stage-trials-11606116047. 6. Ludwig Burger, Kate Kelland, and Alistair Smout, “Decades of Work, and Half a Dose of Fortune, Drove Oxford Vaccine Success,” Reuters, November 23, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-astrazeneca-oxford/decades-of-work-and-half-a-dose-of-fortune-drove-oxford-vaccine-success-idUKKBN2832NC?

Jenny Strasburg, “AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 Vaccine Is Safe, 79% Effective in Late-Stage U.S. Trials,” Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-is-79-effective-in-late-stage-u-s-trials-11616397735. 8. Nick Triggle, “Covid: Under-30s Offered Alternative to Oxford-AstraZeneca Jab,” BBC, April 7, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56665517; “Pushing Boundaries to Deliver COVID-19 Vaccine Across the Globe,” AstraZeneca, February 2021, https://www.astrazeneca.com/what-science-can-do/topics/technologies/pushing-boundaries-to-deliver-covid-19-vaccine-accross-the-globe.html. 9.

Francis Elliot and Tom Whipple, “Malaria Vaccine Another Success Story for Jenner Institute Team Behind Covid Jab,” Times (London), December 5, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/malaria-vaccine-another-success-story-for-jenner-institute-team-behind-covid-jab-9r55m7jj3. 12. Thomas M. Burton and Peter Loftus, “J&J Covid-19 Vaccine Authorized for Use in U.S.,” Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/j-j-covid-19-vaccine-authorized-for-use-in-u-s-11614467922. 13. Burton and Loftus, “J&J Covid-19 Vaccine Authorized for Use in U.S.” 14. @sigh__oh, Twitter post, April 13, 2021, 8:35 a.m., https://twitter.com/sigh__oh/status/1381949214574448640?lang=en. 15. Parmy Olson and Jenny Strasburg, “J&J, AstraZeneca Explore Covid-19 Vaccine Modification in Response to Rare Blood Clots,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/j-j-astrazeneca-explore-covid-19-vaccine-modification-in-response-to-rare-blood-clots-11626173015. 16.


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

Coronaviruses are named after their crownlike appearance under powerful microscopes; the virus particles are studded with protein ‘spikes’. COVAX Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility Covid-19 Covid-19 stands for ‘coronavirus disease 2019’, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. dexamethasone A cheap steroid that improves the chances of survival of the sickest Covid-19 patients. DHSC Department of Health and Social Care Ebola Can refer to the Ebola virus or the disease it causes (Ebola virus disease). The virus, first identified in 1976, is transmitted from animals (such as fruit bats or non-human primates) to people and can spread from person to person through bodily fluids.

., ‘Investigate the Origins of COVID-19’. Science, 372(6543), 14 May 2021. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1 p. 78 ‘On 5 February 2020, the Diamond Princess …’ Kenji Mizumoto et al., ‘Estimating the Asymptomatic Proportion of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Cases on Board the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, Yokohama, Japan, 2020’. Eurosurveillance, 25(10), 12 March 2020. www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.10.2000180 p. 85 ‘Researchers would later count more than 1,300 separate occasions .. Hannah Devlin, ‘No “Patient Zero” as Covid-19 Came into UK at Least 1,300 Times’.

New York Times, 17 March 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/europe/coronavirus-imperial-college-johnson.html p. 134 ‘Instead, when Boris Johnson appeared on TV …’ ‘Coronavirus: PM Says Everyone Should Avoid Office, Pubs and Travelling’. BBC News, 16 March 2020. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51917562 CHAPTER 6 p. 135 ‘Known global cases: 167,515’ ‘Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Situation Report – 56’, 16 March 2020. www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200316-sitrep-56-Covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=9fda7db2_6 p. 136 ‘Behavioural fatigue seems to have been a peripheral idea …’ Elisabeth Mahase, ‘COVID-19: Was the Decision to Delay the UK’s Lockdown Over Fears of “Behavioural Fatigue” Based on Evidence?’ British Medical Journal, 7 August 2020. www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3166 p. 137 ‘As London was ahead of other regions in its number of infections …’ George Parker et al., ‘Inside Westminster’s Coronavirus Blame Game’.


pages: 368 words: 102,379

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

Moderna would have owed taxpayers Samanth Subramanian, “In the Push for New Vaccines, Taxpayers Keep Paying and Paying,” Quartz, May 12, 2021, https://qz.com/2006390/taxpayers-are-paying-twice-or-more-for-the-covid-19-vaccine/. Moderna isn’t the only company Operation Warp Speed Contracts for COVID-19 Vaccines and Ancillary Vaccination Materials, 2021. It did help that the government promised Valverde, “How Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccines Are Tied to Operation Warp Speed.” The boom in biotech and healthcare stocks Giacomo Tognini, “Meet the 40 New Billionaires Who Got Rich Fighting Covid-19,” Forbes, April 7, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2021/04/06/meet-the-40-new-billionaires-who-got-rich-fighting-covid-19/?sh=25efda0f17e5. 22. The Death Pits More than 80 of his fellow residents COVID-19 Long-Term Care Facilities Data for Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Department of Health, https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/disease/coronavirus/Pages/LTCF-Data.aspx, accessed December 2, 2021.

On March 11, the WHO made it official “WHO Director-General’s Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19—11 March 2020,” World Health Organization, March 11, 2020, https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19—11-march-2020. On March 13, Trump declared a national emergency “Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak,” White House, March 13, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-declaring-national-emergency-concerning-novel-coronavirus-disease-covid-19-outbreak/ “I don’t take responsibility at all” Caitlin Oprysko, “ ‘I Don’t Take Responsibility at All’: Trump Deflects Blame for Coronavirus Testing Fumble,” Politico, March 13, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/13/trump-coronavirus-testing-128971. 5.

.,” Moderna press release, December 18, 2020, https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-fda-authorization-moderna-covid-19-vaccine-us. The federal government would order 300 million doses Operation Warp Speed Contracts for COVID-19 Vaccines and Ancillary Vaccination Materials, 2021. By February 2021, roughly a year Inti Pacheco, “Insiders at Covid-19 Vaccine Makers Sold Nearly $500 Million of Stock Last Year,” Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/insiders-at-covid-19-vaccine-makers-sold-nearly-500-million-of-stock-last-year-11613557801. the company’s valuation ballooned Matthew Frankel, “Could Moderna Justify Its $129 Billion Valuation?”


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

“negative serial interval”: Zhanwei Du, Xiaoke Xu, Uye Wu, Lin Wang, Benjamin J. Cowling, and Lauren Ancel Meyers, “The serial interval of COVID-19 from publicly reported confirmed cases,” medRxiv preprint, March 20, 2020. A German study: Valentina O. Puntmann, M. Ludovica Carej, and Imke Wieters, “Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19),” JAMA, July 27, 2020. 3. SPIKE horse farms: Interview with Barney Graham. not Covid-19: Stacy Kuebelbeck Paulsen, “Study finds no link between COVID-19, Guillain-Barré syndrome,” CIDRAP, Dec. 14, 2020. may have been misdiagnosed: Armond S.

Grand Princess: “Grand Princess Updates,” April 7, 2020. a single infected passenger: Smriti Mallapaty, “What the cruise-ship outbreaks reveal about COVID-19,” Nature, March 26, 2020; Expert Taskforce for the COVID-19 Cruise Ship Outbreak, “Epidemiology of COVID-19 Outbreak on Cruise Ship Quarantined at Yokohama, Japan, February 2020,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, Nov. 2020. through aerosol droplets: Parham Azimi, et al., “Mechanistic Transmission Modeling of COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship Demonstrates the Importance of Aerosol Transmission,” medRxiv, July 15, 2020. put at 19.2 percent: Interview with Martin Cetron.

actively discouraged their use: “Media Statement: the role and need of masks during COVID-19 outbreak,” World Health Organization, Mar. 6, 2020. Also, see the statement: “We don’t generally recommend the wearing of masks in public by otherwise well individuals, because it has not been up to now associated with any particular benefit,” “FULL TRANSCRIPT: WHO Press Briefing COVID-19,” Mar. 30, 2020. “If it’s not fitted”: Jeremy Reynolds, “Are homemade face masks effective in protection against COVID-19?” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 24, 2020. “Right now in the United States”: “Dr. Anthony Fauci Talks with Dr. Jon Lapook about COVID-19,” 60 Minutes Overtime, March 8, 2020.


pages: 311 words: 90,172

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

But some of the leading tech companies—Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Shopify—were able to sustain 20%+ growth in 2020, and that growth made them even more attractive to investors. So what do you do with high-growth tech stocks in a Covid-19 recovery world? This book offers stock-picking lessons, not specific stock advice. But two key points from those lessons are directly relevant to thinking about high-growth tech stocks in a Covid-19 recovery and then in a hopefully post-Covid-19 world. First, comps will be an unusually material issue for almost all tech companies in 2021—either materially challenging for the WFH/LFH companies or materially easy for the companies that suffered severe demand hits during the Covid-19 pandemic. We should expect to see major growth deceleration with the first group, and major acceleration or recovery with the second.

The WFH/LFH basket of stocks contained some great outperformers in 2020, but the most dramatic part of the outperformance for most of the stocks occurred in a tight three-to-six-month period. Making predictions is dangerous, but my strong guess is that the Covid-19 recovery trade will last about as long as the Covid-19 crisis trade did (three to six months). After that, the market will focus on the sustainability of companies’ fundamentals into 2022 and beyond. Perhaps the most important action question is: Did the Covid-19 crisis and the Covid-19 recovery cause a company to become structurally stronger or weaker for the long term? That’s the key question that investors should focus on. ADDRESSING THE RELEVANCY CRITICS So let me get this right.

The blockbuster Airbnb IPO was particularly noteworthy because it occurred while the company was still recording—thanks to the Covid-19 crisis—30% year-over-year declines in its bookings and revenue. Growth companies are typically expected to be, well, growing when they stage their IPOs. Airbnb was declining. And it still pulled off a highly successful IPO. Wow! Reflects a lot of trust and hope by investors in Airbnb’s secular growth opportunity post-Covid-19. A lot. And imagine how much interest there would be were TikTok—one of the fastest-growing Internet apps of all time—to announce its IPO intentions! The Covid-19 crisis made some of these Internet companies indispensable.


pages: 296 words: 96,568

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert, Catherine Green

Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, global pandemic, imposter syndrome, lockdown, lone genius, profit motive, Skype, social distancing, TikTok

., and https://www.npr.org/sections­/latest-updates-­trump-covid-19-results/2020­/10/03/919898777/timelin­e-what-we­-know-of-preside­nt-trumps-covid­-19-diagnosis. 20. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140­-6736(20)31022-9. 21. https://www.npr.org/sections/latest-updates­-trump-covid-­19-results/2020/10­/03/919898777/ti­meline-what-we-know-of­-president-trumps­-covid-19-diagnosis. 22. Ibid. 23. https://www.medrxiv.org/­content/10.11­01/2020.06.22­.20137273v1. 24. https://www.fda.g­ov/news-events/press­-announcements/coro­navirus-covid-19-update­-fda-authorizes-monoclonal-­antibodies-treatment­-covid-19. 25. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news­/world-europe-55409693.

More information For more detail on the effectiveness of the vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 see: https://www.gov.uk/government/­publications/phe-monitoring-of-the­-effectiveness-of-covid-19-vaccination https://publichealthscotland.scot/news/2021­/february/vaccine-linked-to­-reduction-in-risk-of-covid-19-admissions­-to-hospitals/ For more detail about safety reporting through the Yellow Card scheme in the UK see: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications­/coronavirus-covid-19-­vaccine-adverse-reactions For a wide range of general information on Covid vaccines see: https://www.who.int/news-room­/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease­-(covid-19)-vaccines http://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk Chapter 1 1. The Times: ‘This is a remarkable achievement for British science and offers hope to the world of an end to the pandemic’, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article­/the-times-view-on-the­-success-of-the-oxford-vaccine-great-british­-breakthrough-ljwltmtbc.

We also knew that, in order to assess the vaccine’s ability to protect people from disease, we would have to wait for our volunteers to catch Covid-19 in the course of their normal lives. With some diseases, such as malaria or influenza, we can conduct what we call challenge trials, in which volunteers are intentionally exposed to the pathogen. This has the advantage of yielding results very quickly. However, at the time we were designing the trials for our Covid-19 vaccine, relatively little was known about SARS-CoV-2 (the pathogen) or Covid-19 (the disease). The ethical implications of exposing people to a dangerous and poorly studied virus with no known treatment meant that challenge trials were, for the time being, off the table.fn2 When we were first planning the vaccine trials, cases in the UK were increasing and predicted to peak in May.


pages: 406 words: 88,977

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

You can find it at https://papers.ssrn.com. I wouldn’t advise reading it before bed—it is sobering. *3 A word about terminology. SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus that causes the disease COVID-19. Technically, COVID refers to all diseases caused by coronaviruses, of which COVID-19 is one. (The 19 comes from the fact that it was discovered in 2019.) But to keep things readable, from here on out, I’m going to use COVID to refer to both the disease COVID-19 and the virus that causes it. *4 I’ve already mentioned the Gates Foundation several times in this Introduction, and I’ll be mentioning it more throughout this book.

Learn from COVID Figure: The true toll of COVID. Estimated number of global excess deaths include official count of COVID-19 deaths, additional estimated COVID-19 deaths, and deaths from all causes attributed to complications stemming from the pandemic through December 2021. Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington (2021). GO TO FIGURE IN TEXT Toward the end of 2021: Our World in Data, “Estimated Cumulative Excess Deaths Per 100,000 People During COVID-19,” https://ourworldindata.org/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Figure: Containing COVID in Vietnam.

New cases per day (seven-day rolling average). Source: “Emerging COVID-19 Success Story: Vietnam’s Commitment to Containment,” Exemplars in Global Health program, https://www.exemplars.health (published March 2021; accessed Jan. 2022). Using data extracted from Hannah Ritchie et al., “Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)” (2020), published online at OurWorldInData.org, https://ourworldindata.org/​coronavirus. GO TO FIGURE IN TEXT Its rate of excess deaths: Our World in Data, “Estimated Cumulative Excess Deaths per 100,000 People During COVID-19,” https://ourworldindata.org. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT IHME’s data also suggests: T.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

See Government Nationalism and populism, 84 Natural Capital, 191 Natural capital (New Zealand Living Standards Framework), 235fig Natural resources “Earth Overshoot Day” (1970–2020), 48fig–49 oil, 12, 62–64 water, 49–50 See also Environmental issues Neo-liberalist government, 225 Neoliberalist ideology description of the, 249 shareholder capitalism of the, 171–172, 173 shareholder model of the, 13–14, 88, 213, 217–218 The Netherlands digital economy embraced by, 113–114 DSM and Philips of, 215 lowering debt burden through economic growth, 31 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 Net-Zero Challenge, 162 “Never Again War” (First World War), 4 New Scientist, 220 New York City Freelancers Union in, 242–243 Independent Drivers Guild of, 238, 241–242 ride-hailing workers in, 238 See also United States New York Times Benioff's editorial on Proposition C referendum, 213 Carroll's analysis of Singapore model for health care in, 231–232 Friedman essay in the, 136 Leonhard on factual oligopolies of giant companies in the, 140 on New Zealand's effective COVID-19 response, 223 Schwab's globalization op–ed in the, 85 New Zealand creating prosperity, 249 effective response to COVID-19 by, 219–224, 236 female-led government leadership during COVID-19 pandemic, 224 Living Standards Framework (LSF) dashboard of, 222–223, 234–236 targeting social issues instead of GDP growth, 234–236 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 183, 197, 215, 237. See also specific NGO “Nie Wieder Krieg” (First World War), 4 Niger, 70 Nigeria, 27, 70 Nikkei Asian Review, 125, 233 9/11 terrorist attacks, 17, 18 Nooyi, Indra, 250 Northern Natural Gas division (InterNorth) [US], 218 O Occupy Wall Street movement (2011), 39, 40, 86 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries Better Life Index of, 190 efforts to create fair global tax rules for the Internet, 212 health disparities and life expectancy among, 43 as an international community stakeholder, 178 oil embargo by, 6 public health care spending in, 32 “Trade in the Digital Era” report (2019), 107 US with highest health care costs among, 227 working toward digital trade system, 197 Oil resources Chinese consumption (2020) of, 62–63 driving world economy, 12 imported to China, 64 OPEC control of (1970s), 12 See also Energy resources Okamoto, Geoffrey, 28 The one percent, 41–42 OPEC countries, oil embargo (1970s) of, 12 Open Society Initiative for Europe, 195 Opium Wars (China–Britain), 56 Organisation for European Economic Co-operation and Development (OEEC), 6 Osborne, Michael, 116 Otago University, 222 Oxford Internet Institute (UK), 242 P Pakistan gig workers of, 240, 243 Sheedi population in, 245–246 WHO on unsafe air (2019) in, 72 Palantir (US), 208 Palma, Stefania, 233 Paris Agreement (2015), 150, 165, 182, 183, 189, 198 PayPal (US), 95 Paytm (India), 69 Peace of Westphalia, 130 Pearl Harbor attack, 17 Peccei, Aurelio, 13, 47, 53, 150 Pegida movement (Germany), 88 Pension saving gap, 32–33 People at the center of the global stakeholder model, 180fig at the center of the simplified stakeholder model, 178fig–179 interconnectedness of all this planet's, 176–177 a post-COVID world and sustainable economy for, 251 as Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics pillar, 214 See also Planet; Prosperity; Stakeholder model People, Power and Profits Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (Stiglitz), 42 People's Party (US, 1892), 133 People's Republic of China.

He lives in Geneva with his wife, Valeria. Preface In early February 2020 I sat down in Geneva to discuss this book with a colleague, when the phone rang in my office. It turned out to be what you could call an AC/BC moment, when attention shifted from the time before COVID-19 to the reality that set in after COVID-19. Before that call, me and my colleagues had been preoccupied with the long-term challenges of the world economy, including climate change and inequality. I had reflected in depth on the global economic system built in the 75 years since the end of the Second World War, and the 50 years since the creation of the World Economic Forum.

I will present in what follows my observations on rising inequality, slowing growth, sputtering productivity, unsustainable levels of debt, accelerating climate change, deepening societal problems, and the lack of global cooperation on some of the world’s most pressing challenges. And as I hope you will agree, these observations are as valid after COVID-19 as they were before. However, one thing has changed in the interim period between “BC” and “AC”: there is, I notice, a greater understanding among the population, business leaders, and government that creating a better world would require working together. The idea that we need to rebuild differently post-COVID is widely shared. The sudden and all-encompassing impact of COVID-19 made us understand, much more than the gradual effects of climate change or increasing inequality, that an economic system driven by selfish and short-term interests is not sustainable.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

See Government Nationalism and populism, 84 Natural Capital, 191 Natural capital (New Zealand Living Standards Framework), 235fig Natural resources “Earth Overshoot Day” (1970–2020), 48fig–49 oil, 12, 62–64 water, 49–50 See also Environmental issues Neo-liberalist government, 225 Neoliberalist ideology description of the, 249 shareholder capitalism of the, 171–172, 173 shareholder model of the, 13–14, 88, 213, 217–218 The Netherlands digital economy embraced by, 113–114 DSM and Philips of, 215 lowering debt burden through economic growth, 31 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 Net-Zero Challenge, 162 “Never Again War” (First World War), 4 New Scientist, 220 New York City Freelancers Union in, 242–243 Independent Drivers Guild of, 238, 241–242 ride-hailing workers in, 238 See also United States New York Times Benioff's editorial on Proposition C referendum, 213 Carroll's analysis of Singapore model for health care in, 231–232 Friedman essay in the, 136 Leonhard on factual oligopolies of giant companies in the, 140 on New Zealand's effective COVID-19 response, 223 Schwab's globalization op–ed in the, 85 New Zealand creating prosperity, 249 effective response to COVID-19 by, 219–224, 236 female-led government leadership during COVID-19 pandemic, 224 Living Standards Framework (LSF) dashboard of, 222–223, 234–236 targeting social issues instead of GDP growth, 234–236 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 183, 197, 215, 237. See also specific NGO “Nie Wieder Krieg” (First World War), 4 Niger, 70 Nigeria, 27, 70 Nikkei Asian Review, 125, 233 9/11 terrorist attacks, 17, 18 Nooyi, Indra, 250 Northern Natural Gas division (InterNorth) [US], 218 O Occupy Wall Street movement (2011), 39, 40, 86 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries Better Life Index of, 190 efforts to create fair global tax rules for the Internet, 212 health disparities and life expectancy among, 43 as an international community stakeholder, 178 oil embargo by, 6 public health care spending in, 32 “Trade in the Digital Era” report (2019), 107 US with highest health care costs among, 227 working toward digital trade system, 197 Oil resources Chinese consumption (2020) of, 62–63 driving world economy, 12 imported to China, 64 OPEC control of (1970s), 12 See also Energy resources Okamoto, Geoffrey, 28 The one percent, 41–42 OPEC countries, oil embargo (1970s) of, 12 Open Society Initiative for Europe, 195 Opium Wars (China–Britain), 56 Organisation for European Economic Co-operation and Development (OEEC), 6 Osborne, Michael, 116 Otago University, 222 Oxford Internet Institute (UK), 242 P Pakistan gig workers of, 240, 243 Sheedi population in, 245–246 WHO on unsafe air (2019) in, 72 Palantir (US), 208 Palma, Stefania, 233 Paris Agreement (2015), 150, 165, 182, 183, 189, 198 PayPal (US), 95 Paytm (India), 69 Peace of Westphalia, 130 Pearl Harbor attack, 17 Peccei, Aurelio, 13, 47, 53, 150 Pegida movement (Germany), 88 Pension saving gap, 32–33 People at the center of the global stakeholder model, 180fig at the center of the simplified stakeholder model, 178fig–179 interconnectedness of all this planet's, 176–177 a post-COVID world and sustainable economy for, 251 as Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics pillar, 214 See also Planet; Prosperity; Stakeholder model People, Power and Profits Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (Stiglitz), 42 People's Party (US, 1892), 133 People's Republic of China.

He lives in Geneva with his wife, Valeria. Preface In early February 2020 I sat down in Geneva to discuss this book with a colleague, when the phone rang in my office. It turned out to be what you could call an AC/BC moment, when attention shifted from the time before COVID-19 to the reality that set in after COVID-19. Before that call, me and my colleagues had been preoccupied with the long-term challenges of the world economy, including climate change and inequality. I had reflected in depth on the global economic system built in the 75 years since the end of the Second World War, and the 50 years since the creation of the World Economic Forum.

I will present in what follows my observations on rising inequality, slowing growth, sputtering productivity, unsustainable levels of debt, accelerating climate change, deepening societal problems, and the lack of global cooperation on some of the world’s most pressing challenges. And as I hope you will agree, these observations are as valid after COVID-19 as they were before. However, one thing has changed in the interim period between “BC” and “AC”: there is, I notice, a greater understanding among the population, business leaders, and government that creating a better world would require working together. The idea that we need to rebuild differently post-COVID is widely shared. The sudden and all-encompassing impact of COVID-19 made us understand, much more than the gradual effects of climate change or increasing inequality, that an economic system driven by selfish and short-term interests is not sustainable.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Like a lightning storm on a dark night, the COVID-19 crisis helps illuminates some of the long-standing problems we face, making hidden issues clear. It also provides an opportunity to put them right. Furthermore, COVID-19 illustrates the vital necessity of getting right the long-run features of the economy. Just as innovation in World War II built on the stock of basic research before the war, such as radar, COVID-19 vaccines are based on past discoveries, such as Katalin Kariko’s research into synthetic messenger RNA.1 And, of course, paying down the debt buildup created by COVID-19 will require faster economic growth.

First, we should cautiously weaken IP rights, rolling back patents in areas where their remit has grown—for example, by ending patents on software and straightforward business processes, reducing patent lengths in selected industries, requiring genuine disclosure of what makes underlying technologies work, and introducing prizes or patent buyouts for certain socially desirable inventions, such as antibiotics.32 When the world was racing to develop a COVID-19 vaccination, the economist Joshua Gans suggested using a prize for a COVID-19 vaccine to solve the commitment problem—namely, that the successful development of a COVID-19 vaccine runs the risk of having governments take control of the vaccine for less than the market price, a question that ended up being hotly debated in 2021.33 A precommitment to purchase such an important innovation may be optimal from the government’s point of view because a vaccine would not only save lives but also save the rest of the economy; but the government has to find a way of committing to rewarding the vaccine company for its sunk costs.

Now, thanks to globalisation, supply chains, and the internet, we seem to be increasingly exposed to the mere flap of a butterfly’s wings on another continent. For many, the ruinous human impact of COVID-19 offers a forewarning of the havoc that climate change will cause in the years to come. The combined actual impact of the pandemic with the expected impact of global warming illustrates the vulnerability of the economy to big, ecosystem-level threats. Both problems share another feature: the curious gap between knowing how to solve them and actually doing so. Countries from Taiwan to Thailand have shown that the right policies can help to reduce the number of COVID-19 deaths and the amount of economic damage. Likewise, detailed and credible plans for decarbonising the economy exist.


pages: 304 words: 95,306

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

The first big clinical study of patients infected with coronavirus was published at the beginning of February. Out of the 138 patients admitted to Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan, China, 4.3 per cent died. Shortly afterward, on 11 February, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced “COVID-19” as the name of the new disease. COVID-19 got its slightly robotic name to avoid the stigma surrounding some of its epidemic predecessors: Middle East Respiratory Virus, German Measles (not Measles), and Spanish Flu (not Spanish) – the latter being the last comparable pandemic, that of 1918, which I’d mentioned in my email to my dad.

And this took place in a world before planes, trains and automobiles – a world far less connected than today. I changed tubes and looked up other coronaviruses, wondering how we managed SARS back then. By comparison, it seemed that COVID-19 could spread easily without symptoms, while SARS patients were usually feverish when they were infectious, making them easy to isolate and quarantine. COVID-19 could also last on surfaces; one paper I found suggested it could live on metal, glass and plastic for up to nine days2 and still infect a person. So we were dealing with a virus that easily spread, was 20 times more deadly than flu, was harder to detect in people and could cling to surfaces all around us.

My hands dug deeper into my pockets, and, when I got off the tube, I picked up some hand sanitizer at the chemist. • • • The next few days were a sea change for me. My ears would prick up when I heard any mention of COVID-19. On my commutes and breaks I continued to hoover up studies and news. Twitter became a valuable resource of other doctors and experts sharing and debating the research. Among the obligatory memes and outrage, Twitter emerged as the world’s largest medical forum. The topic: SARS-CoV-2 (the virus), or COVID-19 (the disease). Through all these sources, the numbers I’d only just started to pay attention to painted a bleak picture. A picture I’d seen before.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

‘The Future of Jobs Report 2020’, World Economic Forum, 20 October 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020; see also McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The Future of Work After Covid-19’, 18 February 2021, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-after-covid-19; ‘More Than Half of Employees Globally Would Quit Their jobs if Not Provided Post-Pandemic Flexibility’, 21 May 2021, https://www.ey.com/en_ro/news/2021/05/ey-study--more-than-half-of-employees-globally-would-quit-their-; Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, ‘The Professional and Technical Workforce: By the Numbers’, 2021 Fact Sheet, 27 September 2021, https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-professional-and-technical-workforce-by-the-numbers 5. See data from Office for National Statistics Coronavirus (Covid-19) Latest Insights: Work, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/work; and the World Bank: Michael Weber and David Newhouse, ‘These Types of Workers Were Most Impacted by the Covid-19 Pandemic’, World Bank Blogs, 23 September 2021, https://blogs.worldbank.org/jobs/these-types-workers-were-most-impacted-covid-19-pandemic 6. See Leesman, ‘Workplace 2021: Appraising Future-Readiness’, https://www.leesmanindex.com/media/Leesman-Workplace-2021-Report-1.pdf; and McKinsey, ‘Future of Work’, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work 7.

sh=388df2006442; see also Matthew DiLallo, ‘Commercial Real Estate Investing Statistics 2021’, Millionacres, 16 November 2020, https://www.millionacres.com/research/commercial-real-estate-investing-statistics/; and for specific prediction of 80 per cent occupancy see Erik Sherman, ‘Delta Disrupts Office Return Plans: What Now?’, GlobeSt.com, 13 September 2021, https://www.globest.com/2021/09/13/delta-disrupts-office-return-plans-what-now/?slreturn=20210901045552 7. McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The Future of Work After Covid-19’, 18 February 2021, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-after-covid-19 8. ‘Management, professional and related occupations’ according to the US bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2020, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm Introduction 1. International Labour Organization, World Employment and Social Outlook Trends 2020, International Labour Office, Geneva, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_734455.pdf 2.

‘The Professional and Technical Workforce: By the Numbers’, 2021 Fact Sheet, Department for Professional Employees, 27 September 2021, https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-professional-and-technical-workforce-by-the-numbers 4. ‘The Future of Jobs Report 2020’, World Economic Forum, 20 October 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020; see also McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The Future of Work After Covid-19’, 18 February 2021, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-after-covid-19; ‘More Than Half of Employees Globally Would Quit Their jobs if Not Provided Post-Pandemic Flexibility’, 21 May 2021, https://www.ey.com/en_ro/news/2021/05/ey-study--more-than-half-of-employees-globally-would-quit-their-; Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, ‘The Professional and Technical Workforce: By the Numbers’, 2021 Fact Sheet, 27 September 2021, https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-professional-and-technical-workforce-by-the-numbers 5.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The country continues to labor under about $300 billion in public debt, nearly equal to its entire economic output in 2020. And inflation was ravaging the country during and after the COVID-19 crisis with the inflation rate for 2022 expected to be over 50 percent. Increasingly, the entire world resembles Argentina. Public debt owed by governments, on top of private debt owed by corporations, financial institutions, and households, was soaring out of control before the gigantic tab for the COVID-19 pandemic response came due. In the United States, the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed in 2021, plus two huge stimulus measures passed during the Trump presidency, added $4.5 trillion to its public debt since 2019.

Mounting evidence began suggesting as much in 2021 to anyone following the financial news. Inflation, the precursor to stagflation, flared up thanks to the COVID-19 shock, which was both a negative supply and demand shock. The COVID-19 recession led to massive and unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus in 2020–21 that, together with global supply chain bottlenecks, commodity price surges, and a shrinkage in labor supply, nudged inflation rates to levels not seen since the 1980s. Things got worse in 2022, when some observers hoped that the fading of the COVID-19 contagion would reduce the supply bottlenecks that cause inflation. Instead, the Russian invasion of Ukraine raised the price of commodities that Russia and Ukraine supply: oil and natural gas, industrial metals, fertilizers and agricultural goods.

Exotic financial securities that go by names like repurchase agreements (repos, for short) got locked out of capital markets. The Fed braced for a downturn in the usual way. It cut rates below 2 percent and resumed quantitative easing. Almost a year before the COVID-19 crisis changed everything, the Fed could not stomach even a modest dose of policy tightening. Instead, it stepped right back into a debt trap. COVID-19 was a shock no one could have predicted precisely, although the risk of some sort of pandemic was already on the minds of medical experts. In March 2020 the stock market plunged, millions of Americans lost their jobs, and the economy threatened to seize up, with every lender hoarding cash, and no money circulating to keep the economy moving.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

Transport is blind to our rapidly evolving online habits: in this case, we won’t get a clear picture of whether fleets of delivery vans are inefficiently servicing a small group of enthusiastic users, or whether they are efficiently substituting the need for lots of people to trudge around shops. An emerging finding from UK academic research suggests that the boom in online grocery shopping during Covid-19 has been largely attributable to people who were already doing it before the pandemic switching to doing it a lot more. How this splits by region and demographic is unclear.6 The data we have frames the conversation, while the data we need often goes unnoticed. * * * 6 COVID-19 TRANSAS. 2021. At a crossroads: travel adaptations during Covid-19 restrictions and where next? Report (https://covid19transas.org/category/reports/). Table 6. Behavioural adaptations requiring careful attention.

What is only a mild disincentive to a wealthy motorist may be disproportionately punitive to someone on low, or no, income. 10 Department for Transport. 2020. Travel behaviour, attitudes and social impact of COVID-19. UK Government website, 23 July (www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-travel-behaviour-during-the-lockdown). 11 Department for Transport. 2021. All change? Travel tracker – wave 4 report. Report (www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-travel-behaviour-during-the-lockdown). 12 Phase 1 cuts journey times from 2 hours and 7 minutes to 1 hour and 40 minutes. Phase 2a will bring it down again, to 1 hour and 30 minutes, and then Phase 2b will bring it down further, to 1 hour and 11 minutes. 13 Department for Transport. 2015.

Policy Paper, UK Governement (www.gov.uk/government/publications/inclusive-transport-strategy/the-inclusive-transport-strategy-summary-of-progress). 14 Based on quantitative and qualitive research by Opinium conducted for Scope. See C. Smith and S. Symonds. 2019. Travel fair. Report, Scope (www.scope.org.uk/scope/media/files/campaigns/travel-fair-report.pdf). Experiences during Covid-19 are even tougher and more complex: see I. Eskytė, A. Lawson, M. Orchard and E. Andrews. 2020. Out on the streets – crisis, opportunity and disabled people in the era of Covid-19: reflections from the UK. Alter 14(4), 329–336. 15 L. Laker. 2020. The way we design transport is not equal. Smart Transport 6(May), 58–63 (https://smarttransportpub.blob.core.windows.net/web/1/root/insight-inclusivity-ongoing-series-physical-disability-laura-laker-low-res-pdf.pdf). 16 L.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Retrieved from https://thenarwhal.ca/almost-everything-we-know-about-e-waste-is-wrong/ The internet appeared to be holding up, in spite of usage surging: Beech, M. (2020, March 25). COVID-19 pushes up internet use 70% and streaming more than 12%, first figures reveal. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/markbeech/2020/03/25/covid-19-pushes-up-internet-use-70-streaming-more-than-12-first-figures-reveal/#63dcee3a3104 Air traffic, automobile, and other forms of fossil-fuelled transportation plummeted: Henriques, M. (2020, March 27). Will Covid-19 have a lasting impact on the environment? Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200326-covid-19-the-impact-of-coronavirus-on-the-environment Americans waste up to $19 billion annually in electricity costs: University of Utah. (2016, October 25).

Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08740 They even issued a rare joint statement: Statt, N. (2020, March 16). Major tech platforms say they’re ‘jointly combating fraud and misinformation’ about COVID-19. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21182726/coronavirus-covid-19-facebook-google-twitter-youtube-joint-effort-misinformation-fraud “Platforms should be forced to earn the kudos they are getting”: Douek, E. (2020, March 25). COVID-19 and social media content moderation. Retrieved from https://www.lawfareblog.com/covid-19-and-social-media-content-moderation Mandatory or poorly constructed measures could be perverted as an instrument of authoritarian control: Lim, G., & Donovan, J. (2020, April 3).

., Understanding and addressing the disinformation ecosystem, 5-12. The WHO went so far as to label COVID-19 an “infodemic”: World Health Organization. (2020, February 2). Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV): Situation report 13. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200202-sitrep-13-ncov-v3.pdf. See also Chen, E., Lerman, K., & Ferrara, E. (2020). Covid-19: The first public coronavirus twitter dataset. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07372; Abrahams, A., & Aljizawi, N. Middle East Twitter bots and the covid-19 infodemic. Retrieved from http://workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/pdf/2020_17.pdf Russian propaganda outlets spread disinformation: Breland, A. (2020, February 3).


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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

The same study estimated that by 2080 lower crop yields would cause between 2 percent and 10 percent of adults in Mexico to try to cross the border into the United States. Let’s put all this into terms that everyone who is experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic can relate to. If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and then imagine spreading the pain out over a much longer period of time. The loss of life and economic misery caused by this pandemic are on par with what will happen regularly if we do not eliminate the world’s carbon emissions. I’ll start with the loss of life. How many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus by climate change? Because we want to compare events that happen at different points in time—the pandemic in 2020 and climate change in, say, 2030—and the global population will change in that time, we can’t compare the absolute numbers of deaths.

Second, we need to let science—actually, many different sciences—guide our efforts. In the case of COVID-19, we are looking to biology, virology, and pharmacology, as well as political science and economics—after all, deciding how to distribute vaccines equitably is an inherently political act. And just as epidemiology tells us about the risks of COVID-19 but not how to stop it, climate science tells us why we need to change course but not how to do it. For that, we must draw on engineering, physics, environmental science, economics, and more. Third, our solutions should meet the needs of the people who are hardest hit. With COVID-19, the people who suffer most are the ones who have the fewest options—working from home, for example, or taking time off to care for themselves or their loved ones.

Chapter 12: What Each of Us Can Do “When we have a fact-based worldview”: Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better than You Think, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018), 255. Afterword: Climate Change and COVID-19 Black people and Latinx people: “Race, Ethnicity, and Age Trends in Persons Who Died from COVID-19—United States, May–August 2020,” U.S. Centers for Disease Control https://www.cdc.gov. Among recipients of Medicare: “Preliminary Medicare COVID-19 Data Snapshot,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, https://www.cms.gov. A study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation: “Goalkeepers Report 2020,” https://www.gatesfoundation.org.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

They married young, which had its own challenges but led them to have children and value family, which are key protective factors against mental distress, especially in older adulthood. Due to improvements in medical care, Silents were also less likely to be widowed as older adults than Greatests. But then, in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It came at a particularly bad time for Silents. As the bulk of the oldest senior citizens, Silents were the most vulnerable: More than half of deaths from COVID-19 in 2020–2021 were among people 75 years and older. To stay safe, many older people chose not to leave their homes except when absolutely necessary. Some did not see their children or grandchildren in person for a year or more—especially difficult for a generation so focused on family.

Another label is Zoomers, which references the video-chat platform that so many used for school and work during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Whatever you call them, they are different. Smartphones and widespread social media use have meant Gen Z conducts more of their social interaction online and less in the “meatworld” of in-person interaction. Older Gen Z’ers spent their childhoods in a severe recession, their adolescence in a time of robust economic growth but growing political division, and their young adulthood during the COVID-19 pandemic, while younger Gen Z’ers barely remember a pre-Trump world and grappled with online school in 2020 and 2021.

Figure 6.16: Percent of U.S. 12th graders engaging in adult activities, 1976–2021 Source: Monitoring the Future and Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System Notes: The 2020 data were collected in February and early March 2020, before schools shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. 2021 data on sex are from the Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences survey, fielded by the CDC in early to mid-2021 as a substitute for the YRBSS survey during the pandemic. Most 12th graders were Gen Z after 2013. Figure 6.17: Percent of U.S. 8th or 9th graders engaging in adult activities, 1991–2021 Source: Monitoring the Future and Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System Notes: The 2020 data were collected in February and early March 2020, before schools shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sexual intercourse data are from 9th graders in the Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences survey, fielded by the CDC in early to mid-2021 as a substitute for the YRBSS survey during the pandemic.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

“the truth” about immigration “Brexit and Trump Voters More Likely to Believe in Conspiracy Theories, Survey Study Shows,” University of Cambridge, November 23, 2018, www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/brexit-and-trump-votersmore-likely-to-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-survey-study-shows. definitely or probably true Katherine Schaeffer, “A Look at the Americans Who Believe There Is Some Truth to the Conspiracy Theory That COVID-19 Was Planned,” Pew Research Center, July 24, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2020/07/24/a-look-at-the-americans-who-believe-there-is-some-truth-tothe-conspiracy-theory-that-covid-19-was-planned. nearly three million COVID-19 truthers “Dashboard: New Far-Right Groups on Facebook Protesting COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Directives,” Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, August 6, 2020, www.irehr.org/ covid19updates/dashboard-new-far-right-groups-on-facebook-protesting-stayat-home-directives. harassment from QAnon followers Ari Sen and Brandy Zadrozny, “QAnon Groups Have Millions of Members on Facebook, Documents Show,” NBC News, August 1, 2020, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ qanon-groups-have-millions-members-facebook-documents-show-n1236317. heard of QAnon “5 Facts about the QAnon Conspiracy Theories,” November 16, 2020, Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2020/11/16/5-facts-about-the-qanon-conspiracy-theories. criticism of the governor Craig Mauger, “President Trump Tweets on Kidnapping Plot, Criticizes Gov.

And because of Facebook’s algorithmic rabbit hole, COVID-19 misinformation sucked some Plandemic viewers into more extreme beliefs. AnnMarie, a newly converted QAnon follower, told me she’d only learned about the far-right theory after binge-watching online videos about COVID-19 hoaxes. “If it wasn’t for COVID19, I would have been just continuing to tell my kids about the ‘stuff ’ I was finding,” Ann-Marie told me of her tentative pre-COVID ventures on the conspiracy internet. Without the virus, she said she “wouldn’t have found out about QAnon.” One COVID-19 hoax popular in Flat Earth Facebook circles wrongly claimed that truthers could exempt themselves from wearing protective face masks if they lied about having a disability.

The clip went so viral online, with one mocking tweet racking up nearly ten million views, that Lewis deleted her social media accounts. Ironically, Lewis was among those in greatest need of protection from COVID-19. She had lupus, an autoimmune disease that places people at heightened risk of serious COVID-19 complications. Lewis’s battle with lupus had helped lead her to Flat Earth, she told me in late 2019, shortly before COVID-19’s outbreak. As a child, she’d longed to be an astronaut. She wanted to be the first woman to walk on the moon. Her dream led her to enroll in the prestigious US Military Academy in West Point, New York.


pages: 223 words: 60,936

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere by Tsedal Neeley

Airbnb, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discrete time, Donald Trump, future of work, global pandemic, iterative process, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lockdown, mass immigration, natural language processing, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Silicon Valley, social distancing

Like other global leaders entering an emergent market, she was bound to work in conditions rife with ambiguity. Seven years later, she would work in even greater ambiguity—as well as volatility, uncertainty, and complexity—when the worldwide pandemic caused by COVID-19 blew open the world. I will describe how she responded a little later. We don’t know what the long-term effects of COVID-19 will be on organizations, industries, and societies, although we do know that the world has profoundly changed. During the pandemic, every government leader had to make decisions that weigh the losses and gains of quarantine versus business as usual while not being able to accurately predict the consequences of whatever strategy they designate.

Accurate and effective communication channels between official agencies, medical administrators, and personnel were already active; testing and tracing technology was in place; and people understood the purpose of stay-at-home precautions. The population remained relatively unscathed because leadership at many levels was able to accurately frame and anticipate the 2020 COVID-19 health crisis by building a coordinated, country-wide task force. Singapore’s leaders clicked into and framed the risks they saw on the horizon. GENERATE SOLUTIONS WITH DIVERSE MINDS The crisis unfolding in 2013 around Molinas in Turkey, while not as volatile, complex, or far-reaching as the COVID-19 pandemic (although she too would have to reckon with the events of 2020), is more indicative of the crises that global leaders face on a regular basis.

Webster, “‘We Were Not Given a Warning’: New Orleans Mayor Says Federal Inaction Informed Mardi Gras Decision Ahead of Covid-19 Outbreak,” Washington Post, March 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/coronavirus-new-orleans-mardi-gras/2020/03/26/8c8e23c8-6fbb-11ea-b148-e4ce3fbd85b5_story.html. when leaders don’t heed warning signals: Erika Hayes James and Lynn Perry Wooten, “Leadership as (Un)usual: How to Display Competence in Times of Crisis,” Organizational Dynamics 34, no. 2 (2005): 141–52. leadership at many levels: Li Yang Hsu and Min-Han Tan, “What Singapore Can Teach the U.S. About Responding to Covid-19,” Stat, March 23, 2020, https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/23/singapore-teach-united-states-about-covid-19-response/.


pages: 319 words: 102,839

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

The concern that everyone at the yard still showed for him and his wife truly humbled him, just as he and Sheila remained dumbfounded by those who continued to deny the existence of the virus or its impacts. They shook their heads when they saw people without masks in public. People seemed to think of Covid-19 as just another type of flu—catch it, quarantine, and get on with your life. They experienced firsthand how such an untrue mind-set threatened everyone. They lost a couple of friends and a family member to Covid-19 over the summer. Warren still got winded and endured dizzy spells, but he survived. Like Warren Outlaw, other steelworkers kept away from the yard as Covid-19 continued to ravage the region, the state, and the country, and not only because they worried about the virus.

To get to the waterfront, shipbuilders queued at the gates, and once inside, they needed to access tools, food, and other daily resources, creating other points to gather and wait. To help develop action plans to address those needs, while keeping the yard operational and Covid-19 compliant, on April 2, yard president Jennifer Boykin established a Covid-19 Crisis Action Group (CAG) of team leaders from all over the yard to work on recommendations on how to safely and efficiently operate during the pandemic. A new vice-presidential steering committee considered recommendations and sent ones it approved to Boykin.

Being stuck in his bed, staring around the room—the towels stuck under the door to keep his germs from getting out—he felt himself going nuts. A nurse brought him his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Later, he made it a point to tell those in the yard about Covid-19. Devastating. Wash your hands, he told them, and wear your mask, because you can help yourself, as well as another person. “I want you to picture this,” he said. “A little kid, two, three, four, five, six years old. And you come home because you didn’t want to wear your mask and they get Covid-19. Can you imagine a child that’s two or three years old, can’t breathe? And let’s say they don’t make it. For the rest of your life, you’re gonna beat yourself up.


pages: 665 words: 159,350

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

., which in almost all cases involve differentially bad health outcomes for people of color. But white people, who made up only 35% of all confirmed COVID-19 cases, made up 49.5% of all COVID-19 deaths. So among the white subpopulation, a COVID-19 case was substantially more likely to be fatal than a COVID-19 case in the general population. Why? The answer, as I learned from mathematician and writer Dana Mackenzie, is age. White people with COVID-19 are more likely to die of COVID-19 because old people with COVID-19 are more likely to die of COVID-19, and white people, in the aggregate, are old. If you break cases down by age groups, things look really different.

His argument on the random walk was meant to show that, after the number of mosquitoes in a region had been reduced, it would take quite some time for enough mosquitoes to wander into the area to push it back over the epidemic threshold. That’s a key idea for the battle against COVID-19, too. We don’t need to eliminate every transmission of the disease, which is a good thing, since that’s impossible. Epidemic control is not about perfectionism. 77 TRILLION PEOPLE WILL CATCH SMALLPOX NEXT YEAR In the spring of 2020, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the disease was clearly tracing out the kind of geometric progression you don’t want to see. Cases of COVID-19 were growing by about 7% every day. That meant every week the cases were getting multiplied by 1.07 seven times, which amounts to a 60% increase.

If you come into a room with a toggle light switch and the light isn’t how you left it, you know someone has flipped the switch; but the reason you know that is that the state of the light tells you it’s been flipped an odd number of times. WHITE PEOPLE ARE OLD Not everyone faces identical risks from COVID-19. The risk of serious symptoms, hospitalization, and death is much higher among older people, much lower among the young and middle-aged. In the United States, there are racial and ethnic differences, too. As of July 2020, confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. broke down along racial lines like this: 34.6% Hispanic 35.3% non-Hispanic white 20.8% Black The distribution of deaths from COVID-19 looked different. 17.7% Hispanic 49.5% non-Hispanic white 22.9% Black These numbers are startling on their face if you know anything about health disparities in the U.S., which in almost all cases involve differentially bad health outcomes for people of color.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Socializing the costs would add an extra 1 percent to UK public spending.47 But whatever happens to the funding of the system, the status of the people who work in it will also remain an issue if the United Kingdom and the United States, and other rich societies are going to avoid an even more intense recruitment crisis into these jobs. The longer term response to the Covid-19 crisis will surely be not only to build more emergency capacity into our health services but also to raise the status and pay of the Cinderella parts of the care economy, above all elderly care. In much of Europe care homes for the elderly reported a disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths as protective measures focused on health systems. All reputable surveys of future skill requirements in rich countries focus on what Adair Turner calls the “Hi-Tech, Hi-Touch” combination, meaning higher-order cognitive and technical skills on the one hand and interpersonal skills in education and health on the other—sometimes shortened to “coders and carers.”

Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. To my children, in the hope that they might finally read something I have written Preface I wrote most of this book before the Covid-19 crisis struck. Yet the crisis and its likely consequences have a direct bearing on its main theme: the lop-sided distribution of status that has become such a feature of rich societies in recent decades. For one thing it has made the unthinkable thinkable. If we can close down society and economic life for months and collectively underwrite at least some of the cost, then it becomes a little bit easier to imagine that we might adjust the status balance in our educationally stratified, postindustrial societies by a few degrees.

In a partial inversion of the status hierarchy, many of the truly key workers turned out to be people who did not go to college and were less adept at manipulating information. Not all are hand workers in a literal sense, nor the factory workers of old, but all do essential jobs, and in the United Kingdom and United States at the height of the crisis it was males, especially older ethnic minority males, in those frontline jobs who were twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as the wider working population. The pause for reflection that the lockdown imposed on normally hectic, achievement-orientated societies and individuals may leave the deepest traces of all. Many of us, perhaps especially the privileged and highly educated, have been forced to reconsider what we value most deeply and, having looked up from our busy, mobile, existences, often met a neighbor for the first time and actually felt rooted in a physical community.


pages: 304 words: 90,084

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

acid rain 25, 194 Africa xiv, xv, 2, 25, 30, 38, 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 137, 229 agriculture 2, 6, 12, 13, 14, 23, 35–6, 43, 44–5, 70, 76, 86, 87–8, 95, 100, 102, 109, 116, 146–7, 149, 159, 163–80, 181, 183, 192, 197, 198, 206, 220 baseline, the 164–8 biodiversity loss and 2, 5, 100, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 180 biofuels and 197–8 carbon emissions and 2, 12, 13, 35–6, 76–7, 146–7, 163–80 carbon price and 167–70, 171, 172, 173, 180 China and 28–9, 35, 45, 180 economics of 76, 165, 166–7, 171, 174 electricity and 13, 166, 168, 174, 178, 180 fertiliser use see fertiliser lobby 14, 110, 164, 165, 169, 170, 197 methane emissions 23, 84, 177, 178, 179 net gain and 172–4 net value of UK 76, 166 new technologies/indoor farming 87–8, 174–9, 180, 213 peat bogs and 2, 179 pesticide use see pesticides petrochemicals and 166 polluter-pays principle and 76, 168–70, 172, 173 pollution 36, 86, 163, 165–6, 168–70, 172, 173, 177–8, 230 public goods, agricultural 170–4, 180 sequestering carbon and 12, 95, 163, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173–4, 177, 179, 180 soils and 2, 146, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 179 subsidies 14, 76, 102, 109, 116, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 180, 228 25 Year Plan and 179–80 Agriculture Bill (2018), UK 170 air conditioning 135–6, 224, 233 air quality xiii, 13, 25, 46, 52, 61, 70, 135, 153, 177, 180, 201, 216, 230, 232 air transport 3–4, 6, 11, 13, 22, 50, 53, 73, 87, 88, 92, 107, 125, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 149, 156–7, 186, 195, 201, 203–5 aluminium 7, 117 Amazon rainforest 2, 34, 35, 95, 145, 149–50, 151, 155, 229, 230 ammonia 35, 137, 191 anaerobic digesters 35, 165, 230 animal welfare 167, 177 antibiotics 93, 165, 174 Arctic 26, 46, 114, 178 artificial intelligence (AI) 32, 175, 220, 231 autonomous vehicles 13, 129, 132, 175, 189–90, 231 Balkans 137–8 Bank of England 121 batteries 6, 31, 131, 135, 141, 183, 184, 185–90, 191, 199, 204, 213, 214, 219, 220, 221, 225, 231 beef 5, 95, 116, 117, 167, 230 Berlin, Isaiah 104 big 5 polluter products 117–18, 120 bin Salman, Mohammad 27 biocrops 36 biodiversity xiv, 2, 5, 12, 13, 28, 35, 51, 76, 94, 100, 148, 149, 152, 153, 158, 159, 164, 165, 168, 169–70, 171, 172, 174, 180, 227, 233 bioenergy 31, 34–5, 36 biofuels 21, 35, 49, 50, 67, 70, 95, 135, 183, 184, 197–8, 210, 230 biomass 32, 34, 49, 50, 67, 69, 109, 146, 147, 151, 210, 217 bonds, government 220 BP 27, 149, 187, 199 Deepwater Horizon disaster, Gulf of Mexico (2010) 147 Brazil 2, 35, 38, 44–5, 47, 95, 145, 149–50, 155, 198 Brexit 42, 47, 56, 117, 165 British Gas 102, 139 British Steel x, 194 broadband networks 6, 11, 90, 92, 125, 126, 127–8, 130–1, 132–3, 135, 140–1, 199, 201, 202, 205, 211, 214, 231, 232 Brundtland Commission 45 BT 127–8, 141 Openreach 214 Burn Out (Helm) ix, xiv Bush, George W. 36, 48, 53, 103 business rates 76, 165 Canada 52, 191, 193 capitalist model 26, 42, 99, 227 carbon border tax/carbon border adjustment xii, 11, 13, 60, 80, 115–20, 194–6, 204 carbon capture and storage (CCS) xiv, 12, 75–6, 95, 109, 146, 147–8, 149, 154, 159, 203–4, 207, 209, 222, 223 Carbon Crunch, The (Helm) ix, xiv, 221 carbon diary 4–5, 8, 10, 11, 64–6, 83, 86, 116, 143, 144, 155, 156, 167, 180, 181, 185, 203, 205 carbon emissions: agriculture and see agriculture by country (2015) 30 during ice ages and warm periods for the past 800,000 years 21 economy and 81–159 electricity and see electricity global annual mean concentration of CO2 (ppm) 19 global average long-term concentration of CO2 (ppm) 20 measuring 43–6 since 1990 1–14, 17–37 transport and see individual method of transport 2020, position in 36–7 UN treaties and 38–57 unilateralism and 58–80 see also unilateralism carbon offsetting xiii–xiv, 4, 5, 12, 34, 45, 72, 74, 79, 94–6, 97, 105, 143–59, 192, 201, 203, 207, 214, 222, 223, 234 for companies 148–50 for countries 151–5 for individuals 155–7 markets 71–2, 110–13, 117, 144, 157–9, 208 travel and 156, 201–3 see also sequestration carbon permits 71–2, 79, 110–13, 117, 144, 208 carbon price/tax xii, xiii, xv, 8, 11, 12, 13, 26, 60, 61, 71, 72, 77, 79, 80, 84, 85–6, 102–3, 105, 106–24, 134, 143, 146, 147, 150, 151–4, 157, 159, 192, 197, 198, 199, 203, 227–30, 232, 234 agriculture and 167, 168, 169–70, 171, 173, 180 domain of the tax/carbon border adjustment xii, 11, 13, 60, 80, 115–20, 121, 124, 192, 194–6, 197, 204, 227 electric pollution and 216–18 ethics of 107–10 floor price 115, 117, 208 for imports 11, 13 prices or quantities/EU ETS versus carbon taxes 110–13 setting 113–15 transport and 192–9 what to do with the money 121–4 where to levy the tax 119–20 who fixes the price 120–1 carbon sinks 2, 5, 166, 169, 203 carboniferous age 34 cars 1, 3, 4, 7, 20, 22, 36, 44, 70, 73, 114, 129, 181, 182, 183, 184–5, 190, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198, 199 see also electric vehicles cartels 39, 40, 43, 45, 46, 47, 56 cattle farming 35, 36, 95, 150, 166, 167, 173, 177, 198 Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) 102, 139, 218 cement 6, 7, 26, 29, 34, 87, 117, 171 charging networks, electric vehicle 91, 129–30, 141–2, 184, 185–90, 199, 200, 202, 219 Chernobyl 78 China xi, xv, 1–2, 5, 8, 18, 42, 46, 47, 48, 64, 66, 74, 101, 180, 229 Belt and Road Initiative 28, 45 coal use 1–2, 8, 23–4, 24, 28, 31, 38, 117, 154, 206, 208 Communist Party 2, 27, 42, 46 demand for fossil fuels/carbon emissions 1–2, 8, 18, 20, 22, 23–4, 24, 25, 27–31, 36, 38, 51, 73, 117, 154, 206, 208 export market x–xi, 5, 9, 64, 66, 117, 155, 194 fertiliser use 35 GDP xv, 27, 29 nationalism and 42 petrochemical demand 22 renewables companies 9, 32, 73, 74, 77, 79 Tiananmen Square 42 unilateralism and 58, 59 UN treaties and 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59 US trade war 56, 118 Churchill, Winston 183 citizen assemblies 99–101 climate change: carbon emissions and see carbon emissions 1.5° target 38, 57 2° target 1, 10, 22–3, 28, 30, 38, 39, 45, 47, 54, 55, 57, 108, 122, 155, 206 see also individual area of climate change Climate Change Act (2008) 66, 74–7 Clinton, Bill 40, 48 Club of Rome 98 coal 1–2, 5, 8, 13, 20, 23–5, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38, 50, 52, 53, 60–1, 67, 72, 77, 78–9, 101, 109, 112, 116, 117, 119, 134, 136, 145, 147, 148, 151, 154, 155, 182, 183, 194, 196, 206–9, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217, 218, 229, 230 coastal marshes 146, 159 colonialism 45 Committee on Climate Change (CCC), UK x–xi, 7, 74–5, 120, 164, 166, 169, 217, 235 ‘Net Zero: The UK’s Contribution to Stopping Global Warming’ report x–xi conference/video calls 6, 129, 156, 202, 205 Conference of the Parties (COP) xii, 10, 48, 50, 53–4, 55, 59, 205 congestion charges 198 Copenhagen Accord 48, 53–4, 59 Coronavirus see Covid-19 cost-benefit analysis (CBA) 71, 108, 110, 114, 138 cost of living 116 Covid-19 x, xi–xii, 1, 3, 6, 9, 18, 19, 22, 25, 27, 30, 37, 44, 46, 50, 57, 65, 69, 80, 89, 93, 129, 135, 148, 171, 201, 202, 204, 232 CRISPR 176 crop yields 172, 177 dams 2, 36, 52–3, 179 DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) 100 deforestation 2, 5, 34, 35, 36, 38, 43, 44, 47, 55, 87, 95, 145, 146, 149–50, 155, 172–3, 179, 197–8, 229 Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 170 deindustrialisation x, 29, 46, 52, 54, 59, 72–4, 218 Deng Xiaoping 27 Denmark 69–70, 136–7 desalination 135–6, 179 diesel 4, 20–1, 70, 76, 86, 109, 119, 121, 129, 132, 164, 165, 166, 174, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185, 186, 191, 192, 196–7, 208, 217, 230 ‘dieselgate’ scandal 196–7 digitalisation 1, 8, 11, 13, 33, 92, 117, 136, 174, 175, 180, 206, 211, 215, 221, 228–9, 231 DONG 69 Drax 147, 151, 154, 218 economy, net zero 10–12, 81–159 delivering a 96–103 intergenerational equity and 96–7 markets and 103–5 net environmental gain see net environmental gain political ideologies and 98–101 polluter-pays principle see polluter-pays principle public goods, provision of see public goods, provision of technological change and 98 EDF 139, 218 Ehrlich, Paul 98 electricity 1–2, 4, 6, 11, 12, 13, 23, 31, 32, 49, 53, 61, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 77, 78, 79, 91, 92, 101, 102, 109, 117, 125, 127, 128, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 149, 158, 166, 168, 174, 178, 180, 182, 183, 228, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235 coal, getting out of 206–7 electric pollution and the carbon price 216–18 electric vehicles 4, 6, 13, 20, 23, 49, 61, 91, 92, 94, 121, 125, 128, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 141, 183–92, 193, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202, 206, 219, 228 equivalent firm power auctions and system operators 210–16 future of 206–25 gas, how to get out of 207–9 infrastructure, electric 185–90, 218–20 low-carbon options post-coal and gas 209–10 net gain and our consumption 222–5 R&D and next-generation renewables 220–2 renewable see renewables Energy Market Reform (EMR) 219 equivalent firm power (EFP) 212–16, 217, 220 ethanol 35, 71, 95, 197 eucalyptus trees xiv, 152 European Commission 60, 71, 72, 112 European Union (EU) xiv, 2, 7, 8, 9, 37, 42, 44, 46, 47, 117, 137, 165, 166, 197; baseline of 1990 and 51–2 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 76, 165 competition regime and customs union 56 deindustrialisation and 46, 52, 54, 59, 72–4 directives for 2030 66 Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) 71–2, 73, 79, 110–13, 117, 144, 208 importing carbon emissions 59 Internal Energy Market (IEM) 68, 71 Kyoto and 9, 51, 59, 66–7 Mercosur Agreement 44, 95 net zero target for 2050 66, 115, 143, 155, 167, 180 Paris and 54 Renewable Energy Directive 68–71, 73, 109 2020 targets signed into law 66 2020–20–20 targets 67, 69, 74 unilateralism and 59, 66–71, 80 Eurostar 133 externalities 104, 170, 180, 196 Extinction Rebellion 6 farmers 14, 26, 35, 36, 43, 71, 76, 86, 95, 102, 109, 110, 146–7, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 174, 175, 196, 197, 198 fertiliser 4, 6, 7, 26, 29, 35, 61, 73, 86, 87, 116, 117, 119, 163, 165, 169, 174, 175, 178, 179, 191, 194, 197 fibre/broadband networks 6, 11, 90, 92, 125, 126, 127–8, 130–1, 132–3, 135, 140–1, 201, 202, 205, 211, 214, 231, 232 financial crisis (2007/8) 1, 19, 69 first-mover advantage 75 First Utility 199 flooding 13, 77, 149, 152, 153, 159, 170, 233 food miles 167 food security 170–1 food waste 178, 180, 231 Forestry Commission xiv Formula One 186, 196 fossil fuels, golden age of 20–5 see also individual fossil fuel France 46, 47, 52, 56, 73, 78, 101, 113, 130, 136, 138 free-rider problem 39–40, 43, 62–4, 106, 119 fuel duty 121, 195–6 fuel efficiency 197 fuel prices 26, 112–13, 209 fuel use declaration 195 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (2011) 52, 78 Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man 40–1 gardens 6, 43, 143, 156 gas, natural ix, 2, 5, 8, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 36, 50, 52, 68, 69, 79, 102, 109, 117, 119, 129, 136, 137, 146, 147–8, 149, 183, 190, 193, 194, 207–9, 210, 211, 214, 216–17 G8 47 gene editing 172, 176, 231 general election (2019) 121 genetics 98, 172, 174–6, 231 geoengineering 177 geothermal power 137, 178 Germany 9, 30, 47, 52, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77–80, 83, 91, 101, 112, 136, 137, 138, 144, 206, 208, 209 Energiewende (planned transition to a low-carbon, nuclear-free economy) 59, 69, 77–80, 112, 144, 208 Gilets Jaunes 101, 113 GMOs (genetically modified organisms) 176, 177 Great Northern Forest, Britain 151 Green and Prosperous Land (Helm) xiii, xiv, 165, 169, 234 greenbelt 173 greenhouse effect 17 green new deal 90, 102, 234 green parties/green votes 69, 77, 78 green QE (quantitative easing) 102–3 green walls 153, 231 greenwash 156 gross domestic product (GDP) xii, xv, 1, 25, 27, 29, 41, 57, 59, 73, 76, 83, 93, 98, 103, 133, 165, 207, 227, 229, 233 growth nodes 133 G7 47 G20 47 Haber-Bosch process 35, 163 Hamilton, Lewis 186 ‘hands-free’ fields 175 Harry, Prince 6 Heathrow 133, 134 hedgerow 76, 166, 167, 172 Helm Review (‘The Cost of Energy Review’) (2017) ix, 120, 141, 200, 210, 212, 215, 217, 220, 238 herbicide 163 home insulation 102 House of Lords 170 housing 101, 223–4 HS2 92, 125, 132–4, 138, 202 Hume, David 49 hydrogen 13, 49, 92, 125, 128, 135, 137, 183, 184, 190–2, 199, 200, 204, 206, 213, 228 hydro power 31, 35, 36, 50, 52–3, 70, 136, 137, 191 Iceland 137, 178 imports x–xi, xiii, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 62, 68, 70, 117–18, 155, 167, 178, 173, 180, 196, 227 income effect 72, 111 income tax 121, 122, 232 India xiv, xv, 25, 30, 31, 38, 43, 44, 47, 48, 51, 54, 55, 57, 154, 229 individuals, net zero for 155–7 Indonesia 2, 35 indoor farming 87–8, 177–8, 180, 213 indoor pollutants 223, 232 Industrial Revolution 1, 18, 19, 25, 47, 116, 145 INEOS Grangemouth petrochemical plant xi information and communications technology (ICT) 117, 202, 231 infrastructures, low-carbon xiii, xiv, 11–12, 14, 28, 60, 62, 65, 66, 90, 91–4, 96, 105, 109, 123, 125–42, 143, 147, 151, 154, 159, 171, 184, 186, 187, 190, 199–200, 214, 218–20, 228, 230, 231–2, 234–5 centrality of infrastructure networks 128–30 electric 125–41, 218–20 making it happen 141–2 net zero national infrastructure plan 130–6 private markets and 125–8, 141–2 regional and global infrastructure plan 136–7 state intervention and 126, 127–8, 141–2 system operators and implementing the plans 138–41 inheritance tax 76, 165 insects 164, 177, 231 insulation 102, 224 Integrated Assessment Models 114 intellectual property (IP) 75 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 17–18, 47, 55, 57, 108, 172 internal combustion engine 13, 22, 181–2, 183, 184, 200, 221, 228 Internal Energy Market (IEM) 68, 71, 138 International Energy Agency (IEA) 25, 207 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 51 internet banking 131, 213 internet-of-things 128, 175 Iran 27, 42, 113, 137 Iraq 56, 192 Ireland 43, 157 Italy 137, 182 Japan 27, 28, 30, 52, 73, 78, 101, 185 Jevons Paradox 224 Johnson, Boris 89–90 Kant, Immanuel 104 Keynes, John Maynard 89, 102, 103, 105 Kyoto Protocol (1997) xii, 2, 7, 9, 13, 17–18, 37, 38, 39, 40–1, 47–8, 49, 51, 52–3, 59, 66–7, 119 laissez-faire 104, 138, 188 land use 35, 61, 95, 172, 237 LED (light-emitting diode) lighting 87, 178, 179, 180, 213 liquefied natural gas (LNG) 136, 183 lithium-ion battery 185 lobbying 10, 14, 33, 69, 71, 109, 110, 111–12, 115, 121, 157, 169, 170, 187, 197, 209, 223, 227, 228 location-specific taxes 194 maize 35, 165, 197 Malaysia 2, 229 Malthus, Thomas 98 Mao, Chairman 27, 42 meat xi, 65, 164, 177, 180, 232 Mekong River 2, 28, 179, 229 Mercosur Agreement 44, 95 Merkel, Angela 78 methane 4, 23, 84, 177, 178, 179, 216 microplastics 22 miracle solution 49–50, 55, 209 mobile phone 5, 125, 185 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 110, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171 National Grid 139, 141, 189, 200, 211, 214, 219 nationalisations 101–2, 126–7 nationalism 41, 43, 55, 56, 138 nationally determined contributions (NDCs) 54–5 natural capital xiii, 14, 33–6, 51, 85, 86, 88, 90, 94, 97, 154, 158, 168, 171, 173–4, 236 Nature Fund 123, 169, 234 net environmental gain principle xiii, xiv, 10, 12, 62, 84, 94–6, 105, 143–59, 169, 172–4, 192, 201–3, 222–5 agriculture and 169, 172–4 carbon offsetting and see carbon offsetting electricity and 222–5 principle of 94–6, 143–4 sequestration and see sequestration transport and 192, 201–3 Netherlands 138 Network Rail 214 net zero agriculture and see agriculture defined x–xv, 3–14 economy 10–12, 81–159 see also economy, net zero electricity and see electricity transport and see individual method of transport 2025 or 2030 target 89 2050 target x, xi, 5, 59, 66, 74, 75, 115, 120, 135, 143, 155, 167, 169, 180, 184, 216, 217, 222, 226, 230, 231, 232 unilateralism and see unilateralism NHS 65 non-excludable 91, 93, 126, 170 non-rivalry 91, 93, 126, 170 North Korea 42 North Sea oil/gas 9, 40, 75, 97, 102, 137, 139, 147, 148, 193 Norway 130, 137, 191 nuclear power 5, 9, 12, 18, 23, 52, 60, 73, 77–9, 109, 125, 128, 129, 136, 140, 178, 194, 199, 206, 207, 208, 209–10, 212, 214, 216, 218, 219, 222, 228 Obama, Barack 48, 53, 54, 59 oceans 2, 14, 22, 33, 85, 86, 88, 148, 163, 231 offsetting see carbon offsetting offshore wind power 31, 69, 75–6, 208, 212, 219, 221 Ofgem 220 oil ix, 2, 20, 22–3, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 36, 39, 40, 50, 67, 69, 86, 97, 117, 119, 129, 136, 137, 146, 147, 148–9, 150–1, 152, 181–3, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 192–4, 196, 197, 199, 206, 209, 210, 216–17, 229 OPEC 39, 40, 193 Orbán, Viktor 41, 42 organic food 61, 87, 178 Ørsted 70 palm oil 2, 5, 6, 35, 36, 66, 71, 167, 173, 197–8, 230 pandemic see Covid-19 Paris Climate Change Agreement (2015) xii, 2, 10, 13, 18, 30, 37, 38, 39, 48, 49, 54–5, 56, 57, 58, 66, 80, 105, 106, 118, 119, 227 peat bogs xiv, 2, 13, 14, 33, 35, 36, 43, 109, 146, 169, 179 pesticides 4, 26, 61, 163, 165, 169, 174, 178, 231 petrochemicals xi, 7, 8, 20, 22–3, 29, 73, 80, 86, 117, 166, 182 petrol 4, 86, 119, 121, 129, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 199 photosynthesis 34, 197 plastics 1, 22, 28, 35, 43, 66, 86, 87, 119, 143, 166, 184, 231 polluter-pays principle xiii, xv, 84–90 agriculture and 76, 168–70, 172, 173 carbon price and see carbon price/tax generalised across all sources of pollution 86 identifying polluters that should pay 86 importance of 10–11, 13, 61, 62, 65 intergenerational balance and 96–7 net environmental gain and 94 sequestration and see sequestration, carbon sustainable economy and 96–7, 105, 106 transport and 192–5, 198–9 see also individual type of pollution population growth 93, 97, 177, 178, 179, 232 privatisation 127, 140, 218–19, 220 property developers 94 public goods, provision of xiii, 10, 11–12, 62, 75, 84, 90–4, 96, 104, 105, 109, 122, 123, 126, 128, 141, 147, 151, 153, 159, 164, 168, 173–4, 180, 192, 199–200, 202, 218, 229, 230 agricultural 170–4, 180 low-carbon infrastructures see infrastructures, low-carbon research and development (R&D) see research and development (R&D) Putin, Vladimir 27, 41, 42, 89 railways 11, 13, 13, 87, 91, 92, 94, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132–3, 138, 139, 156, 182, 183, 187, 202, 212, 214, 232 rainforest 2, 5, 34, 35, 36, 38, 44, 47, 55, 87, 95, 145, 149, 155, 173, 179–80, 197, 229 rationalism 40–1 Reagan, Ronald 103 red diesel 76, 109, 164, 165, 196 regulated asset base (RAB) 127, 141, 215, 220 remote working 128, 156, 201–2, 205 renewables ix, 6, 8, 9–10, 18, 19, 21, 26, 31–5, 36, 49, 50, 55, 61, 67, 72, 77, 79, 85, 86, 109, 110, 112, 123, 125, 128, 131, 135, 138, 140, 144, 149, 178, 188, 191, 194, 197, 199, 207, 209–10, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220–2, 224, 228 Chinese domination of market 9, 32, 73, 74, 77, 79 cost-competitiveness of 9–10, 49, 51, 61, 68 failure of, 1990-now 19, 31–3, 36 modern global renewable energy consumption measured in TWh per year 32 miracle solution and 49–51 Renewable Energy Directive 68–71, 73, 109 subsidies ix, 9, 10, 50, 68–9, 71, 79, 80 see also individual renewable energy source Renewables UK 110 research and development (R&D) xiv, 12, 13, 14, 62, 65, 66, 90, 93–4, 104, 109, 123, 165, 172, 192, 200, 218, 220–2, 223, 228, 234 reshoring businesses 8, 204 rivers 2, 22, 28, 86, 128, 152, 165, 169, 179, 214, 230 roads 11, 28, 45, 91, 92, 125, 129, 131–2, 140, 165, 182, 189, 194, 198, 202, 232 robotics 32, 175, 204, 206, 231 Rosneft 26 Royal Navy 183 Russia 26, 27, 30, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 55, 56, 192, 193 RWE 139, 218 Ryanair 156–7 rye grass 35 salmon 169, 177 Saudi Arabia 26, 33, 40, 42, 50, 137, 192, 193 Saudi Aramco 26, 50 seashells 34 sequestration, carbon xi, xiv, 12, 61, 66, 85, 90, 95, 143–59, 228, 229, 231, 232 agriculture and 12, 163, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176–7, 179, 180 baseline definition and 146–7 biofuels and 35, 146, 217 carbon capture and storage (CCS) xiv, 12, 75–6, 95, 109, 146, 147–8, 149, 154, 159, 203–4, 207, 209, 222, 223 companies, net zero for 148–51 countries, offsetting for 151–5 electricity and 222, 223 gas and 207 individuals, net zero for xi, xiv, 155–7 markets, offsetting 157–9 natural capital destruction and 2, 19, 33–6, 44, 45, 51 natural sequestration xi, xiii, 2, 7, 12, 14, 33–6, 37, 45, 52, 66, 85, 90, 94–6, 105, 143–59, 163, 168, 171, 173, 176–7, 179, 180, 203, 206, 207, 222, 223 net gain principle and 143–4, 146, 149–50 offsetting principle and 143–5 peat bogs and see peat bogs principle of xi, xiii, 2, 7, 12–13 soils and see soils transport and 185, 190, 203 tree planting and see trees, planting/sequestration and types of 145–8 wetlands/coastal marshes and 146, 159, 233 shale gas 8, 208 Shell 27, 149, 199 shipping 8, 13, 22, 28, 36, 49, 114, 125, 137, 181, 182–3, 191, 194–5, 203–5, 217 Siberia 2, 46 smart appliances 128, 129, 132 smart charging 11, 13, 128, 129, 130, 139, 214, 219 soils xiii, 2, 5, 7, 12, 14, 33, 35, 36, 43, 55, 76, 109, 146, 149, 152, 156, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 179, 203, 228 solar panels/solar photovoltaics (PV) 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 21, 31, 32, 33, 49, 53, 68, 69, 71, 74, 79, 87, 91, 135, 136, 137, 178, 179, 188, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 221, 222, 223, 224–5 Sony 185 Soviet Union 18, 40, 52, 67–8, 89 soya 95 Spain 69, 130, 137 sport utility vehicles (SUVs) 106, 121, 192 spruce xiv, 152, 170 standard of living xv, 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 229, 233 staycations 201 steel x–xi, 6, 7, 8, 26, 28, 29, 53, 66, 73, 80, 87, 116, 117, 118, 119, 171, 184, 194–5 Stern, Nicholas: The Economics of Climate Change 41, 63 subsidies ix, 9, 10, 14, 32, 50, 51, 52, 53, 69, 71, 76, 79, 80, 89, 102, 109, 110, 113, 116, 123, 140, 154, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 180, 193, 196, 198, 209, 215, 221, 222, 228, 230 sugar cane 35, 71, 95, 197, 198 sulphur pollution 22, 25, 28, 78, 191, 194, 197, 230 sustainable economic growth xv, 10, 12, 14, 61, 83, 92, 94, 97, 98, 105, 227, 233 Taiwan 42 taxation xii, 11, 62, 71, 72, 76, 80, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 97, 101, 102, 103, 106–24, 126, 127, 130, 133, 147, 150, 151–2, 153–4, 157, 159, 165, 169, 170, 192–6, 197, 198, 199, 203, 232, 234 technological change 98, 127, 141, 174–5, 221 Thatcher, Margaret 17 Thompson, Emma 6 3D printing 175, 204 Thunberg, Greta 6, 205 tidal shocks 159 top-down treaty frameworks 13, 38–57, 80, 110, 119 tourism/holidays 6, 22, 36, 88, 94, 107, 114, 128, 156, 201, 204–5 transport, reinventing 181–205 aviation 195, 201, 203–5 see also air transport batteries and charging networks 185–90 biofuels 196–8 electric alternative 183–5 hydrogen and fuel cells 190–2 innovation, R&D and new infrastructures 199–200 internal combustion engine 181–2 net gain and offsets (reducing travel versus buying out your pollution) 201–3 oil 183–4 polluter pays/carbon tax 192–6 shipping 203–5 urban regulation and planning 198–9 vehicle standards 196–8 see also individual type of transport Treasury, UK 120–2 trees, planting/sequestration and xi, xiii, xiv, 2, 7, 13, 14, 33, 34, 45, 76, 85, 94–6, 146, 148, 149–51, 152–3, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 168, 169, 172, 179, 203, 231 trophy project syndrome 133 Trump, Donald 2, 8, 41, 42, 48, 89, 99, 103, 121 25 Year Environment Plan xiii, 153, 170, 179–80 UK 47, 69 agriculture and 164, 166, 167, 173 carbon emissions (2015) 30 carbon price and 115, 120 Climate Change Act (2008) 66, 74–7 coal, phasing out of 24–5, 60–1, 77, 208 Committee on Climate Change (CCC) x–xi, 7, 74–6, 120, 164, 166, 169, 217, 235 deindustrialisation and 72–4 80 per cent carbon reduction target by 2050 74 electricity and 206, 208, 218, 219, 224 Helm Review (‘The Cost of Energy Review’) (2017) ix, 120, 141, 200, 210, 212, 215, 217, 220, 238 infrastructure 125, 132–3, 134, 137, 139–40 net zero passed into law (2019) 66 sequestration and 145, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156 transport and 195–6, 197, 198 unilateralism and 58–9, 60–1, 65, 66, 69, 72–7, 80 unilateralism xi, 8, 10, 11, 25, 58–80, 83, 105, 106, 119, 125, 143, 144, 155, 164, 167, 197, 203, 227 in Europe 66–80 incentive problem and 58–60 morality and 62–6 no regrets exemplars and/showcase examples of how decarbonisation can be achieved 60–2 place for 80 way forward and 80, 83 United Nations xi, xii, 6, 10, 17, 37, 38, 118 carbon cartel, ambition to create a 39–40, 43, 45, 46–7, 56 climate treaty processes xi, 6, 10, 13, 17–18, 36, 37, 38–57, 59, 80, 110, 118, 119, 204–5 see also individual treaty name Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 17–18, 36, 38, 59 miracle solution and 50–1 origins and philosophy of 41 Security Council 46, 47, 57 United States 8, 74, 139, 206 agriculture in 175, 176, 197 carbon emissions 8, 29, 30 China and 27–8, 42, 118 coal and 2, 24, 28, 29, 208 economic imperialism 45 energy independence 50 gas and 8, 20, 23, 24, 29, 50, 208 oil production 40, 50, 193 pollution since 1990 29 unilateralism and 58, 59, 74 UN climate treaty process and 38, 40–1, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 56 universal service obligations (USOs) 92, 126, 131, 202 utilitarianism 41, 63–4, 108, 110 VAT 117, 119–20, 121, 122, 232 Vesta 69 Volkswagen 196–7 water companies 76, 214, 230 water pollution/quality xiv, 12, 22, 61, 76, 152, 153, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 232 Wen Jiabao 53, 59 wetlands 159, 233 wildflower meadow 164, 184 wind power 5, 9, 12, 21, 31, 32, 33, 49, 53, 68, 69–70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 91, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 178, 188, 191, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214–15, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222 wood pellets 67, 217, 230 Woodland Trust 156, 158 World Bank 51 World Trade Organization (WTO) 52, 56, 118 World War I 183 World War II (1939–45) 78, 90, 92, 101, 106, 171 Xi Jinping 27, 41, 42 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS So much is now discussed, written and published about climate change that it is impossible to keep track of all the ideas and conversations that have influenced my understanding of the subject.

The predictions of the peak-oilers have turned out to be nonsense, the price of oil (and gas) has fallen back and, whatever their advocates claim, renewables are not yet subsidy-free once all the costs have been taken into account. What I had not anticipated was that no serious progress would yet have been made on the fundamental problem, and that the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere would still just keep on going ever upwards, without so much as a blip, and, if anything, slightly accelerate. Only the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has made a difference, and this is likely to be temporary. When set against the enormity of the consequences of climate change, the only rational response is anger. If this failure to achieve anything much in the last 30 years had been the consequence of not trying, it would be bad but at least understandable.

Thirty years on from the UN’s drive to address climate change, we are still going backwards at an alarming rate. Up to the start of 2020, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere carried on going up relentlessly at around 2 parts per million (ppm) every year. The only thing that has worked and lowered carbon consumption is the Covid-19 lockdowns, sharply reducing GDP and emissions. Anger is not enough, and neither is despair at what has so far failed to happen. We can do much better. There needs to be a plan. This is my attempt to bring together my earlier arguments and analyses, to set out a better way of thinking through the carbon problem, and to lay out what a carbon policy would look like if we really wanted to limit global temperatures.


pages: 450 words: 144,939

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

Tommy expressed a constant fear of catching or having COVID-19 and unwittingly infecting his Grammy, Arlene Bloom, Sarah’s mom, with whom he was very close and who preferred not to wear a mask around family members. We spent ridiculous amounts of time deciding when masks needed to be worn and for how long, and where, when, and how to get tested. COVID-19 made even the most informal social occasions among family a matter of profound anxiety and endless planning, analysis, and second-guessing. The whole thing was exhausting and demoralizing. I was spending most of my time as a congressman addressing the crises created by COVID-19. At the start, hundreds of my constituents were strewn, and stuck, all over the world as air travel ground to a halt, and my district director, Kathleen Connor, and our amazing staff of Erica Fuentes, Nina Weisbrodt, Jennie Foont, Joseph Eyong, and Christa Burton worked around the clock to get planes in the air and our people back home.

When he went sailing off on an anti-Chinese polemic and filibuster, I would seek recognition to recount at least nineteen different occasions on which Donald Trump lavishly praised the beautiful performance of General Xi and the Chinese autocratic government in the first five months of the COVID-19 crisis. But from a public policy standpoint, all of it was just spinning our wheels. Against the GOP propaganda machine, the White House, and Fox News, there was little we could do to hold back the flood of disinformation. Amazingly, the party that had invented and railed against mythical “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act was now defending Donald Trump and his monstrous mismanagement of COVID-19 that would come to cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths, according to Trump’s own COVID-19 point person, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator.

But it became painfully clear to me—yes, even to me, of the perpetual naïve faith that friendship and community can overcome all obstacles—that Jim Jordan considered us his enemies in the most basic sense and that his time in Congress was going to be spent demonstrating his absolute devotion to one person alone: Donald Trump. On our COVID-19 subcommittee, Jordan acted nimbly to cover up for what I saw as Trump’s recklessness, incompetence, and mismanagement of the pandemic response. He ridiculed and heckled Dr. Fauci. He tore into the urgent public health mandates of masking and social distancing, which were pretty much all we had to protect ourselves before the vaccines came out. He ignored or minimized the massive death toll of COVID-19, and blamed the economic problems caused by the COVID public health disaster on “Democrat governors.”


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

in twenty-three states: Paris Martineau, “Amazon Quietly Expands Large-Scale Covid Testing Program for Warehouses,” The Information, September 24, 2020, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-quietly-expands-large-scale-covid-testing-program-for-warehouses (January 26, 2021). thousands of tests a day across 650 sites: “Update on COVID-19 Testing,” Amazon, October 1, 2020, https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/update-on-covid-19-testing (January 26, 2021). “injecting Amazon with a growth hormone”: Matthew Fox, “ ‘COVID-19 Has Been Like Injecting Amazon with a Growth Hormone’: Here’s What 4 Analysts Had to Say About Amazon’s Earnings Report as $4,000 Price Targets Start to Roll In,” Business Insider, July 31, 2020, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/amazon-earnings-wall-street-reacts-blockbuster-report-analysts-stock-price-2020-7-1029456482 (January 26, 2021).

Another project to regularly test the oxygen levels of FC workers with pulse oximeters didn’t meaningfully identify anyone with Covid-19 and was also abandoned, as was a trial to track the location of employees inside warehouses using their personal cell phones and their facility’s Wi-Fi network. Dr. Ian Lipkin had talked to the S-team about the urgent need for rapid testing, to address the issue of asymptomatic people who are infected and come to work, unknowingly spreading the disease. With the U.S. grappling with a critical shortage of Covid-19 tests and Amazon unable to procure a supply of its own, Bezos decreed that Amazon should make tests itself—even though it had no previous experience in the area.

The piece, which included an interview with Chris Smalls, was punishing, particularly about the company’s reluctance to release any information about infection rates in the FCs. Dave Clark was trotted out alone to face the formidable Lesley Stahl; he affably maintained that the number of overall Covid-19 cases wasn’t a useful figure, since Amazon believed most employees were infected in their communities, not at work. But by the fall, Amazon had reversed course amid growing pressure. It reported that around twenty thousand of its 1.3 million frontline employees had tested or been presumed positive for Covid-19. The company argued that its preventative measures had made that figure far lower than could be predicted based on the infection rates in local communities.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Our personal responsibility for ourselves and our collective effort to understand, shape and improve our shared social life are outsourced to the state, in particular to the [Communist Party of China], and delegated to an algorithm.25 China’s unpopular, fragmented, and often slapdash social credit systems aren’t quite as ubiquitous or powerful as the mass surveillance Ivanhoe fears. It’s possible that Black Mirror’s dystopia may never come. China’s leaders could change their minds in the face of public opposition, like in Suzhou. Or they might keep trying, emboldened by their initially successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic, taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by mandatory COVID-19 health code apps and harnessing the ever-decreasing cost of technology—like in Suzhou. And if they get it right, Mumford would argue there’s no going back. “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE” It’s easy to view China’s social credit scores as an oddity that would never fly in Western democracies.

This is very helpful to build trust across the teams.” Sometimes treating the real world as a game feels more unsettling. As COVID-19 spread beyond China, websites tracked cases and deaths in real time, with commenters grimly comparing them to the video game Plague, Inc., where players intentionally spread and evolve a virus to wipe out humanity.10 No doubt this was one reason why China banned the game in February 2020; and why, in the following month, the developers donated a quarter of a million dollars to fight COVID-19, and in November, released an expansion where players try to save the world through contact tracing, furlough schemes, and vaccine development.11 Grimmer still is the weaponisation of video games by the far right.

I first came across r/wallstreetbets at the beginning of 2020, just as COVID-19 was making its effects felt in Asia and then in Europe. The community had just shy of one million members, many of whom were fixated on shorting shares they correctly predicted were about to plunge off a cliff. The most popular predictions weren’t made through posts filled with detailed analysis and sources but via elaborate and frequently offensive memes. One memorable meme took an epic battle sequence from Game of Thrones and replaced the dragon with COVID-19, the oncoming Dothraki horde with short sellers, and the hapless defenders with vulnerable shares like airlines, office landlords, and cruise operators.


pages: 250 words: 79,360

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson

Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, butterfly effect, carbon tax, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Emanuel Derman, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, hindcast, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, implied volatility, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kim Stanley Robinson, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, negative emissions, paperclip maximiser, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, random walk, risk tolerance, selection bias, self-driving car, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Great Resignation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trolley problem, value at risk, volatility smile, Y2K

This is the basis of the epidemiological models that informed the advice given by SAGE to the UK government in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. In practice they are much more complicated, dividing the UK into blocks of population density, defining where individuals live, how far they travel for work and how often they come into contact with other people of different ages. A lot of information about people and their behaviour goes into the model, as well as the characteristics of the virus itself. The actual progress of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, proved rather different from that predicted by the models, in which the spread and transmission of the virus closely paralleled population density.

So, if it didn’t release any cash for Ebola, you are probably wondering what happened to the pandemic bond when Covid-19 came along, since a three-year bond issued in June 2017 reached maturity in 2020. The coronavirus family of diseases were – luckily! – specifically covered under the terms. The bond rapidly lost value in the early months of 2020 since investors could see the likelihood of the conditions being met, and indeed in the middle of April 2020 the mechanism was triggered. This released $195.84 million, which the World Bank split between sixty-four lower-income countries that at that point had reported cases of Covid-19. Why did it take so long to respond? This was due to the trigger conditions, which required a delay of at least twelve weeks beyond the declaration of an outbreak.

The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, 2010 Mansnerus, Erika, Modelling in Public Health Research: How Mathematical Techniques Keep us Healthy, Springer, 2014 Neustadt, Richard, and Harvey Fineberg, The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-making on a Slippery Disease, US Dept of Health, Education and Welfare, 1978 Rhodes, Tim, Kari Lancaster and Marsha Rosengarten, ‘A Model Society: Maths, Models and Expertise in Viral Outbreaks’, Critical Public Health, 30(3), 2020 ——, and Kari Lancaster, ‘Mathematical Models as Public Troubles in COVID-19 Infection Control: Following the Numbers’, Health Sociology Review, 29(2), 2020 Richardson, Eugene, ‘Pandemicity, COVID-19 and the Limits of Public Health Science’, BMJ Global Health, 5(4), 2020 Spinney, Laura, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, Vintage, 2018 Chapter 10: Escaping from Model Land Dhami, Mandeep, ‘Towards an Evidence-Based Approach to Communicating Uncertainty in Intelligence Analysis’, Intelligence and National Security, 33(2), 2018 Harding, Sandra, Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research, University of Chicago Press, 2015 Marchau, Vincent, Warren Walker, Pieter Bloemen and Steven Popper (eds), Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty, Springer, 2019 Scoones, Ian, and Andy Stirling, The Politics of Uncertainty: Challenges of Transformation, Taylor & Francis, 2020 Chris Vernon Erica Thompson is a senior policy fellow at the London School of Economics’ Data Science Institute and a fellow of the London Mathematical Laboratory.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

“increasing our use of machine learning”: Vijaya Gadde and Matt Derella, “An Update on Our Continuity Strategy During COVID-19,” Twitter (blog), March 16, 2020, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/An-update-on-our-continuity-strategy-during-COVID-19.html. “we will temporarily start”: The YouTube Team, “Protecting Our Extended Workforce and the Community,” YouTube Official Blog, March 16, 2020, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/protecting-our-extended-workforce-and/. “This was an issue”: Guy Rosen (@guyro), “We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics—not just those related to COVID-19. This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too,” Twitter, March 17, 2020, https://twitter.com/guyro/status/1240088303497400320?

The social mobilization that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd and many other Black Americans at the hands of the police surfaced longstanding concerns about whether communities of color can expect equal treatment under the law. The disastrous responses of some governments to the COVID-19 pandemic also appear inseparable from failures of democratic institutions, with the United States, Brazil, and India leading the world in deaths from COVID-19 and the European democracies not faring especially well, either. Even young people, the cohort we most associate with an embrace of liberty, are turning against democracy. One study found that 46 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine would prefer to be governed by experts than by elected officials.

So they work harder—and harder than those in nondemocratic regimes—to avoid this worst-case scenario. Democracy, it turns out, is a kind of man-made technology that eliminates famine. The often-incompetent responses of democratic governments, including in the United States, to the COVID-19 pandemic might cause you to question Sen’s conclusion. But as we saw in the debates about the COVID-19 response during the run-up to the US election, the policy landscape was a battle over competing values—whether to prioritize the economy or public health, to protect only the most vulnerable or to reduce exposure for all Americans—and politicians were vying for voters based on these alternative visions.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

“New World Curriculum,” The Economist, March 7, 2020, 19. 7.Jamie Grierson, “UK Government Under Fire After ‘Big Influx’ of Covid-19 Cases from Europe Revealed,” Guardian, May 5, 2020. 8.Laura Donnelly, “Earlier Lockdown Could Have Prevented Three-Quarters of UK Coronavirus Deaths, Modelling Suggests,” Daily Telegraph, May 20, 2020. 9.Rafaela Lindeberg, “Man Behind Sweden’s Controversial Virus Strategy Admits Mistakes,” Bloomberg, June 3, 2020. 10.Sen Pei, Sasikiran Kandula, and Jeffrey Shaman, “Differential Effects of Intervention Timing on COVID-19 Spread in the United States,” posted on medRxiv preprint server, May 29, 2020. 11.Drew Armstrong et al., “Why New York Suffered When Other Cities Were Spared by Covid-19,” Bloomberg, May 28, 2020. 12.Armstrong et al., “Why New York Suffered When Other Cities Were Spared by Covid-19.” 13.Fareed Zakaria, “If New York Founders It Will Be Because of Bad Government, Not the Pandemic,” Washington Post, June 11, 2020. 14.Raphael Rashid, “Being Called a Cult Is One Thing, Being Blamed for an Epidemic Is Quite Another,” New York Times, March 9, 2020. 15.Laura Spinney, “The Coronavirus Slayer!

CHAPTER FOUR: THE COVID TEST 1.John Burns-Murdoch and Chris Giles, “UK Suffers Second-Highest Death Rate from Coronavirus,” Financial Times, May 28, 2020. 2.Tim Ross and Kitty Donaldson, “Boris Johnson Revamps Agenda to Meet Worst UK Recession in 300 Years,” Bloomberg, June 2, 2020. 3.Marc Champion, “Coronavirus Is a Stress Test Many World Leaders Are Failing,” Bloomberg, May 22, 2020. 4.Lara Zhou and Keegan Elmer, “Thousands Left Wuhan for Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore or Tokyo Before Lockdown,” South China Morning Post, January 27, 2020. 5.Richard Horton, The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 53. 6.“New World Curriculum,” The Economist, March 7, 2020, 19. 7.Jamie Grierson, “UK Government Under Fire After ‘Big Influx’ of Covid-19 Cases from Europe Revealed,” Guardian, May 5, 2020. 8.Laura Donnelly, “Earlier Lockdown Could Have Prevented Three-Quarters of UK Coronavirus Deaths, Modelling Suggests,” Daily Telegraph, May 20, 2020. 9.Rafaela Lindeberg, “Man Behind Sweden’s Controversial Virus Strategy Admits Mistakes,” Bloomberg, June 3, 2020. 10.Sen Pei, Sasikiran Kandula, and Jeffrey Shaman, “Differential Effects of Intervention Timing on COVID-19 Spread in the United States,” posted on medRxiv preprint server, May 29, 2020. 11.Drew Armstrong et al., “Why New York Suffered When Other Cities Were Spared by Covid-19,” Bloomberg, May 28, 2020. 12.Armstrong et al., “Why New York Suffered When Other Cities Were Spared by Covid-19.” 13.Fareed Zakaria, “If New York Founders It Will Be Because of Bad Government, Not the Pandemic,” Washington Post, June 11, 2020. 14.Raphael Rashid, “Being Called a Cult Is One Thing, Being Blamed for an Epidemic Is Quite Another,” New York Times, March 9, 2020. 15.Laura Spinney, “The Coronavirus Slayer!

How Kerala’s Rock Star Health Minister Helped Save It from Covid-19,” Guardian, May 14, 2020. 16.“New World Curriculum,” The Economist. 17.Shalini Ramachandran, Laura Kusisto, and Katie Hoanan, “How New York’s Coronavirus Response Made the Pandemic Worse,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2020. 18.Full disclosure: Paul Deighton is chairman of The Economist. 19.Gordon Lubold and Paul Vieira, “US Drops Proposal to Put Troops at Canadian Border,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2020. 20.Teresa Coratella, “Whatever It Takes: Italy and the Covid-19 Crisis,” European Council on Foreign Relations, March 18, 2020. 21.Andy Hoffman, “Sex Workers Can Get Back to Business in Switzerland, but Sports Remain Prohibited,” Bloomberg, May 20, 2020. 22.YouGov, “Americans Trust Local Governments over the Federal Government on COVID-19,” April 27, 2020. 23.John Lichfield, “Coronavirus: France’s strange defeat,” Politico, May 8, 2020. 24.Anne Applebaum, “The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff,” The Atlantic, March 15, 2020.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

But from Assange to Ebola to ISIS, what Wolf did went well beyond that: by claiming to possess some secret piece of knowledge that she alone had uncovered, and by claiming she was being terribly persecuted by daring to share it, she was able to insert herself in the middle of countless trending cultural conversations. Where there was heat, there was her. And nothing had ever been nearly so hot, so potentially clout-rich as Covid-19. We all know why. It was global. It was synchronous. We were digitally connected, talking about the same thing for weeks, months, years, and on the same global platforms. As Steven W. Thrasher writes in The Viral Underclass, Covid-19 marked “the first viral pandemic also to be experienced via viral stories on social media,” creating “a kind of squared virality.” This squared virality meant that if you put out the right kind of pandemic-themed content—flagged with the right mix-and-match of keywords (“Great Reset,” “WEF,” “Bill Gates,” “Fascism,” “Fauci,” “Pfizer”) and headlined with tabloid-style teasers (“The Leaders Colluding to Make Us Powerless,” “What They Don’t Want You to Know About,” “Bill Gates Said WHAT?!?”)

“demonic”: Steve Bannon, host, “Chris Wray Lies on 60 Minutes,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,808, April 25, 2022, at 33:59–34:06, posted on Apple Podcasts. “transnational group of bad actors”: Naomi Wolf, “Facing the Beast,” Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf, Substack, July 17, 2022. “hundreds of women”: Geoff Brumfiel, “The Life Cycle of a Covid-19 Vaccine Lie,” National Public Radio, July 20, 2021. “a very highly followed influencer”: Brumfiel, “The Life Cycle of a Covid-19 Vaccine Lie.” “bleeding between [her] period”: Morgan Yew @weynagrom, tweet, May 23, 2021, Twitter, video 9 of 25, at 0:24. “They are sterilizing an entire generation”: Yew, tweet, May 23, 2021. “one foot in the grave”: Yew, tweet, May 23, 2021.

Johnson & Johnson: Edward Helmore, “Lawsuits, Payouts, Opioids Crisis: What Happened to Johnson & Johnson?,” The Guardian, October 18, 2019. rare cases of heart inflammation: “Myocarditis and Pericarditis After mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, September 27, 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/myocarditis.html. possible small uptick in strokes: “CDC & FDA Identify Preliminary COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signal for Persons Aged 65 Years and Older,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, January 13, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/bivalent-boosters.html.


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

But soon one of them sent her a message: “Where did you come from???” Another began to refer to her as “Wolverette.” “We liked her right away,” Carter said. “She’s spitfire.” * The first death caused by COVID-19 recorded in the United States occurred in Seattle on February 28. In late April, Santa Clara County reclassified two earlier deaths after figuring out that they, too, had been caused by COVID-19. The first had occurred on February 6, the second on February 17. Both patients would have been infected by the virus roughly a month before death. As neither victim had traveled outside the area, the virus had clearly been circulating in the Bay Area by early January

She began to put her thoughts in emails—for instance, after the state of Washington, on February 28, reported its first COVID-19 case that could not be explained either by travel from China or contact with some person known to have been infected by the virus. With the virus openly spreading in greater Seattle, Charity wrote an email to her boss suggesting that the western states—California, Oregon, and Washington—seize the moment to form a coalition. They would stop waiting for the CDC to create a test for COVID-19 that actually worked and create their own test, using their own laboratories. The three states together would have a credibility that no state on its own could generate.

They’d be able to return results to people within a day; in a pinch, they could get you an answer in three hours. And—here was the kicker—they worked for free. There was no bill. You just handed over your test tubes with the nasal swab inside and the Biohub told you who had COVID-19 and who did not. Joe assumed, not unreasonably, that his new team of volunteers would soon be overrun by hordes of customers delighted by the freebie. The previous week, the entire state of California had received fewer than two thousand COVID-19 test results. Test tubes holding nasal swabs from more than 55,000 Californians were lying around in labs waiting to be evaluated. By redirecting 2,666 a day from the big corporate labs, the state of California could save itself $426,560 every day and get results back in time to make a difference.


pages: 199 words: 63,844

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Rachel Clarke

Airbnb, Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disruptive innovation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, social distancing, zero-sum game

., et al., ‘Inequalities and deaths involving COVID-19: What the links between inequalities tell us’, Health Foundation, 21 May 2020. ‘Disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19’, Public Health England, Aug 2020. de Prudhoe, K., ‘My dad died alone because we played by the rules. Why is it different for Dominic Cummings?’, Huffington Post, 26 May 2020. Ellery, B., et al., ‘Loyalty to Dominic Cummings will cost lives, says scientist’, The Times, 25 May 2020. Fancourt, D., et al., ‘The Cummings effect: politics, trust, and behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Lancet, 6 August 2020. Canale, D.

., et al., ‘Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster’, Sunday Times, 19 April 2020. Conn, D., et al., ‘Revealed: the inside story of the UK’s Covid-19 crisis’, Guardian, 29 April 2020. Worst-case Scenarios Williams, W. C., The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967). Crawford, D., Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Johns Hopkins University, ‘COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE)’, Johns Hopkins University, accessed 8 March 2020. Kington, T., ‘Coronavirus: Doctors forced into life-or-death decisions as patients swamp hospitals’, The Times, 11 March 2020.

ISBN 978-1-4087-1376-1 Little, Brown An imprint of Little, Brown Book Group Carmelite House 50 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DZ An Hachette UK Company www.hachette.co.uk www.littlebrown.co.uk This book is dedicated to the memory of four members of staff at Oxford University Hospitals: Oscar King Junior, Elbert Rico, Philomina Cherian and Peter Gough. Each lost their life to Covid-19 while doing their utmost to help others. To date, over 600 NHS and care workers have suffered the same fate. Heartfelt thanks to them all for their courage and selflessness. Contents Author’s Note Prologue 1 Pneumonia of Unknown Cause 2 The Might of Tiny Things 3 Worst-Case Scenarios 4 A Brilliant Plan 5 A Long Deep Breath 6 The Thin Red Line 7 Inside the Wave 8 The Thing with Feathers 9 Sacrifice 10 Human Factors Epilogue References Acknowledgements Author’s Note The majority of these stories are told with the permission of patients, families and members of staff who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this book.


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The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

Index Aar Tee Commodities ref1 Abengoa ref1, ref2 Accenture ref1, ref2 Agritrade ref1 Ahearn, John ref1 AIG ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Aigis Banca ref1, ref2 Allesch-Taylor, Stefan ref1, ref2 Allin, Patrick ref1 anti-money-laundering (AML) questions ref1 ANZ ref1 Apollo Global Management ref1, ref2 Apple ref1 Aramco ref1 ArcelorMittal ref1 Archegos ref1 Arthur Andersen ref1 Asda ref1 Atlantic 57 Consultancy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Auditing Association of German Banks ref1 Augustus Asset Managers ref1 Austin, Jason ref1, ref2 Australia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19 Australian Taxation Office ref1 Aviva ref1 BAE Systems ref1 Baer, Julius ref1, ref2 BaFin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Bailey, Andrew ref1 Bank of America ref1 Bank of England ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Barclays ref1, ref2 Barnes, Rob ref1, ref2, ref3 Barrell, Neil ref1 Barron’s ref1, ref2, ref3 Bates, Chris ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Battershill, William ref1, ref2 Baylis, Natalie ref1 BBB see British Business Bank BBC News ref1 BBVA ref1 BCLP see Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner BDO ref1, ref2 Becker, Arthur ref1 Berkshire Hathaway ref1 Bethell, Richard, 6th Baron Westbury ref1, ref2 Bingera ref1 Bishop, Julie ref1, ref2 BlackRock ref1, ref2, ref3 Blackstone ref1 Blair, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bloomberg ref1, ref2, ref3 Bloomberg News ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bluestone Resources Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Blunkett, David ref1, ref2 BNP Paribas ref1 Boeing ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 737 Max 8 aircraft ref1 Bond and Credit Company, The (TBCC) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Borbely, Barnabas ref1 Borneo ref1 Breedon, Tim ref1 Breedon report ref1 Brereton, Greg ref1 Brexit referendum ref1 Brierwood, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Brighthouse ref1 British Business Bank (BBB) ref1, ref2, ref3 British Gas ref1 Brown, Eliot ref1 Brown, Gordon ref1, ref2 Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (BCLP) ref1 BSi Steel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Buckingham Palace ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Buffett, Warren ref1 Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Bunge ref1 Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committee ref1 Cabinet Office ref1, ref2, ref3 Caillaux, Gabe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Callahan, Mark ref1 Cameron, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘Big Society’ policy ref1 and Earnd ref1 Greensill remuneration ref1 and Greensill’s collapse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 hired as Greensill adviser ref1, ref2 lends credibility to Greensill ref1 and Lex ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and Mohammed Bin Salman ref1 and the pharmacy plan ref1 role at Greensill during the Covid-19 pandemic ref1 and The Bond and Credit Company ref1 Cameron, Samantha ref1 Cameron administration ref1, ref2 Cantor Fitzgerald ref1, ref2, ref3 Carillion ref1, ref2 ‘early payment facility’ ref1 Carlyle Group ref1 Carna ref1 Carnell, Kate ref1, ref2 Carney, Mark ref1 Carrington ref1 Carson Block ref1 Carusillo, Mickey ref1 Casey, Dame Louise ref1 ‘cash-less rolls’ ref1 Catfoss group ref1, ref2, ref3 central banks ref1 Chap (magazine) ref1 Charles, Prince ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Chase Manhattan ref1 CHBG Limited ref1 Chehaoduo ref1, ref2 Chelsea Group ref1 Chelsea Village ref1 Chicago Police Pension Fund ref1 Chilean mining ref1 Chubb ref1 Chuk ref1 CIMIC ref1, ref2 Citibank ref1 Citigroup ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 City, the ref1 Clarke, Tracy ref1 Clearbrook Capital ref1 Cleland, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 coal mining ref1, ref2, ref3 Coca-Cola ref1, ref2 CoFace ref1 Comerford, Robert J. ref1, ref2 Commerzbank ref1 Companies House ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) ref1 Conservative government ref1, ref2 Copenhagen ref1 Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) ref1, ref2 Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS) ref1, ref2 corporate espionage ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Coupe, Mike ref1 Covid-19 Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) ref1, ref2 Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 government loan schemes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 restrictions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Crain’s (magazine) ref1 Credit Suisse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and the Covid-19 pandemic ref1 and Greensill Capital ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33 and Sanjeev Gupta ref1 Crothers, Bill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Crown Representatives programme ref1 Cunliffe, Sir Jon ref1 CWB ref1 de Botton, Alain ref1 de Botton, Gilbert ref1 de la Rue, Tom ref1 Deal Partners ref1, ref2, ref3 Degen, Michel ref1, ref2, ref3 Dell ref1 Deloitte ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Demica ref1 Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ref1, ref2 Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs ref1 Department of Health ref1 Department of Health and Social Care ref1 Department of Work and Pensions ref1 Deutsche Bank ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Deutsche Börse ref1 Doordash ref1 Doran, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 dotcom boom ref1, ref2 Dow Jones ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Downes, Brett ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dragon Technology ref1, ref2, ref3 Eadie, Al ref1 Earnd ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Ecclestone, Bernie ref1 Edelman ref1 1860 Munich ref1 Ellis, Brett Easton, American Psycho ref1 Enterprise Investment Schemes (EISs) ref1 equity warrants ref1 Ernst & Young ref1 see also EY Euler Hermes ref1, ref2 European Banking Association ref1 Ewing, Fergus ref1 EY ref1, ref2 see also Ernst & Young Eyjafjallajökull ref1 factoring ref1, ref2, ref3 see also supply chain finance Fair Financial ref1, ref2, ref3 Fairmac Reality ref1 Fairymead ref1 Fan, Colin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Farrell, Maureen ref1 FCA see Financial Conduct Authority ‘fee ramp agreements’ ref1 Feeney, Chuck ref1 Ferrin, Ronald ref1 Fidelity ref1 5th Finger ref1 Finacity ref1 Financial Accounting Standards Board ref1 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Skilled Persons Reviews ref1, ref2 financial crisis 2008 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 aftermath ref1, ref2, ref3 and central banks ref1 and fintechs ref1 tougher regulations following ref1, ref2 Financial News (banking publication) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Financial Reporting Council ref1 Financial Times (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Finews (Swiss news site) ref1 ‘fintechs’ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Fitch ref1 ‘flash title’ ref1 Fleetsolve ref1 Food Revolution Group ref1 Forbes (magazine) ref1 Ford ref1 Ford, Bill ref1 Formula One ref1 ‘Four Eyes Principle’ ref1 FreeUp ref1, ref2 Friedman, Alex ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Galligan, Shane ref1, ref2 GAM Greensill Supply Chain Finance fund (GGSCF) ref1, ref2 Gapper, John ref1 Garrod, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 GBM Banca ref1 General Atlantic (GA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20 General Mills ref1, ref2, ref3 Gentleman’s Journal (magazine) ref1 German Deposit Protection Authority ref1 Global Asset Management (GAM) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26 Absolute Return Bond Fund (ARBF) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 regulators ref1 Global Supply Chain Finance Forum ref1 Global Trade Review (trade finance publication) ref1 Goldman Sachs ref1, ref2 Gorman, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gottstein, Thomas ref1, ref2 government loans ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘GovTech’ firms ref1 Grant Thornton ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gray, Sue ref1 Green, Philip ref1, ref2 Greenbrier hotel ref1 Greene, Stephen ref1 Greensill, Alexander ‘Lex’ David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 ambition ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ascent ref1 Australian property investments ref1, ref2 Australian tax obligations ref1 awards ref1, ref2, ref3 CBE ref1, ref2, ref3 birth ref1 and Carillion ref1 celebrity status ref1 childhood ref1, ref2 at Citigroup ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 on the Crown Representatives programme ref1 CV ref1 and Daniel Sheard ref1 and David Cameron ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 directorships ref1 double down strategy ref1, ref2 and Downes ref1 dresses the part ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Duncan Mavin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 eager to own bank ref1, ref2 education ref1 legal studies ref1 MBA at the Alliance Manchester Business School ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and 5th Finger ref1 and Greensill Bank AG (formerly NoFi) ref1 and Greensill Capital ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 acquisitions ref1, ref2 aircraft leasing deals ref1 attempts to raise emergency finance ref1, ref2, ref3 avoids toughest regulators ref1 BaFin probe ref1 Bluestone ref1, ref2 BSi ref1 Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3 Credit Suisse involvements ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 demise ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Dragon Technology ref1 expansion ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘flak’ (PR advisers) ref1 General Atlantic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Global Asset Management ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 harmful effect of SCF on small businesses ref1 insurance ref1, ref2, ref3 malpractice ref1 multi-obligor programmes ref1 National Health Service venture ref1, ref2 new category of loans ref1 payroll finance ref1 perilous state ref1 premier ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 sells company private jets ref1 Softbank dealings ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 start-up ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Tower Trade ref1 Tradeshift Networks ref1, ref2 and Jeremy Heywood ref1 and John Gorman ref1 legal work ref1 marriage ref1 and Masayoshi Son ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 mentors ref1 mission statement, ‘helping out the little guy’ ref1 and Mohammed Bin Salman ref1 at Morgan Stanley ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 remuneration ref1 moves to the UK ref1, ref2 at OzEcom ref1 and politics ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘rewilding’ project ref1 risk-taking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 and Sanjeev Gupta ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 and Saudi Arabia ref1 sits on Bank of England committee on SCF ref1 skiing ref1 spending ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 takes loan from the Greensill family ref1 and Tim Haywood ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 at TRM ref1, ref2 wealth ref1 billionaire status ref1, ref2 hits the big time ref1, ref2 Greensill, Andrew (Lex’s brother) ref1 Greensill, Judy (Lex’s mother) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Greensill, Lloyd (Lex’s father) ref1, ref2, ref3 Greensill, Peter (Lex’s youngest brother) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Greensill, Roy (Lex’s grandfather) ref1, ref2 Greensill, Victoria (Lex’s wife) ref1, ref2 Greensill Bank AG (formerly NoFi) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and the Atlantic 57 loan ref1, ref2 and the BaFin probe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and the end ref1, ref2 and General Atlantic ref1 and government loans ref1 and Gupta ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 private aircraft ref1 regulation ref1 and Softbank ref1, ref2 technology ref1 and trade credit insurance ref1, ref2 whistle-blower at ref1 Greensill Capital ref1, ref2 aircraft leasing deals ref1 allegations of corruption at ref1 and the Atlantic 57 loan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 avoids toughest regulators ref1 and the BaFin probe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and Bill Crothers ref1 billion dollar plus valuation ref1 and Bluestone ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and BSi ref1 business cards ref1, ref2 cash burner ref1 client list ref1 collapse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 corporate events ref1 corporate governance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and the Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and Credit Suisse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33 Credit Suisse’s investigation into ref1, ref2, ref3 crisis mounts ref1, ref2, ref3 and David Cameron ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and David Solo ref1, ref2, ref3 defaults ref1, ref2 and Dragon Technology ref1 early backers ref1 early struggles ref1, ref2 evergreen loans ref1 ‘everyone wins’ pitches ref1 expansion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 external public relations ref1, ref2 EY investigation into ref1 fault lines ref1 as ‘fintech’ company ref1, ref2 fraud and misconduct allegations ref1 and General Atlantic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15 and Global Asset Management ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22 gossipy culture ref1 and Greensill Bank ref1 and Griffin Coal ref1 and Gupta/Gupta Family Group ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 harmful impact on small businesses ref1 headquarters on the Strand ref1 ‘High Risk Franchise Names’ document ref1 hits the big time ref1, ref2 illiquid investments ref1 insolvency ref1, ref2 investment protection ref1 investors abandon ref1, ref2 IPO ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and John Gorman ref1 and Katerra ref1 and the Lagoon Park SPV ref1 launch ref1, ref2 lavish spending at ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Lex’s claims about ref1 liquidity ref1, ref2 and Lloyds ref1 loan book ref1 losses ref1 and Maurice Thompson ref1 Morgan Stanley employees ref1 and the NHS ref1, ref2, ref3 obligors ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 offices ref1, ref2, ref3 and payroll finance ref1 and Pemex ref1 perilous state ref1 and the pharmacy plan ref1 pre-IPO funding (‘Project Olive’) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 profitability issues ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 ‘reasonably permanent’ funding ref1 reducing the early risks of using ref1 remuneration ref1, ref2, ref3 retrenchment ref1, ref2 risk team ref1, ref2 risky ventures ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and Roland Hartley-Urquhart ref1 and Saudi Arabia ref1 as ‘shadow bank’ ref1 and SoftBank ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24 SPAC talks ref1 start-up style management ref1, ref2 takes loan from the Greensill Capital family ref1 technology ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Tim Haywood ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 and Tower Trade ref1, ref2, ref3 and trade credit insurance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 ‘Unicorn’ status ref1 and the US capital markets ref1 whistle-blower allegations emerge ref1 and the Wickham SPV ref1 Greensill Corporation Pty ref1 Greensill Farming Group ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Greensill Trust ref1 Grenda Investments ref1 Griffin Coal ref1, ref2 Gross, Bill ref1 Guazi ref1 Gulf Petrochem (GP Global) ref1 Gupta, Nicola ref1 Gupta, Sanjeev ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17 Australian property ref1 and Bluestone ref1 and the demise of Greensill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and German steel ref1 and Grant Thornton ref1 and Greensill Bank ref1 Gupta Family Group (GFG) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 and Bluestone ref1 and government loans ref1 and Greensill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 and Greensill Bank ref1 Guttridge, Jane ref1, ref2 Guy, Toby ref1 Gymshark ref1 Haas, Lukas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hambro, Jay ref1 Hanafin, Dermot ref1 Hanafin, Sean ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Harris, Piers ref1 Harry, Prince ref1 Hart ref1 Hartley-Urquhart, Roland ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Havens, John ref1, ref2 Haywood, Tim ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18 Henkel ref1 Hewlett Packard ref1 Heywood, Jeremy ref1, ref2, ref3 Highways Agency ref1 HM Revenue & Customs ref1 HM Treasury ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hobday, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Holmes, Elizabeth ref1 House of Lords ref1 HSBC ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Huawei ref1, ref2, ref3 Hutton Inquiry ref1 IAG see Insurance Australia Group ICBC Standard Bank ref1 Indonesia ref1 Industrial Cadets ref1 Inflexionpoint ref1 ING ref1 Insurance Australia Group (IAG) ref1, ref2, ref3 International Chamber of Commerce ref1 Intrepid Aviation ref1 ‘Iran Notices’ ref1 Iraq, UN weapons inspectors ref1 Isle of Dogs ref1 Jacob, David ref1, ref2, ref3 Jahama Highland Estates ref1 Jain, Anshu ref1 Jakarta ref1 Jardine Matheson ref1 Johnson, Boris ref1 Jones, Karen ref1 J.P.

Given his lucrative pay packet, some senior executives privately discussed whether Cameron really added enough value to offset the considerable cost of having him on staff. When Covid-19 struck, it was Cameron’s time to prove his worth. From as early as March, and for months thereafter, Lex hit Cameron with a barrage of text messages, urging the former PM to pull strings in Whitehall and at the Bank of England to get Greensill access to the suite of government bailout schemes. This intense lobbying, directed by Lex, was happening as the UK hit the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, much of it when Prime Minister Boris Johnson was himself hospitalized with the disease. While the rest of us were thinking about how we might get through the lockdown and the worst healthcare crisis in generations, Lex was thinking about how he could tap an unprecedented pool of government money.

In May, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office said it was investigating his businesses over suspected fraudulent trading and money laundering, including its financing with Greensill. Details emerged also of the lobbying by Cameron and Crothers and Lex himself. Their efforts to get access to government Covid-19 loans and the Covid-19 Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) became a front-page sensation, and Lex’s face was plastered across newspapers around the world. Several government inquiries were launched. Cameron, Lex and others were hauled in to explain themselves to parliamentarians. In spring, Lex spoke to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committee by video call from home.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

Part 2: The Crash Chapter 4 The Virus Spreads January 2020 1/1/20—Huanan Seafood Market closed by local authorities in response to illness outbreak. 1/3/20—ISM manufacturing declines to 47.2, its lowest print in a decade. 1/7/20—At a closed politburo meeting, Xi Jinping requests prevention and control work to address the new coronavirus. 1/8/20—South Korea announces its first case of coronavirus from China: a woman who had recently traveled to Wuhan. 1/10/20—Payrolls miss at 145K; unemployment steady at 3.5%; average hourly earnings at 2.9%, first time -3% since July 2018. 1/11/20— China reports its first COVID-19 death. 1/11/20—WHO announces: “The Chinese government reports that there is no clear evidence that the virus passes easily from person to person.” 1/15/20—Phase 1 of US/China trade deal signed. 1/16/20—Trump impeachment trial begins in the Senate. 1/16/20—Japan announces first COVID-19 case. 1/20/20—First reported case of COVID-19 in the USA. 1/23/20—Wuhan goes into lockdown. 1/30/20—FOMC leaves rates unchanged, downgrades household spending description to “moderate” from “strong.” 1/30/20—WHO declares “global health emergency.” 1/31/20—President Trump bans Chinese travelers from entering the USA.

Chapter 5 Risk Management and an Inflection Point February 2020 2/2/20—First COVID-19 death outside China (in the Philippines). 2/3/20—Pete Buttigieg appears to win the Iowa Caucus after count confusion. 2/3/20—USA declares “public health emergency.” 2/3/20—ISM manufacturing bounces back to 50.9; eased US/China trade tensions likely helped. 2/5/20—Trump acquitted by the Senate. 2/7/20—Payrolls beat at +225K for January; unemployment rate to 3.6%; average hourly earnings to 3.1%. 2/14/20—France announces first COVID-19 death within Europe. 2/19/20—S&P peaks. 2/23/20—Large swaths of Italy locked down in response to case surge. 2/26/20—South America’s first case: Brazilian man who had been in Italy. 2/26/20—Vice President Pence named head of COVID-19 Task Force; daily briefings. 2/29/20—First COVID-19 death in the USA.

Chapter 5 Risk Management and an Inflection Point February 2020 2/2/20—First COVID-19 death outside China (in the Philippines). 2/3/20—Pete Buttigieg appears to win the Iowa Caucus after count confusion. 2/3/20—USA declares “public health emergency.” 2/3/20—ISM manufacturing bounces back to 50.9; eased US/China trade tensions likely helped. 2/5/20—Trump acquitted by the Senate. 2/7/20—Payrolls beat at +225K for January; unemployment rate to 3.6%; average hourly earnings to 3.1%. 2/14/20—France announces first COVID-19 death within Europe. 2/19/20—S&P peaks. 2/23/20—Large swaths of Italy locked down in response to case surge. 2/26/20—South America’s first case: Brazilian man who had been in Italy. 2/26/20—Vice President Pence named head of COVID-19 Task Force; daily briefings. 2/29/20—First COVID-19 death in the USA. Month-end: UST 10s at 1.15%; S&P -8.2%; Nasdaq -6.4%; dollar index +0.8%; oil -12.5%. Red lights flashing, negative numbers shooting at me, faceless people mumbling about short gamma and curve flattening, visions of people running for the exits, night sweats, visions of my boss taking away my access pass and ushering me out of the building: a PnL dream.


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

Some of it spilled onto the victims of the disease. They were the ones, after all, who had let their guard down. And with every breath they were endangering everyone else. In a 2020 Johns Hopkins study, 42 percent of Americans agreed that “people who get COVID-19 have behaved irresponsibly.” One result of this judgment was that many victims of COVID-19 were reluctant to seek help: They withdrew or were in denial because they were ashamed. This was counterproductive, of course, and not only for the victims. It also raised the risks for everyone else. Shaming the afflicted is yet another form of punching down.

/​pacifica-beach-yoga-bay-area-indoor-classes-studio-defies-covid-19-order-san-mateo-health-noncompliance/​8910067/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “So think of vaccines as part of God’s plan”: Jan Hoffman, “Clergy Preach Faith in the Covid Vaccine to Doubters,” The New York Times, March 14, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/​2021/​03/​14/​health/​clergy-covid-vaccine.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “not only because of our best interest”: Katie Jackson, “For Gathering Safely with Her Congregation and Traveling: Pastor Gets COVID-19 Vaccine,” WellSpan Health, May 21, 2021, https://www.wellspan.org/​news/​story/​for-gathering-safely-with-her-congregation-and-traveling-pastor-gets-covid-19-vaccine/​N6392.

When he was first homeless, he was sent to the Bellevue shelter in lower Manhattan, a place that he says looks like a prison. After two weeks there, they woke him up in the middle of the night and told him to put all of his stuff in a garbage bag. He was getting transferred to another shelter in Brooklyn. When the COVID-19 crisis hit in 2020, they moved Hutchins and lots of other homeless people again—this time into hotels, two to a room. But they were careful first to remove the cushy beds and replace them with uncomfortable cots. “They want it to be difficult,” he says. “They want to shame you.” So far, we’ve seen an abundance of moneymaking opportunities within the industrial shame complex: weight-loss consultancies, pharmaceutical giants, addiction camps—they all build rich markets and prey upon their customers.


pages: 492 words: 152,167

Rikers: An Oral History by Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

Bernie Sanders, biofilm, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, housing justice, Saturday Night Live, social distancing

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A Abady, Jonathan, 311 Absolam, Colin after Rikers, 404, 409 constant violence, 88 description of trip to Rikers, 7 making weapons, 164 on racial attacks, 87 reputations of detainees, 57–59 adjudication of cases, 23, 31 Alite, John, 180–81, 409 Antonov, Dimitri fear of new detainees during COVID-19, 340, 341 getting masks during COVID-19, 339 information about COVID-19, 332–33, 338, 344 detainees and civilians in kitchens, 157 lack of testing during COVID-19, 342 use of phones, 12–13 “Apache Lines,” 62 B Baer, Harold, 283, 284 bail guilty pleas and, 26–27, 38 for homeless, 123 inability to afford, 235, 265, 267 for misdemeanors, 26, 268 reform and number of incarcerated, 387 release and, 398–99 Bamenga, Lisette, 319–20, 322, 323 Barrow, Moses, 256 Barry, Charles, 401–2, 409 Bassett, Mary, 362, 363 bathrooms in bullpens, 10, 12, 27, 33 in protective custody section, 12 at Tombs, 21 Beame, Abraham, 379–80 Bee, Samantha, 329–30 Berman, Greg adjudication of cases, 31 after Rikers, 409 drugs and increase in crime, 388 importance of journalism in reform, 387–88 individuals arrested for misdemeanors, 29 Lippman Commission, 385–86, 389 on sentences, 32 Bernsen, Henry, 264 Bharara, Preet, 377 Bing.

See also correction officers: treatment of detainees; mentally ill individuals; specific individuals ability to establish relations with new officers, 173 attacks on officers by, 65–66 bullying other detainees, 17 dehumanization of, 8, 11, 16–17, 34, 46–48, 135–36, 328 handicapped, 342 hierarchy among, 87–88 ingenuity of, 325, 331 innocent, labeled as criminals, 244–45 learning law, 330 muscle building by, 224–25 officers assaulted by, 352 process undergone by, before visits, 301 race of, 41 sexual relations with officers, 229–30 violence of fights between, 14 Detrevarah, Grace, 270 developmentally disabled individuals, 118 Dinkins, David, 345 Drayton, Donovan, 8 after Rikers, 411 elderly in Rikers, 121 fighting to establish credentials, 248 first impression of Rikers, 7–8, 9–10 food in solitary confinement, 106 hiding contraband, 170 importance of visits, 302–3, 304 mental effects of being in solitary confinement, 97–98, 100, 102–3 officers Macing and beating detainees, 91–92 poor quality of food, 152 on process detainees undergo before visits, 303–4 punch (drink), 152 violence as way of surviving, 82 waiting for bail to get released, 398–99 Drayton, Ronny after Rikers, 411 dehumanizing treatment by officers of detainees, 46–48 on experiences when visiting, 302, 303 plantation mentality among officers, 52–53 drugs absence of detox help, 36, 136, 137–38 arrests for misdemeanors, 29 in bullpens, 10 crack and crime in New York City, 25, 388 crack and guilty pleas, 388 effect of crack on Rikers, 28–29, 351 failure to provide methadone, 116 gangs and, 176 going through withdrawal in bullpens, 8–9, 10 hiding, 177–78 history of, in Rikers, 3 liquid cocaine, 166 Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols/Howard “Pappy” Mason organization and, 182 officers as smugglers of, 164, 173, 179, 180–81, 182–83 smuggled in, 166, 170–71, 175–76 visitors bringing in, 297–98 Dunn, Tahanee absence of plan for COVID-19, 333 after Rikers, 411 housing for detainees with COVID-19, 343–44 on mentally ill in solitary confinement, 109–11 officers ill with COVID-19, 337–38 sanitary measures during COVID-19, 338–39 Dunne, John, 235 E Edelmann, Joanne, 321, 322–24 elderly detainees, 121 Eldridge, Stanley, 327–28 Elijah, Soffiyah, 384 on “bullpen therapy,” 35–36 closing Rikers, 389–90 jail-attributable death, 138 pretrial detention and guilty pleas, 38 Emergency Response Units (ERUs), 57–58 escapes attempted, 214, 215–16, 221–22 gangs and, 207 detainee counts and, 208–9 officer aiding, 214–15 procedures not being followed and, 210–11, 212, 213 successful, 215 Tackmann’s attempted, 201–5, 209–10 Webb’s opportunity to, 205–8 while being transported, 212 while officers slept, 211, 215 Escartas, Shaneika, 413 Espinal, Mauricio, 195–96, 197 Eversley, Nestor after Rikers, 411 being locked in bus, 32 going through withdrawal, 36 on jail-attributable deaths, 136–38 making money selling contraband, 172 making weapons, 165–66 on officers as gang members, 83 pleading guilty, 33 reasons for being violent, 82–83 F Fat Joe after Rikers, 414 giving concerts in Rikers, 256 living in projects and school-to-jail pipeline, 43–44 treatment of Lil Wayne, 253–54 Feinblatt, John, 29 felonies, 39, 73 Figueroa, Hazel, 145 after Rikers, 418 basic facts about, 140–41 being pregnant, 141–44 on daughter, 144–45 Finkelman, Lewis, 285 Finkle, Florence after Rikers, 411 internal investigation system, 357, 366–67 fire safety, 277–79, 284–85 Flavor Flav, 5 food bartering, 159–60 in bullpens, 10–11, 35, 149, 198 cooked by detainees for selves, 161–62 distribution of, 28, 35 eating during COVID-19, 341 as hair dye, 160 hoarding, 153 keeping at proper temperature, 154–56 kitchen staff, 156–57, 158 KK (officers’ mess), 158–59 missing cutoff time for, 10–11 for mobsters, 151, 158–59 for Muslims and Jews, 157 punch (drink), 152 quality of, 149, 150–51, 152–53 riots and, 192–93, 232–33 in solitary confinement, 94, 95, 106 systemic problems, 153–54 tipping commissary employees, 160–61 at Tombs, 21, 23 Forbes, James “Shaquell” after Rikers, 412 separation of detainees by borough, 60 Fraser, William J., 366 Frazier, Larry.

See King, Amin “Minister” Frey, Matt after Rikers, 412 causes of violence, 91 desensitization to violence, 80 incarceration of mentally ill, 118–19 detainees’ housing assignments, 340–41 quality of medical care, 138–39 trauma of violence, 81 Frey, Warner, 368–70, 412 G Gangi, Robert after Rikers, 412 conditions in bullpens, 27–28 difficulty of detainees obtaining medical care, 130 high school in Rikers, 244 on racism in Rikers, 33 superiors not taking “the Program” seriously, 247 Gang Intelligence Unit (previously Gang Intelligence Task Force), 73 gangs bandannas as identification, 68–69 changes in purpose of, 77–78 in control of housing areas, 236, 238–39, 243, 270, 305, 306 drugs and, 176 entrance into, 13–14, 60–61, 65 escapes and, 207 history of, 12, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62–64, 68–71 housing assignments according to affiliation, 74–75 ignored by officers, 60–61 officers as members of, 77, 83, 311 officers working with leaders of, 61–62, 66, 68, 177 phone use controlled by, 50, 66, 72–73, 239, 240 power of, 61, 66–68, 72, 73–74 reasons for joining, 63, 75 gangs and violence in bullpens, 36–37 to establish credentials, 59 in housing areas, 14–15, 56–58, 60 marking teenagers, 245–46 between members of different, 49–50, 56–57, 60, 69, 72–73, 193–94 riots, 189–90 teenagers marked by, 245–46 teenagers preyed on by, 247–48 Gangster Killer Bloods, 70–71 Garcia, Biany being transsexual in Rikers, 272–73 on being transsexual in Rikers, 271, 274 Gastineau, Mark, 258–59 Gavin, Edward after Rikers, 412 attempted escape and, 210–11 community jails, 391–92 first day as officer, 15–16 food brought in for mobsters, 151 graduation ceremony of, 221 hostage situation, 195–97 on officer hitting Camacho, 259–60 on suicide, 115–16 Gilmore, Kenny after Rikers, 412 conditions in bullpen, 12 on visits, 191 Gilroy, Vincent, 3 Ginsberg, Allen, 149, 156 Giuliani, Rudy conditions in Rikers and, 277, 285 Jacobson and, 345, 346 Seabrook and, 365 “Gladiator School,” 237, 240 Glazer, Elizabeth, 362 de Blasio and criminal justice policy, 386 mentally ill detainees, 123 officers feeling like stepchildren among law enforcement officers, 374–75 power of Seabrook and, 362, 363 reduction of Rikers population, 388–89 on Sturz, 378–79 Gordon, Diane, 382 Green, Mark, 366 Grice, Marcus, 266 after Rikers, 412 on being attacked, 275 being HIV positive, 265 on fear of being in Rikers, 266 in general population teenage housing, 269–70 housing for homosexual teenagers, 271–72 officers’ treatment of LGBTQ detainees, 273–74 reading palms for officers, 270 on surviving Rikers, 275 Grieco, Martha after Rikers, 411 dangerous temperatures in housing areas, 288 Rikers as trigger for mentally ill, 114–15 Gristina, Anna after Rikers, 412 coloring hair with food, 160 on death due to officers’ inaction, 129–30 on fear of leaving, 406 in protective custody for mentally ill, 11–12, 115 violence to establish credentials, 90 on walking in water through metal detectors, 285–86 guilt crack epidemic and pleas of, 388 presumption of, 31, 244–45 reasons for pleading, 26, 32, 33, 35–36, 37–38 refusal to admit, 324–25 H handicapped individuals, 342 Hanley, Jim, 372 Harris, Darrel, 190 Harris, Dupree after Rikers, 413 basic facts about, 292 changes in purpose of gangs, 77–78 early gangs as brotherhoods, 62–64 on power of gang leaders, 73–74 searches of detainees after visits, 296–97 Harris, LaSharn, 293 after Rikers, 413 process visitors undergo, 293–94, 295, 296 racism of officers, 300 travel difficulties for visits, 292 Haynes, Derrick, 126 after Rikers, 249, 413 difficulty of obtaining medical care, 125–26, 128, 129 on gangs marking teenagers, 245–46 officers helping released teenagers, 248–49 riot in chapel, 246–47 Henagin, Lawrence after Rikers, 413 being beaten by officers, 45–46 being white detainee, 45–46, 51 on gang violence, 36–37, 72–73 riot over bananas, 89–90 Hernandez, Devonte after Rikers, 413 on getting used to teen housing area, 241 importance of visits to detainees, 299 on meeting detainees on outside, 249–50 mother’s visit experience, 294 officers ignoring violence between detainees, 243 transfer of, 250–51 vulnerable teenagers preyed on by gangs, 247–48 Heyward, Gary after Rikers, 413 beating detainees for making inappropriate sexual comments or advances to officers, 85 getting slashed, 88 ingenuity of detainees, 325 making weapons, 166 smuggling contraband, 173–74 suicides by officers, 228 history of drug use, 3 of gangs, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62–64, 69–71 of island Rikers is on, 5–6, 41 of racism, 48–49 Rikers Island Penitentiary plan, 6 of solitary confinement, 93–94 homeless individuals as detainees, 29, 117 Horn, Martin after Rikers, 413 on de Blasio and jails, 390 developing county-based jails, 384–85 on development of gangs in jails/prisons, 71 detainees bullying detainees, 17 insular environment of Rikers, 383–84 power of gangs, 72 Seabrook and Bloomberg, 366 selling Rikers, 381 “House of Dead Men,” 6 House of Detention for Men (HDM), 30 House of Xtravaganza, 267 housing areas alternative facilities due to overcrowding in, 400–401 assigning detainees to, 340–41 being removed from, before release, 399–400 blocked fire escape routes, 277–79 celebrity detainees in medical, 252, 255 conditions in, 286, 342 dangerous temperatures in, 287–88 declassification of heat-sensitive individuals and high temperatures in, 289–90 gangs and violence in, 56–58, 60 gangs in control of, 12, 236, 238–39, 305 infestations of mice, roaches, water bugs, rats, and spiders, 150, 280, 290 for detainees with COVID-19, 343–44 for LGBTQ detainees, 264, 270 for pregnant women, 145–46 sanitary measures during COVID-19 in, 332, 333–34, 338–39, 344 searches in, 356 social distancing during COVID-19, 332, 334, 339, 340, 341, 344 spread of COVID-19 in, 337 squalor of, 16 use of unready, new, 280 violence as constant in, 341 housing areas for teenagers gangs in control of, 243, 305, 306 as “Gladiator School,” 237, 240 for LGBTQ, 266 LGBTQ in regular, 269–70, 271–72 new jail for male, 235 state prisoners housed in, 245 violence in, 84, 237, 239, 240, 246 “Howl” (Ginsberg), 149, 156 Hunt, Ervin “Easy,” 30 after Rikers, 414 “bullpen therapy,” 32 detainees and civilians in kitchens, 156 own recidivism, 30, 39–40 on sister, 31–32 on working in kitchen, 151 Husamudeen, Elias after Rikers, 414 discrepancies in and manipulation of statistics, 349–50 effectiveness of solitary confinement, 100–101 Norman and, 364 Hylton, Donna after Rikers, 414 being forced to take medication, 133–34 conditions in clinic, 133 I infirmary/clinic, conditions in, 281 intake process, 8–9, 26 Israel, Stan, 363, 364 J Jacobson, Michael, 346 after Rikers, 414 on appointment as acting commissioner, 346–48 effects of “bullpen therapy,” 38–39 Giuliani and programs, 345 quality of medical care, 134 Seabrook and, 371–72 “Jails for the ’80s,” 384–85 James, Jesse, 309, 311 Ja Rule, 254, 256 Jay-Z, 256–57 John, Kadeem, 241–42 Johnson, Robert, 310 Jones, Latanya, 44–45, 323, 324 journalism, importance of, 387–88 K Kelly, Nellie, 307 after Rikers, 414 brother Ronald Spear, 306, 307–12 Kelly, Ray, 211 Kerik, Bernard after Rikers, 414 basic facts about, 347 on closing Rikers, 391 data collection and preparation process, 355 first impression of Rikers, 9 gang violence, 57 improvements fought by, 277 keeping food hot, 154 reduction of violence and, 352–53 Seabrook and, 368, 370–71 weapons smuggled in, 164–65 Kessler, Eve after Rikers, 415 constant violence, 89 corruption in Corrections Department, 16 manipulation of statistics, 360 number of mentally ill in jails, 117 record keeping by Department of Corrections, 359 on Seabrook, 364 Kev (Boxing Kev), 69 Keys, Alicia, 256 King, Amin “Minister,” 183 after Rikers, 415 basic facts about, 182, 187 drug business in Rikers, 182–83 power of gangs, 66–68 weapons in Rikers, 184–87 Kinkead, Mik, 298–99 Koch, Ed improvement of conditions in Rikers and, 148, 277 sale of Rikers, 379, 381 Sturz and, 376, 379, 380 Koehler, Richard after Rikers, 415 arrival of crack in New York City, 25 changing categories for “use of force,” 355 manipulation of statistics, 354–55 officers always getting blamed, 225 overcrowding and riots, 188 Seabrook and, 364 weapons, 164 Kuby, Ron innocent detainees labeled as criminals, 244–45 lessons taught to teenagers, 244–45 racism in Rikers, 48–49 Rikers as shelter for homeless mentally ill, 123–24 solitary confinement as frequent punishment, 94–95 L Lamashtu, Erobos Abzu, 197–99 Lampe, Bobby, 89 Lasker, Morris, 156, 380 laundry, conditions in, 281–82 Lee, Tami, 253 after Rikers, 415 ghosts at Rikers, 224 kosher food, 157 on self-discipline, 218 sexual relations between officers and detainees, 229–30 smuggling method, 175–76 Tupac at Rikers, 252–53 LGBTQ detainees attacks on, 272, 273, 275 deaths of, 264–65, 268 frequency of sexual attacks on, 264 in general population housing areas, 269–70 HIV positive, 265 hormones for transsexual individuals, 272–73 housing areas for, 264, 270 housing for teenage, 266, 271–72 romances in Rikers, 269 teenage girls, 269 Lindsay, John, 5 lingo, 15 Lippman, Jonathan Close Rikers campaign and, 377 death of Murdough and, 387 on need for criminal justice reform, 386 role of judiciary in criminal justice reform, 386–87 Lippman Commission closing Rikers and, 389–90 members, 389 public discussion of Rikers and, 389 reduction of Rikers population, 387 Sturz and, 385–86 Lombardi, Rick after Rikers, 415 attempted water escape and, 214 beating of teen not following “the Program,” 241–42 beginning of gangs in Rikers, 61, 69 being attacked by detainees, 64–66 being injured in protective custody, 76–77 contraband, 228–29 escapes and, 211, 212, 213 gangs and drugs, 176 gangs in control of housing areas, 238–39, 243 Gastineau, 258–59 hiding places for drugs, 177–78 high level of violence, 89 on hostage situation, 192 housing teenagers with state prisoners, 245 manipulation of statistics, 358–59 officers as gang members, 77 officers working with gangs, 61–62 “the Program” leading to violence, 239–40 Tackmann, 205 weapons, 176–77 Love, Michael, 60–61, 104 Lynch, Patty, 371 M Magro, Baldassare, 163 Mahon, Pete, 196–97 Malcolm, Ben, 223 Mark-Viverito, Melissa, 386 Marques, Stuart, 381–82, 393 Marte, Coss, 14–15, 415 Martin, Glenn after Rikers, 415 Close Rikers campaign, 377 failure of plan to sell Rikers and have community jails, 383 on process of reform, 394–95 Sturz’s commitment to reform, 385 McCray, Antron, 7 McGovern, James after Rikers, 403, 415 contracts being put on detainees, 91 escapes, 208–9, 212, 215 food for mobsters, 151 detainee counts, 208 on riot (1987), 192 violence between detainees, 36 weapons hidden by detainees, 37 McGrath, George, 235 McMickens, Jacqueline, 221 after Rikers, 415 difficulties of being officer, 220 food hoarding, 153 importance of personal ethics, 226–27 location and access to Rikers, 390 need for solitary confinement, 96 officer training and, 222 reasons for what appears to be cruelty by officers, 122–23 on relations between officers and detainees, 14 on resources to improve Rikers, 391–92 medical care celebrities in medical dorms, 252, 255 conditions in infirmary/clinic, 133, 281 by Corizon Health Inc., 125 during COVID-19, 335, 337 dental, 153 difficulty of obtaining, 125–29, 130 for homeless individuals, 117 hormones for transsexual individuals, 272–73 hospitalization, 128–29 detainee complaints about, 308–9 detainees forced to take medication, 133–34 lawsuit against hospital, 133 nurses covering for officers, 62 officers’ failure to provide medical care, 28, 129–32, 330 officers refusing to get, 129–32 during pregnancy, 141–47 quality of, 134–35, 138–39 in solitary confinement, 101–2, 104–5 Meldish, Joey, 168, 169 mentally ill individuals arrests of, for misdemeanors, 29 as “Brad H.,” 111 as caring for each other, 117–18 conditions in unit designed for, 286–87 death of, 286 estimated number of, in jails, 117, 119 heat-sensitivity and, 286, 289–90 inability of, to comply with officers’ orders, 119 poor treatment of, by detainees and staff, 108–9 problems created by, 113–14 in protective custody, 11–12, 115 Rikers as shelter for homeless, 123–24 Rikers as trigger for, 114–15 self-destructive behavior of, 111–13 in solitary confinement, 93, 95, 104–5, 108, 109–11 specialized units for, 119–20 suicide committed by, 116 mental observation units, 121–22 misdemeanors bail for, 26, 268 individuals arrested for, 29 sentences for, 31 Mitchell, Levi information about COVID-19, 344 social distancing during COVID-19, 340, 341 mobsters food for, 151, 158–59 privileges given to, 168–69, 262 Montanez, Paradise, 269 Montefiore Hospital, 134–35 Morse, Kathy after Rikers, 415 first impression of Rikers, 9 teenagers being in solitary confinement, 99 Murdough, Jerome, 286, 387 Murray, Archibald, 291 Mushlin, Michael after Rikers, 416 community jails, 393 on Department of Corrections fighting any improvements, 276–77 failure of community jails plan, 382–83 lawsuits against conditions in New York City jails, 379–80 Sturz and closing of Rikers, 380–81 N Newsday, 164 New York magazine, 347 The New York Times, 6, 148, 235, 380 Ninja Turtles, 42, 62, 86, 193 O odor of Rikers, 7 Oppenheim, Rachel, 328–29, 330–31, 416 Oppenheim, Tom, 319, 320 orange alerts, 15 Osei, Doris, 246, 250–51, 299–300 P “the pack up,” 396 Pasqua, Frank, III after Rikers, 414 conditions in housing areas, 286, 290 hiding contraband, 170 his contraband business, 178–80 detainees’ attempt to intimidate him, 85–86 detainees cleaning hazardous waste, 279 detainees cooking for selves, 161 KK (officers’ mess), 158–59 life as mobster in Rikers, 168–69 Pataki, George, 364–65 Perez, Mario “Machete” after Rikers, 416 fighting to establish credentials before gangs, 59 separation of detainees by borough, 59 Petcheam, Suzy, 320, 321, 321–22 Petraro, Anne, 108, 112 Philadelphia Gay News, 264 phones fights over, 17 gang control over, 50, 66, 72–73, 239, 240 selling PIN numbers, 12–13 in solitary confinement, 105 during visits, 292 Picciano, John, 371 Pierce, Gregory after Rikers, 416 emotional shutdown of, 85 officers beating detainees, 84–85, 87 punch (drink), 152 violence to prevent sexual attacks, 84 pleas, reasons for guilty “bullpen therapy,” 26, 32, 33, 35–36 crack epidemic and, 388 pretrial detention, 37–38 Polanco, Layleen, 266–67 Ponte, Joseph, 362, 363, 403 Powers, Peter, 346 Powitz, Robert after Rikers, 416 on age of units, 279–80 conditions in infirmary, 281 conditions in unit for mentally ill, 286–87 lack of cooperation from New York City to improve conditions, 276–77, 284–85, 286, 289–90 pregnancy abortion and, 146–47 methadone treatment during, 141 officers’ treatment during, 146–47 in pregnancy housing unit, 145–46 in regular housing unit, 141–43 in solitary confinement, 143–44 Price, Grace, 6–7, 416 Prison Health Services (PHS), 135.


pages: 225 words: 70,590

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

15-minute city, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, global pandemic, green new deal, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, Lyft, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, post-work, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, social distancing, streetcar suburb, the built environment, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey

In 2019, TU Delft even went as far as building a demonstration project on campus: a solar array capable of charging up to four electric bikes. Small wonder the Dutch government was promoting them as a viable alternative to public transport during the COVID-19 crisis, for journeys up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) in length. This is a mobility solution that checks all three boxes for comprehensive transportation resilience: it is recoverable, reliable, and most definitely sustainable. Crisis as a Turning Point The COVID-19 crisis didn’t just create a cycling revolution. It also led to a dining one, as cities such as London, Boston, New York, and Montréal quickly reclaimed many of their streets, curbside spaces, and parking lots to create “outdoor dining districts” to support their bars, cafés, and restaurants postlockdown.

Recent years have seen an unprecedented push for a more equitable reallocation of this (curb and street) space—especially for walking and cycling—in metropolitan areas across the globe. Fueled by converging climate, health, and safety crises, there is a growing urgency to reduce the speed, access, and volume of cars, in residential and commercial areas alike. The COVID-19 pandemic has further fueled this challenge to the hegemony of cars in cities, as physical distancing requirements suddenly forced citizens to question this inefficient allowance of space. But by focusing on facts, figures, and charts, these discussions often miss the most critical element: the human one.

“When the car became the dominant form of transportation, the post office, newsstand, bookstore, and videostore—all places where we crossed paths just a few years ago—became obsolete,” she writes on page 13. Decades later, the result is a level of loneliness that could be said, without hyperbole, to be reaching epidemic levels; a trend only compounded by lockdown conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Dr. Appleyard, a street in conflict is one where the car travels through and pushes people away, and they ultimately withdraw from the street itself. (Modacity) Forging close personal relationships is vital to humanity in many ways. It is how we learn compassion, empathy, and cooperation from an early age, and how we continue to learn and grow throughout our lives.


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Cloud Airfield Site,”GrowthSpotter, October 20, 2020, https://www.growthspotter.com/news/osceola-county-developments/gs-news-rental-homes-20201020-g4ha5dgpcfaudaqtedstl2uhzy-story.html. 18.  Occupancy data for all Florida tourist properties can be found at “COVID-19 FL Tourism Impacts,” Visit Florida, https://www.visitflorida.org/resources/crisis-preparation/covid-19-resources-and-information-for-businesses/covid-19-fl-tourism-impacts/. 19.  Ken Storey, “Route 192 in Kissimmee Is About to Get a Dubai-Style Resort,” Orlando Weekly, April 4, 2016, https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2016/04/04/route-192-in-kissimmee-is-about-to-get-a-dubai-style-resort.

Jack Witthaus, “As Banks Shy Away, Private Equity Steps In to Fund More Orlando Real Estate Deals,” Orlando Business Journal, September 23, 2020, https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2020/09/23/orlando-commercial-projects-fewer-bank-loans.html.   2.  Emily Benfer et al., “The COVID-19 Eviction Crisis,” Aspen Institute, August 7, 2020, https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-covid-19-eviction-crisis-an-estimated-30-40-million-people-in-america-are-at-risk/.   3.  Not untypically, Florida proved to be a worst-case scenario because state law requires tenants facing eviction to pay the rent they owe into the court registry just to get a hearing for their case.

Motels in particular, whether or not they are designated as “extended stay,” have become the default residence for a significant mass of Americans priced out of the rental and homeownership markets.25 Countless others are doubled up, reliant on the goodwill of relatives or friends with a room or sofa to spare, and who may be in need of extra cash to pay their own bills. In the Sunbelt states, where right-to-work laws ensure paltry wages, budget motels are a convenient stopgap for the meager availability of affordable housing. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified the preexisting conditions of economic stress. Converting the chronic housing crisis into an acute emergency, it threatened a massive wave of foreclosures and evictions, routinely anticipated in the media as a “tsunami.” To stem the tide, federal and local governments issued temporary bans on evictions, but even before these ran out, the ranks of unhoused began to swell.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

Under its stated standard, YouTube would’ve banned any videos in January 2020 that claimed that human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 was possible, given the official WHO stance at the time. In retrospect, that was arguably the most dangerous lie about public health in modern history. As of this writing, the issue remains relevant to other scientific debates surrounding COVID-19 as well. In the spring of 2020, the FDA approved a drug called remdesivir, which it says shortens the duration of hospital stays for patients with severe COVID-19. Tens of thousands of patients hospitalized in the United States went on to receive remdesivir, including one of my family members.

Foolishly, I ignored the brewing tide, hoping that it would naturally subside. We were due to have a townhall later that week, and I decided to use it as an occasion to try to focus the company on our near-term strategy for developing a treatment for COVID-19 and on stemming the impact of the virus on our other ongoing clinical trials. But within minutes after sharing our progress on COVID-19 initiatives, employees began asking questions like “What is Roivant doing to address systemic racism across its many subsidiaries?” “Are we going to revisit our recruiting practices?” I personally reject the narrative of systemic racism, so I listened and didn’t say much in response, trying to sound empathetic whenever I could.

Subramanian went so far as to argue that ESG metrics are the best measure for signaling future earnings risk—superior even to financial risk factors like the level of a company’s leverage, or debt burden.6 Harvard Business School professor George Serafeim, working in collaboration with Boston mutual fund manager State Street, observed that “during the market collapse” in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, “firms experiencing more positive sentiment on their human capital, supply chain, and operational response to COVID-19 experienced higher institutional money flows” and less downside in share prices.7 Similar analyses abound. Morningstar found that sustainable index funds outperformed traditional index funds in the first quarter of 2020.8 Hermes Investment Management observed in 2018 that companies with good or improving ESG characteristics outperform companies with poor or worsening characteristics.9 Countless other reports come to similar conclusions.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Numbers that start out small, perhaps too small to attract worry or even notice, can reach disturbing levels faster than we intuitively realize—as the world saw with the exponential spread of Covid-19. Much as compounding interest amplifies wealth, the exponential (colloquially, “viral”) growth of anything amplifies its impact. For instance, if 10 people in your town are newly diagnosed with Covid-19 each day, then after 10 days there will be 100 more cases. The trend is linear at a rate of 10 per day; if we drew a graph with the date on the x-axis and the total number of cases on the y-axis, we would have a straight line going up and to the right. Now imagine instead that there were 10 new Covid-19 cases diagnosed on one day. On the next day, there were 11 new cases, on the third day 12, and then 13 and 14 on days 4 and 5, respectively.

A New York Post opinion article published in January 2022, for example, relied on an August 2021 analysis to claim that the best-quality studies do not provide good evidence for the claim that masks “work” against respiratory viruses. However, all but one of these studies were done before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the piece failed to mention the best mask study ever performed, a sophisticated experiment on Covid-19 prevention involving six hundred villages and hundreds of thousands of residents in Bangladesh. That study, published in December 2021 in the journal Science, had received considerable publicity in the weeks before the Post article was published.14 Even our ability to apply basic principles of logic can be subverted by our expectations.

The academic reviewers and editor who evaluated the impossibly precise critical flourishing ratio likely accepted the underlying premise that people who have more positive experiences are more likely to thrive and they wanted to believe in the power of psychological science to derive quantitative laws. Administrators at the University of Illinois who wanted to avoid a semester of fully remote learning were happy to act on the precise “worst case” estimate of seven hundred cases. The Trump administration wanted Covid-19 to be a smaller problem than it was, so they accepted the precise prediction of a rapid drop to zero deaths. Zero Covid-19 deaths in a few weeks should have seemed too good to be true, and history records that it was. Usually when something is too good to be true, it’s both too precise and too impressive, like Charles Ponzi’s promise of a return of 50 percent in 90 days.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

So was revitalizing Carlson Wagonlit Travel at a time when internet travel booking was supposed to kill the business. The Covid-19 pandemic that swept across the world in 2020 created significant challenges, threatening the survival of many companies. Yet the severe constraints around health and safety also offered new possibilities. Being forced to rethink process, products, and services brought about new ways to tap into unexplored demand and unleash new growth. Before the Covid-19 crisis, for example, Adobe, the digital creativity company, would hold an annual conference in Las Vegas for 15,000 attendees.

Besides expanding reach, the Covid-19 crisis has also created opportunities to transform customer experience. In April 2020, Best Buy decided to reopen some of its stores, which the company had closed in March, for one-on-one consultations by appointment. This took care of safety concerns related to excessive crowds in a store and provided a high-touch experience to customers. It also led to a higher sales close rate, as the shoppers who made an appointment were those actively looking for solutions and keen to pay for them, rather than browsers. In the same vein, the Covid-19 crisis and the associated safety concerns gave telemedicine a long-awaited boost, which technological progress has facilitated.

More and more people hold the system responsible for social fractures and environmental degradation. Employees, customers, and even shareholders expect much more from corporations than a blind pursuit of profit. Disengagement at work is a global epidemic. More recently, a new civil rights movement and the Covid-19 pandemic have accelerated the need to rethink our system if we want to tackle the enormous challenges facing us. Business can be a force for good in this fight; it is uniquely positioned to help address some of the world’s most pressing issues. A growing number of business leaders agree. But they and I know from experience that it is hard to do.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Spreading through the air we breathe while being this smart is what turned COVID-19 into a global pandemic. But intelligent as it may be among viruses, COVID-19 is superstupid when compared to the lowest level of superintelligence humanity is currently creating. And yet how has our collective intelligence served us in our handling of the COVID-19 outbreak? Our mistakes, fortunately, did not lead us to total destruction, simply because COVID-19 itself did not have that capability, at least at the time of writing this. Here are some of the glaring mistakes we made. We ignore the evangelists For years prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, scientists, public health experts, prominent public figures and global organizations warned us about the possibility of a global pandemic.

The Outbreak of COVID-19 The story of how we handled the outbreak of COVID-19 is a classic example of how our arrogance, greed and political agendas led those in charge to respond in a manner that occasionally ignored our global well-being as one humanity. To start with, for a virus, COVID-19 is considered intelligent. You see, the threat of a virus is measured by three factors: one is its virality, the second is its fatality and the third is its stealth ability. ‘Intelligent’ viruses seem to find a clever balance between these parameters. This is what we witnessed with COVID-19, which is infectious while lying undetected for up to two weeks.

Around the time this book is published, we will be coming out of almost two years of living with the COVID-19 pandemic. We will be feeling optimistic that the vaccines are starting to work and that there is a chance for our way of life to go back to normal. But ‘normal’ is forever changing. I believe that the way our global community and political leaders have handled the outbreak of COVID-19 is not that different to the way they are handling the imminent outbreak of the artificial intelligence pandemic. I just hope that we can learn from the mistakes we made with COVID-19, and perhaps deal with this new shift in our way of life in a manner that ensures less disruption, more predictability and less social and economic adversity.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

This is an estimate by the Economist of the excess deaths from COVID-19 up until November 22, 2021 (Economist 2021c). While 17 million excess deaths are the stated best guess, there is considerable uncertainty: the estimate indicates that with 95 percent probability the true number falls between 10.8 million and 20.1 million. Excess deaths measure the difference between how many people died during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to an estimate of how many would have died if COVID-19 had not happened. This accounts for various issues of under- and overreporting of deaths attributable to COVID-19. More at whatweowethefuture.com/notes. 16.

If we do not rise to the challenge, there is a decent chance that humanity could come to a premature end and our future could be destroyed. Engineered Pathogens Most of this book was written during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of writing, COVID-19 is estimated to have caused seventeen million excess deaths worldwide—one in every five hundred people.15 The death toll is sure to increase in the future. The economic cost will amount to more than $10 trillion.16 And billions of people have lived under lockdown for months on end, unable to see their family and friends in person, even when dying in hospital. But, despite the toll of COVID-19, in some respects we’ve gotten off easily. We know that viruses (like Ebola) can be deadlier than the new coronavirus, and some (like the measles) can be more transmissible.

Only once a huge comet collided with a nearby planet, creating a fireball that reached more than thirty thousand degrees Celsius,58 did governments and the wider public turn their attention towards the risk from asteroids and comets. It is tragic that it might take something as disastrous as COVID-19 to convince the world to pay more attention to pandemics. And the COVID-19 pandemic is tame in comparison with the horrors that novel engineered pathogens might bring. The world eventually got its act together on asteroids and comets. It is time we did the same for engineered pathogens.59 People in the longtermist community were warning about pandemics for many years prior to COVID-19. One of the main longtermist funders, Open Philanthropy, was one of the few pre-COVID funders of pandemic preparedness in the world.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Understanding these 3D structures is essential to understanding how viruses work, as well as how to fight them. For example, the spike protein of COVID-19 can attach to a receptor on the surface of human cells, like a key fits into a lock. After the internalization of virus particles into human cells, the viral genome (RNA, in the case of COVID-19) is transmitted to the host cell and replicated in many human organs, which results in the infected person’s experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. Similar to the way a virus attaches to a human cell, pathogen treatment works by attaching a treatment molecule onto the pathogen to inhibit its function.

—CONFUCIAN ANALECTS, 9:31 NOTE FROM KAI-FU: Inspired by the pandemic year during which this book was written, “Contactless Love” imagines that COVID-19 continues on after the initial vaccines, with new variants of the virus resurging periodically. Humans must learn to coexist with it, helped in part by the ubiquity of household robots that reduce the need for person-to-person contact. The heroine of this story takes the desire to close oneself off from the world to an extreme, however, setting up a conflict between pursuing love and avoiding human contact. “Contactless Love” explores some of the questions raised by the arrival of a globe-altering pandemic, including its stresses but also how COVID-19 has accelerated other trends that may be positive, including new drug discovery, precision medicine, and robotic surgery, all enhanced by AI.

When we look back in 2041, we will likely see healthcare as the industry most transformed by AI. Concern about physical contact, another aspect of COVID-19—illustrated by Chen Nan’s phobias and shut-in lifestyle—will create many opportunities for robotics, an area that, because of improving technologies, is poised for just such a breakthrough. So, will your apartment in 2041 be filled with the kind of busybody robotic helpers Chen Nan relies on in the story? I’ll give you my opinion on that question in the pages that follow. Finally, I want to examine how COVID-19 will drive the adoption of distance work, communication, learning, commerce, and entertainment.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Marina Adshade, “We Need Academic Conferences About Robots, Love, and Sex,” Future Tense (blog), Slate, December 13, 2018, https://slate.com/tech nology/2018/12/love-sex-robots-conference-bannon-academic-research.html. 14. Andrea Morris, “Talk to Your Sex Robot About COVID-19,” Forbes, July 28, 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2020/07/28/talk-to-your-sex-robot-about-covid-19. 15. Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars, “Robots, Men and Sex Tourism,” Futures 44, no. 4 (May 2012): 365. 16. Shivali Best, “Sex Robots Could Be Subject to ‘Visual Laws’ to Stop Them Looking Too Realistic,” Daily Mirror, June 10, 2019, www.mirror.co.uk/tech/sex-robots-could-subject-visual-16494038. 17.

Leaders in the fields of AI, robotics, and digitization are making amazing leaps in research and technological innovation all the time, but wins are never without losses, and glitches and missteps will always cause alarm. Yet even during some of our darkest times (and perhaps especially so)—recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and the social upheavals of 2020, with so many confined to their homes or protesting in the streets against brutality and discrimination—we saw how technological advancements served as a positive force. Technology connected us during isolation, provided care and interaction for the elderly and the sick, assisted the transition to remote work, helped mobilize civil rights activism, kept live records of systemic abuse by law enforcement and private corporations, and made those records known.

The mobile capture and widespread social media dissemination of the video of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minnesota police officer are but one example. Data mining also helped policymakers and scientists assess risks, monitor compliance with shelter-in-place ordinances, and accelerate the race for mass Covid-19 vaccination and herd immunity. When the application of technology fails—as with racially biased facial recognition algorithms, for instance—these failures can be better exposed than past wrongs that were hidden from sight and not recorded. And failures can often be better corrected than our human fallibilities.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Instead of investing in abolishing poverty, America’s leaders have invested in the prison industrial complex, which is plagued by brutal conditions that normalize sexual assault and murder. Even wrongly convicted and nonviolent offenders sometimes find themselves sentenced to death by guard brutality, inmate violence, or unsanitary conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the health crisis in American prisons: as of April 2021, three thousand incarcerated people died of COVID-19.40 In today’s era of mass incarceration, both liberals and conservatives are questioning the massive resources that the United States is allocating to maintain its role as the incarceration capital of the world. According to the American Action Forum, the United States spends nearly $300 billion annually policing communities and incarcerating 2.2 million people.41 The societal costs—lost earnings, adverse health effects, and damage to families—are triple the direct costs, bringing the total annual burden of America’s criminal justice system to $1.2 trillion.

Our analysis shows that these are traits that are more often being displayed by women.”17 New evidence suggests that female leaders have been especially effective during the COVID-19 pandemic. When Zenger and Folkman conducted 360-degree assessments again during the pandemic, the gap between male and female leaders had widened.18 In another study, University of Wisconsin researchers found that states with female governors issued earlier stay-at-home orders and ultimately had fewer COVID-19 deaths.19 That study reviewed hundreds of governor briefings, totaling 1.2 million words, that took place between April 1, 2020, and May 5, 2020, and found that female governors were more confident and empathetic.

Kilolo Kijakazi and Alexander Carther, “How Baby Bonds Could Help Americans Start Adulthood Strong and Narrow the Racial Wealth Gap,” Urban Institute, January 23, 2020, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/how-baby-bonds-could-help-americans-start-adulthood-strong-and-narrow-racial-wealth-gap. 40. Aaryn Urell, “Covid-19’s Impact on People in Prison,” Equal Justice Initiative, April 16, 2021, https://eji.org/news/covid-19s-impact-on-people-in-prison/. 41. Tara O’Neill Hayes, “The Economic Costs of the U.S. Criminal Justice System,” American Action Forum, July 16, 2020, https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-economic-costs-of-the-u-s-criminal-justice-system/. 42.


pages: 445 words: 122,877

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin

coronavirus, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, financial independence, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, job automation, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, occupational segregation, old-boy network, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, remote working, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

But, as I noted then, Group Five includes women who are even younger, and its end date is not yet clear. 222  “Pandemic Will ‘Take Our Women 10 Years Back’ …”    Amanda Taub, “Pandemic Will ‘Take Our Women 10 Years Back’ in the Workplace,” New York Times, September 26, 2020. 222  “Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers,”    Patricia Cohen and Tiffany Hsu, “Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers,” New York Times, June 3, 2020. 222  “How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward.”    Julie Kashen, Sarah Jane Glynn, and Amanda Novello,“How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward,” Center for American Progress, October 30, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/10/30/492582/covid-19-sent-womens-workforce-progress-backward/. 222  “… you’re allowed only a kid or a job.”    Deb Perelman, “In the Covid-19 Economy You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both,” New York Times, July 2, 2020. See also Allyson Waller, “Woman Says She Was Fired Because Her Children Disrupted Her Work Calls,” New York Times, July 8, 2020. 223  fell by just 1.2 percentage points … fell by 4.9 percentage points    Monthly CPS data on labor force participation were used by comparing rates for September 2020 to January 2021 with those for September 2019 to January 2020.

Newspapers and news feeds are filled with disquieting prophecies about the future of the younger members of Group Five: “Pandemic Will ‘Take Our Women 10 Years Back’ in the Workplace,” “Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers,” and “How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward.” In the age of COVID, those with children and others to care for are struggling to put in the hours, publish the academic papers, write the briefs, and attend to demanding clients on Zoom. According to these predictions, a rug is being pulled out from under those who were finally able to achieve historic rates of career and family. As Deb Perelman, a food blogger, put it, “Let me say the quiet part loud: In the Covid-19 economy, you’re allowed only a kid or a job.” Is Group Five being forced to relive the compromises once made by the women of Group One?

See also gender earnings gap; inequality of income economic downturns: caregiving connections to, 219, 231–32, 237; COVID-19 pandemic creating, 74, 219, 221–23, 226, 231, 235; Great Depression as (see Great Depression); marriage effects of, 93; “she-cessions” as, 223 economic growth, 22–23 Economics of Household Production (Reid), 47, 48 education: advanced and professional degrees in (see advanced and professional degrees); age at time of, 41, 50, 265n41; antibias or diversity, 155; antidiscrimination laws for, 130, 225; coeducation in, 42, 82–83, 225, 266n43, 273n83; cost of, 90–91; college graduation rates, 41; COVID-19 pandemic effects on, 16, 203, 219, 221, 225, 227–29, 231; drop-out rates in, 85, 86–87, 274n87; gender earnings gap and, 159–60, 287n160; gender statistics on, 5–6, 41–42, 91–92, 275n92; of Group One women, 25–27, 39–45, 41, 49–50, 269n59; of Group Two women, 28–29, 39–45, 41, 70–71, 86; of Group Three women, 29–30, 39–45, 41, 86, 91–92, 95–96, 101–2, 104, 105–6, 112, 124, 274n86, 276n95, 277n101, 278n104; of Group Four women, 30–33, 39–45, 41, 112–13, 115, 117, 122, 127–30, 129, 139, 146, 199, 284n139; of Group Five women, 33, 39–45, 41, 139, 148–49, 149, 284n139; high school movement for, 71; lowered barriers to, 22; major selection for, 95–96, 101–2, 112, 128–29, 276n95, 282n128; marriage effects on, 35, 86–87; occupation-specific, 95–96, 112; for pharmacists, 190; pregnancy effects on, 36; prohibitions on, 20; sex ratio of, 41–42, 91–92, 275n92; single-sex institutions for, 42, 44; social class and, 42, 43, 50; white-collar work demands for, 70–71.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

As I write this paragraph, I am homebound by the COVID-19 virus. Unlike South Korea, the US government was unable to quickly respond to the new virus. The media wanted to blame President Trump, but, for all his failings, the main problem was systemic. The US Department of Health & Human Services is a giant bureaucracy that manages both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, there was mistrust, infighting, politics, and incompetence throughout the whole system. Despite years of warnings and studies about possible pandemics just like COVID-19, no one had an action plan.

Because it was free and easy to use, and because it was, by definition, a communication device, it began to spread like wildfire. With the COVID-19 lockdowns, Zoom traffic increased by 3,000 percent in May 2020. To “Zoom” became a verb. Students Zoomed to school. The product’s security was criticized, the Zoom team made fixes, and public health experts began to worry about the effects of back-to-back Zoom meetings on locked-down people. As much of the world moves past the COVID-19 emergency, the obvious challenges for Zoom are a reduction in video meetings combined with jealous competition from Google, Microsoft, and others.

It would lay out the conditions that might warrant forced obedience versus those that permit a modicum of individual freedom. COVID-19’s mortality rate for those under seventy is apparently less than 1 percent. What if the pandemic is truly horrific, with a 10 percent mortality rate, then what? And could anyone have predicted that the media and politicians would use the disease as a tool to bludgeon their rivals? The big success in the United States with regard to the pandemic was not any long-range strategic plan but the highly crux-based strategic “Warp Speed” project. Before COVID-19, developing a vaccine was a long-term affair. The fastest prior vaccine development was for the mumps, which took four years.


pages: 592 words: 125,186

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

Choi, ‘In Six Weeks, STOP AAPI HATE Receives over 1700 Incident Reports of Verbal Harassment, Shunning and Physical Assaults’, STOP AAPI HATE Reporting Center, 13 May 2020. 29. Home Affairs Committee, ‘Oral Evidence: Home Office Preparedness for Covid-19 (Coronavirus), Hc 232’, London: House of Commons, 2020. 30. Human Rights Watch, ‘Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide’, 12 May 2020, www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide. 31. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘Far-Right Exploitation of Covid-19’, London: ISD, 2020. 32. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘Covid-19 Disinformation Briefing No. 2’, London: ISD, 2020. 33. A. Goldman, ‘Man Suspected of Planning Attack on Missouri Hospital Is Killed, Officials Say’, New York Times, 25 March 2020. 34.

Information Commissioner’s Office, ‘ICO Investigation into Use of Personal Information and Political Influence’, London: Information Commissioner’s Office, 2020. 4. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘Far-Right Exploitation of Covid-19’, London: ISD, 2020; S. Parkin, ‘“A Threat to Health Is Being Weaponised”: Inside the Fight against Online Hate Crime’, Guardian, 2 May 2020; K. Paul, ‘Facebook Reports Spike in Takedowns of Hate Speech’, Reuters, 12 May 2020. 5. EU vs Disinfo, ‘EEAS Special Report Update: Short Assessment of Narratives and Disinformation around the Covid-19/Coronavirus Pandemic’, 24 April 2020, euvsdisinfo.eu/eeas-special-report-update-2-22-april; C. Miller, ‘White Supremacists See Coronavirus as an Opportunity’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 26 March 2020

When the experiment factored in the role of other politicians supporting Trump’s comment the prejudice-inducing effect skyrocketed.26 Trump was also accused of stirring up hatred of Asians after he used the term ‘Chinese virus’ to describe COVID-19. His first use of the term at a press briefing, questioned at the time by reporters, caused a discernible online reaction, consisting of both criticism and endorsement. Trump uttered the term at least twenty times in March, the month in which a spike in hate crimes on the streets against Asian people was recorded.27 A third-party reporting centre at San Francisco State University recorded 1,710 COVID-19-related hate incidents targeting Asian Americans in just six weeks, across forty-five states.28 Most victims had been verbally harassed on the street, with others suffering physical assault and being attacked online.


Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

Really “Taking Back Control” The Importance of Buy-In Part Two: The Preston Story A How-To Guide Part Three: Community Wealth-Building from Neighbourhood to Nation Participatory Democracy: The Real “Big Society” Jobs and Money Land, Space and Assets Sustainable Futures Conclusion How to Paint Your Own Town Red Local Government Demystified Further Contacts, Resources and Reading Notes Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION This book explores the ways in which you can have an impact at a local level, and by doing so take part in a global phenomenon of larger transformative currents. Across the world, there is a growing awareness of the need for a new kind of economy. The 2008 financial crisis, the climate crisis and the previously unthinkable government interventions in response to the Covid-19 pandemic are proving that national governments can step in to change how the economy works. These developments, despite their devastating effects, have also meant that a new economic and political space for exploration and experiment has been opening up. The challenge of “community wealth-building” is for this transformative moment to work for the benefit of local communities rather than global corporations.

In the UK, too, where local authorities have broken from the status quo in favour of ambitious local experiments, they are gaining success at the ballot box. In the 2019 general election, Preston was one of the few constituencies to buck the national swing that saw heavy losses for Labour in its former heartlands. Recently, and most obviously, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the extent of our reliance both on complex and overextended global supply chains and on the poorest and least valued workers in the cleaning, health, transport and care work sectors to keep the economy and society going. Jobs in these sectors, despite their vital importance, tend to be insecure and poorly paid, and are dominated by young, female, BAME and migrant workers.

The city has adapted community wealth-building as best fits its own circumstances, but its principles and options can be drawn upon in different forms to suit the needs and resources of different localities. Many places will be able to identify their own place-based large employers who can act as anchor institutions for local procurement spending. Dealing with these institutions under the pressures of austerity and the additional crisis of Covid-19 will take boldness and conviction among elected officials to make the arguments, as Preston did, for keeping the wealth of a community within it and for supporting local innovation. It remains to be seen — like all other impacts of Brexit — whether the absence of EU rules on procurement will make it easier for service contracts to be offered locally.


pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

We are seeing forced change on a global scale that will alter the way we see the world of work. This is a rapid change that should and could have taken a decade or more to occur but has happened in months. The Industrial Revolution was huge, but the Digital Revolution and what this means to be ‘at work’ has been accelerated even more by Covid-19, which has already shaken the world and the way we work and will change how we will operate forever. So in writing this book about Neurodiversity in the Workplace, let us hear from the person who is the originator of the term, because it was her early research relating to neurodiversity, and her passion for the subject, that allowed us to even have this debate and explore what neurodiversity means to us.

Ethical, moral and legal responsibilities If we examine official measures of employment and unemployment, between 2013 and 2019, the disability employment gap in the UK had reduced, with the data showing roughly half of disabled people were in employment (53.2 per cent) compared with just over four out of five non-disabled people (81.8 per cent). This data came from The Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Annual Population Survey (APS) and forms part of the Office for National Statistics series of bulletins, which have explored outcomes for disabled people across a number of areas of life.4 A real concern is that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic will reverse this trend unless a spotlight is put on action. This is an ethical and moral responsibility for society otherwise it will potentially turn back time. This gap is much wider for some than for others and also worsens with age. How the statistics are gathered also means you can only be counted as in one category or another.

For example, the number of disabled people in work aged 16 to 64 years in 2019 in the UK who are categorized as having depression, bad nerves or anxiety was 17.9 per cent compared to those grouped as having severe or specific learning difficulties where the percentage was only 0.8 per cent. This means the true level is unclear, as many people who are autistic, for example, will also have some mental health challenges. There are some concerns, however, that the impact of Covid-19 in 2020 and beyond will have a longer-term effect on many global employment settings and that we may see that the gap widens rather than contracts. The ethical and moral responsibility for organizations is to maintain a spotlight on this. Equality provision Equality affirms that all human beings are born free and equal.


pages: 26 words: 5,240

Autism After the Pandemic: A Step by Step Guide to Successfully Transition Back to School and Work by James Ball, Kristie Lofland

autism spectrum disorder, coronavirus, COVID-19, Silicon Valley, social distancing

A Teaching Strategy that can Save You Time: Chaining https://autismclassroomresources.com/a-teaching-strategy-that-can-save-you-time-chaining/ Accessible ABA website: Use Chaining and Task Analysis to Help Your Child with Autism https://accessibleaba.com/blog/chaining-task-analysis-autism REINFORCEMENT/MOTIVATIONAL SYSTEM Autism Behavior Therapy website: Free Printable First-and-Then Board https://autismbehaviourtherapy.com/free-printable-first-and-then-board/ StoryboardThat website: First Then Board Printable Template https://www.storyboardthat.com/storyboards/mon_shari/first-then-template Teachers Pay Teachers website: First-Then Schedule Board Freebie https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/First-Then- Schedule-Board-Freebie-713428 ANTICIPATE THEIR SENSORY NEEDS AND BE PREPARED Noodle Nook website: COVID-19 Social Story FREE! http://www.noodlenook.net/covid-19-social-story-free/ PA Autism website: Wearing a Mask Social Story https://paautism.org/resource/wearing-mask-social-story/ Teachers Pay Teachers website: “We Wear Masks” – Coronavirus Social Story about Wearing a Mask https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/We-Wear-Masks-Coronavirus-Social-Story-about-Wearing-a-Mask-5425981 Autism Little Learners website: Seeing People Wearing Masks Story https://www.autismlittlelearners.com/2020/04/seeing-people-wearing-masks-story.html Autism Research Institute website: I Can Wear a Mask Social Story https://www.autism.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/I-can-wear-a-mask-1-1.pdf YouTube – Jordan Drane: Wearing a Mask: A Social Narrative for Children https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Th is book has step-by-step instructions for teaching skills and strategies to prevent meltdowns, learn new skills, and to cope and grow in a work or school environment, and it is a valuable resource in families returning to a “new normal.” — Temple Grandin, Author of The Way I See It and The Loving Push We have arrived at a new normal: life after the arrival of COVID-19. How do we help those with developmental and/ or intellectual disabilities and those on the autism spectrum return to school or adult services? It has been a long haul at home! Both children and adults are used to the home environment and routines. Some students have been out of their school/adult program for months.

Follow this process for each step: allowing the elastic to be put behind their ears, etc., until the person is wearing the mask. This may take several trials for each individual step. Try not to move ahead too quickly. The following websites contain social narratives and visual supports on wearing a mask and/or how COVID-19 will affect school and/or work. PARENT CHECKLIST Schedule sensory breaks Have brain breaks (Go Noodle, Adventures to Fitness, etc. are all fun apps to use) Break as often as needed, but return to schedule ASAP and pick up where you left off EXAMPLE: Ideas for sensory activities for home and classroom: Stretchy resistance bands Bouncing on exercise ball Tactile sensory bins Fidgets Sensory bottles or tubes Wall or chair push ups Squeezing Play-Doh or thera-putty Incorporate brain breaks Please reference Recommended Resources 20 to 26 at the back of the book.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

See also wealth India, 28, 38, 69, 88–9, 151, 152–3, 155, 183, 183, 258, 259, 296, 297, 308, 315, 397, 413 Indigenous peoples: agriculture and traditional knowledge, 172, 420; Amazon rainforest and, 176–7; ‘biodiversity hot spots’ and, 417–18; Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities, 163, 392; Chad pastoralists advocate for ancestral agroecological practices, 177, 178–9; climate justice leadership, elevating voices in, 418–19; colonialism and, 162, 387–8, 399–400, 411; COP26 and, 204; ‘divest-invest’ strategies, 412; drought and, 399; environmental philosophy, 420; front-line communities, 392; geoengineering and, 234; as land defenders, 49; land management of, 107; Lumad, 401; rewilding and, 351; Sámi see Sámi individual action, 5, 278, 283, 284, 324–43, 426, 433–4; activism see activism; apathy, overcoming climate, 337–9; boycotts, 327; buying/using less, 434; culture wars, avoiding, 433; diet and, 340–43, 433–4; democracy, defending, 433; education, self- 324–7, 433; influential/high-profile public figures committing to personal actions, 329; lifestyles, 1.5 °C, 331–6; most affected people in the most affected areas (MAPA) and, 433; personal responsibility for climate change, fossil fuel industry role in promoting idea of, 29, 326–7, 330; scepticism and, 434; systematic change and, 327 Indonesia, 14, 258, 282, 296, 313–17, 383, 384–5, 408–9 Industrial Revolution, 18, 19, 22, 24, 50, 155, 162, 219, 344, 372, 392, 411 industry: disconnection from public consciousness, 260; electrifying industrial processes, 260–61; industrial chemicals, 53, 121, 237; industrial inertia on decarbonization, 258; mapping emissions in, 256–9, 257, 258, 259 inequality, 42; climate change linked to, 42, 132, 138, 182–5, 184, 316, 358, 389, 398; climate reparations and, 410–14, 429; economic growth and, 133; EVs and, 272; fascism and, 181; geopolitics and, 316; Global North and Global South see Global North and Global South; individual carbon rights and, 407–8; just transition and, 377, 390, 391, 395, 396; middle class, rise of global and, 282; redistribution and, 405–9, 406; taxes and see taxes; urbanized populations and, 138–9; vector-borne disease and, 143; World Inequality Database, 406; World Inequality Report (2022), 407 inertia, 79, 220–21, 258 infectious disease: Covid-19 see Covid-19; Great Dying and, 387; green barrier against spread of, 101; nutrient reductions and, 149–50; zoonotic, 133 influential/high-profile public figures committing to personal actions, 329 information, consumption of, 286 Informed Citizens for the Environment, 30 insects, 104, 108, 110–12, 113, 114, 115, 144, 150, 172, 360, 378 Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), 30 Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), 187 insurance rates, 193 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 36, 40, 52, 57–8, 97, 125, 171, 192, 324, 337, 372, 380, 402; First Assessment Report (1990), 26, 28, 39, 204, 205, 235, 337; founded, 20, 26, 157; Third Assessment Report (2001), 39–40, 39, 373; Fifth Assessment Report (2014) 39; Sixth Assessment Report (2021/22), 37–8, 39, 68, 80–81, 158, 427–8 internally displaced people, 167, 181, 187, 188 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), 269 International Energy Agency (IEA), 228, 261, 272, 298, 306; Covid-19 recovery plan estimates, 217; Energy Technology Perspectives report (2020), 260–61; net zero scenario for CCS capture, 261, 263, 264; World Energy Outlook, 260 International Maritime Organization (IMO), 269 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 217, 383 international travel, 146, 380 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 90 interpersonal influence, 328–9 Irma, hurricane (2017), 170 iron, dietary, 149, 150, 151 iron/iron ore production, 256, 261, 388 irrigation, 10, 55, 73, 168, 171, 183, 245, 246, 255, 341, 342, 343, 402 J Japan, 62, 65, 86, 90, 258, 269, 270, 297, 304 jet stream, 62–6, 63, 64 jobs: exploitation of workers, 362; green, 42, 312, 338, 346, 351, 392–3; just transition and, 377, 391, 392–3; no worker left behind principle, 393, 394; retraining, 376, 393 Jokkmokk, 173–4 Jones, Bryan, 167 journalism, 155, 435 just transition, 187, 377, 390–95, 401 K Kavango Basin, 399–400 Keep America Beautiful lobby group, 295 Kenya, 149–50, 402–4, 413 Keynes, John Maynard, 382 keystone species, 349 Klemetsrud waste facility CCS plant, Norway, 262 Koch brothers, 221 Kolkata, India, 414 Kolyuchin, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Russian Federation 125, 126–7 Kyoto Protocol (1997), 27, 28, 92, 156, 269 L Lakota people, 387 land theft, 42, 394 land-fill, 87, 140, 281, 282, 291, 294, 296, 297, 333, 425 landslide, 91, 291 land use management, 91, 244–7, 246; agriculture and, 244–55, 246, 249, 250, 251; biodiversity loss and, 109, 212; food systems and, 248–55, 249, 250, 251; forested areas, 99, 103, 230, 245, 246; mixed use, 253, 254; reflectance, 55; wildfires and, 96, 99 La Niña, 64, 166 lawsuits, big polluter, 280 Leishmaniasis, 143 liability, climate change, 159, 357 life expectancy, 292, 386–7 Lindqvist, Sven: Exterminate all the Brutes, 388 lobbying, 30, 218, 222, 227, 295, 296, 338, 370 locusts, 149, 156, 378 logging, 100, 102, 325, 356 Lumad, 401 M Maathai, Wangari 402–4 Magnitogorsk, Russia, 213, 214–15 maize, 149, 165, 166, 192, 250, 254, 402 Malaysia, 297, 425 Mali, 172 Manabe, Syukuro, 23, 23n, 25, 306, 382 Manchin, Joe, 221 mangroves, 85, 151, 152–3, 253, 317, 318–19, 345, 346, 350 manure, 140–41, 248, 252–3 Maria, hurricane, 170 marine protected areas, 347 Markey, Ed, 382 Marshall, Alfred, 331, 333, 335 material efficiency strategies, 259, 264 material footprints, national, 311, 311 Mauritian dodo, 9 Mayan Forest, 417 McNeill, J.

The problem is, all that evidence puts the current best available science on a collision course with our current economic system and with the way of life many people in the Global North now consider their right. Limitations and restrictions are not exactly synonymous with neoliberalism or modern western culture. Just look at how some parts of the world reacted to restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic. You can of course argue that there are different scientific views and opinions; that not every scientist agrees with every other scientist. And this is true: scientists spend huge amounts of time debating different aspects of their results – that is how science works. This argument can be used in countless topics of discussion, but it can no longer be used in connection with the climate crisis.

Many have wondered what the first disaster to bring the modern, globalized world to a temporary standstill would be. Some kind of resource-related conflict, an energy crisis or financial collapse, perhaps. Instead, it was a pandemic that appeared and changed our lives overnight. In the winter of 2022, when we were finishing this book, it was not possible to say for sure that Covid-19 had been transmitted to humans from other animals, in this case bats. There are still uncertainties. What we do know, however, is that most pandemics do come from animals; they are zoonotic diseases. In fact, 75 per cent of all new infectious diseases originate from wildlife. Natural habitats should work as a protecting shield, but once you strip back too much of that natural barrier we are exposed to increasing levels of risk.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Russia has a female president. The world suffers a new and even more lethal pandemic than Covid-19. Vladimir Putin is constitutionally prevented from running for another term as president of Russia and his wife takes his place on the ballot, allowing him to run the country from the sidelines. Massive strikes and riots force Nicolás Maduro to resign as president of Venezuela. A respiratory virus jumps from bats to humans in China and starts a new and even more lethal pandemic than Covid-19. After Iran develops a nuclear weapon and tests it in an underground explosion, Saudi Arabia develops its own nuclear weapon in response.

The believing brain: From ghosts and gods to politics and conspiracies. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Shermer, M. 2015. The moral arc: How science and reason lead humanity toward truth, justice, and freedom. New York: Henry Holt. Shermer, M. 2020a. COVID-19 conspiracists and their discontents. Quillette, May 7. https://quillette.com/2020/05/07/covid-19-conspiracists-and-their-discontents/. Shermer, M. 2020b. The top ten weirdest things countdown. Skeptic. https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/the-top-10-weirdest-things/. Shermer, M. 2020c. Why people believe conspiracy theories. Skeptic, 25, 12–17.

., 82–83 validity vs. soundness, 83 loss aversion, 192–94 lotteries, 176–78, 182–83, 188–92 Lotto, Beau, 30 Love Story (film), 76–78, 263 lucky streaks, 148 Madison, James, 41 Madman Theory, 60–61, 236 Maduro, Nicolás, 23, 24 main effect, 273, 274, 275, 278 Maine, USS, 124, 125 The Maltese Falcon (film), 61–62 mañana fallacy, 101 Mao Zedong, 245 margins of error, 196 marshmallow test, 47–48, 50 Marx, Chico, 294–95 Marx, Karl, 90 Masons, 36, 40 mathematicians caution about mindless use of statistical formulas, 166–67 mansplaining, 18 paragon of rationality, 74 simulation vs. proof, 20 stereotype of, 20 Matthew Effect, 263–64, 354n21 Maymin, Philip, 342n17 Meadow’s fallacy (multiplying probabilities of interdependent events), 129–30, 131 media accountability for lying/disinformation, 313, 314, 316, 317 availability bias driven by, 120, 125–27 consumer awareness of biases in, 127 correlation confused with causation and, 256, 260, 353n13 cynicism bred by, 126–27 innumeracy of, 125–27, 314 negativity bias, 125–26 politically partisan, 296 rational choice portrayal by, 173–74 reforms for rationality, 127, 314, 316, 317 tabloids, 287–88, 306 and truth-seeking, 316 the Winner’s Curse and, 256, 353n13 See also digital media; entertainment; journalism; social media medical quackery, 6, 90, 284, 304, 321, 322 celebrity doctors, 305 COVID-19 and, 284 harms caused by, 322 hidden mechanisms posited by, 258 intuitive essentialism and, 304–5, 321 science laureates and, 90 medicine base-rate neglect in diagnosis, 155 Bayesian reasoning in, 150–51, 152, 153–54, 167, 169–70, 321 correlation and causation, 251–52 COVID-19, 2, 283 disease control, 325 drug trials, 58, 264 evidence-based, 317 expected utility of treatments, 192–94, 198–99 false positives, 169–70, 198 frequencies and, 169–70 randomized controlled trials and, 264 rational ignorance and, 57 rationality and progress in, 325–26 sensitivity of tests, 150, 154, 169, 352n10 signal detection and, 202, 211, 213, 220 specificity of tests, 352n10 taboo tradeoffs in, 63–64 See also health; mental health Meehl, Paul, 279, 280 Mellers, Barbara, 29, 219–20 memes, 144, 308–9 mental health, 251, 256, 276–77, 276, 280 Mercier, Hugo, 87, 291, 298–99, 308, 313 meteorology, 114, 127, 133, 220 The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 27 military, 63, 220, 231, 295 Miller, Bill, 143 Miller, Joshua, 132 mind-body dualism, 304 miracles, Bayesian argument vs., 158–59 Mischel, Walter, 47 Mlodinow, Len, 143 modal logic, 84 modernity vs. ecological rationality, 96–98 vs. mythology mindset, 303–4 See also progress modus ponens, 80 modus tollens, 80–81 Molière, virtus dormitiva, 11–12, 89 money diminishing marginal utility of, 181–83, 247 dollar value on human life, 63–64 See also finances; GDP per capita money pump, 176, 180, 185, 187–88 monocausal fallacy, 260, 272–73 Montesquieu, 333, 335 Monty Hall dilemma, 16–22, 115, 342n33 morality of Bayesian base rates, 62, 163–66 discounting the future and, 51–52 God and, 67 Golden Rule (and variants), 68–69 heretical counterfactuals, 64–65 impartiality as the core, 68–69, 317, 340 marginal utility of lives and, 183–84 the mythology mindset and, 300, 307 relativism and, 42, 66–67 self-interest and sociality, 69 taboo tradeoffs and, 64 See also moral progress moral progress overview, 328–29 analogizing oppressed groups, 335 animals, cruelty to, 334–35 democracy, 335–36, 339 feminism, 336–37 homosexuality, persecution of, 333–34 ideas vs. proponents, 339–40 rationality as driver of, 329–30, 340 redistribution of wealth and, 182 religious persecution, 301–2, 330 sadistic punishment, 332–33 slavery, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339 war, 331 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 81, 82, 178 Morgenstern, Oskar, 175, 197, 228, 350n1 motivated reasoning, 289–92, 297, 298, 310.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

If the sum of the parts, in their estimation, is greater than the whole, activists will force management to split the company. In ACE’s case, management was proactively seeking to disassemble the pieces, starting by spinning off Aeroplan in 2005, then moving on to Jazz airlines. Have I mentioned that nothing is ever new on Wall Street? In 2020, gravely hit by the coronavirus pandemic, cash flow-bleeding airlines around the world raced to raise money in the capital markets and borrowed from the government. Mileage programs became, once again, a source of value once forgotten and unneeded as a distinct asset from the business of flying. Not anymore. In June 2020, United, American, and Spirit Airlines mortgaged their loyalty schemes as collateral for new debt.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

Of the eighteen thousand police departments in the United States, sixty of them still used PredPol.6 And all the surveillance in the world didn’t help China identify in a timely manner the most devastating pandemic in a century: Covid-19. On December 31, 2019, China reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, a city in the central part of the country.7 That “pneumonia,” as China called it, was once believed to have originated in a messy, nonhygienic “wet market” selling indiscriminate cuts of raw pork, beef, and chicken displayed in the open air for long periods of time, under little or no regulated conditions. It turned out to be the novel coronavirus Covid-19,8 which shut down the world and wiped out economic activity for much of 2020. When Covid-19 reached America and emptied out city centers and beach resorts, the consequences of China’s rise as an opaque authoritarian government directly touched American soil.

“Moreover, local officials launched a round of mandatory tests for Covid-19, followed by mandatory self-quarantine, for anyone with ‘African contacts,’ regardless of recent travel history or previous quarantine completion.”13 Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesman who tussled with foreign officials and journalists on Twitter, even posted a series of tweets suggesting American soldiers brought Covid-19 to China. “It might be US [sic] army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,” he wrote. “Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation! [sic]” The conspiracy theory that US troops brought Covid-19 to China spread rapidly there.14 Covid-19 was dangerous not merely because of the threat of the virus itself, but because the suddenness of its appearance was so overwhelming that governments scurried to embrace excessive powers for social control—powers they had no obligation to relinquish.

[sic]” The conspiracy theory that US troops brought Covid-19 to China spread rapidly there.14 Covid-19 was dangerous not merely because of the threat of the virus itself, but because the suddenness of its appearance was so overwhelming that governments scurried to embrace excessive powers for social control—powers they had no obligation to relinquish. Some administrations are already showing signs that they will be unwilling to give up their newfound powers, and that they’ll use the data obtained in the fight against Covid-19 to surveil political opponents or aid law enforcement. Many of the emergency legal powers don’t come with sunset provisions that end them after a period of time.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Perhaps for this reason, it wasn’t clear to countries how seriously to take the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 and the illness it caused, Covid-19. China closed the city of Wuhan, an unprecedented step that seemed like something only an authoritarian regime could or would do. In Italy, cases mushroomed before they knew what had hit them. Lombardy’s hospitals were so overrun that for a period, weeping doctors were forced to give sedatives to the elderly so they could die in less pain, to save limited medical resources for younger sufferers. All countries were working off the same data, as WHO and MSF had been in 2014. And as in the case of Ebola, the way countries initially framed Covid-19 affected the options they envisioned, the actions they took, and how they fared at the outset of the crisis.

But who possesses such confidence? 9 vigilance we must remain on guard not to cede our power In the spring of 2020, as America’s Covid-19 lockdown began in earnest, a series of short TikTok videos went viral on social media. The chaotic word salad sounded familiar, as did the raspy voice: “We hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet, or just very powerful light.” But the words emanated from the youthful, dynamic Sarah Cooper, lip-synching the proposed Covid-19 remedy of Donald Trump. “Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way . . .

Britain’s pathetic Covid response: “Britain Has the Wrong Government for the Covid Crisis,” Economist, June 18, 2020, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/06/18/britain-has-the-wrong-government-for-the-covid-crisis. Britain’s Covid performance in June: “Coronavirus: UK Daily Deaths Drop to Pre-lockdown Level,” BBC News, June 8, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52968160. UK data on deaths and cases: “COVID-19 Pandemic Data in the United Kingdom,” Wikipedia, accessed October 30, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_Kingdom_medical_cases_chart. Neil Armstrong’s “small step”: Robbie Gonzalez, “Read the New York Times’ 1969 Account of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing,” Gizmodo, August 25, 2012, https://io9.gizmodo.com/277292567?jwsource=cl.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Engineers working on Google search saw the same thing. Google closed its offices on March 6, days before much of the country shut down. By May, as the grim reality of the pandemic settled in, Susan Wojcicki arranged a video chat with Hank Green that he would broadcast. The pioneering YouTuber had already addressed COVID-19 on his science channel and his personal vlog (“The Anxious Scroll”). He welcomed Wojcicki, who looked into her webcam in front of a massive white inlaid bookshelf stacked neatly with paperbacks and family photos. “Well, let’s get this out of the way,” Green began. “How is quarantine?” “It’s tough,” she replied.

Everyone trapped indoors, scouring online for news, was hit with what health officials called an “infodemic.” In March, YouTube halted some human moderation until lawyers sorted out how reviewers could screen “egregious content” from homes. YouTube, Wojcicki explained, leaned on its new self-regulation systems. Engineers built a “shelf” to prominently display select videos about COVID-19 on the site and rejiggered code to promote videos from established news outlets and medical authorities higher in rankings. In April, YouTube wrote a new rule banning videos with “medically unsubstantiated” claims, and the company said viewers were primarily fed “authoritative” footage on the pandemic.

Housebound late-night TV hosts fumbled it at first, shooting from webcams angled awkwardly upward, displaying their nose hairs, and keeping in pauses for audience reactions instead of the jump cuts YouTubers knew online attention spans demanded. “Y’all seem to be failing pretty hard when it comes to doing our job,” the YouTuber MatPat teased in a video. As COVID-19 shutdowns spread, the Office star John Krasinski launched a YouTube series called Some Good News, which was purchased within two months by—wait for it—Viacom. YouTube disclosed few statistics, but those it did—views of videos about sourdough grew more than 400 percent in the pandemic’s first months—revealed an unprecedented explosion in usage.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

During the 2020 pandemic crisis, for example, polling by Yahoo News and YouGov found that 44 percent of Republicans, and half of people who relied primarily on Fox News, said it was true that “Bill Gates wants to use a mass vaccination campaign against COVID-19 to implant microchips in people that would be used to track people with a digital ID.” Fewer than a quarter of Democrats and independents believed that bizarre claim.57 Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to believe that the COVID-19 virus was intentionally created in a lab.58 And so on. “One consequence,” wrote the political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, “is that conservative news media consumers are less likely to encounter news narratives that are widely shared by those who are not part of their political tribe.

“The pace is unmatched,” one scientist told the Washington Post.21 Primer.ai, a corporate website which tracked research on the virus, showed that the number of published papers grew from only one on January 21, 2020, to more than 100,000 a year later, with no end in sight. The amount of research available on COVID-19 more than doubled each month from March through August of 2020, an accumulation of knowledge whose rate of increase seemed to rival that of the virus itself.22 The Ultimate Social Network So here, at last, in the epistemology of Locke and Peirce and Popper and in the ambitious network-building of practical inquirers, is an answer to the riddle of Theaetetus and Montaigne.

I would have reason to build a truthful reputation.35 The point of floating such notions is not to predict they would work. The point is to think about designing digital media with epistemic valence in mind. In November 2020, as Twitter sought to stem the tide of misinformation about the election and the COVID-19 pandemic, it introduced alerts warning users if they were about to share a post which had been rated false or misleading. “This is disputed,” the alert said, in boldface type. “Help keep Twitter a place for reliable info. Find out more before sharing.”36 Users could still press the retweet button, but they would have to think first, and some of them might accept the suggestion to learn more.


pages: 495 words: 114,451

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald

23andMe, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Floyd, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, microbiome, mouse model, ocean acidification, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Skype, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, TED Talk, the scientific method, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Traditional Owners: “Traditional Owners of the Great Barrier Reef,” Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2021, https://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-partners/traditional-owners/traditional-owners-of-the-great-barrier-reef. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT carbon emissions fell: E&T editorial staff, “Largest CO2 Emissions Drop in History Due to Covid-19 Pandemic,” Engineering & Technology, October 15, 2020, https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/10/covid-19-pandemic-caused-largest-co2-drop-in-history/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 37. Flicker Breonna Taylor: Darcy Costello and Tessa Duvall, “Who Are the Louisville Officers Involved in the Breonna Taylor Shooting?

Isy had just been wait-listed at one of them in Wisconsin, and I worried about leaving town while we were trying to make major decisions about her mental health, including how much they would cost. As with the health of reefs, providing for mental health is too often absent from our plans. Just as concerning, alarms about the spread of COVID-19 were beginning to sound. A few cases had shown up in Washington state, and The Nature Conservancy had just made going to the office optional. Even weighing the negatives, I convinced myself it made sense to travel to meet experts face-to-face. Or maybe I was looking for a reason to escape the looming threats.

When Hurricane Delta hit Quintana Roo on October 7, it brought windspeeds of 110 miles per hour and triggered the payout in the insurance policy. As soon as the weather calmed, the reef brigades deployed, spending hours underwater righting coral colonies and cementing them in place. There were setbacks. The COVID-19 pandemic precluded brigade members from diving every day; the payout didn’t reach Quintana Roo as quickly as intended; a second, but weaker, Hurricane Zeta pounded the reef eleven days later, interrupting repair efforts. Nonetheless, by the end of December the brigade had righted and stabilized two thousand large colonies and secured 12,500 fragments of coral to the reef


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

In these countries, we can find useful lessons and examples for other countries around the world. The prime example is the Nordic model. And to understand just how it has adapted to fill the gaps left lingering in the US-dominant social contract, we can find a clear contrast. Just look at how both handled the COVID-19 pandemic. THE NORDIC MODEL The way a society responds to a crisis reveals a lot about its social contract. As COVID-19 swept across the globe in March 2020, an economic downturn appeared imminent. To contain the damage, the United States created a patchwork of stimulus programs: directing loans, grants, and tax breaks to businesses while raising unemployment benefits and sending stimulus checks to citizens.

researchers found that 40 percent of American households: Natasha Bach, “Millions of Americans Are One Missed Paycheck away from Poverty, Report Says,” Fortune, January 29, 2019, https://fortune.com/2019/01/29/americans-liquid-asset-poor-propserity-now-report/; “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2017,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2019, https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2017/home.htm. Workers who received welfare payments: Henry Aaron, “The Social Safety Net: The Gaps That COVID-19 Spotlights,” Brookings Institution, June 23, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/06/23/the-social-safety-net-the-gaps-that-covid-19-spotlights/. transformed China from an agrarian state: “Poverty Headcount Ratio at $1.90 a Day (2011 PPP) (% of Population)—World, China,” World Bank Group, accessed July 20, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?

seven of the world’s eleven longest-serving: Dave Lawler, “How the World’s Longest-Serving Leaders Keep Power, and Hand It Over,” Axios, March 21, 2019, https://www.axios.com/worlds-longest-serving-leaders-africa-putin-8046c3c0-3cef-4166-bd1a-46533f1b46a4.html. The median age is only twenty years old: Jacob Ausubel, “Populations Skew Older in Some of the Countries Hit Hard by COVID-19,” Pew Research Center, April 22, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/22/populations-skew-older-in-some-of-the-countries-hit-hard-by-covid-19/. Over the next three decades: “World Population Prospects 2019,” United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, accessed January 3, 2020, https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/903. Already, people in the Sahel region: Ahmadou Aly Mbaye, “Africa’s Climate Crisis, Conflict, and Migration Challenges,” Africa in Focus (blog), Brookings Institution, September 20, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2019/09/20/africas-climate-crisis-conflict-and-migration-challenges/; Kanta Kumari Rigaud, Alex de Sherbinin, Bryan Jones, Jonas Bergmann, Viviane Clement, Kayly Ober, Jacob Schewe, Susana Adamo, Brent McCusker, Silke Heuser, and Amelia Midgley, Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29461.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

In an interview in late March with The New Yorker after he published his COVID-19 articles, Epstein said his prediction of 500 total COVID-19 deaths had been an error, that he’d actually meant to say 5,000 Americans in all would die. After the reporter challenged other factual assertions, Epstein finally replied, “You’re going to say that I’m a crackpot….That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That’s what you’re saying?…Admit to it. You’re saying I’m a crackpot.” Three weeks later, nearly 5,000 Americans officially died of COVID-19 in a single day, and six weeks after that, 100,000 Americans had died, 200 times Epstein’s original estimate of the total deaths, 20 times his adjusted estimate and, of course, still climbing

*5 Right-wing fantasies and misinformation about COVID-19 on Fox News apparently caused unnecessary deaths. “[Sean] Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February,” according to the research by economists in their paper “Misinformation During a Pandemic,” but “[Tucker] Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February….Greater viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic.”

Fantasyland’s magical thinking and conspiracism and mistrust of science fueled the widespread denial of and indifference to the crisis, and fused with the evil geniuses’ immediate, cold-blooded certainty that a rapid restoration of business-as-usual must take precedence over saving economically useless Americans’ lives. What I said at the end of Fantasyland I’ll restate (and I first drafted this paragraph, it’s important to note, a year before COVID-19 existed): societies do come to existential crossroads and make important choices. Here we are. The current political and economic situation wasn’t inevitable, because history and evolution never are. Nor is any particular future. Where we wind up, good or bad, is the result of choices we make over time—choices made deliberatively and more or less democratically, choices made by whoever cares more or wields more power at the time, choices made accidentally, choices ignored or otherwise left unmade.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Neat as it is, the island system wouldn’t work for us, but payments do. They work so well, in fact, that modern economies need payments as much as they need water, power and energy. Without smooth-functioning payments, financial markets, commerce, employment, even unemployment, would all be compromised. Look at who your country identified as key workers during the Covid-19 lockdown and you’ll probably find payments staff are listed. Unless you live off-grid in splendid and completely self-sufficient isolation, you need to be able to pay and (most of us at least) need to be able to get paid. If access to the payment system is critical for everyone, then our modern, monetary-based societies have first to ensure that they have a good system and, second, that everyone has access to it.

He then sold the original notes for cash, which was used to fund the resistance. After the war all the loans were redeemed properly.5 During the Irish banking strike in 1970, the Republic’s economy survived largely on the basis of uncashable cheques. For more than six months, the population effectively printed its own money. In the first half of 2020, after the Covid-19 pandemic erupted, cash ran out in parts of Papua New Guinea and residents resorted to ‘tabu’, strings of marine snail shells, measured in an arm’s length. One-and-a-half arms will buy you a packet of rice, should you ever be caught short there. On our fictional island it’s a banknote that does the rounds but it could just as well have been gold, salt, wooden sticks or even cigarettes, all of which have served as currency at some point.

We could continue to make deposits in dollars, euros, pounds, yen, lek and all the rest, even if their physical manifestations disappeared. What about ‘printing’ money? Would central banks still be able to create money if they couldn’t print it? Again, the short answer is yes. The metaphors around monetary policy are unhelpful here. Many of the headlines used to describe the Covid-19 economic aid programme involved the printing of banknotes: the Fed was ‘firing up the printing press’, the European Central Bank (ECB) was ‘priming the money-printing gun’ or, for those of a more digital bent, the ‘Money Printer Go Brrr’ meme. Evocative, but misleading; just as ‘sending’ money isn’t what banks do to make payments, ‘printing’ isn’t the way that central banks create money.


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

PHARMA IS GETTING FASTER AND SMARTER It’s February 2, 2020, I’m in New York, and Alex Zhavoronkov, from Insilico Medicine, is in San Diego. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has locked China down tight, and Italy has just seen its third case of the disease. As the deadly virus careens its way around the world, governments, medical providers, and health authorities are fraught with uncertainty. After getting the green light from its investors, Insilico has been working around the clock to identify drug candidates to treat COVID-19. “You have them?” I ask, between gulps of black coffee. “You already have them?” “Yes,” Alex replies, “we’re going to work on the six that we think are the most promising, and release the rest to the global community.

</style></author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Global Social Mobility Index 2020: why economies benefit from fixing inequality</title></titles><dates><year>2020</year><pub-dates><date><style face=”normal” font=”default” size=”100%”>January</style><style face=”normal” font=”default” charset=”238” size=”100%”> 19</style></date></pubdates></dates><publisher>World Economic Forum</publisher><urls><related-urls><url>https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality</url></related-urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote> 27Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745. Gulliver’s Travels. New York :Harper, 1950.; “meers and bounds” refers to petty disputes. 28World Economic Forum, We’ll Live to 100 – How Can We Afford It? (Geneva: WEForum, 2017), 7. 29Colin Gordon et al., “COVID-19 and the Color Line,” Boston Review, last modified May 1, 2020, http://bostonreview.net/race/colin-gordon-walter-johnson-jason-q-purnell-jamala-rogers-covid-19-and-color-line. 30Paul Irving, Interview with the author, June 9, 2020 31Max Roser, “Economic Growth: The economy before economic growth: The Malthusian trap,” All of Our World in Data, 2013, https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth#the-economy-before-economic-growth-the-malthusian-trap. 32“The World Bank In China,” World Bank, last modified April 23, 2020, https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview. 33Max Roser, “The global decline of extreme poverty – was it only China?

But the truth is that few longevity scientists of note dismiss the concept of radical life extension out of hand. Logically and scientifically, the theory of longevity escape velocity has merit. To understand the exponential medical and scientific breakthroughs we’re on the cusp of, just consider the COVID-19 vaccine in the context of history: it took two hundred years from the first smallpox outbreak in 1595 before a vaccine was invented to prevent the disease. From the first instance of polio in 1895, scientists worked for more than fifty years before a successful vaccine was developed. But within just twelve months of the discovery of SARS-CoV-2, multiple highly effective vaccines were shipped around the world.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Kitty Goes to Washington Chapter 2 September 8, 2019 Chapter 3 Killer App Chapter 4 Winter of 2019–2020 Chapter 5 Race to the Bottom Chapter 6 April 2020 Chapter 7 Get Shorty Chapter 8 Summer–Fall 2020 Chapter 9 Cheat Code Chapter 10 Holiday Season 2020–2021 Chapter 11 Poking the Bear Chapter 12 January 22, 2021 Chapter 13 Rise of the Apes Chapter 14 January 26, 2021 Chapter 15 The Influencers Chapter 16 January 27, 2021 Chapter 17 LOL, Nothing Matters Chapter 18 January 28, 2021 Chapter 19 Men in Tights Chapter 20 January 29, 2021 Chapter 21 How Not to Stick It to the Man Chapter 22 February 2021 Chapter 23 The Same Old Game Bonus Round Acknowledgments Notes Index Introduction I’ll never forget the day I found out that my sons were degenerates. With my newsroom shut by COVID-19, I was working from home the morning of January 25, 2021, when I stopped editing a column for the next day’s Wall Street Journal midsentence to see what they had been up to on the internet. After less than ten minutes of scrolling, I began to draft an email. It wasn’t to their mom or their principal or even a child psychologist.

So began the congressional testimony of an until recently middle-class, thirty-four-year-old financial wellness expert from the suburbs of Boston. His quip, a reference to a video of a virtual legal pleading that had gone viral a week earlier, injected a bit of levity into the serious proceedings, being conducted remotely on the afternoon of February 18, 2021, because of the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike the hapless, tabby-faced lawyer, Keith Patrick Gill had more than enough tech savvy to disable a Zoom filter.[1] He had recently come into a bit of money in the stock market—over $50 million at one point—and, indirectly at least, he had modern social media and trading apps, which had radically lowered the bar for novice investors, to thank for it.

By the time the company gave a tepid mid-January update on how its holiday-season sales had gone, Gill’s balance had dropped to $56,541. “You fucking retard everyone told you to sell when you were up 121k. I hope you get out of this in once [sic] piece,” was one response. And after Gill’s sobering February update, by which time stocks had begun to factor in the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic could disrupt normal life? “That 42,377 dollars you lost on a silly gamble would literally change my life. Kind of melancholy to think about on a Saturday morning.” Gill thought the stock price could possibly go as high as $20 or $25, but he wasn’t looking for affirmation. In his Roaring Kitty persona, he said he was sharing his insights so others could poke holes in his hypothesis that the once-admired company could have a profitable second act.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

But funds for ordinary investors still use the same accounting methods to show a constant dollar value for investors. People can still write checks on their accounts. Money-market funds are not regulated like banks, but for most people money in a money fund still feels like money in the bank. In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic spread around the world, people once again started frantically pulling billions of dollars out of money-market funds. And the US government once again rushed to protect the funds. “It’s just frustrating that we never really fixed this stuff to begin with,” Sheila Bair, a former regulator, said.


pages: 227 words: 67,264

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak by Rosie Wilby

Airbnb, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Santayana, Jeremy Corbyn, Kintsugi, lateral thinking, lockdown, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social contagion, social distancing, zero-sum game

I’m not getting paid.’ ‘Oh, I know. But it’s good to just give it a go.’ ‘Yes, I suppose it might get my creative juices flowing.’ ‘Yeah…that…and it’ll mean that you’ll wash your hair and put makeup on.’ During my final months of writing this book, the UK is plunged into lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. The changes to society and how we can interact are unprecedented. Early suggestions from sociologists are that the pandemic has completely reshaped our close relationships. In every country that has had a lockdown, divorce rates have surged. Perhaps that is no surprise. Divorces normally peak just after holiday seasons at Christmas and summertime when people have had no escape from one another.


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Title: The stolen year : how COVID changed children’s lives, and where we go now / Anya Kamenetz. Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, [2022] Identifiers: LCCN 2022001106 | ISBN 9781541700987 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541701014 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education—Social aspects—United States—History—21st century. | COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020—Social aspects—United States. | Children—United States—Social conditions—21st century. | Child welfare—United States—History—21st century. | Educational sociology—United States. Classification: LCC LC191.4 .K36 2022 | DDC 306.430973/0905—dc23/eng/20220524 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001106 ISBNs: 9781541700987 (hardcover), 9781541701014 (ebook) E3-20220709-JV-NF-ORI Contents Cover Title Page Copyright A Note Introduction SPRING 2020 CHAPTER 1 Schools CHAPTER 2 Hunger CHAPTER 3 Childcare CHAPTER 4 Special Education SUMMER 2020 CHAPTER 5 Racism CHAPTER 6 Courts CHAPTER 7 Mothers and Others FALL 2020 CHAPTER 8 Schools CHAPTER 9 Mental Health WINTER 2020–2021 CHAPTER 10 Politics SPRING 2021 AND BEYOND CHAPTER 11 Future Acknowledgments Discover More About the Author Notes Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

As March 2020 turned to April and then May, it dawned on all of us that, in so many ways, the cavalry wasn’t coming. Institutions and leaders weren’t taking the necessary steps to make sure children’s needs were met, for food, care, education, or connection. Hundreds of children ultimately died directly of COVID-19. This is a tragedy. We were fortunate that this direct toll was not larger. Instead, the harm of the pandemic for the overwhelming majority of children came in a host of other forms. A full year into the pandemic, more than four in ten children were still not attending school in person. That was not the norm in most parts of other wealthy countries, regardless of the many different courses of their pandemics.

I heard from some special education teachers that they worried their students would not be able to wear masks or wash their hands correctly. And they worried about transmission for those students who need help eating and help with the bathroom. Hawaii did bring special education students back to school. But it was an excruciating choice. Alexis is in delicate health and uses a feeding tube. Vanessa was terrified of her getting COVID-19. “Do we keep her home, you know, in a bubble or do we send her out into the world and risk her getting something that can kill her?” Ultimately, she concluded that she had to take the risk. “She had just shut down so much of her life. She’s barely even here. She’s a shell of a child.” School with COVID protocols in place didn’t bring all the benefits Vanessa had hoped for.


Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

After approval at an EU Summit in July, this removes eurozone break-up risk and makes the EUR a more attractive alternative to the USD as a reserve currency. ECB is quiet, saying fiscal policy (not monetary policy) needs to do the heavy lifting on COVID-19 relief. No further easing from ECB is bullish EURUSD. The Fed has been mega-dovish in response to COVID-19 and is ready to get even more dovish on the back of a new Average Inflation Targeting (AIT) framework. The details of the framework are not yet clear, and the market is excited to hear more from Fed Chairman Jerome Powell at Jackson Hole (late August) and the next Fed (FOMC) meeting (mid-September).

Striking the balance between too big and too small is vital in trading and that balance can be the difference between crushing a crisis period or getting crushed by it. 2. Keep an open mind and use your imagination. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, the market took oil from $65 to $50 as concerns about consumer demand knocked a market that was already bulled up on “cheap” energy stocks. Then the OPEC meeting in early March crumbled and crude plummeted from $50 to $27 in a week. The pressure from COVID-19 started the ball rolling then the Saudi pledge to pump like crazy broke the back of the oil market. Anyone watching oil go from $65 to $50 might have thought that was enough of a move.

For example, when a central bank meeting is coming up, and there is a tiny (but not zero) chance of that central bank cutting rates, the market loves to go into the meeting short the currency. This often creates an imbalance where there are so many people betting on the longshot (a rate cut) that you get an outsized move when no cut is delivered. Here is an example: in early February 2020, COVID-19 was popping up all over the world and had triggered the first wave of fear about the global economy. Given Australia’s dependence on commodities and global growth, some observers thought the Reserve Bank of Australia might cut rates in response to the virus contagion. Interest rate markets priced the probability of an interest rate cut as less than 10%, but if the cut was delivered, AUDUSD might drop 100 points.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

There is a growing preparedness to share data, as seen by the open science movement and the use of preprints which rapidly dominated scientific investigations of COVID-19. On the other hand, we are increasingly aware of privacy and individual rights; researchers recognise that large-scale genomic studies might have to deal with millions of individual claims over the use of personal genetic data in that research.82 Furthermore, indigenous groups realise that their DNA might be used to develop products and are understandably hostile to the exploitation of their most personal data. Finally, despite initial claims from many universities racing to develop a COVID-19 vaccine that any successful product would be made available cheaply, or free, to developing countries, virtually no university or research institute would now allow its employees to refuse to patent a significant vaccine.viii Scientists and university administrators have eaten from the tree of wealth, and things will never be the same again.

viii At the very end of 2021 an honourable exception appeared. Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine announced they were making their COVID-19 vaccine freely available around the world, starting with India. Mind you, this was only possible because a number of private donors, including philanthropic foundations, made substantial donations to the developers. In May 2022, leading members of the World Trade Organization proposed waiving patents on COVID-19 vaccines, in order to encourage the production of existing vaccines around the world. The pharmaceutical companies have been lobbying against the proposal, and as this book goes to press, no agreement has been reached

Many of the leading agencies and organisations involved in discussing gene editing have recognised that even if such developments were possible, they would encourage the growth of inequalities and should therefore be forbidden. In the world of 2020, where COVID-19 was amplifying the differences between rich and poor, both within and between countries, and where social justice had become increasingly significant in rhetoric if not reality following the explosion of Black Lives Matter, the idea of advocating that a tiny minority should profit from some spurious upgrade seemed completely off-message. This could be seen in the way that the Joint Commission of the National Academies of Science and of Medicine and the Royal Society used the COVID-19 pandemic and the struggle against racial injustice to frame their 2020 report on what they called heritable human genome editing (HHGE):ii These twin upheavals have underscored that we live in an interconnected world, where what happens in one country touches all countries, and that science occurs in a societal context.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

After fifty years we haven't been back to the Moon; we haven't cured cancer; life expectancy increases have stalled; we're still horrifically addicted to carbon-based energy. We didn't realise the visions of Kahn, Wiener and the postwar world. Our societies have been floored by a widely predicted pandemic. As I worked on the book, Covid-19 overturned much we took for granted, from meals at restaurants to transatlantic flights to safe government debt levels. But in the face of perhaps the biggest challenge for seventy-five years, government, corporate and even personal thinking was often trapped by the models of the past, incapable of building those of the future on the fly.

For example, per capita energy use grew for centuries in what has been called the Henry Adams curve, underpinning technological and societal change.28 This growth has stopped: if pre-1970 energy use trends had continued, we would have access to thirty times as much energy today, likely supplied by novel forms of nuclear power.29 But at the frontier, the availability of energy has stagnated, even as it is growth in available energy that underwrote almost everything about modernity.30 Across a range of significant metrics there is a marked deceleration in the rate of change: especially in developed countries, we are seeing a slowdown not in just absolute economic growth, or major innovations, or energy use, but also in debt (student, automobile and mortgage), the number of books published per year, population and, with it, fertility rates, the number of relationships and age of marriage, improvements in living standards, median wage growth, property and other asset price inflation, increases in human height, the introduction of new significant consumer appliances and enrolment in tertiary education.31 Covid-19 has witnessed dramatic slowdowns in business, hospitality, transport, the number of conferences and the pace of life. This slowing – and in some cases outright reversal of growth – isn't necessarily all bad but it does imply we have hit an historic inflection point. In contrast to the past, the breakthrough problem spans fields, its tentacles suffocating the economy.

This paralysis means ‘new anxieties’ are faced with ‘old ideologies’.19 Some new ideas get through: nudge unit governance for example, or perhaps nascent concepts like Universal Basic Income or Modern Monetary Theory.20 But in general, despite progress, we lack ideas to solve questions as diverse and significant as loneliness, homelessness, social care, care of the elderly and child care.21 Even the most energised debates – about race, gender or the environment, for example – have their roots in the 1960s and earlier. The Covid-19 pandemic was, in its early phases, thought to be changing every facet of life; its impact has indeed been enormous, but this has mainly involved accelerating pre-existing changes like uptake of digital technology. Perhaps the most surprising thing is how little has changed structurally. Events unfold, yes; but change at the frontiers of political economy is glacial.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

You don’t have to learn how to use it. Before COVID-19 shut down all my travel and in-person classes, I had never heard of Zoom. I learned about it from my colleagues, who were all using either Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Zoom’s success is a prime example of a new company rising because of an old company’s failure to innovate. Eric Yuan was a head engineer for Cisco’s popular Webex videoconferencing platform. He begged Cisco to improve Webex, but to no avail. So he started his own company, with a better, easy-to-use service. Yuan made $12 billion in the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Clive Thompson, in his book Coders, states that working on the front end of a website, where the user interacts with the site, is often “denigrated as aesthetic, fuzzy stuff” and “not real coding.”

As I’ve grown older and had more experiences, I can solve problems much more easily, because my memory contains more visual data. My world has gotten bigger and bigger. Navigating visually often means finding visual metaphors to explain novel situations, and I still use them. Most recently, I was particularly concerned about COVID-19 because I am in the at-risk older population. To get a grip on it when the pandemic first started, I did what I always do, by applying bottom-up thinking. I gathered numerous research papers about medications to treat the virus. Then I categorized the treatments: the antivirals and the anti-inflammatories.

With test requirements removed, student applications have skyrocketed, especially at Ivy League schools, says a February 2021 New York Times article. “First generation, lower income, as well as Black, Hispanic, and Native American students were much less likely to submit their test scores on college applications,” Anemona Hartocollis reported in the Times in April 2021. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 650 more schools dropped the test requirement. Students who would have screened themselves out based on test scores now have an opportunity to showcase their public service, hobbies, recommendations, work experience, and personal essays. This is progress, especially for visual thinkers.


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

WHO, of course, is currently at the center of the global fight against COVID-19. WHO has helped to coordinate scientific information about the pathogen and how to control it, and to coordinate and monitor the global push to contain and end the pandemic. Globalization enables one part of the world to learn from others. When one country shows successes in containing the spread of COVID-19, other parts of the world quickly aim to learn of the new methods and whether they can be applied in a local context. The development of new drugs and vaccines to fight COVID-19 is also a global effort, as was the case with HIV. The clinical trials to test the new candidate drugs and vaccines will involve researchers spanning the world.

Since then, Africa’s malaria burden has stood as an obstacle to child survival and economic development, though new drugs and preventative measures are enabling humanity to fight back against this age-old scourge. More recently, another killer pathogen circled the globe and caused devastation and havoc: the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, the cause of AIDS. HIV, like COVID-19, is a zoonosis, that is, a pathogen of animal populations that jumps to human populations through some kind of interaction and perhaps genetic mutation. AIDS entered the human population most likely from West African apes that were killed for bushmeat. COVID-19 entered the human population most likely from bats. In the case of AIDS, the virus apparently spread among Africans for decades in the middle of the twentieth century, then was transmitted internationally in the 1970s and early 1980s.

A notable initiative was the launch of a new Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, in which I was thrilled and honored to play a role during its early formulation and development. The speed of policy implementation and health interventions was greatly spurred by rising public awareness and the crucial activist leadership of civil society. COVID-19 similarly provokes the reckoning of the balance sheet of globalization, and the policy challenge of promoting the positive sides while limiting the negative consequences. The early steps in fighting COVID-19 have involved closing down international trade and travel, and even restricting the movements of people between and within cities of single nations. Quarantines are back, the word itself referring to the forty days (quaranta giorni in Italian) that Venetians held ships away from the port when the ships were suspected of carrying plague.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

In short, Uber not only missed out on the efficiencies of having a vehicle fleet and in-house insurance, it had many costs that taxi companies did not, which made its service more expensive to deliver, despite its claims to the contrary. As activity picked up in the summer of 2021 with the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines in the United States, users got a taste of what ride-hailing services will look like as the companies try to turn a profit. Users complained of higher fares, especially for trips to the airport, and much longer waits. There was a common recognition that the days of subsidized rides were coming to an end, and some users even reported turning back to taxis or bicycles for more of their trips.

The financialization of land and property has caused housing prices in major cities to soar, even after the 2008 housing crash. Housing has become a speculative investment that wealthy people buy up even if they have no intention of living in their properties, because it is seen as a safe investment with high returns—and as billionaires saw their net worth soar through the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, they have more money than ever to sink into speculative assets. With property already at unaffordable levels for a growing segment of the population, autonomous vehicles (in the form that is promised by tech executives) could act as a relief valve that makes it feasible for more people to move even farther from the city center in search of homes and rental units that do not eat up the majority of their incomes because the commute will be more tolerable.

In May 2020, Uber invested $85 million in Lime (another micromobility company) in exchange for taking Jump off its hands and, more importantly, its balance sheet. Jump had been losing $60 million a quarter. Weeks later, Jump’s e-bikes were being crushed at disposal sites around the United States even as there was a bicycle shortage in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The perception that bikes and scooters were so disposable they should just be trashed instead of repainted and deployed into Lime’s fleet, or donated to charities, or even sold to people who might want to ride them illustrated the flawed model that the micromobility industry is designed around.


pages: 341 words: 107,933

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity by Guy Hands

Airbus A320, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deal flow, Etonian, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flag carrier, high net worth, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, traveling salesman

And since, in any case, we needed to raise a substantial amount of money for Terra Firma as a whole by June 2021, I felt that far from looking to find the additional sums Parmaco required, we should actually be selling it as quickly as possible. The timing was far from perfect, given Covid-19, the fact that Parmaco’s CFO was leaving and that the CEO, Ossi Alastalo, had decided, after thirty-two years, that he wanted to go part-time and become a non-executive chairman. But while the general view of others at Terra Firma, the management team and our co-investors was that we should get the business refinanced as quickly as possible and put it up for sale later in 2021 when we had a management team in place and settled in, I felt instinctively that this simply wasn’t the right path to take. Covid-19 demonstrated to me how lucky Finnish society is to have what many people regard as the best school system in the world.

I could hardly blame Julia for never wanting to work for me; she knew my work style better than anyone and knew how I put myself and those who work for me under extraordinary pressure in order to achieve the best result possible. Covid-19 forced me to take the time to work out how all my businesses could be challenged, improved and transformed. I was going to do whatever was necessary to transform my businesses so that they would survive. This was about survival, and all businesses and their stakeholders had to come above personal sensibilities. Julia had already decided to make changes, particularly in Hand Picked’s use of technology, its deployment of specialist skills, its room rates and its brand. However, Covid-19 meant that these changes needed to be done far quicker and more extensively than anyone in Hand Picked was prepared for.

But once it became clear that a basic principle had been established that an income would be provided to employees whom the lockdown had denied work, we realised that the fragility of great swathes of the economy had been recognised. Furlough would help ensure the survival of businesses that millions relied on, just as government intervention had saved the banks in 2008. Stuck in Hawaii, I focused on getting fitter and on looking beyond June. Governments might have been assuring us that the Covid-19 crisis would last only a few months, but I was more persuaded by my elder son’s view that the pandemic was here to stay for at least two years. That meant hoping for the best but planning for the worst. That in turn meant that we needed to focus forensically on each business, stress-test each one and decide whether change was necessary and, if so, how radical that change should be.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Fairplay, “Designing_for_disorder.Pdf,” April, 2022, fairplayforkids .org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/designing_for_disorder.pdf.   5.  Emma Goldberg, “‘Techlash’ Hits College Campuses,” New York Times, January 11, 2020.   6.  Colleen Mcclain, “How Parents’ Views of Their Kids’ Screen Time, Social Media Use Changed During COVID-19,” Pew Research Center (blog), www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/28/how-parents-views-of-their-kids-screen-time-social-media-use-changed-during-covid-19. Index ABI Technologies, 131 Accountable Tech, 254 ACM Queue, 146 “active” and “passive” media, 216 Acton-Boxborough Regional School District’s edtech policy, 232–33, 245–48 digital tools criteria checklist, 248 letter to teachers, 245–47 Administrative Theory and Praxis (journal), 69–70 Advertising Age, 69 Age-Appropriate Design Code (Great Britain), 200–201, 203 Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project, 153–54 Aladdin (film), 159 Alana Institute, 254 Algorithmic Justice League, 254 algorithms, xv, 45, 48–49, 50, 137–41, 147–53 definitions, 45 Google’s search engines, 146–51 machine-learning, 45 personalized recommendations, 45, 48–49, 50, 137–41 predictive, 45, 48–49, 50, 137–41 racist biases and stereotypes, xv, 146–53 social media sites and, 151–53 Algorithms of Oppression (Nobel), 149 AlgoTransparency, 48–49 Alliance for Childhood, 25n allowances, children’s, 226 Almon, Joan, 13, 25n Alphabet, 102 Alter, Adam, 33 Amazon, 59, 77, 133–41, 165 Amazon Kid+, 136 devices marketed to children, 134–36, 151 digital assistants, 133–34, 137–41, 151 Echo Dot Kids Edition, 134–41, 151 Kindle e-reader, 134 one-click buying, 77 persuasive design, 46 predictive algorithms and personalized recommendations, 137–41 Amazon Alexa (voice-activated digital assistant), 133–34, 137–41, 151 “Alexa, I’m bored” feature, 139–40 and Echo Dot Kids Edition, 134–41, 151 predictive algorithms and personalized recommendations, 137–41 search feature and racism, 151 “skills,” 134, 141 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), 43, 52–53 American Coal Foundation, 170 American Gas Association, 182 American Girl dolls, 139 American Psychological Association (APA), 51–52 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 41, 238 Amnesty International, 68 Apple app store, 216 branding and brand loyalty, 67–68, 165 customers’ privacy, 68 digital assistant, 134 hardware dumping in schools, 184 iCloud, 68 in-school advertising (teaching materials), 165 Super Bowl commercial (1984), 67–68 See also iPads apps age-appropriate, 216 commercial-free, 217 edtech and Prodigy, 181, 184–89, 232–33 facilitating meaningful learning, 194–95 “free” apps (“freemiums”), 46, 119, 181, 186–87, 217 Lego, 4, 93–94, 95, 100, 119 Lego City, 93–94, 95, 100 nagware (pop-up ads), 46, 186–87, 189 Aristotle (Mattel smart device), 36–38 artificial intelligence (AI), 66, 135, 141–43 communicative robots (or “sociable bots”), 141–43, 231 and parasocial relationships, 142–43 Ascano, Armida, 61–62, 64–65 The Atlantic, 85 attachment, 36–38, 79 and smart devices, 36–38, 141–43 Australia, 74–75, 93, 94, 118 Australian Financial Review, 200 autoplay settings, 77–78, 128, 204 awe and wonder, 21–24 Axe, 64–65 Baby Einstein videos, 4, 199 Backyard Basecamp, 255 Balloon Pop (app), 119 Banks, Russell, 197 Barbie, 59, 85, 138, 139, 155–57 Barbie You Can Be Anything, 139 Black Barbie, 157 Hello Barbie, 142 Hispanic Barbie, 155–57, 162 Barton, Christopher, 158 Barton, Joe, 38 Bates, Joseph, 229 Be Internet Awesome (Google SEMS), 176–79 Be Tech Wise with Baby!

Ferguson (1882), 158 Pokémon, 30, 84–85, 102–6, 185 branding and, 30 collectibles craze, 30, 84–85, 105–6 theme song chorus (“gotta catch ‘em all”), 30, 85 Pokémon GO, 102–4 Pokémon Oreos, 105–6 Pokémon Sleep, 103–5 Pokémon Smile, 105–6 Political Tribes (Chua), 61–62 pop-up ads (nagware), 46, 186–87, 189 poverty children and, 65 COVID-19 disparities, xv materialistic values and, 97 millennial families and, 121 precautionary principle, 38–39, 209 presidential branding, 67, 69–71 privacy Apple, 68 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 135, 201–3 data mining, 47–48, 81 Echo Dot Kids Edition, 135–36 edtech and inBloom administrative platform, 233–34 Google tracking and data collection, 4, 177–78, 183 online behavior tracking, 47–49, 137, 177–78, 183 smart devices and surveillance/data collection, 36, 47, 133–36, 177–78 YouTube, 4, 47–48 Prodigy Education, 185–86 Prodigy English, 186 Prodigy (freemium math app), 181, 184–89, 192–94, 232–33 nagware and pressures to upgrade, 181, 186–87, 189 question of effectiveness at teaching math, 186, 187–89, 232 as social network, 189 professional organizations, corporate funding and, 238 progressive education Dewey’s philosophy of, 168–69 and personalized learning, 191–92 Psychological Science in the Public Interest (journal), 194–95 Psychology Today, 191 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 52–53 public education American democratic citizenship, 168–69, 172 Dewey’s philosophy of, 168–69 purpose of, 168–69, 172 See also edtech industry; schools, corporate advertising in public media (commercial-free), 52–53, 216 Publicis Groupe, 117 Punished by Rewards (Kohn), 191 puppet therapy, 3, 27 characters’ behavior as models for children, 20 and parasocial relationships, 143 video chats during COVID-19 pandemic, xiii, 33, 138, 194 push notifications, 46, 200, 204, 220–21 Pussy Cat Dolls, 4 Putnam, Robert, 132 racism, racial biases, and racial stereotypes, xv–xvi, 146–62 Alexa’s search feature, 151 algorithms and, xv, 146–53 children’s stories and racialized dolls and toys, 153–62 and COVID-19 pandemic, xiii–xiv and digital beauty filters, 153 Disney films, 159–60, 161 Google’s search engines, 146–51 name searches and search terms (e.g., “Black girls”), 146–47, 149–51 and postslavery history, 158–59 and social media sites, 151–53 white dolls and, 153–57 Radesky, Jenny, 119, 125 radio advertising (mid-twentieth century), 132 Raffi Foundation for Child Honoring, 258 Ranking Digital Rights, 258 reading books differences between using smartphones and, 126, 127–28, 132–33 e-books and e-readers, 132–33, 134, 221 reading to children, 132–33, 214 Reagan, Ronald, 29, 69, 166 Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Turkle), 133 Reinhard, Keith, 69 religious organizations and spiritual leaders, 71, 238–39 Reset Australia, 75 resistance parenting suggestions, 207–28 age-appropriate and commercial-free apps, 216–17 be wary of convenience, 222–2 family plan/agreement about tech use at home, 222 helping kids resist marketing-induced behaviors and values, 225–27 infants and toddlers, 212–14 middle childhood/elementary grades, 217–19 preschool and kindergarten, 214–17 reading to kids, 214 reducing your own time with tech, 220–21 screen time limits, 43, 53, 209–11, 213, 223 and six principles of child development, 209, 210–11 smartphones, 218, 220–21, 225 social media sites, 219 tech-free, commercial-free family time, 223–24 tech-free solutions to boredom, 224–25 tech-free time outdoors, 224 tech-free zones in the home, 224 things to consider in making decisions for your family about tech and commercial culture, 222–25 toys, 213–14 retail therapy, 90–91 Rethinking Schools, 170 Rewards external (material), 8, 97–102, 104–8, 193, 194 intermittent (persuasive design technique), 46–47, 185 and intrinsic motivation, 8, 97–103, 107–8 Rideout, Vicky, 1 Roblox, 218 Rodgers and Hammerstein, 90 Rogers, Fred, 3, 25 Roof, Dylann, 149 Rowling, J.K., 139n Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, 211 Rubenstein, Rheta, 186 Ryan’s World (Ryan’s ToysReview), 72, 204 Salesforce IoT, 45 same-sex marriage legalization, 230 Sanrio, 28 Scholastic, 170 schools, corporate advertising in, 163–80 Channel One News, 182–86 corporate-sponsored “educational” films (1950s), 182 corporate teaching materials (SEMS), 164–66, 169–80, 199 credit card companies and financial literacy materials, 172–75, 180 Disney, 164–65 fast food industry, 165, 167, 172, 180 financially-strapped schools, 166–67, 300–1n20 fossil fuel industry, 170–72, 179–80 Google’s Be Internet Awesome, 176–79 Impossible Foods, 175–76 instilling brand loyalty, 164, 165, 172, 184 local level efforts to change, 231–34 “partnerships,” 164, 167 science materials that deny climate change, 171–72 and true purpose of public education, 168–69, 172 See also edtech industry Schwartz, Shalom, 96 Scooby-Doo, 67 Scotland, 118 Screen Free Week, 234, 254 screen time, children’s, 39–43, 52–53, 118–19, 209–11, 213 babies’ and toddlers’ interaction with screens, 17–19, 39, 41–43, 213 and children of tech executives, 129, 218 and COVID-19 pandemic, 39–40 and language acquisition, 41–42 online videos, 40 recommendations, 43, 53, 209–11, 213, 215, 223 state bills to limit in early childhood settings, 204–5 touch screens, 40, 215 TV watching, 40, 42, 100 Screen Time Action Network at Fairplay, 234, 253 search engine optimization (SEO) companies, 148 search engines Alexa’s search feature, 151 algorithms and, 146–53 Google Search, 145–51 name searches and search terms, 146–47, 149–51 racial and ethnic biases, 146–53 and SEO companies, 148 Searle, Mike, 61 Sears catalog, 158–59 self-regulation, 21, 42, 193 SEMS (“Sponsored Educational Materials”), 164–66, 169–80, 199 financial literacy materials produced by credit card companies, 172–75, 180 and fossil fuel industry, 170–72, 179–80 Google’s Be Internet Awesome, 176–79 Impossible Foods and climate change education, 175–76 science materials that deny climate change, 171–72 See also schools, corporate advertising in Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention (1848), 230 The Sense of Wonder (Carson), 23 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 91 Sesame Street, 27, 131 Sesame Workshop, 52–53, 131 “7 Rings” (song), 90 sexualized toys, media, and clothing, 4, 26, 59, 85, 156 Share Save Spend, 258 Shell Oil Company, 165, 171, 182 Shenoy, Neal, 136 Shine, Nora, 232–33, 234 Shrek, 67, 142 Silent Spring (Carson), 23 Siri, 134 ŠKODA Auto, 117 slavery, 158–59, 230 sleep, 103–5, 224 digital devices and, 104, 224 Pokémon Sleep app, 103–5 slogans, advertising, xiv smart devices, 36–38, 45, 47, 133–41 Amazon’s Alexa, 133–34, 137–41, 151 Aristotle, 36–38 attachment and, 36–38, 141–43 digital personal assistants, 133–41, 151 and “dumb” watches, 220 Echo Dot Kids Edition, 134–41, 151 Internet of Things (IoT), 45, 47, 133 privacy and data collection, 36, 47, 133–36, 177–78 See also smartphones smartphones, 35, 45, 66, 100, 105, 126–28, 130–33 differences between reading books and using, 126, 127–28, 132–33 effect on conversations between parents and children, 130–31, 132–33 and internet access, 40–41 marketed to children, 130–31 parents’ and caregivers’ overuse of, 41, 125–27, 221 resistance parenting advice, 218, 220–21, 225 Snapchat, 5, 73, 152–53, 202, 204 social change, steps toward systemic, 198–99, 208, 229–40 at the local level, 231–35 Minnesota’s Digital Wellbeing Bill, 236–37 organizations working to change laws and policies, 231, 234–35 organizing screen-free weeks in communities, 234–35 religious organizations and spiritual leaders, 238–39 schools and school districts, 231–34 young people’s advocacy groups, 237–38 social media sites, 5–6, 40, 72–76, 151–53, 219 and adolescents’ mental health, 73–75, 219 algorithms and racial biases, 151–53 brand tribes and marketing, 63–65 girls and, 73–75 influencers, 5, 72, 86–88, 204 intermittent rewards, 46–47 “likes,” 46, 47, 63, 72, 73, 152, 153 resistance parenting recommendations, 219 self-branding, 5, 72, 76, 219 Somerville, Kyle, 158 The Sound of Music (film), 90 South Africa, 117 Spears, Britney, 3 Spiderman, 13, 67, 121 SpongeBob SquarePants, 138, 142 SpongeBob SquarePants Challenge, 139, 140 Sponsored Educational Materials.

12:  Resistance Parenting: Suggestions for Keeping Big Tech and Big Business at Bay 13:  Making a Difference for Everybody’s Kids Afterword Acknowledgments Appendix: Model Edtech Policy for School Districts Suggested Reading, Viewing, and Listening Resources Notes Index A Note to the Reader The facts are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter one bit whether something is actually better or faster or more efficient. What matters is what the consumer believes. —SETH GODIN, All Marketers Are Liars I was working away at this book in March 2020 as the COVID-19 virus spread, beginning to take its terrible toll around the world. Sheltering in place began. Confined to my house, I thought I would devote my unexpected, extended solitude to immersing myself in writing. Instead, I found myself distracted by the destruction at hand—mounting deaths, rampant unemployment, and beleaguered and inadequately provisioned health care workers.


The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioff, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

At nearly any other point over the last twenty years, that would have been relatively easy. Scientists, like writers, are generally happy to tell you all about their work. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that became almost impossible to do in person. The US fleet of research vessels had adopted strict protocols for keeping the disease off its ships. As we learned from the COVID-19 outbreaks on cruise ships in the early days of the pandemic, viruses spread extremely well on ships. With its tight hallways, handrails touched by everyone on board, and big enclosed dining halls, a ship is an incubator of illness.

“Mining’s Tesla Moment: DeepGreen Harvests Clean Metals from the Seafloor,” Mining.com, June 15, 2017, https://www.mining.com/web/minings-tesla-moment-deepgreen-harvests-clean-metals-seafloor/. 105.Duncan Currie, “Deep Sea Conservation Coalition Intervention,” paper presented at International Seabed Authority Council Meeting, Kingston, Jamaica, December 8, 2021, https://savethehighseas.org/isa-tracker/category/statements. 106.Casson, “Deep Trouble,” 8. 107.Sue Farran, “COVID-19 Made Deep-Sea Mining More Tempting for Some Pacific Islands—This Could Be a Problem,” The Conversation, June 14, 2021, https://theconversation.com/covid-19-made-deep-sea-mining-more-tempting-for-some-pacific-islands-this-could-be-a-problem-158550. 108.Kolbert, “Mining the Bottom of the Sea”; Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Deep Sea Is Filled with Treasure, but It Comes at a Price,” New Yorker, June 6, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/21/the-deep-sea-is-filled-with-treasure-but-it-comes-at-a-price. 109.Kolbert, “The Deep Sea Is Filled with Treasure, but It Comes at a Price.” 110.Bryant, “$500 Million of SPAC Cash Vanishes Under the Sea.” 111.Elham Shabahat, “‘Antithetical to Science’: When Deep-Sea Research Meets Mining Interests,” Mongabay, October 4, 2021, https://news.mongabay.com/2021/10/antithetical-to-science-when-deep-sea-research-meets-mining-interests/. 112.Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean, 41. 113.Philomène A.

I was listening to the exchange over headphones at my home in San Diego in late 2020. It was just a few days after Joe Biden had won the presidential election, and SCUFN was hosting its first virtual meeting in its forty-five-year history. The annual five-day meeting, scheduled to take place that year in St. Petersburg, Russia, had been called off due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, the SCUFN members met virtually over six tightly planned hours spread across two days. They planned to process more than fifty new names for seafloor features, which was fewer than usual to accommodate the new virtual format. At the last in-person session, SCUFN had processed nearly two hundred new names.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

Fact-checking tools to label misinformation would be used to correct conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Facebook’s HR teams would begin drafting a work-from-home policy as Facebook’s offices across Asia were tasked with gathering information about what was truly happening in China. And Zuckerberg’s personal relationship to the world’s most famous doctors and health experts would be used to promote figures of authority. Zuckerberg told the teams to report back to him in forty-eight hours. “This is going to be big, and we have to be ready,” he said. When the WHO designated COVID-19 a public health emergency on January 30, Facebook’s PR team had a blog post prepared.

When asked if he felt like he was taking heat on behalf of “the entire internet,” Zuckerberg broke into laughter. It took him a few seconds to collect himself. “Um. That’s what leading is,” he said. Chapter 14 Good for the World Well before U.S. government officials and much of the world were aware, Zuckerberg knew that the COVID-19 virus was spreading dangerously fast. In mid-January, he began to receive intelligence briefings on the global spread of the disease from top infectious disease experts working at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Dr. Tom Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Joe DeRisi, co-president of the Biohub funded by CZI, reported that the Chinese government and Trump were downplaying the risk and that the virus had spread to half a dozen countries.

Kaplan sided with his team, which argued that Trump had simply been musing about the effects of bleach and UV light, rather than issuing a directive. Facebook’s PR teams pointed out the distinction to journalists and released a statement saying, “We continue to remove definitive claims about false cures for Covid-19, including ones related to disinfectant and ultraviolet light.” “We, all of us at Facebook, just couldn’t get our heads around the idea that it would be the president who spread nonsense cures about COVID,” said one senior Facebook executive. “We were just stuck in an untenable position. It meant defending a decision to let the president spread absolute nonsense medical information in the middle of a pandemic.”


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

More than seventy countries have been found running disinformation campaigns. China is quickly catching up with Russia; others from Turkey to Iran are developing their skills. (The CIA, too, is no stranger to info ops.) Early in the COVID-19 pandemic a blizzard of disinformation had deadly consequences. A Carnegie Mellon study analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 at the height of the first lockdown. Eighty-two percent of influential users advocating for “reopening America” were bots. This was a targeted “propaganda machine,” most likely Russian, designed to intensify the worst public health crisis in a century.

It would augment and empower people to be even more productive. Maybe there were some risks, they conceded, but they weren’t too bad. People were smart. Solutions have always been found. No worries, they seemed to think, on to the next presentation. Some years later, a short time before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended a seminar on technology risks at a well-known university. The setup was similar: another large table, another high-minded discussion. Over the course of the day a series of hair-raising risks were floated over the coffees, biscuits, and PowerPoints. One stood out. The presenter showed how the price of DNA synthesizers, which can print bespoke strands of DNA, was falling rapidly.

Like AI, genetic engineering is a field in blistering motion, evolving and developing by the week, a massive global concentration of talent and energy beginning to bear real fruit (in this case, literally). CRISPR use cases are multiplying, from tomatoes ultrarich in vitamin D to treatments for conditions including sickle-cell disease and beta-thalassemia (a blood disorder producing abnormal hemoglobin). In the future, it could offer treatments for COVID-19, HIV, cystic fibrosis, and even cancer. Safe, widespread gene therapies are on their way. These will create crops that are resistant to drought and disease, boost yields, and help enable the production of biofuels at scale. Just a few decades ago biotech was expensive, complex, and slow moving, with only the most talented and well-resourced teams able to participate.


pages: 125 words: 35,820

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Constantine Buhayer

banking crisis, British Empire, business climate, centre right, COVID-19, financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, lockdown, low cost airline, offshore financial centre, open economy, Skype, women in the workforce, young professional

The expression “my child” can be used by a much older person, especially by a woman, to address or advise a clearly younger person, even if they don’t know them. In truth, good prospects for young people are a bit thin; salaries in 2022 could be as low as €400 a month. This is mitigated by the fact that many have somewhere parental to stay. The Covid 19 pandemic did little to improve their chances of work, and many have had to move abroad. Since the 1990s they have been leaving as young professionals with diplomas in their hands, some perchance dreaming of following in the footsteps of Nicosia-born Sir Christopher Pissarides and, like him, winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.

DOCUMENTATION Many foreign citizens enter simply showing their passport; others receive visas on arrival; some need visas. Naturally, check what applies to you. If you enter the North from Turkey, you may be refused entrance to the South. No vaccinations are needed to enter either part of the island. However, following the Covid-19 pandemic, entry requirements and vaccinations may vary according to circumstance. If driving, it is advisable to take out insurance. The European Health Insurance Card, EHIC, is valid in the southern Republic of Cyprus and travel insurance and medical coverage is recommended. Getting Around Bicycles can be taken on some buses serving the main intercity routes, but no dogs are allowed.

Many Cypriots go abroad for their health issues, in particular to the UK and Athens, where there may be relatives they can rely upon. Israeli hospitals with their specializations have lately been added to their list. For dental work, some Cypriots from the South choose to head north to dentists who can offer good work and at a lower price. The health system coped as well as can be expected with the Covid-19 pandemic and people respected the safety measures required of them. Vaccination centers were clean, organized, with only small lines, and the personnel were helpful. Occasionally, the only glitch was a lack of dual ventilation systems. LOW CRIME BUT … Compared to other European countries, Cyprus, both North and South, has low crime rates.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

I’d favor a UBI-style plan coupled with Medicare for All and generous unemployment benefits for workers who are displaced by automation, similar to how the federal government stepped in with emergency cash transfers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Whatever we do, it’s inarguable that any collective action would be better than doing what we’re currently doing to address automation-related economic pains on the federal level in the United States, which is essentially nothing. In addition to big nets, we also need to think about the small webs we can create to support each other through this technological transition. Because in the absence of some fairly radical economic and policy changes, we’re going to have to do a lot of this ourselves. Our response to the Covid-19 crisis is a useful guide here.

I spent much of 2019 reporting on these changing attitudes, being careful to keep an open mind to the possibility that these fears were exaggerated. After all, unemployment in the United States was still near a record low, and while corporate executives were chattering among themselves about AI and automation, there wasn’t much obvious evidence that it was taking a toll on workers yet. Then Covid-19 arrived. In the spring of 2020, much of the United States entered shelter-in-place lockdowns, and my phone began lighting up with calls from tech companies telling me how the pandemic was affecting their plans for automation. The difference, now, was that companies wanted to publicize their efforts to automate jobs.

FedEx started using package-sorting robots to fill in for sick and absent workers in its shipping facilities. Shopping centers, apartment complexes, and grocery stores splurged on cleaning and security robots to keep their stores sanitized and safe, creating shortages among those robots’ suppliers. In all, Covid-19 seemed to speed up the automation timeline by years, if not decades. McKinsey, the giant consulting firm, dubbed it “the great acceleration.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed that the company had experienced “two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” In March 2020, a survey by the accounting firm EY found that 41 percent of corporate executives were investing more in automation to prepare for a post-coronavirus world.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

., 16, 41 Rub and Tug (film), 149 Rubin, David, 139–40 Rubio, Marco, 25 Russian disinformation, social media and, 191, 198–99 Sacco, Justine, 208 same-sex marriage issues, 34, 46, 63, 68, 136, 224 Samuel, biblical book of, 4–5 San Francisco 49ers, 157–58 Sanders, Bernie, 67 Sandmann, Nick, 185–86 Sanford, Nevitt, 7 Sanger, Margaret, 49 Sargent, Greg, 2, 181 Scarborough, Joe, 13, 25, 183, 185 Schmidt, Gavin, 107–8 Schmidt, Harald, 105 Schwab, Klaus, 129 ScienceTM, substituted for science COVID 19 protocols and exceptions for Floyd protests and riots, 97–104 COVID 19 vaccines and social justice tranching of availability, 104–6 diversity considered over merit, 114–17 gender dysphoria and, 112–13 outright political endorsements and, 117–18 postmodernism’s impact on, 110–12 race and, 102, 113–14 science and objective truths, 95, 98 ScienceTM and politics, 98–99 Scientism and climate change, 106–10 as threat to scientific credibility, 118 Scientific American, 117 Scruton, Roger, 34 Section 230 of Communications Decency Act, 193–96, 200 Selma (film), 140–41 Seltzer, Wendy, 11 service providers, Left’s attempt to discourage conservative media and, 180–81, 182–83 Sevugan, Hari, 43 Sex Roles (journal), 85 Shafer, Jack, 168–69 Shape of Water, The (film), 140 Shields, Jon, 94 Shor, David, 16 Shrier, Abigail, 112 Signal, 210 “silence is violence,” 36, 127–28, 218 silenced majority, of voters insecurity of authoritarian and, 22 Left’s takeover of institutions and, 34–36 pollsters and shock of Trump’s 2016 victory, 23–27 Silliman College, of Yale University, 93 Silverman, Fred, 145 Silverman, Sarah, 150 Silverstein, Jake, 179 Sister Souljah, 58 1619 Project, of New York Times, 165, 178–80 Skipper, John, 158–59 Smith, Ben, 172–73 Snead, O.

In the midst of a global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, scientists in laboratories across the world stepped into the breach. They researched the most effective methods of slowing the virus’s spread. They developed new therapeutics designed to reduce death rates, and researched new applications of already-existent drugs. Most incredibly, they developed multiple vaccines for Covid-19 within mere months of its exponential spread across the West. Most of the West didn’t shut down until March 2020. By December, citizens were receiving their first doses of vaccine, immunizing the most vulnerable and flattening the infection curve. Meanwhile, in hospitals, doctors and nurses labored in perilous conditions to care for waves of the sick.

And the big companies are growing. The arenas in which big companies thrive—the services sector, finance, the retail trade—are also the fastest-growing areas in the American economy.45 Unsurprisingly, these are also the areas in which employers are most likely to lean to the Left, or at least to mirror leftist priorities. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the advantage for large companies. Between March 2020 and September 2020, more than 400,000 small businesses closed. Meanwhile, big companies got bigger. As economist Austan Goolsbee wrote in The New York Times, “Big Companies Are Starting to Swallow the World.”46 Small businesses are generally tied to the communities in which they exist—they know the locals, they trust the locals, and they work with the locals.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

Here the benefits of the tall building kick in. Since it maximizes the number of people on a given plot of land, it can offset the higher land cost. Meanwhile, it makes for more compact and dense urban living, allowing for more possible social connections between people, which can stimulate economic growth. But, as COVID-19 showed, there are downsides to density. Skyscraper living can be more contagious, with aerosols easily spread in crowded elevators and improperly ventilated high-rise shafts. The pandemic-induced urban exodus may grind the supertall outburst to a halt. Some countries have decided to base their national policy on the positive relationship between urbanization and economic growth.

At night, many of these apartments are dark, with their owners living in them only a few weeks a year, while every day the towers cast long shadows on the neighboring streets and parks. The truckloads of cement and tons of steel to build a few homes so high in the sky place a disproportionate amount of strain on our environments. COVID-19 threatened high-rises and dense urban streets, as hotbeds for the virus to spread. As ingenious as these structures may be, they are also markers of increased inequity and societal risk. In this book, I tell the story of the world’s tallest buildings. I will show the behind-the-scenes design and engineering making possible the monoliths we take for granted, from the 700-ton swinging weights which “tune” buildings to the double-decker elevators moving up to 50 miles per hour and without “howling.”

The Burj Khalifa was completed in 2009 just as the Dubai property market collapsed. Throughout history, the hubris of tall structures, like the Tower of Babel or the Easter Island moai, have seemed to tempt the gods, leading to societal breakdown. In 2020, with a wave of new supertalls in New York still under construction, COVID-19 hit. The pandemic brought the city to an abrupt halt, including its feverish construction activity. Was the curse striking again, with New York’s record-breaking skyscrapers the latest symptoms of excess, and looming economic decline? Economists have since debunked the supposed “Skyscraper Curse.”


pages: 712 words: 212,334

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

But Caroline Maloney, the New York congresswoman who chaired the committee, sent a letter on December 8 indicating that if the family did not voluntarily accept her invitation, she would be forced to subpoena them. Nine days later, the hearing was convened. The proceedings would be held remotely, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and that morning, David Sackler, dressed in a dark suit and sitting in a featureless fluorescent space that looked like a borrowed office, raised his right hand and was sworn in. When the family realized that some of them would have no choice but to appear, they had negotiated, offering David and Kathe, along with Craig Landau from Purdue.

It wasn’t just that the bankruptcy process prized economic compromise over all other values; it was that bankruptcy law is so technical and antiseptic that it is difficult for nonlawyers to grasp. “We’re fighting on their terms now,” one of the PAIN activists, Harry Cullen, complained. “The court speaks in terms of numbers. Everything is fungible.” Early on, the group staged die-ins on the steps of the courthouse. But after the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, Drain stopped holding hearings in person, shifting to telephone conferences, which robbed the protesters of a theater in which to stage their actions. “It chops us off at the knees,” Cullen said. “How are we supposed to hold them accountable?” Goldin actively intervened in the proceedings, helping start a committee of victims to push for greater accountability in the bankruptcy.


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In 1918, an unusual strain of the flu managed to kill between 50 million and 75 million people around the globe.15 Several years later, a mysterious sleeping sickness dubbed encephalitis lethargica—probably also of viral origin—disabled more than a million patients before vanishing without a trace.16 I believed that despite advances in hygiene, sanitation, and medical sciences, we also lived in the era of high population densities and air travel, and that our ability to treat viral infections remained in its infancy; thus, I felt that we were not necessarily better prepared should a similar outbreak happen again. From that perspective, I look at the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the globe in 2020 as a sort of terrible blessing. Although it caused untold suffering and pain, it also reminded us of our vulnerability to infectious diseases while being far less lethal than many of the plagues of old. I was also glad to be proved wrong when it came to our ability to develop novel vaccines in a matter of months. In a sense, it might have been a comparatively gentle wake-up call sparing us from a worse fate down the road. But there’s another lesson from COVID-19: nothing is black-and-white, and the right course of action is obvious only in retrospect.

Lindsey Ellefson, “Vox Deletes January Tweet About Coronavirus That Really Has Not Aged Well,” Yahoo, March 24, 2020, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/vox-deletes-january-tweet-coronavirus-203359493.html. 19. “America’s Two Largest States Are Fighting COVID-19 Differently,” The Economist, February 4, 2021, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/02/06/americas-two-largest-states-are-fighting-covid-19-differently/. 20. Mark Memmott, “Sniper Attack On Calif. Power Station Raises Terrorism Fears,” National Public Radio, February 5, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears/.

Raina Macintyre, “Effectiveness of Cloth Masks for Protection Against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 26, no. 10 (October 2020), https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-0948_article/. 3. “Guidance for Private Gatherings,” California Department of Public Health, October 9, 2020, https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/CDPH-Guidance-for-the-Prevention-of-COVID-19-Transmission-for-Gatherings-10-09.aspx. 4. “Executive Order 2020-42,” Michigan.gov, April 9, 2020, https://www.michigan.gov/whitmer/0,9309,7-387-90499_90705-525182--,00.html. 5. Laylan Connelly, “California Surfer in Handcuffs After Enjoying Empty, Epic Waves,” Mercury News, April 3, 2020, https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/03/malibu-sup-surfer-in-handcuffs-after-enjoying-empty-epic-waves/. 6.


pages: 269 words: 72,752

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, impulse control, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, zero-sum game

Donald’s initial response to COVID-19 underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs. Fear—the equivalent of weakness in our family—is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old. When Donald is in the most trouble, superlatives are no longer enough: both the situation and his reactions to it must be unique, even if absurd or nonsensical. On his watch, no hurricane has ever been as wet as Hurricane Maria. “Nobody could have predicted” a pandemic that his own Department of Health and Human Services was running simulations for just a few months before COVID-19 struck in Washington state.

As the pressures upon him have continued to mount over the course of the last three years, the disparity between the level of competence required for running a country and his incompetence has widened, revealing his delusions more starkly than ever before. Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing so would require courage, strength of character, deference to experts, and the confidence to take responsibility and to course correct after admitting mistakes.

Employees and political appointees can’t fight back when he attacks them in his Twitter feed because to do so would risk their jobs or their reputations. Freddy couldn’t retaliate when his little brother mocked his passion for flying because of his filial responsibility and his decency, just as governors in blue states, desperate to get adequate help for their citizens during the COVID-19 crisis, are constrained from calling out Donald’s incompetence for fear he would withhold ventilators and other supplies needed in order to save lives. Donald learned a long time ago how to pick his targets. * * * Donald continues to exist in the dark space between the fear of indifference and the fear of failure that led to his brother’s destruction.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

Louis—the complex built around the château that Stonecipher had bought while he was running McDonnell Douglas, and which Boeing had turned into its own version of Crotonville. Calhoun, hoping to channel his GE roots, was now using the center as his makeshift office as he tried to revive the company. We flew from New York to St. Louis on the first Monday of March 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic was worsening around the world, and although we didn’t know it at the time, in a little over a week the country would grind to a halt. After landing, Boeing executives showed us around the company’s fighter jet factory and a nearby innovation lab, before taking us to the Leadership Center.

Upon learning of his death, President Trump tweeted a tribute to his old friend and collaborator. Trump missed the mark, however, invoking as a badge of honor the nickname that Welch had always despised. “There was no corporate leader like ‘Neutron’ Jack,” Trump tweeted. “He was my friend and supporter. We made wonderful deals together.” The funeral, held just as the Covid-19 pandemic was taking hold in the United States, was the last time such a collection of business luminaries would gather for more than a year. Within a matter of weeks, much of the global economy ground to a halt. Travel all but stopped. Restaurants were shuttered. Offices emptied out. Factories closed.

., 24–25, 212 Bertelsmann, 51 Bethlehem Steel, 165 Bezos, Jeff, 134, 171–74, 184, 185, 222–23 Bezos Academy, 134 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 133–34 Bin Hussain, Muath, 135 Black Monday (October 19, 1987), 53 BlackRock, 213–14 Blitzer, Wolf, 90–91 Bloomberg, Michael, 132–33 Blumenthal, Richard, 82 Blystone, John, 105 Boeing, 9, 75, 77, 86–90, 126–30, 137, 186–94, 203 bailout, 224 Business Jet Project, 102, 119 Dave Calhoun as CEO, 189, 190–94, 224 Congressional investigations of 737 Max, 156, 189, 194 Covid-19 pandemic and, 224 Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash (2019), 187–89, 190, 194 headquarters relocation to Chicago, 88–89, 219 Leadership Center (near St. Louis), 87, 191–94 Lion Air Flight 610 crash (2018), 185–87, 190 Jim McNerney as CEO, 113, 127–30, 153–54, 194, 200 Dennis Muilenburg as CEO, 154–56, 187–90 pension plan elimination, 128 737 Max with MCAS (737 redesign), 153–56, 186–90, 192–94, 224 787 Dreamliner, 128–30, 153, 190–91 whistleblower complaints to the FAA, 130, 190 Boeing, William, 86 Boesky, Ivan, 54 Bork, Robert, 38 Bossidy, Larry “the Knife,” 78–80, 83–84, 120, 220–21 Boulware, Lemuel, 46–47 Boulwarism, 46–47 Brady, Tom, 121 Brito, Carlos, 179 Brokaw, Tom, 52, 53 Brooks Brothers, 169 Brown, Tina, 121 Buckley, George, 113 Budweiser, 177, 178 Buffenbarger, Tom, 128 Buffett, Warren, 8, 124, 145, 160, 179–81, 196, 222 Buntrock, Dean, 123–24 Burger King, 177, 179 Bush, George H.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO1 In late September 2020 Elon Musk strode out onto a stage in the bright California sunlight to address a car park full of Teslas at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Fremont. Dubbed ‘Battery Day’, the event had been hyped up by Musk for months (he had promised it would be ‘insane’). Due to Covid-19 attendees sat alone behind the steering wheels of bright shiny Model 3 and Model Y cars wearing masks. They greeted Musk with a ripple of discordant honks of their horns, as if they were frustrated commuters stuck in traffic. ‘Well this is a new approach. We’ve got the Tesla drive-in movie theatre basically,’ Musk said.2 The attendees had every reason to be happy: Tesla’s shares had soared during the pandemic, making it the most valuable car company in the world, even though it accounted for only one percent of the global car market.

The mine was only operating at fifty to sixty percent of its capacity due to the weak market and twenty percent of the staff had been cut. ‘China’s caught a cold. So Western Australia’s spodumene has got the flu, but it does not mean that the story is over,’ Brinsden told a conference a few months earlier.12 Adding to the woe, a few months later the Covid-19 pandemic hit. By October, the neighbouring lithium miner Altura went bankrupt. And prices for Australian spodumene continued to grind lower, reaching $400 a tonne, down from $900 a tonne in 2018. ‘It’s tough times for the industry, it’s therefore unsustainable,’ Brinsden said. ‘Supply will not increase at today’s prices; in fact the opposite, it will shrink.’

‘Supply will not increase at today’s prices; in fact the opposite, it will shrink.’ Brinsden turned out to be right. By the beginning of 2021, lithium prices had begun to rise in China and Brinsden bought the bankrupt Altura mine, then raised A$240 million from investors, including Australia’s Super-Fund pension fund. By the summer of that year, as the world recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic, shares in Pilbara Minerals had risen by over four hundred percent, making it one of Australia’s best-performing stocks. Yet while the rise of the Australia–China lithium nexus had challenged the traditional lithium industry and changed geopolitics, it had also brought larger problems for global carmakers.


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, asset allocation, bike sharing, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, distributed generation, distributed ledger, diversification, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, zero-coupon bond

The special rules for coronavirus-related distributions apply only to the following: An individual diagnosed with COVID-19; An individual whose spouse or dependent was diagnosed with COVID-19; An individual who experienced adverse financial consequences as a result of the following: (1) being quarantined, furloughed or laid off, or having work hours reduced due to COVID-19; (2) being unable to work due to lack of childcare because of COVID-19; (3) having to close or reduce the hours of a business he or she owns or operates due to COVID-19; (4) having his or her pay or self-employment income reduced, or having a job offer rescinded or start date for a job delayed, due to COVID-19. An individual whose spouse or household member (shares the individual's principal residence) experienced (1)-(4) above.

Retirement plan loans and distributions Distributions from qualified retirement plans and IRAs, which were waived for 2020, must commence for 2021 by those who attained the required starting date or who have inherited accounts (7.11, 8.13). COVID-19-related distributions may be repaid within 3 years, so a repayment in 2021 means filing an amended return to recoup taxes paid on the 2020 distribution (7.28, 8.27). Education-related tax breaks Educator expenses of up to $250 include the cost of personal protective gear and other COVID-19-related safety measures (12.2). The tuition and fees deduction expired at the end of 2020 and was not extended; it does not apply for 2021. The modified adjusted gross limits for the lifetime learning credit have been aligned with the limits for the American opportunity credit (33.8, 33.9).

Once the election for a particular year takes effect, you may not discontinue contributions to your account or increase or decrease a coverage election unless there is a change in family or work status that qualifies under IRS regulations. However, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the IRS gave employers permission to amend their health FSAs and dependent care FSAs in order to let employees (whether or not impacted by COVID-19) make mid-year changes during 2020, including revoking a previous election for 2020 or increasing or decreasing a prior election for 2020. In the Taxpayer Certainty and Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2020, Congress extended this relief by giving employers the option to amend their plans (whether health or dependent care FSAs) to allow employees to make prospective election changes for plan years ending in 2021, regardless of whether there was a change in status that satisfied the IRS regulations.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

But for its trouble, California has by far the more dynamic economy—hosting four of the world’s ten most valuable companies, as well as much of America’s start-up scene and cultural exports. Natural resources just aren’t that big a deal in the modern economy. However, the threat of infectious disease is a constant reminder that society is built on a biological foundation. The specter of disease The COVID-19 pandemic that burst out of China in 2020 hit New York City extremely hard and extremely quickly. Many wealthy New Yorkers fled to their second homes in the suburbs or to vacation destinations throughout the East Coast. The basic pattern of elites departing disease-ravaged cities for country strongholds is familiar from plague outbreaks in early modern Europe and cholera in the nineteenth century, and reflects the reality that throughout history there has been a tension between the economic opportunities presented by city living and the vulnerability to disease induced by crowding.

The basic pattern of elites departing disease-ravaged cities for country strongholds is familiar from plague outbreaks in early modern Europe and cholera in the nineteenth century, and reflects the reality that throughout history there has been a tension between the economic opportunities presented by city living and the vulnerability to disease induced by crowding. That said, there is some reason to doubt the cogency of the link between density and disease vulnerability in the specific case of COVID-19. America’s second-densest city, San Francisco, wasn’t even close to being the second-hardest-hit city. Both San Francisco mayor London Breed and California governor Gavin Newsom were quick to issue social distancing orders in mid-March, while New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was slower to take equally robust action and New York governor Andrew Cuomo stepped in as the main leader of the response only once the situation was already out of control.

As of this writing, experts continue to disagree as to exactly what the key to Asian success at containment is. But on a broad sociological level it seems clear that jurisdictions that had more experience with SARS earlier in the twenty-first century did a better job at managing the less deadly but harder-to-track COVID-19 outbreak. That’s consistent with the broad historical trend. No society has ever grown and prospered by reacting to infectious disease by abandoning metropolitan living. Successful countries learn how to adopt better public health policies so that life can go on. And while the future of this particular virus remains difficult to predict, it’s easy to see that over the long haul, infectious diseases have become less rather than more threatening thanks to the progress of medical science.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The KPMG report is available at “KPMG Report Concerning the Independent Special Investigation, Wirecard AG, Munich,” Wirecard AG, April 2020, https://www.wirecard.com/uploads/Bericht_Sonderpruefung_KPMG_EN_200501_Disclaimer.pdf. Markus Braun was arrested a few days after he resigned from his position as CEO. Crisis Management For an overview of the Fed’s actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, see Brookings Institution, “What’s the Fed Doing in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis? What More Could It Do?,” https://www.brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covid19/, accessed January 25, 2021. Cross-country Concerns See David Mikkelson, “Are Most Cruise Ships Registered Under Foreign Flags?” Snopes.com, March 23, 2020, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruise-ships-foreign-flags/.

The eurozone debt crisis followed a few years later. Some lessons learned from these crises prompted regulatory reforms that helped to make financial systems more resilient. Banks were instructed to hold more equity capital, making it easier for them to absorb losses without becoming insolvent. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020, it gutted economies worldwide and stressed financial systems, but banks and other financial institutions were better positioned to withstand the pressures. Even amid the ebb and flow of all this surface turmoil, deeper and more powerful undercurrents have continued to drive changes in financial markets.

In its early years, Funding Circle suffered high default rates; of the loans made in the United States in 2014–2015, nearly 18 percent were in default three years after origination. This figure has fallen in subsequent years, with unpaid debts amounting to about 6 percent of total loans, after accounting for partial payments and some recovery of monies from collateral. The average rate of return on all loans was around 6 percent during 2017–2019, although the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have resulted in higher default rates and lower returns in 2020. Another peer-to-peer platform, Upstart, uses criteria such as education level, area of study, and job history as inputs into its credit decisions, in addition to traditional credit scores. This is particularly relevant to borrowers with limited credit histories.


pages: 363 words: 98,496

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Talbot Underwriting Ltd & Others Brillante Virtuoso investigations breach of contract legal strategy to fight Suez Fortune, 118–19 cargo insurers settle salvor claims, 128–29 Christos and informant Theodorou, meetings with and information received from, 163–74 conflict between Veale/Conner and lawyers, 186–88 Conner hired by Veale, 120 fire and explosives experts’ findings, 87–88 Iliopoulos arrested on suspicion of fraud, 160–61 Iliopoulos stonewalling in lawsuit, 145–46 inquest into Mockett’s death, 91–97 insurance syndicates refusal to work with one another and, 118 insurer reluctance to accuse Iliopoulos of wrongdoing, 131–32 insurer syndicate market meeting and, 127–29 law enforcement investigations, lack of progress in, 233, 240–41 Marquez account of Brillante attack, 179–82 Mockett hired to provide damage survey, 44–45 Mockett murdered by car bomb, 60–63 Mockett’s diary and Brillante dossier stolen, 78–79 Mockett’s examination of Brillante, 52–55 Norton Rose security breach and threats against Lallis, 142–45 piracy expert’s report concluding attack by Somali pirates unlikely, 79 Piraeus Bank as co-assured on Brillante’s hull insurance, 162–63 Plakakis’ account of Brillante plot, 198–204 Plakakis and family rescue arranged by Conner, 208–13 Plakakis statement to police, 188–90 separate investigations by hull and cargo insurers, 79–80, 117–18 Sloane oversees ship-to-ship transfer of oil from, 84, 86–88, 89 Stokes, suspicious death of, 125–26, 238 summons to testify in Brillante case, 147, 155 Theodorou account and negotiations with insurers, 166–74 Theodorou evidence and expert analysis, differences between, 186 USS Philippine Sea, statements of Brillante crew given to, 131–32 Veale and Conner advocate for aggressive approach, 136 Veale and Conner rebuffed in request for British law enforcement evidence, 130–31 Veale’s 2013 meeting with insurers, 133 Veale’s Project Tundra investigation, 113–19 Zavos’ and insurer’s strategy for trial, 132–33 Zavos given investigative oversight, 138–39 Britannia, 4 Browder, Bill, 217 bunkering, 193 Bureau Veritas, 152 C Captain Phillips (film), 15, 29–30 cargo insurance, 35, 42, 117–18, 127–29 Carter-Ruck, 243 Castro, Fidel, 5 catastrophic hogging, 115 Central Mare, 32, 33–34, 114 Chevriot, Nigel, 49 Christos (pseudonym), 163–64, 166, 167, 169–74 City of London police, 128, 137, 142, 160–61, 178, 188, 189, 190, 209–13, 233, 239–40 coffin ships, 102 Columbus, 230 Conner, Michael background and law enforcement career of, 120–23 belief British law enforcement could do more against Brillante fraudsters, 233–34 contacts Cynthia Mockett with verdict, 226–27 coordinates rescue of Plakakis in Greece, 208–13 Greek complaint against, 232 hired by Veale to investigate Brillante attack, 120 investigation by, 123–26 at judgment in trial, 216–17 Marquez gives official statement on Brillante attack, 179–82 meetings with Christos and informant Theodorou, 163–74 mixed feelings about verdict of, 226 Plakakis statement to police and, 188–90 provides protection for Lallis, 145 visits Mockett’s grave, 231–32, 233, 234–35 visits with and keeps Cynthia Mockett informed of investigation, 124–26, 141–42 Zavos and, 136–37, 178–79 container ships, 11–12 coronavirus. See COVID-19 pandemic coroners, 92 Costoulas, George, 192 COVID-19 pandemic Iliopoulos’s purchase of passenger vessels during, 230 Lloyd’s members, liabilities of, 231 Cunningham, Paul, 38, 39–40, 114, 115, 116, 138–39 breach of contract legal strategy to fight Suez Fortune, 118–19 Christos and informant’s offer to help insurers and, 163–64 Christos and informant Theodorou, meetings with, 170–72 discussions about Plakakis testimony in court, 205–6 hires Veale to investigate Brillante attack, 75–76 Plakakis, meetings with, 213 verdict in Suez Fortune case and, 226 D Dawson, Charles, 81 Death Ship, The (Traven), 103 Deepwater Horizon, 87 Demosthenes, 100 Despina Andrianna, 229–30 disclosure, 146 Drake, Francis, 38 E East India Company, 4 Economist, The, 9 Eggers, Peter MacDonald, 216, 217, 221–24 Egypt, 4 Elli, 114, 115, 117, 118, 129, 154, 195 European Business Information Services (EBIS), 73–74, 113, 187 F Facey, Roy, 49, 61, 64–67, 205–6 identified as potential target by British embassy and evacuated, 66–67, 238 Mockett discusses Brillante case with, 57–58 prepares report on Mockett’s background for Yemeni police, 66 Fagan, Michael, 71 Far Eastern Regional Investigation Team (FERIT), 106 Financial Conduct Authority, 137 Five Oceans Salvage, 115, 118, 202 flagging of vessel, 31–32, 150 Flaux, Julian, 135, 157, 159, 160, 161–62 foenus nauticum (maritime interest), 100 Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), 62–63, 94 G Gadani breaking yards, 89–90 Gaisman, Jonathan clients of, 217 examination of Iliopoulos at pretrial by, 158, 159–60 as insurers’ advocate at trial, 217–21, 224–25 Gate of Tears (Bab el-Mandeb), 15 Gen.

Like Norwood at Zurich Insurance Group, who was pushing through paperwork on the Brillante in his cubicle a dozen blocks away, Cunningham began the process of checking in with Talbot’s attorneys and the other members of the syndicate to prepare for what might happen next. An amiable character with a toothy grin and gelled hair, Cunningham was in some ways a typical Lloyd’s man. Until the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted habits that had endured for centuries, business in London’s insurance district was done face-to-face, preferably over a lunch meeting that might stretch long into a well-refreshed afternoon. A clubbable personality was essential, and the uniform stubbornly formal. Before 2007, anyone seen on the floor of Lloyd’s without a jacket and tie risked being thrown out.

The marine assets controlled from Piraeus dwarf those held by Japan, with 11 percent of the total, and the US, with just 3 percent. Collectively, Greek shipowners have done better out of the seventy-five-year explosion in international trade than almost anyone else. No geopolitical or macroeconomic event—not the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, or the emergence of COVID-19—has thrown them off course for long. Not even their country’s recent financial collapse, which drove unemployment to nearly 28 percent and threatened to split the Eurozone, diminished their power. At the nadir of the crisis, with Greece’s government desperate to raise revenue to fend off creditors, the shipowners of Piraeus fought successfully to retain an astonishingly favorable set of fiscal advantages, some of them written into the Greek constitution.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Given the political fault lines rippling across the nation’s heartland, could litigation soothe the families’ pain and right the injustices and turn back an overdose crisis that only grew worse in the face of COVID-19? What was the real fix—not the easy hit or half measures that desperate users and wealthy companies alike had resorted to in place of real recovery? If money alone can’t swoop in to fill a leadership vacuum fueled by stigma and a racist War on Drugs that overrides the health of the most vulnerable Americans, what can? Since the publication of my 2018 book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, I have often been asked to explain why the crisis just keeps escalating. A month before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, a group of Indiana sheriffs invited me to address them.

first billion-dollar drug: Arnie Cooper, “An Anxious History of Valium,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2013, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303289904579195872550052950. “there ain’t another term for it”: Damian Sutherland, author interview, February 18, 2021. all-time record: “Overdose Deaths Accelerating During COVID-19,” press release, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, December 17, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-deaths-covid-19.html. $26 billion: Amanda Bronstad, “Lawyers Suing Over Opioid Crisis Announce $26 B Proposed Settlement,” Law.com, November 5, 2020. food fight: Mike Moore, e-mail to author, February 18, 2021. (died at age 70): Emily Langer, “Paul J.

“nearly impossible”: Paul Hanly, author interviews, July 1, 2020, and August 12, 2020. failed to disclose: Jonathan Randles, “Purdue Lawyers Face Disclosure Questions Over Sackler Defense,” Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2021. repeated delays: Eric Eyre, “COVID-19 pushes back more opioid lawsuits in West Virginia,” Mountain State Spotlight, October 14, 2020, https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2020/10/14/covid-19-pushes-back-more-opioid-lawsuits-in-west-virginia/. “there’s this opioid fatigue”: Eric Eyre, author interview, February 10, 2020. “how heartless”: Former Purdue sales rep (name withheld because the rep fears retribution for speaking about the company), author interview, March 7, 2017.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

One video game streamer, Aztter, constructed a stunning cyberpunk city out of an estimated 370 million Minecraft blocks, having worked an average of 16 hours per day for a year.7 Scale is not the sole achievement of the platform. In 2015, Verizon built a cellphone inside Minecraft that could make and receive live video calls to the “real world.” As the COVID-19 virus spread across China in February 2020, a community of Chinese Minecraft players rapidly re-created the 1.2-million-square-foot hospitals built in Wuhan as a tribute to the “IRL” (“in real life”) workers, receiving global press coverage.8 One month later, Reporters Sans Frontières (also known as Reporters Without Borders) commissioned the construction of a museum within Minecraft that was composed of over 12.5 million blocks assembled by 24 virtual builders in 16 different countries over some 250 hours combined.

Certainly, few imagined a future in which entire generations would communicate primarily through emojis, tweets, or short filmed “Stories.” Or where Reddit’s stock investing forum, combined with free and easy investing via platforms such as Robinhood, would drive the rise of “You Only Live Once” trading strategies—which in turn saved companies such as GameStop and AMC Entertainment from COVID-19–driven bankruptcy. Or where 60-second-long TikTok remixes would define the Billboard charts, and with it, the soundtrack of our daily commutes. In 1950, IBM’s product planning department reportedly spent the entire year “insisting that the market would never amount to more than about eighteen computers nationwide.”16 Why?

Instead, the cost of traditional, in person education has continued to rise (and at orders of magnitude above the average rate of inflation), while applications to colleges and universities continue to surge—even though the experience remains mostly unchanged. None of the most prestigious schools in the world have even tried to launch remote education programs that aspire to match the quality or imprimatur of their in-person equivalent, in part because employers seem unlikely to recognize them as such. And for millions of parents worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic was a lesson on the inadequacy of children learning alone via 2D touchscreen. Many imagine that the improvements to 3D virtual worlds and simulations, as well as VR and AR headsets, will fundamentally reshape our pedagogical practices. Students from around the world will be able to strap into a virtual classroom, sit alongside their peers while making eye contact with their teacher, then shrink down to blood cells which travel through a human circulatory system, after which these previously 15-micrometer-tall students re-enlarge and dissect a virtual cat.


pages: 229 words: 75,606

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

The investment committees are experienced and nimble enough to duck and weave through each idea within hours, assigning next steps for the project teams and making decisions worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of investors’ cash, from entry into an investment to refinancing it to selling out several years later. * * * — It’s now early 2022, nearly fourteen years since the original events that inspired the TV Corp sketch. The impact of the financial crisis has given way to another global shock, the Covid-19 pandemic. But the private equity industry has thrived, growing at double-digit rates, raising larger funds, and making far more profit for its investors and itself than anyone could have imagined. A firm once managing billions of dollars has its eyes on tens of billions; those once managing tens of billions are now managing hundreds of billions.

As they observe the increase in value of an investment and the risk of things going wrong, they ask themselves, week in and week out, Can I see this working out? In 2020 and 2021, the period in which I was writing this book, burning buildings were everywhere—and the masters of private equity were running inside. Private equity dealmakers analyzed the risks of businesses impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, positively and negatively, uncovering concrete paths to compelling returns across the economy. Often, such deals involved structuring the money going in as loans, or a mix of loans and equity, or a hybrid instrument such as preferred equity that has attributes of both. Money was invested in airlines, travel, and car rental franchises with household names, even when almost nobody was traveling, in anticipation of recovery.

Somewhat crudely, a handful of the Founder’s greatest rivals cannot help themselves from making public comparisons between the relatively error-free conduct of their own firms and the seemingly error-prone conduct of the Firm. This kind of problematic attention is particularly unhelpful in the aftermath of Covid-19, when a new Democratic Party administration in Washington is looking at ways to both improve the public finances, in the wake of income and job support measures deployed during the pandemic, and to address worsening issues of social justice, including wealth inequality. Certain members of the administration appear to have the private equity industry in their sights—specifically, the question of whether income and capital gains taxation for private equity executives is pitched at the right level.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Russia’s interference in the 2016 American presidential election was the first warning sign of the coming deception revolution.85 Russia’s deception playbook isn’t just for Russia anymore. In October 2019, Facebook publicly acknowledged its discovery of foreign influence campaigns waged by Iran and China on its platform.86 As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020, China orchestrated an aggressive global social media campaign spreading false information along with it—including that the United States created COVID-19 as a bioweapon.87 Advances in artificial intelligence have given rise to deepfakes, digitally manipulated audio, photographs, and videos that are highly realistic and difficult to authenticate. Deepfake application tools are now widely available online and so simple to use that high school students with no coding background can create convincing forgeries.

Paul and Matthews, “Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood.’ ” 115. Stephanie Bodoni, “China, Russia are spreading virus misinformation, EU says,” Bloomberg, June 10, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-10/eu-points-finger-at-china-russia-for-covid-19-disinformation. See also “EEAS Special Report Update: Short Assessment of Narratives and Disinformation Around the COVID-19 Pandemic,” EUvsDiSiNFO, May 20, 2020, https://euvsdisinfo.eu/eeas-special-report-update-short-assessment-of-narratives-and-disinformation-around-the-covid19-pandemic-updated-23-april-18-may/; Kathy Gilsinian, “How China is planning to win back the world,” Atlantic, May 28, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/china-disinformation-propaganda-united-states-xi-jinping/612085/. 116.

Intelligence Community   4.1     President Barack Obama and His National Security Team, May 1, 2011   5.1     The Predictability Spectrum   5.2     The Müller-Lyer Illusion   5.3     Visualizing Probabilities in Cancer Testing   6.1     The Changing Motives of Traitors   8.1     Longtermers on Senate Committees, 1975–2020   8.2     Longtermers on House Committees, 1975–2020 10.1     Russia’s Facebook Deception in Action, 2016 ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS AI artificial intelligence BJP Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian political party) CIA Central Intelligence Agency COVID-19 Coronavirus disease of 2019 DCI director of central intelligence DIA Defense Intelligence Agency DNI director of national intelligence DOD Department of Defense FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation Five Eyes Intelligence partnership between the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand FOIA Freedom of Information Act GDP gross domestic product GEOINT geospatial intelligence GPS global positioning system HPSCI House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence HUMINT human intelligence IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency IARPA Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity IC Intelligence Community, a collection of eighteen U.S. federal agencies INR State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research INTs intelligence missions and disciplines IRA Russia’s Internet Research Agency ISIS The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff JSOC Joint Special Operations Command KGB The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or the Committee for State Security (the Soviet Union’s spy agency) KSM Khalid Sheikh Mohammed MI5 Military Intelligence Section 5 (U.K. agency) MI6 Military Intelligence Section 6 or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) (U.K. agency) MICE money, ideology, coercion/compromise, and ego MID Military Intelligence Division (later known as the Army’s G-2) NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NCAA National Collegiate Athletic Association NCRI National Council for the Resistance of Iran NCTC National Counterterrorism Center NGA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency NIE National Intelligence Estimate NRO National Reconnaissance Office NSA National Security Agency ODNI Office of the Director of National Intelligence OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries OPM Office of Personnel Management OSINT open-source intelligence OSS Office of Strategic Services RT Russia Today SAPs special access programs SAR Synthetic Aperture Radar (enables satellite imaging in cloudy conditions) SATs Structured Analytic Techniques SCIFs Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or “Skiffs” SEALs Sea, Air, and Land (Naval Special Warfare combat forces) SIGINT signals intelligence SSCI Senate Select Committee on Intelligence UN United Nations WMD weapons of mass destruction SPIES, LIES, AND ALGORITHMS 1 INTELLIGENCE CHALLENGES IN THE DIGITAL AGE CLOAKS, DAGGERS, AND TWEETS IN JUNE 2014, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed when I came across the following Tweet: At first, I thought it was a joke.


pages: 295 words: 89,441

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

Looking at one case in particular, DoorDash went public in December 2020 and on 5 February 2021 the return on the initial investment (the sum of realised and unrealised value divided by total investment) was 16.8 times the original amount. The company was only launched in May 2017, so at the time was only three and a half years old. Due to the Covid-19 epidemic the trend of the world conducting all of its business online has only been speeded up: it is a sure bet to say not many people had heard of Zoom before the novel coronavirus dictated they would live their daily lives indoors, but now it has become an important part of life. People who may not have thought of ordering food online before have had to reconsider their stance and those who did not previously use Netflix are now watching films on their mobile phones; many more companies have had to expedite their plans to move the majority of their business online.

WeWork continues to evolve, with 70 per cent of the world’s largest companies – such as ByteDance, Google, Facebook and Goldman Sachs – having accessed its services. In any sector or business, being at the right place at the right time – random acts of fate, essentially – plays an important role in success and with the Covid-19 pandemic and social-distancing requirements companies have been forced into a rethink of population density within the workplace, with some concluding agreements with WeWork to accommodate their employees. It also presents a solution in terms of new trends in reducing the distance between the workplace and employees’ places of residence, such as with Facebook telling its employees they can work from any WeWork they please.

WeWork currently provide three types of services: ‘on demand’, or hourly rentals; ‘all access’ (which includes membership and passport services) allows use of WeWork facilities anywhere in the world; and ‘dedicated space’, which is more akin to traditional property letting services but more flexible. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the world has changed and working from home has rapidly become a widespread practice. People’s expectations have changed as well: they may be perfectly happy working from home or they may not want to work from home but would still like to avoid the hassle and time-sink of a commute (the notorious three-hour commutes into Tokyo on crowded trains immediately spring to mind here).


pages: 265 words: 93,354

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

In fact, I was so ready that Bae told me because I was constantly doing my hair throughout the apartment, he got used to finding hair in various corners, so he’s now no longer afraid of spiders. That’s right, a bitch cured his arachnophobia and rocked a glistening and healthy ’fro while quarantined. John Frieda salon could never. Jokes aside, medical workers weren’t the only ones who faced difficulties during Covid-19. Some folks were (and still are) homeless. Some were (and still are) living in a domestic environment that made quarantining dangerous. While people such as myself were able to work from home, many others were furloughed or lost their jobs and waited on the ill-equipped federal government to hand out insufficient stimulus packages.

., Bill Gates, who, back in a 2015 TED Talk, stated that many governments were woefully underprepared if a virus pandemic seized the world), most of us were too consumed with our day-to-day responsibilities to ponder potential doomsday scenarios. But another part of the reason Covid so totally and utterly blindsided many of us is because it happened in 2020. This shit wasn’t supposed to happen then! Covid-19 showing up and canceling 2020 felt much more significant than it would in any other year. I mean, c’mon! Astrologists and numerologists practically alluded to everything being amazing in 2020! Dreams were supposed to come true! Resolutions were supposed to be upheld! Did I lose some of you with “astrologists and numerologists”?

Despite the tragedies of Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and a long list of other school shootings, we don’t protect our students and restrict the kinds of guns that can be purchased because some people’s allegiance is to the Second Amendment and not to the safety of our youth. Hell, look at the national response to Covid-19 in America. We can’t even come together in the face of a global pandemic. After nine months of the federal government spreading disinformation, coupled with the nation’s “me first” mentality, which resulted in many people refusing to wear a mask and socially distance, more than three thousand people were dying per day, meaning that each day we were surpassing the total deaths on 9/11.


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

Chapter 12: Why Fascism Is Winning 1.Sofia Tomacruz, “What Prevents Swift COVID-19 Vaccine Deliveries to Philippines’ Provinces?,” Rappler, February 1, 2022, https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/investigative/what-prevents-swift-deliveries-provinces-analysis-philippines-covid-19-vaccination-drive-2022-part-2/. 2.“Senate Halts Search for Yang, Lao, Pharmally-Linked Officials Due to COVID-19 Surge,” Rappler, January 18, 2022, https://www.rappler.com/nation/senate-halts-search-michael-yang-christopher-lao-pharmally-officials-due-covid-19-surge/. 3.The exact moment when I found out, including my reactions, was captured in this video by FreedomFilmFest: “Live Reaction: Maria Ressa Wins Nobel Peace Prize,” Facebook, December 9, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/freedomfilmfest/posts/10160060586766908. 4.Guardian News, “Moment Maria Ressa Learns of Nobel Peace Prize Win During Zoom Call,” YouTube, October 8, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

“States of Rebellion, Emergency Under Arroyo Administration,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 4, 2016, https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/812626/states-of-rebellion-emergency-under-arroyo-administration. 6.Raissa Robles, “Coronavirus: Is Covid-19 Task Force Duterte’s ‘Rolex 12’ in Plan for Marcos-Style Martial Law in the Philippines?,” South China Morning Post, April 28, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3081939/coronavirus-covid-19-task-force-dutertes-rolex-12-plan-marcos. 7.Korina Sanchez, Henry Omaga-Diaz, and Ces Oreña-Drilon were the founding anchors of Bandila. 8.We co-opted two key ideas: crowdsourcing from James Surowiecki, who wrote the book The Wisdom of Crowds, and the tipping point from the book The Tipping Point, written more than a decade earlier by Malcolm Gladwell. 9.

The eight charges the government had brought against me—for cyberlibel, for tax evasion, for securities fraud—carried a cumulative maximum prison sentence of more than a hundred years. The thirty-seven-year-old judge, Rainelda Estacio-Montesa, walked in. Unlike the rest of us, she wasn’t wearing a mask, which made her bright red lipstick and fresh makeup stand out in the dreary courtroom. The small, dank, windowless space she ruled had been transformed by covid-19, so only a few of us were allowed inside. No court observers were allowed; no one from the diplomatic community could be in the room. Plastic dividers partitioned the space, making it seem smaller but cleaner. Immediately facing the judge was my lawyer, Ted Te, a former Supreme Court spokesman, next to his counterpart from the Department of Justice, prosecutor Jeannette Dacpano (who had gone on government-funded trips with our judge).32 Behind her sat a team of prosecution lawyers, hired to strengthen the government’s case.


pages: 302 words: 96,609

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Big Tech, California gold rush, Cape to Cairo, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, energy transition, global supply chain, Google Earth, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, private military company, Scramble for Africa, social distancing, tech baron, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

There are many episodes in the history of the Congo that are bloodier than what is happening in the mining sector today, but none of these episodes ever involved so much suffering for so much profit linked so indispensably to the lives of billions of people around the world. The field research for this book was conducted during trips to the Congo’s mining provinces in 2018, 2019, and 2021. Travel during 2020 was not possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic wreaked havoc across the globe, its impact on the destitute people mining for cobalt remains largely unassessed. When industrial mines went into lockdown for extended periods during 2020 and 2021, demand for cobalt did not graciously hibernate. It only grew as people across the world relied more than ever on their rechargeable devices to continue working or attending school from home.

It only grew as people across the world relied more than ever on their rechargeable devices to continue working or attending school from home. The increased demand for cobalt pressured hundreds of thousands of Congolese peasants who could not survive without the dollar or two they earned each day to clamber into the ditches and tunnels, unprotected, to keep the cobalt flowing. COVID-19 spread rapidly in the artisanal mines of the Congo, where mask wearing and social distancing were impossible. The sick and dead infected by the disease were never counted, adding an unknown number to the industry’s bleak tally. To obtain the testimonies included in this book, I devoted as much time as possible listening to the stories of those living and working in the mining provinces.

His favorite show was a fantasy crime serial called Guardian, about alien races that live with humans on another planet and fight over limited resources. Claude told Xi more about who I was and the research I was doing into cobalt mining. “It is good we can talk here,” Xi said. “In Kasulo, the soldiers will harass us.” Xi was thirty-two years old and was originally from Wuhan. Our meeting turned out to be about a year before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from his home city and spread across the globe. Xi had been in the Congo for almost two years when we met. His first post was working at the CDM processing facility in Lubumbashi, after which he was sent to help man a depot in Musompo, and finally to operate Depot 88 in Kasulo. Xi said he worked at the depot six days a week, usually from about ten in the morning until six in the evening.


pages: 327 words: 90,013

Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn by Nick Kostov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, bitcoin, business logic, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, Masayoshi Son, offshore financial centre, rolodex, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, the payments system

Some of the liveliest neighborhoods of Beirut were flattened and thousands of people were made homeless. Ghosn’s pink house was damaged, but the Ghosns were unhurt. The international community rushed to help, but matters continued to deteriorate. Waves of covid-19 infections knocked down the country, and the ongoing financial crisis raged harder still, pushing large swaths of the population below the poverty line. Covid-19 struck Carole’s parents. Her mother recovered, but her stepfather passed away. Among the patients in Beirut’s covid-19 wards that spring was George Zayek, the former militiaman who had helped Ghosn escape. He recovered, although he suffered the effects of the virus for months.

The statement said that Ghosn’s legal counsel had advised their client not to bother reviewing our message. Finally, while working on this story, we both developed some of the most intense source relationships we’ve ever had. It was a particularly difficult time for many of the people mentioned in these pages: families were torn apart, careers were ruined. Often, we conducted interviews while covid-19 had locked down the world, which added even more strain to those people’s lives. Despite all that, they still spoke to us. Our conversations were sometimes emotional, leading to relationships that yielded both revelations and challenges. On occasion, those connections were impossible to maintain.

Having booked and not boarded three flights since landing in Lebanon, he decided to take a chance and hopped on a flight home to Massachusetts via Dubai. He made it home without issues. Back in the United States, he picked up his old activities, including playing basketball on Wednesday and working on expanding his vitamin water business. Within a few weeks, the COVID-19 outbreak was forcing countries around the world to shut down one after the other. Taylor’s son Peter decided to ride out the pandemic at his father’s place near Boston rather than in Beirut, where he had lived for the past year and a half. The family was back together again, and there was still no sign of a red notice.


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

Meanwhile, as governments and companies fight over who gets to define our future fiat-backed currency system, we cannot discount the role of decentralized alternatives such as Bitcoin, even as sideline players. David and I might disagree on this, but I see post-Covid-19 political fragmentation breeding demand for Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention, which will represent an alternative – if not a more stable – store of value. Trust in both governments and corporate gatekeepers will be challenged by Covid-19 politics. Those who bemoan the lack of accountability in unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus packages could be very amenable to a new idea of money. For others who fear the surveillance powers of both corporate- and state-issued currencies, the alternative of depoliticized, pro-privacy digital currencies such as Bitcoin will be attractive.

The assumption, I imagine, was that with instant digital onboarding the vast majority of the population ought to be able to enrol in a couple of minutes, download a Fed app and get to work. FedAccounts could then be used to ensure that everyone who was entitled to Covid-19-related relief would receive it quickly and inexpensively. I completely sympathize with the spirit of the senator’s proposal, but would people really have accounts with or devices from the Fed, or any other central bank? I think not, as I will explain in chapter 6. It would be an interesting turn of events, to say the least, if the Covid-19 crisis turned out to be a trigger for the transition to digital currency in developed nations, particularly in the United States, where the spectacle of the government mailing paper cheques to desperate citizens seems oddly anachronistic.

You will read in the pages ahead, for example, about outgoing Bank of England governor Mark Carney’s bold vision for the International Monetary Fund to steward creation of a digitally rendered ‘synthetic hegemonic currency’ to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve unit. But it took a third, massively disruptive societal upheaval – the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic – to turn this gradual two-trend convergence into something even more powerful and urgent. The global health crisis of 2020, which quickly also became a financial, economic and political crisis, threatens to redraw the boundaries of economic power – not only across countries, but also within them – as centralized governments’ failure to rapidly respond has shone a light on alternative models that embrace decentralized governance.


Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

With gently downregulated PFCs, students speak out more freely, make intellectual connections with one another, and get to witness their mentors working things out on the fly, partially and temporarily free from the fetters of academic hierarchies. Colleagues float ideas that would otherwise never bubble up into consciousness and recklessly venture out of their intellectual safe zones, blundering across disciplinary boundaries that often desperately need to be crossed. This book was written in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. It will take years to understand the various ways in which this crisis may have negatively impacted innovation. More obvious and dramatic factors, like the stress of caring for sick loved ones or homeschooling children, clearly slash productivity and narrow one’s focus. Less obvious, perhaps, is the way in which the widespread and abrupt transition from in-person meetings to Zoom and Google Hangouts has changed the way that people talk and think.

Wide-ranging chats over a few beers, sprawling over an hour or two, have been replaced by shorter video meetings focused on a specific set of agenda points. In this artificial medium, people have trouble naturally interrupting one another or smoothly navigating shifts in topic or speaker. This is one of the ways in which the Covid-19 crisis, like American Prohibition, might provide an excellent natural experiment demonstrating how meeting in person, often over alcohol, enhances both individual and group creativity. Truth Is the Color Blue: Modern Shamans and Microdosing Alcohol has dominated our story for good reason.

The advent of Skype and other videoconferencing technologies in the mid-2000s brought phonotelephotes into every home that had access to a decent internet connection. Each new advance in remote teleconferencing capacity is accompanied by renewed predictions of the demise of business travel. Yet the fact is that, at least until the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, business travel has done nothing but steadily increase. Given the expense, hassle, and physiological toll of traveling, especially between very different time zones, this is genuinely puzzling. Why fly from New York to Shanghai to meet a potential business partner when you could just call or Zoom?


pages: 384 words: 105,110

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

As of the writing of this Note in late May, 2021, the consensus in the scientific establishment, including national and international regulators, and in the mainstream press that follows them, has finally shifted to one of grudging acceptance of the obvious: SARS-CoV-2 may well have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the COVID-19 pandemic might therefore be for humanity an entirely self-inflicted wound. The strength of this hypothesis is something we have been discussing on our podcast, DarkHorse, since April of 2020. Those discussions caused a great deal of derision and stigma to be directed at us, and it is a bewildering relief to watch the world suddenly come around to the plausibility of this well supported, if unfortunate, explanation. But no matter what humanity ultimately concludes about this pandemic’s origin, there is a deeper truth hovering just outside our collective awareness: COVID-19 is a product of technology, no matter what path it took to humans.

Much as people thought little about washing their hands prior to the germ theory of disease, we give no thought to the scale of misery caused by a given person transporting a new and nameless cold virus to some continent that was free of it the day before. “Novel Coronavirus” took advantage of that nonchalance before the pathogen even had a proper name. The COVID-19 pandemic is itself a symptom of another disease entirely. In the pages of this book, we call that disease “hyper-novelty.” It is caused by a rate of technological change so rapid that transitions in our environment outstrip our capacity to adapt. You will not find the COVID-19 pandemic specifically dissected here, but you will find a full exploration of the hyper-novelty crisis that left us vulnerable to this virus—a virus so weak that it could have been cured with a bit of well-coordinated fresh air.

This is part of what drives brand loyalty, taking the same commute even when a better one is available, and sticking to pharmaceutical and dietary recommendations even after they’ve been debunked. In our quest for set-and-forget rubrics, we fall prey to reductionist thinking. What we need instead is flexible, logic-based, evolutionary thinking with which to navigate. In February 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US surgeon general repeatedly told the public that “masks aren’t helpful” in protecting against SARS-CoV-2.20 In this case, too many people listened to the authorities rather than thinking through the logic themselves. Why, for instance, if masks are pointless, are they exactly the equipment used by health professionals when trying to avoid infection from respiratory ailments?


pages: 453 words: 122,586

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Li Wenliang and seven other doctors who express alarm at the spread of the disease were punished by Chinese authorities for “spreading false rumors.” 41.By the end of July 2020, 35,107 Italians had died of COVID-19. 42.Steven Terner Mnuchin (December 21, 1962–), American investment banker. U.S. Treasury Secretary 2017–2021. 43.https://datausa.io/coronavirus. 44.In January, the total of reported unemployed in the U.S. was 74.8 million. https://nypost.com/2021/01/14/us-jobless-claims-965000-filed-amid-pressure-from-covid-19/. 45.Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882–April 12, 1945). Thirty-second president of the United States. 46.See Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, HarperCollins, 2007. 47.“The Impact of Covid-19 on U.S. Economy and Financial Markets,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2020/10/12/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-us-economy-and-financial-markets/?

If not, then in that example at least the disagreement is over economics, not values. I suspect that the same would be true in many other cases, although probably not all.26 17 Capitalism Teeters The financial freeze of 2008 proved a severe test for the competing ideas of Samuelson and Friedman. Then along came COVID-19 Had he lived one more year, Milton Friedman would have witnessed a financial catastrophe that tested the limit of his theories about the Fed providing enough money in times of tight liquidity: the financial freeze of 2007–8. In 2002, Ben Bernanke had been confident—even perhaps complacent—that the U.S. financial and banking structure was secure.

The paper noted that “Samuelson frequently crossed swords with the monetarist Milton Friedman,” but that “in 2008, when the world slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, it was Samuelson’s prescriptions, rather than Friedman’s, that carried the day.”39 NEITHER MAN was alive to witness the next catastrophic threat to the world’s prosperity: the emergence in China in November 2019 of the coronavirus COVID-19, a highly contagious pneumonia-like disease that often proved fatal, particularly to the elderly or patients with debilitating conditions. Using the authoritarian powers vested in it as the sole legitimate political force in a one-party communist state, the Chinese government imposed a strict curfew on the citizens of Wuhan, Hubei, a city of 11 million.


pages: 265 words: 80,510

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, corporate governance, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Global Witness, Greensill Capital, income inequality, information security, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Londongrad, low interest rates, market clearing, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, profit maximization, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stock buybacks, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

A year later,16 he faced yet another of Ukraine’s long history of financial disasters. Corruption had not been sharply reduced and the COVID-19 crisis was adding to economic hardship. He found himself forced to enter more negotiations with the IMF, and his country obtained a $5 billion line of credit as a result.17 In this case, having had years of experience dealing with Ukraine, the IMF imposed further anti-corruption conditions as part of the loan deal. The onset of the COVID-19 crisis increased the dangers of widespread sovereign debt defaults as the global economy slumped, and as the export earnings of many of the emerging markets and developing countries collapsed.

In some cases, the collateral provided by the borrowing countries to the Chinese are natural resources assets or other businesses. Significantly, in some cases, the borrowers will draw on the IMF and other emergency cash inflows to pay the Chinese. The Economist has reported: “As a result of Covid-19, work on some projects has come to a halt. A few have been scrapped. Several that seemed of dubious worth even before the pandemic now look like white elephants. Many of the loans are on the brink of technical default, as debtor countries—hammered by Covid-19—seek to defer payments that are coming due.”30 In the short term, the global debt crisis will also be a blow to the Chinese and their ambitious B&R projects. But the Chinese take a long-term view and are likely to see the problems in coming months as little more than irritating delays.

As South Africa’s independent public prosecutor, Madonsela investigated the president, denounced his schemes in exceptional detail in a dense “State Capture” report,12 and then demanded that justice be done. Zuma was ousted from power following large-scale demonstrations and placed on trial. He left a shattered nation. Power shortages had become commonplace. The government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis was, as the government itself admitted, inadequate. Zuma’s successor, President Ramaphosa, explained the situation simply in a radio interview in January 2021: “We do not have the money . . . that’s the simple truth that has to be put out there.” The breakdown of the country’s public services and the failure of the government to respond effectively have been explained, for example, by South African political analyst Daniel Silke, who told theFinancial Times: “We are finally seeing the effects of bad governance and low growth.


pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

After years of measures to torment migrants—such as the administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which stranded tens of thousands of asylum seekers in squalid and dangerous refugee camps on the Mexican side of the US border—and slash legal immigration, Miller quietly took advantage of the uncertainty and fear of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 to enact the most ambitious anti-immigration actions of the Trump administration. While the justification for new anti-immigrant policies was putatively economic, Miller helped to ensconce in federal policy the long-held white-supremacist belief that immigrants bring disease. On April 22, 2020, Trump signed a Miller-engineered executive order barring new green cards from being issued.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Working Britain made it quite obvious in 2019 that they believed their verdict should be respected, and that they were prepared to abandon generations of anti-Toryism on the promise of improved lives, better jobs and more dynamic local economies. That promise must still be delivered. COVID-19 – A CALL TO ACTION Our national experience during the Covid-19 pandemic has made the necessity for the promised change even more urgent. The pandemic has clearly shone a light on the tilted nature of the economy, and as we have previously discussed, the lowest paid have been more exposed to both the health and financial risks of the virus.

It saw many people in working-class areas move from having economic power, often through mechanisms such as collective bargaining, to becoming economically powerless, and workers moved from having a central to a peripheral part in the social contract. The winner-takes-all approach has created an economy in which the majority are working harder for less, with work tending to be more insecure and having less dignity. This divide has only been magnified with the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that the lower-paid faced greater danger and greater hardship. WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS? WHO ISN’T THE ECONOMY WORKING FOR? It is beyond dispute that capitalism is the best way of creating wealth, spurring innovation and growing living standards. For many years, the link between national economic growth, growing productivity and blossoming for individuals throughout society was also clear.

When the time came for left-behind places to answer how they felt about decades of economic neglect, they seized the opportunity. Nobody should have been surprised when all but one of the former coalfields voted for Brexit. Twelve years after the banking crash came another catastrophe that hit hardest those communities who were suffering the most from over a decade of stagnating real wages. With over 100,000 deaths, Covid-19 was devastating for the entire country, but the lower down the income scale you were, the worse hit you were by both the economic and the health impacts of Covid. Put simply, it’s easier to work from home in most middle-class jobs than in most working-class jobs, and social distancing was simply not an option in many unskilled positions.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

At the end of the session, participants always take a group photo, turn to someone they don’t know, introduce themselves, and close out with the same final line: “Have a great day.” Ideally, my parents and I would’ve tried out intenSati in person, but in April 2020, that wasn’t exactly possible. Two weeks into California’s COVID-19 quarantine, we were forced to exercise at home. I figure, though, if my thesis about language and power is correct, then Patricia’s incantations should compel me even through a screen. I didn’t actually think they’d work, of course. On paper, the workout coalesces two things I gravely detest: cardio (blegh) and group activities that require you to awkwardly shout things out loud.

Five years after their initial crowdfunding campaign, Peloton had raised almost a billion dollars and was deemed the first-ever “fitness unicorn.” A wellness editor I used to work with assured me that Peloton’s virtual model, which is simple and nonproprietary, is without question the future of boutique fitness (a prediction that seems even likelier post-COVID-19, when workout studios were forced to digitize overnight or die). On the Peloton app, each rider chooses a username (the cheekier, the better; there are entire subreddits dedicated to cute Peloton handle ideas: @ridesforchocolate, @will_spin_for_zin, @clever_username) and has access to everyone’s speeds, resistance levels, and ranks.

And the linguistic red flags had always been there: By glorifying the police in the names of its Hero WoDs, CrossFit had been telling on itself all along. Hundreds of gyms disaffiliated with the brand, big activewear companies pulled their contracts, and Glassman stepped down as CEO. A few months after Glassman’s fall from grace, it was SoulCycle’s turn for a scandal. In late 2020, things were already going south for the company due to COVID-19 lockdowns forcing location closures left and right, when multiple damning exposés surfaced online: According to reporting from Vox, underneath all the motivational Soulspeak, studios across the country harbored long track records of toxicity. Cults of personality formed around certain “Master” instructors, who took advantage by creating hierarchies of favorite and least favorite clients, giving private “off-the-clock” rides, and allegedly sleeping with some students.


pages: 211 words: 78,547

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

In 2020, a year that was sold at the time as a moment of unique political foment—as a “reckoning”—we saw the American progressive movement drift from the essential to the inconsequential, from the material to the illusory, in much the same way. Early that year, an unprecedented global pandemic bloomed in front of our eyes. The novel coronavirus Covid-19 exploded out from China and across the face of the globe in the span of a few months. There have been deadlier diseases, and there have been diseases that have wrought more havoc, but there had never before been a disease that so took advantage of a globalized and interconnected Earth, of our now-small world.

The Trump presidency had enflamed the country, his boorishness and serial scandals convincing many that the 2020 presidential election would prove to be one of the most consequential of our lifetimes. Along with sustained rage at Trump’s long history of racist and misogynist statements, there was despair at his handling of the Covid-19 crisis. In March of that year, the virus had bloomed into a pandemic, spreading across our globalized world with unprecedented speed. In response to the crisis, state and city governments across the country had enforced lockdown policies that closed public spaces and kept people in their homes. Fear gripped the country as the virus killed hundreds of thousands, and being shut inside ratcheted up the tension.

The #MeToo movement had galvanized public anger toward sexual misconduct, and the Bernie Sanders movement, with its army of newly minted socialists, continued to call for change through the Trump years. Our whole civic society seemed strewn with kindling. On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis police officers lit the match. The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed man accused of nothing more than passing a counterfeit bill, reverberated around the world. Covid-19 had devastated the economy, causing massive and immediate job losses of a kind rarely seen in American history. Floyd had recently lost jobs as a truck driver and a bouncer. In time, aggressive economic policies jump-started the American economy and led to historically low unemployment, but in May 2020, there was little comfort or support for an unemployed Black man.


Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity by Torben Iversen, Philipp Rehm

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Big Tech, business cycle, centre right, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crony capitalism, data science, DeepMind, deindustrialization, full employment, George Akerlof, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, lockdown, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microbiome, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Robert Gordon, speech recognition, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, union organizing, vertical integration, working-age population

The list of disqualifying preexisting conditions is lengthy and can be quickly updated. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, many life insurance companies immediately tightened their underwriting rules. Common adjustments included the postponement of applications from consumers who had recently traveled internationally, a temporary freeze on applications from older people, and refusal to offer policies to customers with COVID-19, at least for the time being. Changes of this kind were clearly designed to screen out applicants with a high probability of contracting COVID-19 or a high probability of dying because of it. The second topic covered in underwriting guidelines pertains to necessary medical information for the purposes of risk classification. 5 Examples of these qualifiers read as follows: • “For Agent Use Only – Not For Use With The Public” (National Life Group) • “For Producer or Broker/Dealer Use Only.

But the American healthcare system is a good illustration of the powerful centrifugal force of increasingly fragmented private insurance taking advantage of new opportunities to subdivide risks, even as the centralizing force of government provision garners significant popular support with so many worrying about whether they will be able to insure themselves and their families through the market. In the short run, it is conceivable that the COVID-19 pandemic will boost support for public insurance as more people have been exposed to the fear that their employer-provided insurance plans will not survive the lockdowns. Even more than the financial crisis, the pandemic has created a sense that no one is safe. But any solidarity “bump” from the pandemic is likely to be dwarfed by the most important long-term driver of the politics of health insurance: more and better information.

TransUnion offers TrueRisk scores, a similar product that “has been validated by Reinsurance Group of America” (Balasubramanian, Chester, and Milinkovich 2020, 6). 8 Katie Devlin: “Leveraging Electronic Health Data for Insurance Operations” (http://clar eto.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/8.8.19-Clareto-White-Paper-DRAFT-KFD.docx, last accessed June 10, 2021 [https://perma.cc/RV5P-SH4J]). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009151405.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press Life Insurance Markets 77 later, the use of digital health data in underwriting has become standard, at least in some companies. The reliance on digital health data was greatly accelerated due to COVID-19. The pandemic made many traditional underwriting practices impossible, most importantly in-person medical examinations. Life insurance companies immediately sought to replace in-person medical exams – long the centerpiece of risk classification – with alternative ways of credibly assessing an applicant’s health status and history.


pages: 445 words: 135,648

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

Ollstein, Alice Miranda, and Mohana Ravindranath. “How Some—but Not All—Dating Apps Are Taking on the STD Epidemic.” Politico, December 10, 2019. www.politico.com/news/2019/12/10/dating-apps-stds-080159. Olson, Loren A. “Do You Need a Hug? I Do: Anxiety in the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Psychology Today, March 26, 2020. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finally-out/202003/do-you-need-hug-i-do-anxiety-in-the-covid-19-pandemic. Ortutay, Barbara. “Dating Apps Face US Inquiry over Underage Use, Sex Offenders.” Associated Press, January 31, 2020. https://apnews.com/a93a6e2b02b7f979efca92ea7266e9f2. Padilla, Mariel. “North Carolina Lawmakers Pass Bill to Close Sexual Assault Loopholes.”

Abigail is twenty-seven and an inveterate online dater. She’s told me lots of stories over the years about dating app culture and its chilling effect on relationships. “He’s gonna be out the door as soon as isolation ends,” she texts. “That’s what I’d be worried about too,” I text her back. But then, who knows how any of this is going to end? Covid-19 isn’t like anything we’ve seen before, so there’s no way of knowing what its long-term effects on dating and relationships will be. There have been reports, ever since shelter-in-place orders went into effect, that online dating has surged. Which comes as no surprise, since millions of people are now trapped at home, feeling lonely, horny, and bored, not to mention desperate and scared.

In 2015, Tinder responded with a cease-and-desist order when the AIDS Healthcare Foundation put up billboards and bus ads across LA warning that online encounters on dating apps like Tinder and Grindr could lead to unsafe sex. Under pressure, the following year, Tinder agreed to add a health and safety section to its app, as did other major sites such as OkCupid and Grindr. “But who reads that?” asked a young man I spoke to. “And who really cares?” As the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread, I wondered if dating apps were factoring into this new public health crisis. Not many people were asking this question in public, with the exception of an opinion piece I saw in the New York Times in March of 2020: “Can we really afford to rely on horny people forced to stay at home all day to ‘make the best-informed decisions’ about everyone else’s health?”


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

At the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, 23 September 2019. 3. Daniel Gerszon Mahler, Nishant Yonzan, Christoph Lakner, R. Andres Castedana Aguiilar & Haoyu Wu, ‘Updated estimates of the impact of COVID-19 on global poverty’, World Bank Blog, 24 June 2021. FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO, The state of food security and nutrition in the world 2021, FAO 2021. 4. Norberg 2015. 5. Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado & Max Roser, 'Natural disasters', Our World in Data, 2022. 6. Zeke Hausfather, ‘Covid-19 could result in much larger CO2 drop in 2020’, Breakthrough Institute, 30 April 2020. 7. Andrew McAfee, More From Less, 2019, p.67. See also Marian L.

INDEX NB Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations Afghanistan, 160–61, 256 Africa, 30–35, 70, 267, 282 colonisation, 31 independence, 31–4 Sub-Saharan Africa, 30–31 AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), 170 Albania, 50 Algeria, 251 Alphabet, 179 AltaVista, 169, 174 Amazon, 169–72, 178–9 Amazon Prime, 179 Andersson, Magdalena, 8 Angola, 239 Annan, Kofi, 3 Ant Group, 227 AOL (America Online), 169–71, 174 Apple, 107–8, 159, 163, 169–73, 179 Apple TV, 179 Arab Spring, 215 Aristophanes, 73 Aristotle, 70 ARPA, 183–6 ARPANET, 184–5 Asia, 267, 282 Asp, Anette, 287 Attac, 2–3, 6 Australia, 11, 258, 267, 282, 285 Ayittey, George, 31 Bangladesh, 235 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 144 Bankman-Fried, Sam, 153 Bao Tong, 212 Baran, Paul, 184, 186–7 Bastiat, Frédéric, 114 Beijing, China, 209 Belgium, 285 Berggren, Niclas, 62 Bergh, Andreas, 56, 103 Bezos, Jeff, 127 Biden, Joe, 76, 217 big companies, 141, 146–50, 176–7, 292 BioNTech, 177 biotechnology, 195 Björk, Nina, 263, 265, 272, 274–5, 278 BlackBerry, 174 Blair, Tony, 170 Blockbuster, 151 Blue Origin, 202 Bolivia, 47 Bolt, Beranek and Newman, 184 Bono, 4, 170 Botswana, 34–5 Boudreaux, Donald, 125 Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Lerner), 190 Brazil, 11, 29, 239, 258 Brexit, 116–18 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Graeber), 86, 98–9 business regulation, 139–41 Callaghan, James, 10 Canada, 102, 267, 283 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 128 capital income, 130–31 Carbon Engineering, 255 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 29 Carlson, Tucker, 146 cars, 158 Carter, Jimmy, 10 Case Deaton, Anne, 108–11, 136 Castillo, Pedro, 30 Chávez, Hugo, 43, 135 child labour, 20 child mortality, 19–20, 20 Chile, 11, 29–30 China, 5, 7, 11, 19, 24–5, 76, 78–80, 83–4, 104–7, 204–29, 239, 258 agricultural productivity, 206–7, 209 Communist Party, 182, 204–9, 211–12, 215–18, 221–3, 226–8 deindustrialization, 84 economic development, 205–29 environmental issues, 251–3, 257 exports, 209–10 industrial policy, 205, 212–13, 217, 223–4, 296 innovation strategy, 182, 192 innovation, 226–8 poverty, 213, 214 Reform and Opening Up programme, 212 state-owned companies, 208 WTO and, 205, 209, 211 China’s Leaders (Shambaugh), 215 Chirac, Jacques, 191 Chomsky, Noam, 49 Christianity, 264–5 Churchill, Winston, 135 Clark, Daniel, 87 climate change, 5–7, 230–60, 293 carbon border tariffs, 258 carbon tax, 256–7, 259 energy supplies, 233–5, 253–6, 259 greenhouse gas emissions, 231, 233–5, 238, 240–41, 244, 253–9 see also environmental issues Climeworks, 255 Clinton, Hillary, 140 Coase, Ronald, 206 Cohen, Linda, 189 communism, 2, 25–6, 241–3, 290–91 Communist Manifesto, The, 1848, 2 community, 267 Compaq, 174 Concorde, 191 Confucianism, 22, 25 Congo-Brazzaville, 30 Congo, 239 consumer culture, 160–62, 287–8 Cook, Tim, 173 cooperation, 278–9 Coopersmith, Jonathan, 188–9 Corbyn, Jeremy, 43 coronavirus see Covid-19 pandemic Council of Economic Advisers, 147, 152 Covid-19 pandemic, 8, 21, 76–81, 223, 232–3, 270 Cowen, Tyler, 154 Credit Suisse, 132–3 crony capitalism, 139–40, 291 culture wars, 12–13 Czechoslovakia, 26 Dalits, 63–4 dating profiles, 154 ‘deaths of despair’, 7, 108–10, 136, 271, 293 Deaths of Despair (Deaton and Case Deaton), 136 Deaton, Angus, 19, 108–119, 136 DeepMind, 177 degrowth, 232–5, 254–5 ‘deindustrialization’, 83–5 democracies, 26, 37, 46 Deneen, Patrick, 262–5 Deng Xiaoping, 24, 46, 205, 212–13 Denmark, 91, 285 ‘dependency theory’, 27–8 Detroit, Michigan, 87–8 dictatorships, 11, 24, 29, 32, 42–8 Digital Equipment Corporation, 174 disability-adjusted life years (DALY), 237 dishonesty, 153–6 Disney, 178 Dominican Republic, 225 Easterlin, Richard, 279 ‘Easterlin paradox’, 279–80 Easterly, William, 39 Ecclesiazusae (Aristophanes), 73 Economic Freedom of the World index, 35–7 economic freedom, 35–42, 36, 57, 58–62, 58, 77–8 Economist, The, 179, 192 education, 20, 94 Energiewende, 191, 192–3 Engels, Friedrich, 2, 277, 290–91 Enlightenment, 73 entrepreneurship, 123–4, 128–9, 152–4 ‘welfare entrepreneurs’, 197 environmental issues, 236–41, 245–52, 293 agriculture, 239–40 air pollution, 237–8 biodiversity, 238–9, 249–50 deforestation, 239 health and, 236–8, 237 plastics, 247–8 prosperity and, 245–52, 249 transportation, 250–51, 254–5 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), 248, 252 Estonia, 26 Ethiopia, 277 Europe, 22, 239, 267, 282 European Centre for International Political Economy, 79 European Union (EU), 4, 68, 79, 116, 164, 258–9 Everybody Lies (Stephens-Davidowitz), 155 Facebook, 163, 167–75, 179–80 Fallon, Brad, 192 famine, 29 Fanjul, Alfonso and José, 140 fascism, 75 Federal Communications Decency Act (USA), 174 Feldt, Kjell-Olof, 11 feudalism, 73, 75 Financial Fiasco (Norberg), 142 financial markets, 141–3 Financial Times, 8, 267 Finland, 76, 78, 268, 285 Foodora, 102 Forbes’ list, 129–30 forced technology transfers, 211 Foroohar, Rana, 8 Fortune 500 list, 151 Fortune magazine, 169 France, 79–80, 97, 159, 192, 281, 285 Fraser Institute, 35 free markets, 2–4, 6, 23, 58–62, 65–82, 83, 290–97 happiness and, 279–89, 282, 284, 286 human values and, 261–89 Friedman, Thomas, 204 ‘friendshoring’, 79 Friendster, 170 GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), 169–70 Gallup World Poll, 267 Gandhi, Indira, 245 Gapminder, 18 Gates, Bill, 124–7, 274 GDP (Gross Domestic Product), 5, 23, 26, 33, 35, 49–56 General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), 164 generosity, 274–7 Georgia, 26, 215 Germany, 26, 84, 97, 101, 192–3, 196, 268 gig economy, 101–3 Gingrich, Newt, 191–2 Gini coefficient, 132 global financial crisis, 2008, 4–5, 142–3 global supply chains, 41–2, 58–61, 76, 81 Global Thermostat, 255 global warming see climate change globalization, 3–8, 17, 19, 80, 103–10, 117 Google, 163, 169–73, 179–80 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 215 Graeber, David, 86, 98–9 Grafström, Jonas, 240 Greece, 26, 254 Green Revolution, 239–40 green technology, 243, 251–5 Greider, Göran, 50, 241 growth, 49–57 degrowth, 232–5, 254–5 government and, 55–6 health and, 52–3 poverty and, 53–4 Guangdong, China, 207–8 Guardian, 3, 169 Halldorf, Joel, 262, 265 happiness, 279–89, 282, 284, 286 Hawkins Family Farm, 140 Hawkins, Zach, 140 Hayden, Brian, 161 Hayek, Friedrich, 66 Helm, Dieter, 193 Henrekson, Magnus, 56 Hertz, Noreena, 261, 262, 265, 268, 272, 274–5, 278 Hillbilly Elegy (Vance), 87 Hinduism, 22, 25 Hong Kong, 23, 205, 207 Horwitz, Steven, 294 housing market, 131, 142–3, 208–9 How China Became Capitalist (Wang and Coase), 206 How Innovation Works (Ridley), 188 Hsieh, Chang-Tai, 148–9 Hu Jintao, 215–16 Hugo, Victor, 25 Hume, David, 284 Hungary, 26, 283 IBM, 151 Iceland, 285 IKEA, 119, 141, 147 illiteracy, 20, 20 ‘import substitution’, 27–8 In Defence of Global Capitalism (Norberg), 3, 17, 33, 38, 42, 146, 151, 156, 169, 204, 214, 230–31 income, 22, 55, 88–96, 95, 134–5, 285, 291 low-income earners, 136–8 minimum wage, 90 wage stagnation, 89, 92–3 see also inequality India, 11, 24–5, 63–4, 70, 234, 239, 251, 258 caste system, 63–4 Indonesia, 239 industrial policy, 182, 188–203 Industrial Revolution, 22 inequality, 7, 27, 42, 54–5, 110, 131–8, 133, 285–7 happiness inequality, 131–2 income, 285–7 life expectancy and, 136–8 infant mortality, 19–20, 235, 291 Infineon, 196 inflation, 8, 10–11, 69 innovation, 65–6, 122–3, 125, 151, 181–203 government policy and, 181–203 innovation shadow, 169, 176 prizes and, 199 research, 199–200 subsidies and grants, 196–7 Instagram, 168, 177 integrity, 164 intellectual property, 41, 210–11 International Disaster Database, 235 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 238 internet, 162–8, 183–7 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 231 iPhone, 107–8, 156, 159 Iran, 220 Iraq, 251 Ireland, 285 Italy, 97, 285 Jackson, Jesse, 43 Jacobs, A.

The country introduced export-processing zones where a deregulated textile industry could grow, and the economy has continued to diversify with a modern service sector. After uninterrupted high growth, Mauritius was classified by the World Bank as a high-income country in 2019. Even though it slipped back because of Covid-19, it will probably soon rise again. Today, Mauritius and Botswana have GDP per capita similar to a EU country like Bulgaria. In recent years, countries such as Uganda and Rwanda have tried to imitate such policies after brutal episodes of conflict and massacre. Although they have had authoritarian leaders, they have liberalized their economies more than their neighbours and also grown faster.


pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

We know this, because it was just such a crisis that gave birth to Britain’s butlering career back in the years when my parents were young and I was unthought of. 2 SUN, SAND, CANAL In spring 2020, the one trip I tried hardest not to cancel – and the one I was eventually sorriest to miss out on when COVID-19 became too huge to ignore – was one to Sunderland, in the north-east of England, scheduled for 29 March. That was when the Suez Veterans’ Association was due to lay up its standard – that is, to finally fold up its flag, because there were too few veterans to fly it any more – and to close for good. It would have been the final act in the history of this overlooked, determinedly narky and generous group of ex-servicemen, who had all served in British bases along the Suez Canal. Sadly, with two weeks to go, and the rapid spread of COVID-19 making total lockdown inevitable, the membership secretary was forced to contact the handful of surviving veterans (and me), and inform them the event had been postponed indefinitely owing to the risk to the attendees posed by the coronavirus.

One of the reasons I decided to write this book was that, in the months and years after the UK’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016, there was so much anguish about what kind of country Britain should be, without – as far as I could tell – much public discussion of what kind of country it actually was. Brexit felt at the time like a crisis that required a response, but it has since been eclipsed by the far more serious crisis of COVID-19. The need to diagnose what’s wrong with Britain has been heightened by the pandemic, which has exposed tensions in many countries but has hit the UK – with its disproportionately high death toll and stumbling governmental response – particularly hard. I hope that when the crisis passes, British politicians heed its lessons and aim to forge a new kind of country that does not see every situation as an opportunity to earn a fee and does not engage quite so readily in enabling the kind of activities I describe in this book, but acts more like the land of heroes they claim to admire.

Britain had lost an empire, but it had already found a role: as an amoral servant of wealth wherever it could be found, using the skills it had built up over centuries of empire-building to help the owners of wealth avoid having to account to anyone but themselves. And the effects are all around us. I am writing this sentence nine months into the COVID-19 crisis, and have just read a report published by the accounting giant PwC and the banking giant UBS which revealed that between April and July 2020, the world’s 2,189 billionaires increased their collective wealth by $2.2 trillion. How, the report asked, should the world respond to this, particularly with governments facing such huge deficits as the pandemic dented their economies, and their spending surged in response?


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But one of the things about Silicon Valley is that people are not as skeptical as everywhere else. You can still throw out a crazy idea, and people will get excited.” Epilogue On March 9, 2020, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped a record 2,000 points amid fears over oil prices and the Covid-19 pandemic that had begun to consume the world. Three days later, the Dow fell another 2,350 points, and the following Monday it lost 3,000 more. It was a once-in-a-century financial calamity, and nothing in the market was spared—stocks, bonds, commodities, and even precious metals suffered a dizzying plunge.

Coinbase, meanwhile, rode the volatility to trading riches on the scale of what it enjoyed during the peak of the 2017 bubble. • • • In San Francisco, Coinbase’s founder waited out the pandemic in his penthouse in the city’s tallest building, where his neighbors included NBA star Kevin Durant and other members of the Golden State Warriors. Brian had grasped the implications of the Covid-19 crisis early, and Coinbase’s work-from-home blueprint had been shared widely among companies in the Valley and beyond. But he was hardly the first from the crypto world to warn about what was coming as coronavirus emerged—that designation belonged to Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former CTO who had almost burned the company to the ground in order to save it.

Index Accenture, 140 addresses, blockchain, 19–20 Age of Cryptocurrency, The (Vigna and Casey), 23 Airbnb, 3, 5 Alford, Gary, 122 algorithms, in financial trading, 11–12 AlphaBay, 107–108 Alphabet, 64 altcoins, 138 crash in, 165, 202 value of, 146–148 Altman, Sam, 5–6, 7–8 American Kingpin (Bilton), 31 Andreessen, Marc, 11, 48 Andreessen Horowitz, 137, 177, 186–187, 225 Andresen, Gavin, 82 Antonopoulos, Andreas, 44 Apple, 7, 216 Coinbase app and, 40, 63 gift cards, money laundering with, 45 iPhone, 94–95 April Fools’ Day rally, 201 Arca, 105–106 Armstrong, Brian, 155, 206 in Beijing, 81–83 blog posts by, 109–111, 161 Coinbase culture and, 49–51 Covid-19 and, 222 on the crypto winter, 173 Dimon and, 211–213 first meeting with Fred, 13–14 in funding rounds, 33–37 on the future of Coinbase, 219–220 Gemini and, 116–117 Hirji and, 190, 192–200 IRS and, 125–126 leadership development of, 66, 68, 111–113, 117, 199–200 media coverage and, 159 origins of Coinbase and, 3–15 personal life of, 175 at Satoshi Roundtable, 80–81 social media scams using, 143 Srinivasan and, 186 super voting shares to, 112–113 targeted by bitcoin believers, 78–80 in Washington, DC, 129–131 workplace morale and, 67–68 authentication, two-factor, 143 Bain & Company, 191 Bain Capital, 204 Bakkt, 223 Bancor, 135–136 Berlin, Leslie, 99 Bezos, Jeff, 111 Big Pump, 144 Billions (TV show), 168, 224 Binance Coin, 179–182, 187, 196, 209 bitcoin academic attention to, 107 acceptance of by merchants, 29–30, 55, 64 anonymity of, 20 blocks, 19–20, 152–153 bull run in, 201–203 in China, 81–83 code oversight, 94 Covid-19 and, 221–223 crashes, 40, 160–161, 165–175 creation of, 4–5 criminal activity with, 17–18, 30–31, 58–60, 79, 107–108 in the crypto winter, 172–175 decentralization and, 8–9, 12, 104–105 Ethereum compared with, 88–93 federal efforts to prosecute, 17–18, 20 future of, 224–225 IRS on, 121–126 lifestyle and, 105–106 network problems with, 152–154 origin story of, 23–24 Pizza Day, 22 problems with using, 61–62 as property versus currency, 122–126 reputation of, 58, 69–70 resilience of, 208–210 as rival to gold, 83–84 scaling and, 88 traditional finance and, 65, 99–108 true believers in, 23, 25 user growth and network problems in, 75–84 US government ownership of, 126–127 value fluctuation in, 21–23, 47, 57–60, 61–62, 65–66, 121, 139, 146–148, 151–155 Wall Street and, 99 warring factions in, 75–84 Bitcoin Cash, 147, 173 on Coinbase, 159–160 collapse of, 202–203 Bitcoin Core, 75–76, 78, 82–83 bitcoin exchanges.


pages: 295 words: 66,912

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor by Glyn Moody

Aaron Swartz, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, connected car, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, non-fungible token, Open Library, optical character recognition, p-value, peer-to-peer, place-making, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, rent-seeking, text mining, the market place, TikTok, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

But the Web technology is so simple, that they didn’t build in any way that publishing has always worked, which is usually a publisher puts something out, and it goes into a bunch of different libraries such that if any of those go down, then you have the other copies. That’s not how the World Wide Web works. There’s only one copy and it’s on one server. And if that goes and changes, or goes down, then it’s not available at all.”91 In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic added an extra relevance to mass digitisation projects. During times when physical access to libraries and museums was difficult or impossible, the digital versions offered a way for people anywhere to access materials. In early March 2020,92 HathiTrust began to work on what it came to call the ‘Emergency Temporary Access Service’ (ETAS),93 which was formally launched on 30 March that year.

By 2020, we can spark a new ‘Carnegie moment’ in which thousands of libraries unlock their analog collections for a new generation of learners, enabling free, long-term, public access to knowledge.”99 By 2022, the Open Libraries project had digitised 2.7 million books, and the Internet Archive had been operating its digital lending library for a decade. However, for 12 weeks during the spring of 2020, the Internet Archive’s system worked a little differently. The global Covid-19 pandemic forced libraries around the world to close their physical locations, and library patrons could not access the millions of books that libraries had bought from publishers. Libraries and schools across the globe reached out to the Internet Archive for help. Under those unprecedented circumstances, the Internet Archive lifted its one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio (while retaining other controls, such as a two-week loan period and DRM to prevent copying and redistribution) and launched, along with over 100 library endorsements,100 the ‘National Emergency Library’ (NEL).

The American Library Association ‘denounced’ the move; its president, Wanda Brown, said: ‘Macmillan Publishers’ new model for library ebook lending will make it difficult for libraries to fulfill our central mission: ensuring access to information for all.’116 The association urged library customers of Macmillan to voice their objections. Less than a year later, in March 2020, Macmillan announced that it was abandoning the ebook embargo. Perhaps it was because of the backlash, or because Macmillan recognised that the public had a pressing need to access ebooks as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In a brief note addressed to ‘Librarians, Authors, Illustrators and Agents’, the company’s then-CEO John Sargent wrote: ‘There are times in life when differences should be put aside.’117 Maybe Macmillan also recognised that the ebook market for libraries was booming, and to put obstacles in the way of its titles was foolish—especially since the data showed ebook sales to the public were thriving.


pages: 705 words: 192,650

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail by Nick Wallis

Asperger Syndrome, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, lockdown, paper trading, social distancing, Wayback Machine, work culture

I found his details on social media and thought it was worth chancing my arm to see if he was willing to be interviewed for this book. Being an amiable chap, he saw no reason why not. It was fascinating to have a lengthy chat with someone who had the job of introducing Horizon to hundreds of Subpostmasters across the country. Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus pandemic, we couldn’t meet in person. ‘I thought Horizon was state of the art,’ Sio told me, when we finally got our Zoom link working. ‘I actually really liked the solution, and the hardware we were delivering was quite high spec. I mean, it didn’t run so well, but that’s because it was being asked to do so much.

To me, the information which had been pushed into the public domain in Bates v Post Office put the Horizon story on the same footing as Windrush or the Infected Blood scandals. It was all there in plain sight. Why wasn’t the government doing everything it could to find out what went wrong? As the sound and fury at Westminster grew, the coronavirus pandemic was taking hold across the country. Kate Osborne, the MP who had secured the PM’s commitment to a full public inquiry, became the second member of parliament to be struck down by the virus.2 I had spent most of February and March working on a second Panorama which was due to be aired on Monday 23 March at 8.30pm.


pages: 362 words: 87,462

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demand response, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, financial independence, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, Google Chrome, helicopter parent, impulse control, Jean Tirole, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, meta-analysis, Minecraft, New Journalism, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, working poor

People placed loving but firm pressure on those who refused to socially distance. This swift, expansive response rose up in a matter of days and took effect long before our state and local government started requiring us to isolate. Like climate change, COVID-19 began as a mostly abstract fear. Like climate change, the virus was terrifying to think about, and we knew serious damage was inevitable. The news presented us with dozens of apocalyptic-seeming projections of how the COVID-19 disaster might play out, just as they do with climate change. Yet individual people rapidly started making responsible, altruistic choices to address the pandemic, despite having spent years doing comparatively little to address climate change.

We’ve had to trade our health for our financial or professional well-being, choosing between getting adequate time for rest, exercise, and socializing and logging enough hours to get by. Tragically, many of us do this not out of paranoia but because we know just how economically vulnerable we really are. An international disaster like COVID-19 only convinced Michael he was smart to have overworked as much as he did in the past. If he hadn’t, he would have had an even smaller financial nest egg to survive on. Chronic overcommitters are experts at ignoring their bodily needs. Our economic system and culture have taught us that having needs makes us weak, and that limits are negotiable.

Point to evidence of it in your own workplace—remind leadership of times when employees were happy and effective because they weren’t being pushed too hard. If you don’t have the power to influence a boss, educate your coworkers and friends about these facts, and consider organizing a union. The more informed people are, the more they can move toward an “evidence-based” workplace. 2. Ask for Flex Time and Remote Work Options The outbreak of COVID-19 left many people working from home for the first time in their careers. The shift online was a drastic and sudden change for a lot of organizations, but it demonstrated in a stark way that flexible schedules and telework can be just as effective as coming into the office. At this point in history, every organization needs to be open to unconventional work systems and schedules.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

Each time the individuals in these groups discussed COVID-19 during the early months of 2020, they exchanged important information, which changed group and individual behavior. You met your friend in the dressing room before the hockey game, saw them wearing a mask, and asked them why; they explained about airborne virus spread, and you began wearing a mask. These everyday conversations are the ways most people receive their news about life, and American states that had more social associational life than others saw 20 percent lower excess mortality from COVID-19. “The entire [positive] effect of social association is about conversation at large,” Stone said.

This future, made possible by artificial intelligence, big data, mobile computing, the internet, electric cars, smart scooters, virtual reality, and blockchain, would make us happier, healthier, smarter, richer, and just better-off. And then one day, just like that, our digital future arrived. Late in 2019, a sick bat emerged from its cave somewhere in China, pooped near a pangolin (or some other creature), and set off a chain of events that none of the tech oracles predicted (except Bill Gates). The COVID-19 pandemic happened so suddenly and so completely that few people even realized the scope of what they were experiencing. On Wednesday we were dropping our kids off at school, heading into the office, going out for lunch, and seeing a play after dinner; by Saturday we were assessing how many cans of beans we owned and which sourdough recipe was the simplest, while figuring out how to simultaneously stream a yoga class through the television, take a conference call in the closet, and get our kids enough digital devices to do school and play Roblox all day long.

Journalistic exposés of Amazon’s draconian working conditions have highlighted everything from abusive corporate environments, in which office employees are openly berated by coworkers for their faults or terminated for developing cancer or getting pregnant, to deadly conditions in Amazon’s huge warehouses, where injuries and exhaustion are rampant, workers pee in corners because they literally have no time to walk to a restroom, product pickers down painkillers like candy, and ambulances wait outside during heat waves to whisk off those who drop like flies. Amazon warehouses were frequent sites of COVID-19 outbreaks, leading to countless instances of illness, hospitalization, and even death. At one point, health officials had to close one of the biggest Amazon warehouses outside Toronto because the spread of the virus by its workers was devastating the surrounding community. The human cost of Amazon’s singular vision of commerce’s digital future does not come from some sadistic desire of Jeff Bezos to inflict pain on workers, suppliers, and others for his own pleasure.


The Trauma Chronicles by Westaby, Stephen

Albert Einstein, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, James Dyson, lockdown, Nelson Mandela, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

So called ‘permissive’ low blood pressure became acceptable in trauma patients in order to avoid the lethal triad of clotting disturbances, hypothermia and metabolic derangement caused by the original ATLS guidelines. To pour in fluids as soon as possible was never the right thing. It was well intentioned but naïve. Like mechanical ventilation for Covid-19 patients, it damaged more patients than it saved. So ‘permissive hypotension’ simply aimed to maintain a pre-surgery blood pressure averaging 65 mm Hg, just enough for a palpable pulse at the wrist and the same as my cardiac patients on the bypass machine. Should fluids be required for lower pressure they should be blood based products to maintain clotting, not clear fluids to destroy it.

After shaking hands vigorously I departed to find some traditional dolls for my granddaughters, then my flight home beckoned. A short, and as it turned out, an eventful trip. It was mid-January when I received a polite follow up call from the conference organisers who were curious to know whether I had been ill? I hadn’t but my wife and son certainly had two weeks after I arrived home. By then, Covid-19 had its name and would become familiar to virtually every person in the world. China had ordered a draconian lockdown of Hubei Province enforced by police and the military. I received pictures of the vast conference hall, which was now home to several hundred makeshift hospital beds. Moreover, Wuhan built a huge new Covid isolation hospital in just two weeks and were soon running fifty ECMO systems continuously for their sickest patients.

Having negotiated personally with the Prime Minister, Sir James Dyson wasted £20 million in his efforts. Incidentally, when we sought his help to improve battery technology for our British artificial heart we were simply ignored. Sure enough the knee jerk approach to sick patients was soon contributing to the UK’s poor survival rates. The Covid-19 Hospitalisation in England Surveillance System actually showed the intensive care unit of admission to be a risk factor for death equally as strong as older age, pre-existing heart disease, and the presence of pre-existing immunosuppression. On Friday 4 September 2020, the Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘Intensive care death rates dropped as doctors rejected ventilators.’


pages: 308 words: 97,480

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Or, at least, a sufficient veneer of “all” to reassure its more timid adherents that border walls and “Muslim bans” and “kung flu” and “Black crime” and “replacement theory” somehow do not add up to the dreaded r-word, which anyway these days, in the new authoritarian imagination, only happens in “reverse,” against White people. Such victims feel themselves drawn together not by Whiteness but by that of which it is made. By their belief in a strongman and their desire for an iron-fisted God and their love of the way guns make them feel inside and their grief over Covid-19 and their denial of Covid-19 and their loathing of “systemic” as descriptive of that which they can’t see, can’t hold in their hands and weigh, and their certainty that countless children are being taken, stolen and raped, or if not in body then in spirit, “indoctrinated” to “hate themselves.” They are angry about their own bodies, about how other people’s bodies make them feel, about eating too much because they’re afraid they won’t have enough, about not having enough, about others having more.

“Red-pilling” has been adopted as a meme not only by MRAs but also by White nationalists, despite the film’s radical commitment to genderfluid multiculturalism. “Fuck both of you,” Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski told Ivanka Trump and billionaire troll Elon Musk when they Tweeted their “red-pilled” status to each other in an apparent expression of contempt for Covid-19 protocols. 3 Within the manosphere, Farrell passed as a gentle character. In his daylong pre-conference workshop, he asked attendees to make massage circles, to close their eyes and think of their fathers, to role-play explaining manly needs to the one woman in the session. A cover of one edition of The Myth of Male Power depicted its title in big red letters over a shadowy photograph of a naked woman, the “POWER” said to belong to men breaking into pieces against her buttocks.

Wouldn’t that give it away? “Take it as a whole,” Dave said. All of it—virus, rapists, child murderers. How they conspired against Trump. Weren’t they winning? Not at all. This was the plan. “He wants to discipline us,” Dave said. He, in this instance, meant not Trump but his father: God. Like Trump, Covid-19 was an instrument of His will, and He had allowed the virus as a punishment for our “corporate” sin. Corporate as in corpus, the body, the nation as one flesh and its failure, as a nation, to fully embrace Him and his messenger, Trump. But there was good news. God had given us a chance to redeem ourselves: “We could use this as an opportunity to purge.


pages: 201 words: 60,431

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb by Dorie Clark

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Blue Ocean Strategy, buy low sell high, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Lean Startup, lockdown, minimum viable product, passive income, pre–internet, rolodex, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, solopreneur, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Levy, the strength of weak ties, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

But to create the kind of interesting, meaningful lives that we all seek, they’re essential—and it’s time to embrace them. On February 28, 2020, my email pinged. “I’m delighted to report that we would love to publish the book,” my editor wrote. The Long Game was on. The very next day—March 1, 2020—the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in New York City, where I live. During the early days of lockdown, a colleague messaged me about my book project. I had set out to write about the importance of being a long-term thinker in a short-term world. But in light of Covid, he wondered, wasn’t long-term thinking a little passé?

The CEO of a marketing and innovation consulting firm, Zach had always had a passion for literature. “It was always my favorite class in high school and college, and the teachers inspired me to live my best life,” he recalls. But as a busy CEO, he didn’t have time to read as much as he might like—and even if he did, it wasn’t clear who would be willing to discuss it with him. But the Covid-19 pandemic made something very clear to him. “In the quarantine, the grind of daily routines, anxiety, working from home, higher stress, constant changes, and seeing people less really took its toll on me,” he says. “I knew I needed to do what I loved, and too often I made compromises—focusing on the urgent over the important.”

Next, we’d go around the table to do introductions, break for a few moments when dinner arrived to allow the server to distribute the meals, and then go around the table once more with a more introspective question everyone could answer, such as “What are you proudest of this year?” or “What are you looking forward to in the fall?” or “What’s the most surprising lesson you’ve learned in the past few years?” I’ve now hosted more than sixty dinners with hundreds of attendees and over time have built a reputation as a connector in a city where I hardly knew anyone. During Covid-19, I shifted the format to virtual and began hosting them over Zoom with my friend Alisa Cohn (the executive coach/freestyle rapper from chapter 3), which enabled us to preserve the general format but with the added opportunity to invite guests from around the world. Not everyone you invite will become your best friend.


pages: 254 words: 82,981

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, Easter island, epigenetics, food desert, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, precautionary principle, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, South China Sea, the built environment

“Overview on the Occurrence of Microplastics in Air and Implications from the Use of Face Masks During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Science of the Total Environment 800:149555. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scito tenv.2021.149555. 43. Li, Lu, Xiaoli Zhao, Zhouyang Li, and Kang Song. 2021. “COVID-19: Performance Study of Microplastic Inhalation Risk Posed by Wearing Masks.” Journal of Hazardous Materials 411:124955. https://doi.org/10 .1016/j.jhazmat.2020.124955. 44. OceansAsia. 2020. “COVID-19 Facemasks and Marine Plastic Pollution.” https://oceansasia.org/covid-19-facemasks/; Wang, Zheng, Chunjiang An, Xiujuan Chen, Kenneth Lee, Baiyu Zhang, and Qi Feng. 2021.

Given how difficult and expensive it is to test for nanoplastics, though, that remains an assumption. “But it’s a very reasonable one,” says Dris. So unless you work in a factory making synthetic textiles, the most polluted place you frequent may be the room you’re sitting in right now. (Wearing face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic has had contradictory effects here.42 The synthetic material keeps out both the virus and microplastics swirling in indoor air but also sheds fibers for us to inhale.43 Don’t get me wrong—that is far and away a better outcome than eschewing masks and getting COVID. But disposable masks are now all over the environment: a study estimated that in 2020 alone, 1.5 billion masks may have entered the oceans, and another found that one of those masks releases 1.5 million microplastics as it decomposes.44) All of it’s coming from the towels we wipe our hands with and the clothes we wear and the couches we plop down on and the carpets we tread—just look at the sunlight coming in through a window and you can watch airborne microfibers dance in the beam.

., 135 celluloid, 10 cellulose, modified, 50 cellulose acetate, 82 cellulose nitrate, 10, 82 cetaceans, 63–64 Charleston, South Carolina, 29, 35 chickens, 103 children bottles and, 4, 107–108 BPA and, 139 eliminating lead in products for, 164–165 endocrine-disrupting chemicals and, 144–146 extra risks to, 4, 127–128 lungs of, 135–136 polyvinylchloride and, 16 Chile, 87 China, 92, 104, 107, 160 Choy, Anela, 53–54 cigarette butts, 82 cilia, 130 climate change, 7–8, 162 clothing fast fashion and, 32, 158–159 life cycle of fiber in, 58–60 oceans and, 46 overview of problems of, 32–38 solutions for, 163 clotting, 148–149 clouds, 121–122 Coastal Conservation League, 29 coating solutions, 162 coffee cups, 108 Coffin, Scott, 106–107, 157 cognitive problems, 135–136 coho salmon, 77–80 Cole, Matthew, 46–47, 74 collodion, 10 colonialism, 160 consumption, estimates of total, 130 contamination of microplastic samples, 26 copepods, 61–62 corals, 68–69 correlation, causation vs., 135 cosmetics, 13–14, 151 cotton, 32, 50, 158 Couceiro, Fay, 38, 127, 137 COVID-19 pandemic, 128 crops, 85–90, 98–103 cruise ships, 47 crustaceans, 66–67, 73 currents, 43, 62 index dairy, 104 Danopoulos, Evangelos, 104, 105 DDT, 133 definition of microplastics, 24–25, 31 dementia, 135–136 Denmark, 47, 104 DES. See diethylstilbestrol detergents, 34 Díaz Sánchez, Laura, 159 DiBenedetto, Michelle, 43 diethylstilbestrol (DES), 143 digestive tract, 150–151 dinoflagellates, 60 dirt, 93–98 dispersing agents, detergents as, 34 drinking water, 105–110, 158 Dris, Rachid, 126, 128 drought, 89 dryers, 129 Dusza, Hanna, 145–146 earthworms, 93–94, 100 Easter Island, 56–57 economics, 17, 157–162 Ecuador, 104 EDC.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

In 2015, when the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans who had used smartphones to apply for jobs—perhaps the most essential online activity of all—they struggled with a number of tasks, from navigating websites not optimized for mobile to entering large amounts of text and submitting required files. Smartphones simply make poor substitutes for home broadband; those who are compelled to rely on them are at a significant disadvantage. The COVID-19 crisis greatly magnified those disadvantages. As lockdowns and social distancing pushed more of people’s lives online, a decent home internet connection became all the more essential. In response, the many millions of Americans without one flocked to the parking lots of schools, libraries, and other institutions that continued to offer free Wi-Fi.

A system of wireless transmitters beams an internet signal to partnering community groups in three different neighborhoods, and from there to people’s homes. These homes not only receive internet for zero or low cost, depending on residents’ ability to pay, they also get access to a private network—an intranet—that lets them communicate with one another and find information on local resources like food pantries and translation services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as connectivity became even more crucial, EII organizers also helped create several Wi-Fi hotspots in the three neighborhoods. “If the community has ownership of the infrastructure, then they’re more likely to participate in its maintenance, evolution, and innovation,” Diana Nucera, founder and former director of DCTP, told YES!

This loss of dynamism wasn’t limited to the US; the story in Western Europe and Japan was much the same. Each subsequent decade has marked further decline: these economies performed more poorly in the 1980s than in the 1970s, and more poorly in the 1990s than in the 1980s. The opening decades of the twenty-first century, with the Great Recession and the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been especially dismal. But stagnation, as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, isn’t bad for everyone. As the US economy has slowed down, it has also become more unequal: since the 1970s, the richest .01 percent of Americans have more than quintupled their share of the country’s total wealth.


pages: 209 words: 64,635

For the Love of Autism: Stories of Love, Awareness and Acceptance on the Spectrum by Tamika Lechee Morales

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Hangouts, neurotypical, stem cell, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, TikTok

While we knew there was no quick-fix or miracle cure, we wanted to provide A.J. with anything that could help him achieve his full potential, whatever that might look like. SILVER LININGS A.J. started the Abilities First program the following fall. He began receiving ABA therapy after school and at home, and again all the pieces seemed to be falling into place for providing A.J. with support. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The initial wave of COVID-19 was the perfect storm of frustration, isolation, and fear. My wife, who manages a medical practice, physically reported to her office every day, while I worked from home. Thankfully, the brokerage firm I work for knew I was caring for my autistic son, and they were mostly accommodating.

The seizures are unpredictable; there are no warnings. It is traumatic to watch my girl experience these seizures and the after-effects for days later. HER BEST LIFE Nevertheless, despite numerous obstacles, Grace is living her best life! She is now sixteen years old and will be starting her junior year at our local high school. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and her underlying seizure disorder, Grace attended school fully remote for the end of eighth grade and freshman year of high school. She rose to the occasion and excelled at remote learning. If anyone asked me years ago where I saw my daughter at this age, I would have said that I had no idea.

A.J. is also mostly nonverbal, which causes him to engage in attention-seeking behaviors like screaming, climbing on furniture, or throwing objects. While everyone at work is sympathetic, they can’t understand how my attention and time are stretched beyond limits in every direction. It’s an overwhelming feat that I face daily. While it’s been brutal at times, COVID-19 did provide me with a rare opportunity to experience A.J.’s growth and development firsthand. I would have missed this if I was commuting to the office and my son was going to school and daycare. Weirdly, it has been a blessing as my bond with A.J. has grown stronger than I could have ever imagined.


pages: 252 words: 66,183

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

As a result of the further tightening of zoning restrictions beginning in the 1970s, median housing prices have dramatically outpaced median incomes in many parts of the country over the past half century, such that millions of Americans now struggle to make rent or pay their mortgage each month. That is, if they have the luxury of having a stable home at all: in places where demand for new housing is especially high—as in cities like New York and Los Angeles—zoning restrictions have facilitated acute housing shortages, with attendant surges in displacement and homelessness. The COVID-19 pandemic has only expedited these trends, with home prices in 2020 rising at the fastest rate since 1979.1 The arbitrary restrictions that zoning places on cities also show up in our capacity to grow and innovate as a nation. By severely limiting new housing production in a handful of our most productive cities—including San Jose and Boston—we have made moving to our most prosperous regions a dubious proposition.

Two zoning maps covering the exact same territory of New York City in 1961 and 2021, illustrating the exponential increase in complexity of zoning maps. (NYC Department of City Planning) As with rezonings, text amendments are often a response to specific development applications, which come by the dozens each year in most major cities. But sometimes they reflect broader shifts. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many cities scrambled to amend their zoning codes to accommodate home-based businesses.17 Whatever the source, extend this type of amendment activity across the half century that most zoning ordinances have been in effect, and the typical zoning text has devolved from clear and concise twenty-page documents into hundreds of pages of hedges, qualifications, and exceptions that can only be interpreted by a trained planner or land-use attorney.18 Better governed cities respond to this problem by regularly overhauling both the zoning text and map.

Between 1970 and 2010, median home values appreciated at a rate of nearly three times median household incomes, particularly in prospering coastal cities.5 Today, half of all American renters are rent-burdened—spending over a third of their income on rent—and one in four American renters is severely rent-burdened—spending over half of their income on rent.6 These figures have only worsened over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, with supply shortages driving up housing prices at the highest rate since the crisis years of the late 1970s.7 But what exactly is the mechanism by which zoning increases housing costs? There are three. The most obvious way is by blocking new housing altogether, whether by prohibiting affordable housing or through explicit rules restraining densities.


pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

We proved that the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fired chemical weapons at his own people. We showed who was behind the downing of Flight MH17. We located ISIS supporters in Europe. We identified neo-Nazis rampaging through Charlottesville, Virginia. We helped quash the floods of disinformation spreading alongside Covid-19. And we exposed a Kremlin ‘kill team’. This discipline is so new that it lacks a single name. Most common is ‘OSINT’, for open-source intelligence. But that shorthand derives from government intelligence, whose secretive practices diverge from the open and public mission of Bellingcat. A more accurate description is ‘online open-source investigation’.

But sane society was not about to surrender its main source of information to the deceitful. The question was whether to accept two parallel information streams, where one part of the public consumed fact-based reports and another was abandoned to dubious viral content; or to fight back. We chose the latter. The stakes were high, as became clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lies acquired the potential to kill thousands, perhaps millions, of people. At Bellingcat, ‘emergency prepping’ for such information crises had been underway since our inception, as we endured malicious hacking, contended with constant slurs and confronted a thicket of falsehoods online.

A third iteration of fact-checkers, Full Fact argued, must meet the scale of the internet, probably through massive collaborations that disregard national frontiers.95 We are pushing for exactly that. More than ever, news events prompt people to scour the internet for immediate insights, and we are seeking to mobilise this public in the push for credible evidence. For example, within a month of the World Health Organization designating Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020, Bellingcat produced a range of material to involve citizens in online sleuthing on the subject, including a guide to debunking coronavirus disinformation; an article on scammers exploiting the disease on Facebook and YouTube; and a video segment on applying open-source tools to studying a world gone still during lockdown.96 When a police officer in Minneapolis killed an African-American suspect, George Floyd, setting off protests across the United States and beyond, we produced an explanatory article on the Boogalo movement that hoped unrest would degenerate into a second American civil war; we compiled an exhaustive list of attacks on journalists, geolocated and plotted onto an interactive map to involve the public in absorbing the dimensions of the efforts to suppress information; and we sought to inform citizens of our techniques via a new podcast, BellingChat.


pages: 332 words: 100,245

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Maybe the Supreme Court should reserve seats for student groups. Or auction the seats and use the revenue for guided high school tours of its awe-inspiring building. Or—and this is our view—the Court should implement a different path to access altogether, such as video livestreaming arguments so they are freely available to everyone online. During the COVID-19 shutdown, the Court moved partway there with audio livestream, and the administration of justice did not noticeably falter. Put another way, every rule for making things mine rewards a different idea about what to value, like the options for the rocking chair we discussed in the Introduction.

Think about the last time you were in the checkout line at the supermarket with your shopping cart. Imagine a stranger had come up, peered into your cart, taken out the cereal box, then looked again and grabbed the carton of milk. This seems insane. It never happens (although we did come across one example during the panicky early days of COVID-19: toilet paper filching). You would probably shout at the person, “What the—what are you doing? That’s mine!” But why are the cereal box and milk carton yours? You haven’t bought them yet. What makes you so confident, even though your physical possession is not legal ownership? Retailers have always understood, and taken advantage of, this possession instinct by creating conditions where customers can get attached to products for sale.

The conflicts are growing more acute: as beach-spreaders are pushing the boundaries of possession, rising sea levels are shrinking New Jersey beaches. Local residents pay for lifeguards and beach upkeep and get mad when beach-spreaders keep them away from the water. Regional variations in beach possession symbols matter even more in the COVID-19 era. That’s why White House coronavirus adviser Deborah Birx urged beachgoers to defend circles of sand around their umbrellas: “Remember that is your space, and that is the space you need to protect.” She was arguing for uniform beach spacing nationwide. Bad ownership design can have deadly consequences in New Jersey, Florida, and elsewhere.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Akash had a proposal to stop COVID-19. I forwarded it to the team. Text from my sister, who is an eye surgeon at a major hospital in New York: Sad case today. A 17-year-old with a bad injury from yard work. Full corneal laceration, traumatic cataract and retinal detachment. His father was so devastated. When we were talking he collapsed and hugged me out of sorrow. Now I feel like I’m covered in corona. Akash wrote that he had 735 kilograms of niclosamide on its way to the U.S. They were going to use it for a clinical trial as a form of birth control, as a spermicide. But they wanted to try it for COVID-19. They were in contact with the FDA.

It had been pulled off the U.S. market in 1996, but it was still made elsewhere. The argument was that niclosamide might work because, even though it had never been used to treat SARS or MERS during an outbreak, long after the fact it was shown that niclosamide could stop those viruses from replicating inside us. The COVID-19 virus had the same 11 proteins as SARS and MERS, the same arsenal of weapons. Normally, VCs take weeks or months to study a deal. This took us about an hour to say yes, which was the length of our first phone call. It was a blind bet with no evidence, only theory. Usually those bets bust. We would have been fine with that.

But first, we must survive it. You are all IndieBio companies. Which means you are already survivors. Born and bred in the basement on Jessie Street in the Tenderloin. Walking into the office meant stepping over the hardships of life just to face it again in the lab. But this shock is different. Covid-19 will test us all.” At least a dozen of our alumni were running into the fire. In Korea, their Zoonotic Virus Lab tried 3,000 existing drugs, in a high-throughput screen using kidney cells infected with the virus. They found 24 that worked well, and niclosamide was one of the two that stood out above the rest.


pages: 341 words: 99,495

Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully by Kelly Starrett, Juliet Starrett

airport security, call centre, COVID-19, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microdosing, Minecraft, phenotype, place-making, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

“Sleep Restriction Enhances the Daily Rhythm of Circulating Levels of Endocannabinoid 2-Arachidonoylglycerol.” Sleep 39, no. 3 (March 2016): 653–64. DOI: 10.5665/sleep.5546. Huang, Baozhen, Yanlin Niu, Weiguo Zhao, et al. “Reduced Sleep in the Week Prior to Diagnosis of COVID-19 Is Associated with the Severity of COVID-19.” Nature and Science of Sleep 12 (2020): 999–1007. DOI: 10.2147/NSS.S263488. Krause, Adam J., Aric A. Prather, Tor D. Wager, et al. “The Pain of Sleep Loss: A Brain Characterization in Humans.” Journal of Neuroscience 39, no. 12 (March 2019): 2291–2300. DOI: 10.1523/​JNEUROSCI.2408-18.2018.

If information about the past can be gleaned from the study of contemporary Indigenous tribes with hunter-gatherer habits, the number may be around 15,000 steps per day. Any way you look at it, most of us are falling far short of that. According to the America on the Move study (published in 2010, but we’re willing to wager things haven’t changed much since then, and perhaps got even worse during the COVID-19 pandemic), Americans only take an average of 5,117 steps daily (about 2.5 miles). That’s well below today’s widely accepted health recommendations. By comparison, Australians average 9,695 steps daily; the Japanese, 7,168. Not coincidentally, they also have considerably lower rates of obesity. We know steps aren’t the only cultural differences in our obesity rates, but it’s hard to argue against more daily movement.

Before you go into work and humblebrag, “I got four hours of sleep last night,” consider the likely thought bubble in your coworkers’, maybe even your boss’s, head: “Wow, you’re going to be the least efficient worker today, contribute nothing, and make our company worse!” Although no one would say the COVID-19 pandemic was a good thing, one by-product of the shift in the way people work has been that many of them are getting more sleep. How that will ultimately play out is unknown right now, but pre-pandemic it was clear that lack of sleep was a global problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called sleeplessness a public health problem.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

As more and more depositors attempt to take their money out, a bank run ensues, resulting in its financial collapse. The economic event, a drought, didn’t directly produce the bank run—the bank was healthy. It was the rapid spread of a distorted economic narrative that led to its downfall. Narrative Economics was published in 2019, prior to both the current viral spread of cryptocurrency and the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that, it is remarkable to observe how intertwined these two viruses would become in the following years. To understand the origins of economic narratives surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, we have to go back to the events that inspired them. Both crypto and the “easy money” policies from which this book derives its title sprang from the same roots: the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), also known as the subprime crisis

For both political and economic reasons, the Fed would find it impossible to unwind its backstop of the economy. In fact, it continued to grow. By late 2014, what had been $2.3 trillion of assets on the Fed’s books had grown to over $4.4 trillion, a level at which it would more or less remain until March 2020, when COVID-19 hit. At the same time, interest rates stayed historically low as well: effectively 0 percent until 2016, and only rising above 2 percent in 2019. The government’s response to the subprime disaster spawned an era of easy money that benefited deep-pocketed corporations above everyone else, but that was not all it produced.

This is what the Fed’s balance sheet looked like at the end of 2021: Source: “Monetary Policy: Credit and Liquidity Programs and the Balance Sheet. Recent Balance Sheet Trends,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, accessed March 3, 2023, https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm. In response to the threat of COVID-19 shutting down the economy, some $5 trillion flooded into the US economy. An unprecedented amount of money was now available for people (as well as institutions) to spend, save, invest, or gamble with. Flush with dough, markets of all kinds went berserk. Home prices, which had steadily climbed back above the 2006 peak, now soared, as did stocks and all manner of speculative investments.


pages: 536 words: 126,051

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion by Dean Burnett

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, call centre, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, COVID-19, double empathy problem, emotional labour, experimental economics, fake it until you make it, fake news, fear of failure, heat death of the universe, impulse control, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, neurotypical, New Journalism, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, social distancing, theory of mind, TikTok, Wall-E

And all for different reasons. I eventually had to face a hugely inconvenient, but irrefutable, fact: my knowledge about emotions was woefully insufficient for writing a book about them. Unfortunately, I was still contractually obliged to do exactly that. It was a tricky situation. But then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and the world went into lockdown as the virus tore across the globe. At first, I felt I was well placed to ride things out. I already worked from home, my job wasn’t under threat, my wife and children and I are quite a harmonious group. This will be fine, I figured. This will be fine.

That’s not how evolution works. Also, if we’ve got adults denying evolution purely because monkeys exist, we need better adults. ‡‡‡ How exactly you’d do such a thing is a whole other problem. 3 Emotional Memories In late April 2020, despite the best efforts of the medical profession, my father died from COVID-19. Did I cry at that point? Indeed. The logjam holding back my emotions crumbled, and … stuff came out. But it was often at odd times, and in odd ways. When I learned he was gone, I was weirdly numb for several hours, before spontaneously collapsing into a mess that evening. This continued for several days.

Still, I will say that having more upsetting and vivid dreams than usual was rather annoying, given all the other emotional issues I was trying to get to grips with. In some ways it is unsurprising, though: the sudden loss of a loved one undeniably makes your daily life a fog of emotional turmoil and confusion, so why wouldn’t your dreams follow suit? It’s the same brain responsible for everything, after all. I’m not alone, either. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to people worldwide being more scared, confused, anxious, angry, and stressed than usual. The overall mental health impacts will take years to uncover and unpack, but interestingly, at the time of writing, I’m seeing a lot of people online opening up about the weird, unsettling dreams they’re regularly having.


pages: 391 words: 106,255

Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover

autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fixed income, gentrification, George Floyd, McMansion, off grid, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, place-making, social distancing, supervolcano

But the men, and others milling about, were effectively blocking the driveway—like protestors, Harry joked. I revved my engine, getting in the spirit of things. Harry mimed brandishing a pistol at me, then blasting away as I rolled by. * * * — Even if few people had been infected yet by Covid-19 in my part of the flats, much of the turmoil of the outside world filtered in via television and social media. I stopped by a neighbor’s place; he told me, “If you have any money in the bank, get it out.” But why? “Last night it took one trillion dollars to cover the daily bank rate”—I wasn’t sure what this was—“as opposed to the two hundred million dollars in the last banking crisis.”

And it was of a piece with an ideology that underlay much of what La Puente did, which was, in my own paraphrasing, You can’t really know their pain, so don’t judge. But what about judging? Wasn’t forming opinions part of what made us human? I grappled with this problem on the flats, where I was surveying my neighbors about whether they’d gotten a Covid-19 stimulus payment from the federal government and what they’d decided to do with it. This was a happy subject for most of them, since life tended to bring few of these windfalls. I started with the Grubers. Like many Americans, they had received federal stimulus payments totaling $3,200 in the twelve months starting in April 2020.

See also La Puente Alaska, 70 alcoholism, 57, 80 allergies, 186–87 al-Qaeda, 89 Amalia, New Mexico, 194 America first, 70 American flag, 4, 89, 167, 221 American West, history of, 112–14, 119–26, 248 AmeriCorps, 13, 21, 65, 208–9, 213, 237 Amish, 173 Andersen, Paul, 192–93 Anderson, Harold, 114–20, 218, 254, 264n Angels in America (Kushner), 68 Ania (Polish immigrant), 88–92 antelope, pronghorn, 11, 40, 71–72 anti-government ideology, 70, 88–92 Antonito, Colorado, 10, 14, 20, 54, 73, 93, 95–98, 100, 124, 155, 160, 165, 185, 190–91, 199, 212, 215 Appalachia, 70 Apple Valley, California, 123 Arapahoe people, 190 Arellano, Sidney, 66, 199–200 Arizona, 70, 112, 159 Armando (Paul’s neighbor), 17–18 Ashley (Grubers’ cousin), 73–74 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 76 Aspen, 174 Aspen Times, 192 Asperger’s syndrome, 148, 150, 154 at-risk families program, 25 Attica prison, 199 Aurora, Colorado, 80 autism, 154, 265n–66n auto insurance, lack of, 91 B Bankers Life, 46, 119–22, 129, 142 Baroz, Adre “Psycho,” 198–99 BBC World Service, 138 “Beach, The,” 81–82, 95 Beaubien, Carlos, 112–13 Beaubien, Narciso, 112 bentonite mine, 97 Bewitched (TV show), 160 Big Rock Candy Mountain, The (Stegner), 217 bipolar disorder, 211–12 birds deaths of, 228–32 watching, 100, 229 Birds, The (film), 231 birth certificates, 90 bison, 12 Bitcoin mining, 148 Black Lives Matter, 219–23, 227 Blacks, 20, 65, 91, 144–45, 176–84, 227 Blanca Peak (Sisnaajini), 9–11, 10, 13, 15, 23, 26, 50, 64, 82, 106, 124, 127, 129, 141, 148, 200–203, 245, 263n Blanca RV Park, 34, 86, 106, 221 Blanton, Carolyn Gloria, 191 Blanca (town), 10, 25, 49, 81, 85, 88, 116, 119, 127, 146, 243–44, 252, 265n Bobby (Troy Zinn’s friend), 121, 195 Bosdell, Don and Sherry, 166–70 Bowie, David, 217 Branson online curriculum, 72 Brown, Calvin, 220 Brown, Wesley, 260 Brownlow, Lonnie, 123–24 Bundy family, 91 Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 15, 97, 259 burn pits, 105, 157, 170–72 Busse, Brian, 147 C California, 70, 73, 112, 122, 159, 198 Calvin (Vera’s friend), 86–88, 90, 92 Camaro Jim (neighbor), 144–45, 162–63, 230–31 camping, 28, 32, 51, 86, 117, 135, 160, 236 cancer, 78–79 Cano’s Castle, 14 capital letters, 89–90 carbon footprint, 69, 232 Caring for Colorado, 25 Caro, Robert, 128 “Car Wash” Kevin, 237, 256–57 Casper, Wyoming, 44, 74, 207 Catholic Church, 196 cattle, 19, 46, 94–95, 119–21, 140, 143, 144–5, 167, 196, 205, 214, 227 mutilated, 232–34 cell phones, 11, 35, 97, 131, 156, 201 Central Americans, 20 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 88–89 Cerro de la Olla mountain, 234 Chama settlement, 110 Changes in the Land (Cronon), 268n Charlie (Ania and Jurek’s friend), 91–92 Chatwin, Bruce, 260 Chávez, César, 98 Cheap and Easy Way to Find Gold, The (video), 201 Cherokee people, 264n Cheslock, Lance, 13, 18, 21, 24–25, 27–28, 34, 65–66, 85, 96, 98, 100–101, 199, 217, 219, 229, 234, 253, 256 Cheslock, Rachael, 24, 27 Cheyenne people, 190 Chicago, 176–77, 184, 192–93 Chicago Tribune, 109, 126 Chicano activists, 191 China, 227 Choman, Chet, 127–30, 265n Christians, 87–88, 92, 155, 168–69, 215 Christmas, 65–67, 156, 180, 200 Church of Christ halfway house, 67 Church of England, 89 Cielo Vista Ranch (formerly Taylor Ranch), 109–10 Cindy (Sam’s partner), 74, 78–79, 105, 159, 237 climate change, 231 Climax Molybdenum mine, 119 Clinton, Hillary, 70 “Cloud on the Title, A” (Trillin), 110 Cobb, Jelani, 250 cocaine, 52 Cochran (road grader), 134 code violators, 17. See also Costilla County code enforcement Coleman, Ty, 64–65 Cole Park, 177, 185 Colorado, 10, 11 Covid-19 restrictions, 218 Mexican territory and, 112 Rio Grande water agreement and, 121 statehood and, 113 tourism and, 21 white, European culture of, 113 Colorado Aggregate, 166 Colorado Bureau of Investigation, 197 Colorado College, 24 Colorado Gators Reptile Park, 67 Colorado Prospector, 51 Colorado Realty & Land Company, 127–28 Colorado’s Loneliest Railroad (Griswold), 120 Colorado Springs, 12, 94, 126, 133, 171, 190, 212, 259 Colorado Territory, 113–14, 190 “Colorado—‘The State Nearest Heaven’ ” (article), 126 Colville, Ruth Marie, 268n Conejos County, 29, 52, 100, 190 Conejos River, 113, 190 Conejos settlement, 100, 234 Conejos Writers Circle, 229 Conover homestead, 175 electric power and, 173, 186 fence and, 143–44, 143, 187–88, 240–49, 260 history of, 140–41 mobile home on, 38–40, 143, 170–74 power shed on, 143, 147–53 property line and, 242–43 purchase of, 135–42 rattlesnake and, 187–90 second summer at, 185–86 septic tank and, 140 solar panels and, 139, 149, 152, 186 toilet and, 186 trailer moved to, 143–44 well and, 150, 152, 173, 175, 186 wildlife and, 142–44 wind turbine and, 139, 152–55, 153, 175–76 conspiracy theories, 88–89 constitutional sheriffs, 29 COPD, 49, 66–67, 79, 211 Copper Mountain, 11 corporations, 89–90 Costilla County, 29.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

They have an incentive to stop changes with bans, regulations, monopolies, the burning of boats or the building of walls. And when the rest of us panic about the world we let them have their way. And this is how every period of openness and innovation in history was ended, except one: the one that we are in right now. An open world, if we can keep it. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates what can happen and what is at stake. International trade and mobility have not only enriched the world, they have also made it possible for microorganisms to hitch a ride. Historically, rulers have used such great plagues to extend control over their populations, pull up the drawbridges and attack scapegoats, like Jews, foreigners or witches.

(The risk of dying in a crash has since declined by 95 per cent.) In the early 1990s, books with titles like The Jobless Future and The End of Work predicted computers would take our jobs and that we would soon see massive unemployment. (Since then the US economy has created 35 million new net jobs, and the employment rate before the COVID-19 pandemic was almost exactly the same.) In 1995 the flagship magazine of American conservatives, Weekly Standard, had the cover story ‘Smash the Internet’, featuring a sledgehammer destroying a screen. Some of the predicted problems did come about, but we adapted to them in ways no one could have foreseen, because those adaptations were made by millions of people based on what they learned, not by a committee based on prophesies.

INDEX Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), 6, 136–7, 138, 169, 353 abortion, 113 absolutist monarchies, 154, 155, 170, 182, 185 Academy Awards, 82 Accenture, 375 accountants, 41 Acemoglu, Daron, 185, 187, 200 Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 86–7, 88, 249 Acton, Lord, see Dalberg-Acton, John Adams, Douglas, 295 Adobe, 310 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 306 Aeschylus, 132 affirmative action, 244 Afghanistan, 70, 345 Age of Discovery, 177 agriculture, 39–40, 42, 74, 171, 263 Akbar I, Mughal Emperor, 98 Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC), 42 Alaska, 76 Albania, 54 Albertus Magnus, Saint, 145 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond, 154 Alexander III ‘the Great’, Basileus of Macedon, 87–9 Alexandria, Egypt, 134 algae, 332 algebra, 137 Alibaba, 311 Allport, Gordon, 244–5 Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269), 137–8 alpha males, 227–8, 229 Alphaville, 245 altruism, 216 Amalric, Arnaud, 94 Amazon, 275, 311 America First, 19, 272 American Civil War (1861–5), 109 American Declaration of Independence (1776), 103, 201, 202 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 102–3, 200–201 American Society of Human Genetics, 76–7 Americanization, 19 Amherst, William, 1st Earl Amherst, 176–7 amphorae, 48 Amsterdam, Holland, 150, 152, 153 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 anaesthesia, 279, 296 anagrams, 83 Anatolia, 42, 74 Anaximander, 127 Anaximenes, 127 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Andromeda, 88 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Anhui, China, 315 anti-Semitism, 11, 94–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 254, 255 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 Antoninus Pius, Roman Emperor, 91 Apama, 88 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 5 Apple, 82, 195, 304, 311, 319 Apuleius, 89 Arab Spring (2011), 10, 342 Arabic numerals, 70, 137, 156 Arabic, 136, 137, 140 archaeology, 21–2, 31, 32, 38, 43, 50, 51 Archer Daniels Midland, 329 Aristides, Aelius, 48 Aristophanes, 129, 131, 132 Aristotle, 130–31, 132, 137, 141–6, 161 Armenians, 136, 220 ARPAnet, 306 Art Nouveau, 198 art, 198 Artaxerxes III, Persian Emperor, 87 Ashkenazi Jews, 99 Ashoka, Mauryan Emperor, 53 Assyria (2500–609 BC), 248–9 Assyrian Empire (2500–609 BC), 41, 43, 86 astronomy, 80, 145–6, 150 Atari, 304 Athens, 47, 53, 89, 90, 131, 134 Atlas Copco, 65 Augustine of Hippo, 133, 139 Australia, 50–53, 76, 262 Australopithecus afarensis, 24–5 Austria, 1, 150, 151, 190 Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 179, 254 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Habsburg monarchy (1282–1918), 151, 179, 190, 237 migration crisis (2015–), 342 Mongol invasion (1241), 95 Nazi period (1938–45), 105 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 150 Authoritarian Dynamic, The (Stenner), 343 authoritarianism, 4, 14, 220, 343–61, 363, 379 democracy and, 357 economics and, 346–51 exposure to difference and, 242 innovation and, 318 insecurity and, 338, 342, 378 media and, 346–9 nostalgia and 351–4 predisposition, 220, 343–6 populism and, 325, 350–51 scapegoats and, 355–6 science and, 161–3 automatic looms, 179 automation, 63, 312–13 Averroes, 137–8, 143, 144, 145 Aztec Empire (1428–1521), 55 Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, 75 baby-boom generation (1946–64), 294, 340 Babylon, 39, 86–7 Babylonia (1895–539 BC), 39, 42, 43, 86–7, 128, 131, 249, 267 Bacon, Francis, 147, 156, 165–6, 201 bad news, 322 Baghdad, 70, 136, 353 Bahrain, 42 Bailey, Ron, 11 Bailyn, Bernard, 201 balance of trade, 59–60 Banda Islands, 100 Bangladesh, 270 Bannon, Steve, 14, 108 Barcelona, Catalonia, 320 Basel, Switzerland, 152 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Bayezid II, Ottoman Sultan, 98 Bayle, Pierre, 158 Beginning of Infinity, The (Deutsch), 332 Behavioural Immune System, 222 Beirut, Lebanon, 236 benefit–cost ratio, 60, 61, 62 Berges, Aida, 80 Bering land bridge, 76 Berkeley, see University of California, Berkeley Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 10, 340, 341, 363, 364 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 307–8 Bernstein, William, 42 Berossus, 267 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 243 Beveridge, William, 59 Béziers, France, 94 Bezos, Jeffrey, 274, 275–6, 277 Bi Sheng, 171 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 bicycles, 297 de Biencourt, Charles, 189 Big Five personality traits, 7 Black Death (1346–53), 77, 139, 208, 356, 352, 356 Blade Runner, 334 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 124–6 Blue Ghosts, 236 Bohr, Niels, 105 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), 307 bonobos, 226–7 Book of Jonah, 248–50 Borjas, George, 116 Boston, Massachusetts, 122, 223 Boudreaux, Donald, 62, 270 Boulton, Matthew, 194 Bowles, Samuel, 216 Boym, Svetlana, 288 Brandt, Willy, 364 Brewer, Marilynn, 247 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Brezhnev, Leonid, 315 Britain, 169, 181–99 Acts of Union (1707), 101, 194 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 345 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 anti-Semitism in, 254 arts, 198 Bletchley Park, 124–6 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Cheddar Man, 74 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 coffee houses, 166 colonies, 84, 191, 194, 200 Corn Laws repeal (1846), 53, 191 creative destruction in, 179 crime in, 119, 120 Dutch War (1672–4), 101 English Civil War (1642–1651), 148, 183, 184, 201 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 hair powder tax (1795), 72 immigration in, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 193–4 Industrial Revolution, 188–99, 202 innovation in, 53, 189–90 Internet, development of, 307–8 Iraq War (2003–11), 345 Levellers, 183–4, 186 literacy in, 188, 198 literature, 188–9 London Bridge stabbings (2019), 120 London 7/7 bombings (2005), 341 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Magna Carta (1215), 5 monopolies, 182 MPs’ expenses scandal (2009), 345 Muslim community, 113 Navigation Acts, 192 nostalgia in, 294 open society, 169, 181–2, 195–9 patent system, 189–90, 203, 314 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 208 political tribalism in, 238, 240–41 poverty in, 256 railways in, 297 Royal Society, 156, 157, 158, 196, 296 ruin follies, 286–7 slavery, abolition of (1807), 182, 205 smuggling in, 192 Statute of Labourers (1351), 208 United States, migration to, 104 West Africa Squadron, 205 Whig Party, 185, 201 World War II (1939–45), 124–6 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 135 Bronze Age (c. 3300–600 BC) Late Bronze-Age Collapse (1200–1150 BC), 44, 49, 54 migration to Europe, 74–5 Phoenician civilization, 43–6, 49, 70 Sumerian civilization, 42–3 Brotherton, Rob, 322 Brown, Donald, 219, 283 Bruges, Flanders, 208 Bruno, Giordano, 150 Bryn Mawr College, 201 Buddhism, 96, 149, 352 Bulgaria, 73, 342 Bureau of Labor Statistics, US, 65 Burke, Edmund, 152, 292 Bush, George Walker, 328 ByteDance, 318 Byzantine Empire (395–1453), 94, 134, 135, 155, 224 California Gold Rush (1848–1855), 104 Calvin, John, 149 Calvinism, 6, 99, 153, 356 Canada, 235, 258 Caplan, Bryan, 258 Caracalla, Roman Emperor, 91 Carbon Engineering, 332 Cardwell, Donald, 10 Cardwell’s Law, 10 Carlson, Tucker, 82, 302 Carlyle, Thomas, 206 Carthage (814–146 BC), 45 Caspian Sea, 75 Cathars, 94, 142 Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 154 Catholicism, 208 in Britain, 101, 185–6, 191 Crusades, 94, 138 in Dutch Republic, 99 exiles and, 153 in France, 154 Jews, persecution of, 97–8, 100, 106, 140, 233 Inquisition, 94, 97, 98, 100, 143, 150 in Italy, 6, 169 Muslims, persecution of, 97, 106, 233 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 237 in Rwanda, 230–31 in United States, 102, 104, 108, 254 values and, 114 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 201 Celts, 89, 289 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 313 Ceres, 89 Cerf, Vinton, 307 CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), 306, 307 chariot racing, 224 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 148, 179, 183 Chávez, Hugo, 354 Chechen War, Second (1999–2009), 354 Cheddar Man, 74 cheongsam dresses, 73 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 286, 300 Chicago principles, 164–5 Chicago, Illinois, 202 child mortality, 168–9 Child, Josiah, 184 children, 26 chimpanzees, 24, 25, 32, 36, 226–7, 228 China, 4, 5, 6, 13, 84, 270, 314–18 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 authoritarianism, 4, 162–3, 175, 318, 325, 343 budget deficits, 60 cheongsam dresses, 73 Confucianism, 129, 149, 169, 176 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 4, 11–12, 162–3 Cultural Revolution (1966–76), 355 dictatorships, support for, 367 dynamism in, 315–18 ethnic groups in, 84 Great Wall, 178 industrialization 169, 172–3, 207 intellectual property in, 58 kimonos, 73 literacy in, 148 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 54, 148, 175, 177–8, 179, 215 national stereotypes, 235, 236 overcapacity in, 317 paper, invention of, 136 private farming initiative (1978), 315–16 productivity in, 317 poverty in, 273, 316 Qing dynasty (1644–1912), 148, 149, 151, 153, 175–7, 179, 353 Reform and Opening-up (1979–), 4, 53, 56, 315–16 SARS outbreak (2002), 162 science in, 4, 13, 70, 153, 156, 162–3, 169–73, 269 Silk Road, 171, 174, 352 Song dynasty (960–1279), 53, 169–75 state capitalism in, 316–17 Tang dynasty (618–907), 84, 170, 177, 352 Taoism, 129, 149 trade barriers, 59 United States, migration to, 104, 109, 254 United States, trade with, 19, 57, 58–9, 62–3, 64 WTO accession (2001), 63 Yuan Empire (1271–1368), 174–5 Zheng He’s voyages (1405–33), 177–8 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 254 Christensen, Clayton, 305 Christianity, 46, 70, 96, 129 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 in Britain, 101 Calvinism, 6, 99, 149, 153, 356 Cathars, 94, 142 clash of civilizations narrative, 237 Crusades, 94, 138 Catholicism, see Catholicism Dominican order, 356 in Dutch Republic, 99 economic hardship and, 359 fundamentalism, 133–5, 149 Great Awakening (1730–55), 102 Great Vanishing, 134–5 Inquisition, 97, 98, 100 Jews, persecution of, 95, 96, 97 Lutheranism, 99, 356 in Mongol Empire, 96 Old Testament, 46, 72 orthodox backlash, 149–50 Orthodox Church, 155 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 233 Protestantism, 99, 104, 148, 149, 153, 169, 178 Puritanism, 99, 102 Rastafari and, 72 Reformation, 148, 155 in Roman Empire, 90, 93–4 science and, 133–5, 141–6, 149–50 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 97 tribalism and, 230–31, 246 zero-sum relationships and, 248–50 Chua, Amy, 84 Cicero, 141 Cilician, Gates, 42 cities, 40, 79, 140 division of labour in, 40 immigration and, 114, 250 innovation and, 40, 53, 79, 140, 145, 172, 287 liberalism and, 339 Mesopotamia, 37–43 open-mindedness and, 35 productivity and, 40, 98 tradition and, 287, 291 turtle theory and, 121–2 civic nationalism, 377–8 civil society, 6, 199, 253, 358, 363 clash of civilizations narrative, 237, 362–3, 365–6 ‘Clash of Civilizations?’


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The company’s initial reaction to the pandemic was to announce that it was seeding a charitable fund for its temp workers and contract delivery drivers who lacked health coverage and to encourage the public to donate to it. This met with some derision. It also promised two weeks of paid leave to anyone with a COVID-19 diagnosis and offered unpaid time off, without risk of being penalized for missing shifts, to anyone who wanted to stay home as a precaution. It offered a temporary $2 bump in hourly pay to those who kept working. It set up temperature checks and COVID-19 testing stations for arriving workers. It issued masks and provided hand sanitizer and disinfectant. Hector Torrez watched the measures go into effect at the warehouse in Thornton, Colorado.

Its general manager, Clint Autry: Joe Rubino, “Amazon’s Gamble on Finding 1,500 Workers for Robotic Warehouse in Thornton May Not Have Been a Gamble After All,” The Denver Post, March 20, 2019. the Bronx … twice as likely to be fatal: Ese Olumhense and Ann Choi, “Bronx Residents Twice as Likely to Die from COVID-19 in NYC,” The City, April 3, 2020. money for his mother’s cremation: Joshua Chaffin, “Elmhurst: Neighborhood at Center of New York’s COVID-19 Crisis,” Financial Times, April 10, 2020. in the small city of Albany, Georgia: Ellen Barry, “Days After Funeral in a Georgia Town, Coronavirus ‘Hit Like a Bomb,’” The New York Times, March 30, 2020. starting in 1980, this convergence reversed: Robert Manduca, “Antitrust Enforcement as Federal Policy to Reduce Regional Economic Disparities,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 685, no. 1 (September 2019): 156–171.

In late July, Amazon announced that its profit had doubled in the second quarter, with sales up by a stunning 40 percent from those a year earlier. On the news, its share price surged yet higher—by early September, it was up by 84 percent on the year, more than double the rise of other tech giants. “Simply put, Covid-19, in our view, has injected Amazon with a growth hormone,” wrote one industry analyst in a note to investors. To handle the surge in business, the company had, between January and October, added more than 425,000 employees worldwide, bringing its total number of nonseasonal employees in the United States to 800,000 and its global total to more than 1.2 million, up by half from a year earlier and now behind only Walmart and China National Petroleum (and that tally didn’t even include the 500,000 drivers who were delivering its packages).


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

“Fact-Checking a Facebook Conspiracy about Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci and Covid-19,” Daniel Funke, Politifact, April 14, 2020. 13 “Coronavirus is a government made”: Her post received 90,000 shares and 350,000 likes. Tweet by @krisssnicolee, March 7, 2020. twitter.com/krisssnicolee/status/1236309595544584192 14 two doctors presenting phony: Their video received 4.3 million views. “Cue the debunking: Two Bakersfield Doctors Go Viral with Dubious COVID Test Conclusions,” Barbara Feder Ostrov, Cal Matters, April 27, 2020. 15 mushroomed across YouTube: “How Has Covid-19 Affected the Anti-Vaccination Movement? A Social Media Analysis,” Commetric, June 2, 2020. 16 “explosive growth in anti-vaccination”: “The Online Competition between Pro- and Anti-Vaccination Views,” Neil F.

But their business model—keeping people glued to their platforms as many hours a day as possible—and the underlying technology deployed to achieve this goal remained largely unchanged. And while the problems they’d promised to solve only worsened, they made more money than ever. The new decade brought a wave of crises. The Covid-19 pandemic, racial reckoning and backlash in the United States, the accelerating rise of a violent new far right, and the attempted destruction of American democracy itself. Each tested the platforms’ influence on our world—or revealed it, exposing ramifications that had been building for years. In summer 2020, an independent audit of Facebook, commissioned by the company under pressure from civil rights groups, concluded that the platform was everything its executives had insisted to me it was not.

“I made this pitch on a human level: ‘Go back to your companies, get ready, start pulling together teams,’” he has recalled telling them. He set up calls between Tedros and the heads of Facebook, Google, and other platforms. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg suggested the WHO set up pages on WhatsApp and Facebook to post updates and answer user questions. On February 13, two weeks after the spread of the virus now known as Covid-19 had been declared a global emergency, Pattison landed in California for a meeting, hosted at Facebook, with Silicon Valley’s top firms. Life remained normal in the United States and Europe. But his sense of the crisis had already shifted. There was, he told CNBC on the day of the meeting, an “infodemic.”


pages: 279 words: 87,875

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

“Exactly how we would have done it,” he said. Between their savings and some early inheritance, they mustered a $95,000 downpayment. They agreed to pay $433,000 and gave $5,000 in earnest money to the seller. They were to pay another $5,000 in ten days, after an inspection. Before they got the keys, though, the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the U.S. economy. Worried for his job as a church-affiliated marriage counselor, they decided not to make the second earnest payment. Days later he was furloughed. Their lender bailed. The seller let the McLaughlins out of the deal for the $5,000 they’d already handed over and another $2,000 to settle the second, skipped payment.


pages: 192 words: 59,234

Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness by Tim S. Grover, Shari Wenk

COVID-19, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, TikTok

Winners have a “Done” list. You have a list that never gets shorter? Things you just can’t seem to accomplish, because you never have the time, or knowledge, or money, or approval from others, or whatever you claim is stopping you? Things you could have done when you were quarantined at home during the Covid-19 pandemic, with literally nothing to do even after you watched every possible Netflix series? Do yourself a favor: Either do them, or admit you’re never doing them and move on. Managing that “back burner” is a ridiculous waste of time and energy; all those burners generate the same amount of heat anyway, and those things stay on your mind and taunt you every time you start thinking about everything you’ve left unfinished—or unstarted.

That’s the difference between a winning quarterback who can call an audible in a bad situation and turn it into a success, and a failing quarterback who can only execute the play he rehearsed. If you’re flying a fighter jet, you can’t leave complete control to the autopilot; you must be ready at all times to override the system and handle the unexpected. Many of us had to face that challenge during the Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted or altered almost every aspect of our lives in some way. Suddenly, basic routines changed—or disappeared altogether—with limited options to put things back the way they were. All the things that were part of a daily routine—what time you got up, when you left the house, when you went to the gym, where you had lunch, who you saw and spoke to, what time you returned home, what you did when you came in the door, how you relaxed in the evening, what time you went to bed—were suddenly altered or eliminated.

I can’t argue with you about bringing the coach back, you made your decision to break up the team, fine. But I still control how we play. So I will control the one thing I can: Winning. You can control showing up. You can control pushing yourself harder. You can control not complaining. You can control not giving a fuck. You can control being there. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I just about lost my mind every time I heard from an athlete who said he or she had no way to work out. Your facility is closed, you have no control over that, I get it. You have a basement? A yard? A field? We will control the things we can control. What are you willing to control, what will you allow to control you?


pages: 687 words: 165,457

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health by Daniel Lieberman

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, death from overwork, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Santayana, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social distancing, Steven Pinker, twin studies, two and twenty, working poor

Endurance athletes such as cross-country skiers had a stunning two-thirds lower risk of heart attacks than average Finns, while power athletes like weight lifters and wrestlers had one-third higher rates of heart attacks.48 Bottom line: weight training isn’t bad, but don’t skip the cardio. Respiratory Tract Infections and Other Contagions As I edit these words in March 2020, COVID-19, the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu, is overwhelming the globe, causing massive numbers of people to fall ill, many to die, and plunging the world into economic crisis. The virus is a stark reminder that contagious diseases have never ceased to pose a profound and terrifying threat to human health. Even though the majority of people who get COVID-19 experience only mild to moderate symptoms, it is many times deadlier than most viral infections of the respiratory tract, including influenza.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a typical year influenza kills about fifty thousand Americans, most of them elderly. Other infectious diseases like AIDS, hepatitis, and tuberculosis also take the lives of substantial numbers of people around the world annually. You may be wondering what physical activity has to do with contagions like respiratory tract infections (RTIs). During epidemics like COVID-19, health officials urge us to wash our hands more often and more thoroughly, to practice social distancing, to cough into our elbows, and—trickiest of all—to stop touching our faces. These fundamental, sensible measures effectively help impede transmission of the virus. Other key, proven treatments include vaccines that teach our immune systems to protect us from particular viruses, and antiviral medicines.

Contagious pathogens flourish in crowded, unhygienic conditions, and when they jump to humans from other species, they are especially dangerous because no one’s immune system has encountered them before. So, while hunter-gatherers suffer from plenty of infectious illnesses, highly contagious epidemic diseases like COVID-19 are partly mismatches made possible by civilization, and that explains why social distancing and handwashing are key tools to fight them.49 Persistent lack of physical activity may be an additional, partial mismatch for the immune system. There are longstanding concerns that excessively demanding physical activities like running a marathon can compromise the immune system’s capabilities, but several lines of evidence indicate that regular, moderate physical activity has the potential to reduce the risk of contracting certain contagious diseases, including RTIs.50 In addition, exercise appears to slow the rate at which the immune system deteriorates as we age.51 But exercise is no magic bullet.


pages: 442 words: 112,155

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk

23andMe, affirmative action, basic income, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, Donald Trump, failed state, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, language acquisition, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, unpaid internship, World Values Survey

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT new rules established a racial pecking order: Associated Press, “Court Rules against Biden Administration’s Use of Race, Sex to Allocated COVID-19 Aid,” Oregonian, May 28, 2021, https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2021/05/court-rules-against-using-race-sex-to-allocate-federal-aid.html. See also Zaid Jilani, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?,” Persuasion, May 10, 2021, https://www.persuasion.community/p/whats-race-got-to-do-with-it. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Thankfully, a federal court held: See Hailey Konnath, “6th Circ. Blocks SBA’s COVID-19 Loan Priority For Minorities,” Law 360, https://www.law360.com/articles/1389372/6th-circ-blocks-sba-s-covid-19-loan-priority-for-minorities. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In a telling study from the United Kingdom: Robert Ford and Anouk Kootstra, “Do White Voters Support Welfare Policies Targeted at Ethnic Minorities?

Because the central government was incapable of imposing its rules on much of the country, it had tremendous difficulties in raising revenues. That made it impossible to sustain public goods at any significant scale. The quality of schools in Afghanistan remains abysmal. Welfare benefits are minimal. Even before COVID-19 hit, the public health system was perpetually close to collapse. There are whole stretches of the country in which there are barely any paved roads, few functioning schools, and virtually no doctors. The dire impact this has had on the quality of life is evident from just about every cross-national comparison.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Welfare benefits are minimal: Abdul Majeed Labib, “The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan: Updating and Improving the Social Protection Index,” Asian Development Bank, August 2012, https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/project-document/76049/44152-012-reg-tacr-01.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Even before COVID-19 hit: “Coronavirus Pushing Millions into Poverty: SIGAR,” Al Jazeera, July 31, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/7/31/coronavirus-pushing-millions-of-afghans-into-poverty-sigar. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT There are whole stretches: “Afghanistan,” CIA World Factbook, April 21, 2021, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/afghanistan.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

BY THE SAME AUTHOR Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and the Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Women Author’s Note “MILLENNIALS DON’T STAND A CHANCE.” THAT’S HOW Annie Lowrey titled her piece, several weeks into widespread quarantine amidst the spread of COVID-19, detailing the myriad ways the millennials generation is indeed screwed. “The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression,” she writes. “Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed.”

Like the generations before us, we were raised on a diet of meritocracy and exceptionalism: that each of us was overflowing with potential and all we needed to activate it was hard work and dedication. If we worked hard, no matter our current station in life, we would find stability. Long before the spread of COVID-19, millennials had begun to come to terms with just how hollow, how deeply and depressingly fantastical, that story really was. We understood that people keep telling it, to their kids and their peers, in New York Times editorials and in how-to books, because to stop would be tantamount to admitting that it’s not just the American Dream that’s broken; it’s America.

That’s a deeply discombobulating realization, but it’s one that people who haven’t navigated our world with the privileges of whiteness, middle-class-ness, or citizenship have understood for some time. Some people are just now realizing the extent of the brokenness. Others have understood it, and mourned it, their entire lives. Writing this from the middle of the pandemic, it’s become apparent that COVID-19 is the great clarifier. It clarifies what and who in your life matters, what things are needs and what are wants, who is thinking of others and who is thinking only of themselves. It has clarified that the workers dubbed “essential” are, in truth, treated as expendable, and it has made decades of systemic racism—and resultant vulnerability to the disease—indelible.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

DeepMind’s Kareem Ayoub got me started on all this five years ago, and remains a close friend, even if these days AI is the last thing we talk about. Michael Dwyer, my publisher, has been terrific throughout. This is our second book together and hopefully not our last. Euan Thorneycroft at AM Heath gave me some excellent advice early in the process. I wrote most of this book while flat on my back recovering from Covid-19. Suddenly AI didn’t seem like the biggest threat to humanity. I’m so grateful for my friends and family for keeping me sane and looking after me. Thanks especially to Charli Hunt, Jimmy Hillis, Richard Exley and Claire Milner for some good fun in tough times. The book is dedicated to two great friends, Stephen Hare and Stephanie Jones, in honour of adventures past and adventures to come.

A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games


Fodor's Big Island of Hawaii by Fodor’s Travel Guides

Airbnb, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, Easter island, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, polynesian navigation, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

If you are stung by a centipede, wash the site of your bite thoroughly to prevent infection. When camping, shake out your sleeping bag before climbing in, and check your shoes in the morning, as centipedes like warm, moist places. If planning on hiking or traveling in remote areas, always carry a first-aid kit and appropriate medications for sting reactions. COVID-19 When COVID-19 brought travel to Hawaii to a virtual standstill for much of 2020, new travel protocols were developed by the state of Hawaii the following year. Once travel restarted, visitors to Hawaii had to fulfill pre-flight requirements via the Hawaii Safe Travels website. These mandates were in place until March 25, 2022, when the Safe Travels program ended; at this writing, there are no COVID-related requirements for arriving domestic travelers.

The now-beloved animated movie, which tells the story of the demigod Maui, features the voice talents of Aulii Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson. In 2018, Moana was re-recorded and distributed in Olelo Hawaii, or the Hawaiian language, with Cravalho reprising her role. It marked the first time a Disney movie was available in Hawaiian. Know Before You Go COVID-19 Because uncertainty about future COVID variants or seasonal surges remains at the forefront, it’s best to familiarize yourself with the state of Hawaii’s current travel protocols; wwww.GoHawaii.com has the latest information. DRIVING ON THE BIG ISLAND The Big Island is big, which means the average drive to get from Point A to Point B can take time.

The pre-travel test (from approved labs) had to be taken 72 hours prior to departure and then uploaded as a PDF file into the Safe Travels website. A QR code was then emailed to you. Travelers were also advised to bring a printed copy of their test result or actual vaccine card with them on their flight, as well. At this writing, there are no state restrictions for interisland travel. A COVID-19 pre-travel test or quarantine is not required for traveling between islands, regardless of vaccination status. It is wise before booking your trip to inquire about reimbursement policies at your accommodation for COVID-related cancellations. Not all travel insurance policies will protect against pandemic-related cancellations, so always read the fine print.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Sam’s Bargain IN LATE MARCH 2020, with the coronavirus spreading so fast that President Donald Trump had been forced to back off his expressed hope of packing people into churches on Easter, I tuned in to a Monday morning webinar to check out how several major corporations were responding to the pandemic. It was so early in the crisis that the nation’s COVID-19 death count hadn’t even hit 10,000, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had yet to recommend that masks be worn in public. Zoom still seemed more like a blessing than a burden. But things were grim and clearly getting grimmer. The session had been put together by FSG, a consulting firm, and featured executives from Truist Financial, 3M, and Walmart discussing how they were “changing policies to better support their most vulnerable workers.”

My head swirled. Where in this muddle did reality lie? Was Walmart as responsive to the needs of its employees as it was making itself out to be? Or was it as indifferent as Love claimed, bent on fattening its bottom line, the well-being of its workers be damned? For more than a year, prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, I’d been wrestling with these questions. However, answering them wasn’t so easy, at least not anymore. There was a time, for about a decade and a half beginning around the year 2000, when portraying Walmart as greedy, if not downright malevolent, had become as commonplace for many people as grabbing a quart of milk from the store.

They put up with us when we call to complain about something we’ve purchased. They care for our kids. They nurse us back to health when we’re sick. Yet most of us who are served, day in and day out, by these women and men don’t register the depths of their anguish: that one in six can’t come up with the money for their prescription drugs; that, even before COVID-19, about 30 percent of families with two working adults experienced material hardship, such as falling behind on the mortgage or the rent or their medical bills; that a third of those going to food banks are from a household with at least one member who has been working; that nearly half of Americans have only the slimmest of financial cushions and wouldn’t be able to cover their expenses for more than two months if they lost their job; that homelessness is not just a manifestation of mental health issues and addiction but also of work that doesn’t pay sufficiently, with more than half of those in shelters and more than 40 percent of those on the streets having had some formal employment in the year they were living under these conditions.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

., 71 Class bias, 4–6, 88, 136, 161–162, 174, 184, 265 capitalist, 171 dominant, 180–181, 190 equality, 80, 86t exposure, 301–302 India, 299, 302–303, 308 investor, 53 lower, 162 management, 142 Marxist, 171–173 meritocracy, 138, 150 middle, 73, 80, 86, 139, 241 technocratic, 21 upper, 300- 302 upper-middle, 18 working, 79, 141–142, 288, 301, 309 Cloud definition, 33–34 and electricity, 33–34, 44 enables other industries, 46 as factory, 7, 35–36, 42–43, 45–46, 321 and infrastructure, 33–35 kilowatt-hours required, 34 physical, 31–32, 34, 44–46 supply chain, 45 Code Arabic, 191 Assembly, 275, 277, 281, 286 Black Girls Code, 255, 263 breaking, 138–139 (Colossus) Code.org, 253, 255, 259 Code2040, 255, 260 Coding, Girls Who Code, 253, 255, 263 cultural, 302 digital, 284, 289 dress, 145, 164–165, 298 education, 6 empire, 76 #YesWeCode, 253, 264–266 HLL (high-level language), 275, 277–278, 284, 290 Hour of Code, 253, 263–264 is law, 126 platforms, 321 robotics, 201, 203, 205 social media, 59 source, 273–292 passim (see also Source code) switching, 184, 190 typing, 188, 351 writers, 24, 145, 256–259, 262–267, 300, 381 Yes We Code, 255 Code.org, 253, 255, 259 Code2040, 255, 260 Coding, Girls Who Code, 253, 255, 263 Cold War, 137, 152, 169 computer networks, 75–76, 83–84 network economy, 87 technology, 17–18, 94, 137 typewriter, 227 Collision detection, 242–243 Colonialism, 19, 91, 93, 105, 109, 245 cable networks, 93, 99, 101 colonization, 186, 378 digital, 331 Europe, 110, 147–148, 343 internet, 111, 129 language as, 186–188 metaphors, 94 stereotypes, 96, 102, 104 technocolonialist, 103–104 Colossus, 17, 139, 143 Comcast, 35 Commercial content moderation (CCM), 56–58, 62, 66, 122 Commodity computational services, 33 Common sense, 73, 96 Communications Decency Act, 60–61 Compaq, 318 Complex scripts, 188, 222, 344–345, 350 CompuServe, 320, 325 Computer anthropomorphized (see Robots) conservative force, 15 control and power, 23 critiques of, 5 men, 142 utility, 35, 320 humans as, 43, 140, 384 Computer science, 18, 58, 66, 112, 367 artificial intelligence, 58, 66 education, 256, 263 Thompson hack, 275, 291 women in, 254 Computing, 135–155 passim artificial intelligence, 56 Britain and, 21, 138, 148–152 Chinese, 350–351, 353–354 and class, 142–143 cloud, 78, 87 companies, 13, 18–19 devices, 40–41, 45 education, 368 and empire, 147–148 environment, 382 global, 350, 377 hacking, 289–291 history of, 7, 17, 35, 38, 43, 46, 137, 153–154 Latin alphabet, 357 masculinity, 263 management, 23 manufacturing, 39 media, 4–8, 377–380 meritocracy narratives, 137, 153–154, 381 networks, 77, 199, 320–321 personal, 354 power, 328 software, 318 typing and, 220, 226, 337, 339, 341, 344 underrepresented groups and, 253, 255–256, 264, 266 and women, 17, 43, 135, 139–142, 144–147 Concorde, 145, 146f Congress, 11–12, 82, 154 Content antisemitic, 265 app, 319, 321 child abuse, 118–119, 122, 125 commercial content moderation (CCM), 56–58, 62, 66, 122 filtering, 57 illegal, 62 internet, 317, 319 moderation, 54–57, 123, 126, 380–382 moderators, 5, 380–382 review, 121, 128–130 social media, 59, 61–63, 66, 232, 321, 329–331 terrorism, 57, 66, 130 violent, 117 web, 317 Contractor, 35, 53, 56, 266 CorelDraw, 298 COVID-19, 14, 20, 377 Cox, Chris, 61 Creating Your Community, 266 Creative destruction, 4 Crisis, 4, 6, 16, 21, 150, 235, 297, 383–384 Covid-19, 20 identity, 58–60 point, 13 Y2K, 104 CSNET, 81 Cybernetics, 75, 78–80, 83, 86, 86t, 88 cyberneticist, 77, 81–82 Cyberpunk, 100–101, 107, 110 Cybersyn, 75, 79–80, 85, 86t CyberTipline, 125 Dalton gang, 287–289 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), 383 Dartmouth College, 235 Data biased, 66, 205 due process, 206 objective, 205 processing, 38, 40–41, 119, 206, 300 socially constructed, 205 value-neutral, 372 Data broker Salesforce, 87 SAS, 87 Data entry, 5, 104, 150, 367 David, Paul, 337–338, 351, 353, 357–358 Davies, Donald, 83 Death, 15, 120, 186, 371, 373, 379 Covid-19, 12 gaming, 233–234, 236 life-or-, 6, 206, 266 technology and dying well, 378 Decolonization, 91, 104, 111–112 Deep Blue, 7 De Kosnik, Benjamin, 108–109, 110 Dell, 318 Delphi, 290 Democratic Republic of Congo, 45 Denmark, 44, 128–129 de Prony, Gaspard, 39–40 Design values, 73–76, 84–88 American, 81–84 Chilean, 79–81 Soviet, 77–78 state, 75, 78, 80, 83, 86, 86t Devanagari, 339, 342, 344, 350, 354 Developing world, 93, 103, 105, 180, 325, 330–332 Devi, Poonam, 304 Diamond, Jared, 338, 351, 353, 357–358 Difference Engine, 40 Digital coding, 284, 289 colonialism, 91, 93–94, 103, 331 computers, 38, 41, 138 connectivity, 379 economies, 13, 22, 29, 31, 33, 35, 45, 145 forensic work, 123, 126, 128, 354 future, 101 gaming, 241 imperialism, 186–187, 191 inclusion, 303 infrastructures, 126, 151, 155 invisibility, 98, 100, 204 labor, 6, 147, 101, 354 materiality, 5 networks, 83 platforms, 66, 118, 199, 201 politics and, 110, 112 predigital, 96–97, 152 revolution, 29, 32 surveillance state, 119, 130 technology, 40, 64, 123–124, 200, 382 vigilantism, 120 Disability, 12, 15, 160 Disasters, 11–15, 19–20, 22–24, 54, 204, 338, 364 Discrimination.

While this episode may seem a long way off, it should be humbling to recall that less than two hundred years ago instituting technologies to keep sewage away from drinking water was considered first optional, and then revolutionary. As the United States stumbles in our scientific and social understandings of COVID-19 and the best way to end the pandemic, we might look back with more understanding and sympathy for these confused, cholera-ridden Londoners, drinking the wastewater that was killing them because, for most ordinary citizens at the time, there simply was no other choice. Most of the technological advancements we’ve seen over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from skyscraper cities to the ubiquity of the World Wide Web, involve some amount of literal or figurative shit-eating by average citizens, and also long periods of time during which obvious, systemic problems are mostly ignored by those at the top echelons of industry and government.

During a global pandemic this has meant that even healthcare supplies and vital public information have been withheld from citizens and state governments. Scientists and epidemiologists at the CDC and NIH have been increasingly forced out or muzzled, and many of the teams dedicated to pandemic response had been dissolved prior to the COVID-19 crisis, leaving a gaping hole of expertise where our disaster response should have been. As the president screamed on Twitter, taking his misinformation about state leaders, the progress of virus research, and elections directly to the public, suddenly an unregulated tech company with no competence or background in history, politics, journalism, rhetoric, the psychology of online interaction, or fact checking was thrust into the position of trying to unbuild the minsinformation machine that has been long in the making.


pages: 598 words: 150,801

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Manual workers and domestic servants were at the bottom, despite the fact that British industry and most middle-class households depended utterly on their labour.2 And hugely vital but unpaid tasks, like mothering, were ignored. This classification of people’s work – updated but not much changed over the past century – continues to shape policymakers’ understandings of valuable and less-valuable work. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed just how flawed this hierarchy is. Cleaners, carers, shop workers and delivery drivers have played vital roles in keeping society going. The pandemic has made clear to many what these workers already knew: that all these jobs require skill. Cleaning – to take just one example – requires attention to detail, stamina, speed and care.

After the First World War, it suited many employers to employ a large number of female clerks on tasks considered skilled twenty years earlier, but increasingly defined as routine, and therefore paid less. By contrast, after the Second World War, Labour’s establishment of a comprehensive welfare state demanded thousands more teachers and health workers. The war – like the Covid-19 pandemic of the twenty-first century – demonstrated that nurses, social workers, ambulance drivers and home helps were vital to society. In 1945, voters, and the Labour government they elected, took seriously the need to rebuild Britain. They recognised that only the state could undertake such an enormous task, and that prioritising education, healthcare, housing and work, was the best response to the upheaval and destruction caused by the war.

Many wanted to make a useful contribution to society; some aspired to shape their country’s future. Climbing a few rungs up the ladder rarely delivered these dreams. We need to create a future that will, because we require imaginative thinking, big ambitions and hope to tackle the pressing problems of the twenty-first century, including climate change, pandemics like COVID-19, automation and an ageing population. The labour movement pioneers of the early twentieth century and the leftists of the 1970s remind us that an unequal hierarchy of wealth and power is only one model for organising society. They envisioned egalitarian alternatives that are worth pursuing. I end this book with some thoughts about how this could be realised.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The two countries signed the agreement in January 2020, with Trump hailing it as a major victory for his administration and for the nation. Across the first year of the agreement, however, multiple reports suggested that China was doing little to increase its American imports to stipulated goals. As was the case with so many Trump initiatives, there seemed to be little consistency or follow-through. And the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic at the very moment when the trade deal was signed upended global trade in ways wholly independent of US-China trade negotiations.12 Still, Trump’s constant bluster about the evils of free trade, his repeated threats to impose tariffs, and his hostility to the many countries seen by his administration as having gained a trade advantage over the United States pushed a neoliberal world to reassess long-standing beliefs and strategies.

With this world possibly slipping away, the prudent strategy might now be to produce more goods closer to home either by increasing domestic manufacturing or by developing shorter supply chains with nearby countries with whom relations were secure. This kind of thinking had begun to influence the calculations of corporations even before Covid-19 struck. The arrival of the virus accelerated the turn toward production in one’s own nation, in which conditions of manufacturing and transportation were imagined as more stable than in the international arena.13 Economists studying international trade were not surprised by these developments. Their data showed that total international merchandise trade—“the sum of exports and imports of commodities and manufactured goods”—had actually peaked in 2008, when it accounted for 51 percent of the world’s output.

Her staff worked to revive America’s anti-monopoly protest tradition, which a hundred years earlier had energized a progressive political movement that had checked private economic power both by breaking up large corporations and subjecting the ones that remained intact to effective public regulation. Sanders shared Warren’s antagonism to corporate power. If anything, his plans were more ambitious than hers, as he sought to make his social democratic vision a reality in American life.27 Pandemic The 2020 presidential campaign coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which lent new urgency to the issues that critics of neoliberalism had been raising. In political economic terms, the pandemic worked to intensify a development that the decline in the neoliberal order had already set in motion: namely, a conviction that government was the only institution with the wherewithal to address severe economic and social hardship.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The restaurant sat in the heart of Deira, the old part of Dubai. It’s a short walk to the Emirati city’s famous creek, which is still full of wooden dhows that travel back and forth to Iran laden with televisions, washing machines, and other wares. The restaurant, which later closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, was actually a branch of a long-running Pyongyang establishment that specializes in Pyongyang naengmyeon, buckwheat noodles served in chilled broth. The original location in North Korea’s capital seated more than two thousand patrons, and branches have been opened throughout Asia, in Kathmandu and Beijing.

“People say we’re the Underground Railroad, but it was really just me buying tickets with my credit card on Expedia,” Ahn says. Arriving a few hours later that morning, the family of three wore masks to hide their faces. The masks aroused no suspicions. People in Asia frequently wore masks when traveling, even years before COVID-19 made mask wearing a global practice. Seeing an American-looking Korean man standing near the entrance, Kim Han-sol greeted him with the prearranged code name “Steve.” Ahn quietly took them to a VIP lounge where they could lie low until Adrian and his team gave an update on the next move. Ahn saw his job as keeping everyone calm and relaxed.

He described entering the embassy for the first time as a North Korean escapee and how he’d smashed the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Most important, he described how they were there to help a diplomat defect. “We took huge risks to help others reach freedom. Why is the U.S., Spain punishing us?” he asked. * * * — In December 2020, with the world still in the throes of COVID-19, I finally had the chance to meet Christopher Ahn over Zoom. It would be the first of countless hours of mostly late-night discussions. At first, I couldn’t believe how different his personality was from the impression I’d had looking at the pictures and reading the court case against him. Almost all of his stories had a sensitive, emotional dimension to them.


pages: 80 words: 21,077

Stake Hodler Capitalism: Blockchain and DeFi by Amr Hazem Wahba Metwaly

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, congestion charging, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, information security, Internet of things, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, prediction markets, price stability, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Skype, smart contracts, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin

It is managing over 5.2 billion USD of crypto investments, including 4.4 billion USD of Bitcoin. The third is the impact of COVID-19. The pandemic has steered global interest rates even lower than it was before. Some jurisdictions like the Eurozone and the likes are now in the negative region. Others, including the US and UK, could probably come next if care is not taken in the expansionary monetary and fiscal policies being implemented to combat the surge in unemployment rates induced by layoffs due to COVID-19. In this mood, DeFi gives much higher returns are potentially offered to savers than the high-street financial organizations.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

In the 1970s and ’80s, by contrast, the global pace of growth slowed as a result of the 1973 oil crisis and demographic trends. In the 1990s, growth picked up again thanks to the revolution in information technology, globalisation, outsourcing, and the astounding expansion of China and other developing countries. Most recently, the financial crisis in 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic have had adverse temporary effects of the global growth trajectory. But despite these short-run fluctuations due to major crises, economic growth in Western Europe and North America over the past 150 years – that is, since the onset of the Demographic Transition – has maintained an average pace of about 2 per cent a year.

Percentage of the Population with Access to Electricity, 2017 Figure 13e. Secure Internet Services (per million people), 2017 Equally disconcerting is the gap in living standards across social, ethnic and racial lines within societies, manifesting as disparities in education, income and health. In 2019, prior to the impact of Covid-19, in the world’s richest country, the United States, life expectancy of African Americans was 74.7, whereas that of white Americans was 78.8; infant mortality rates per 1,000 were 10.8 for African Americans and 4.6 for white Americans; and 26.1 per cent of African Americans had a college degree by the age of twenty-five, in contrast to 41.1 per cent of white Americans.[2] Even so, the gulf in living standards between the richest and the poorest countries is so much larger that millions of women and men risk their lives in the attempt to reach the developed world.

While these calamities rained destruction on countless individuals, the living standards of humanity as a whole, seen through a wider lens, swiftly recovered from each of these tragedies. In the short run, the growth process has been highly vulnerable to massive swings, as the world has witnessed recently during the Covid-19 pandemic. But history shows that, shattering and dreadful as they are, these events have had limited long-term impact on the grand arc of human development. The relentless march of humanity has so far been unstoppable. Nonetheless, while billions of people have been liberated from the vulnerability to hunger, disease and climatic volatility, a new peril looms over the horizon: the alarming impact of human-caused environmental degradation and climate change, originating during the Industrial Revolution.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

Soon a new set of radical surveillance capabilities, largely powered by AI, became public knowledge. A company called Draganfly, which had invented the original four-rotor “quadcopter” design for drones, contacted me to describe a new technology that it said would enable public-health authorities to detect COVID-19 symptoms from the air. Researchers at the University of South Australia had already created technology to rapidly detect, in a single drone pass, the survivors of a mass-casualty event like an earthquake or tsunami. With 4K-resolution video footage held extremely still by stabilizers, AI could compare the images in the footage to training data showing the motion of humans breathing in and out.

And so the week of April 20, an FAA-licensed drone pilot began flying passes above citizens playing soccer in the park, standing in line outside the local Trader Joe’s, and walking the streets of downtown Westport, not only to determine whether they were standing too close (the drone carried loudspeakers so it could tell people to leave a closed park or to maintain better social distance), but also to potentially identify symptoms of COVID-19. Chief Koskinas explained that his department has adopted radical new technology in the past. Sandy Hook is a half-hour drive north of Westport, and the 2012 murder of twenty children there transformed his department. Before then, he told me, “we were preparing and training differently. Now it’s common practice that a regular police officer carries a high-powered rifle every eight-hour shift.”

Use of that data then deepens the inequity.”6 The tendency to broadly apply the rulings of artificial intelligence when human systems are overwhelmed by human need damages independent judgment everywhere—not just in the courts. And it’s when we strap AI and high expectations onto a broken system that things really go wrong. By January 2021, ten months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic fallout in the United States was severe and deepening. The service industry was decimated as restaurants, hair salons, and gyms faltered and closed. The head of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys told me his members were preparing for an avalanche of lost homes and cars as American entrepreneurs everywhere threw whatever they could at saving their businesses.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Preparing for this climate migration means the phased abandonment of major cities, the relocation of others, and the building of entirely new cities in foreign lands. London, the city I live in, is at least 2,000 years old and accommodates 9 million people. We have mere decades to adapt, expand and build such cities. We can build emergency hospitals in a few days, as we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic; I’ve no doubt we can build ambitious cities within years. But what sort of cities, and where, and for whom? The coming migration will be big and diverse. It will involve the world’s poorest fleeing deadly heatwaves and failed crops. It will also include the educated, the middle class, people who can no longer live where they planned because it’s impossible to get a mortgage or property insurance; because employment has moved elsewhere; because the neighbourhood has become undesirable because those who could have already left for a more tolerable climate.

After all, impossible cities like Dubai and Doha in desert regions do just that – Qatar has even begun air-conditioning the outdoors, cooling sports stadiums, pavements and outside markets and dining areas, a trick that has helped it become by far the world’s biggest per capita greenhouse gas emitter.22 So yes, in some places some populations will be able to endure for longer by essentially living an indoor, cooled or nocturnal existence, and perhaps by wearing powered, air-conditioned bodysuits.23 However, even if you ignore the energy and water costs of extreme adaptation, such strategies will only ever work in a limited way for a small section of urban society. After all, those populations would be heavily dependent on resources produced outside, such as food. Consider that even for wealthy Gulf states, there are continual fears over food security, as there are no permanent rivers or lakes in the region, so vulnerability to shocks, such as the Covid-19 crisis, is acutely felt. Countries like the UAE import 90 per cent of their food. Right now, half of the world’s food is produced on smallholder farms using physical labour, yet as the world warms there will be more and more days when it will be physically impossible to work outside, reducing productivity and food security.

Immigrant-founded companies account for more than half of the top twenty-five American firms and many of the most recognizable brands, including Google (and its parent company Alphabet), Yahoo!, Kraft Foods and Tesla. Silicon Valley is the Geneva of technology: half of the companies’ founders are immigrants, as are two-thirds of the workforce. Henry Ford was the son of immigrants, Steve Jobs’s father was from Syria, and the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 was made by Turkish immigrants to Germany and Hungarian immigrants to the US. The truth is, we need a diversity of skills and talents for productive economies and vibrant societies, which means everyone from fruit-pickers to computer programmers, from truck drivers to ballet dancers. THE DEPOPULATION CRISIS In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.


pages: 430 words: 135,418

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

Shares plunged 17 percent on February 5, one of its worst days ever, on news out of China that the company’s locally made Model 3s would be further delayed because of COVID-19. Excitement about Tesla’s potential for growth in China had fueled a rocket-like rise in value, but now there was growing concern that this new virus, which scientists cautioned was deadly and easily spreadable, might bring the country’s economy to a standstill. As investors began to digest that news, it became increasingly clear, too, that COVID-19 wasn’t a threat to just China or Asia, as the SARS outbreak had largely been almost twenty years earlier. In Tesla’s home state of California, local government officials were growing increasingly concerned.

Just weeks earlier, Musk had been onstage in Shanghai celebrating the start of Model 3 production in China, defying skeptics who thought he couldn’t pull off such a feat in less than a year. Two days after his performance, the World Health Organization announced the discovery of a mysterious pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan, a large Chinese city more than five hundred miles to the west. It was still early days for what would become known to the world as COVID-19. For many around the globe, it was easy to dismiss the potential threat as something a world away—if they were even paying attention. This was especially true if you were a Tesla shareholder joining Musk in celebrating, as the company’s stock continued to surpass record highs. His unexpected victory in China, not to mention racking up two quarters of profitability at the end of 2019, had given him renewed credibility.

Given the sky-high valuation requirement, this first goal might be one of the only tranches Musk could reasonably reach, some thought at the time. Still, in the wake of his “fascist” comment, investors seemed to reward his defiance. Shares were rebounding from a low in February. With his further outbursts downplaying the danger of COVID-19, Musk waded right into the growing political unrest that roiled the nation. Debate hinged on whether to prioritize containing the pandemic or fueling the economy, and it was split largely along party lines. Trump weighed in, supporting Musk in his battle to reopen. To raise the stakes, Musk publicly dared local officials to stop him.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Ryan Deto, “UPMC Workers to Participate In One-Day Strike on Oct. 4,” Pittsburgh City Paper, September 24, 2018; US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Major Work Stoppages in 2018,” February 8, 2019. 14. “ ‘Fire through Dry Grass’: Andrew Cuomo Saw COVID-19’s Threat to Nursing Homes. Then He Risked Adding to It,” ProPublica, June 16, 2020; “Coronavirus Cases Rise Sharply in Prisons Even as They Plateau Nationwide,” NYT, June 16, 2020; “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States,” NYT, April 14, 2020; Centers for Disease Control COVID-19 Response Team, “Characteristics of Health Care Personnel with COVID-19—United States, February 12–April 9, 2020,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69, no. 15 (April 17, 2020), 477–481. 15.

The year 2018 saw the highest level of strike participation in the American economy since the mid-1980s; of those who did walk off the job, 90 percent worked in either education or health care—the major care industries. A small one-day strike at UPMC contributed to these numbers. And over the previous decade, health care accounted for more strike activity than any other industry.13 This dynamic appeared to speed up rapidly as I finished this book in spring 2020, while COVID-19 raged. Like a flash of lightning, the pandemic illuminated our society, revealing who is valued and who is dispensable. The thousands left to die in nursing homes and prisons marked one such revelation—social disposability made plain. The unequal racial toll of the disease was another—one related to who had to continue to work.

See also health insurance Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), 192 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 9, 10, 14, 59 Conners, Martin, 44, 51 consent decrees, 124, 125, 183, 200, 213 consumerism, 59, 64, 80, 220 contracts (union): and Experimental Negotiating Agreement (ENA), 181; and health insurance, 147, 150,158, 159, 205, 206; and layoffs, 182; and 1959 steel strike, 59, 60; and nurses’ union, 223, 232, 249, 250; and retiree benefits, 147, 151; and strikes, 12; and wage reductions, 189, 213; and Section 2-B, 55, 61 Cooper, Richard (Buz), 202 “cost crunch,” 46 “cost disease,” 3 cost-of-living increases, 11, 33, 38, 172 “cost-plus” payment, 148, 218. See also Medicare cost-productivity gap, 46 Cott, Nancy, 83 COVID-19, 263 Cowie, Jefferson, 27 Czap, Mary, 86 Day, Jared, 163 debt: and construction of new hospitals, 167–169, 171, 173, 175, 209, 235; and mergers and acquisitions wave of 1980s, 187, 249, 250; and precarity, 4, 263; and steel industry capital expansion, 38; and steel strike of 1959, 86 debt financing, 167 deindustrialization: and health care, 18, 19, 260; as historical process, 17, 21, 134, 245; and technological unemployment, 185; and welfare state, 181; and working-class community, 99 Denenberg, Herbert, 166 Denominational Ministry Strategy, 190 Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 223–226 Department of Public Assistance, 127 Detre, Thomas, 245–246, 248 Detroit: and African American kinship networks, 120; in comparison with Pittsburgh, 34, 100, 102, 112, 159, 182; and deindustrialization, 195, 206; and growth of health care and social assistance sector, 5, 6; and New Deal order, 8 diagnostic related groups (DRGs), 226, 227 Dillard, Annie, 38, 40 discipline: and social policy, 11, 15; and collective child-rearing, 121; discipline slips, 43, 54, 62–63; and domesticity, 70–75, 84, 89–96; of the market, 227; in steel workplace, 26, 41, 238, 239 disinvestment, 16, 107, 125, 202, 245 divorce, 195, 214 Dohanic, Pete, 46, 47 domesticity, 64, 73, 77, 78, 80, 96, 116, 222 domestic emigration, 195 domestic violence, 200, 201 domestic work, 90, 116, 152, 179, 223, 232 Donora, 114, 120 Dravo, 34 Dravosburg, 58, 86 dualization of economy, 2.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

But the promised interview never materialized, and as COVID-19 case levels soared anew, Thiel’s representative stopped returning my emails. Instead, Thiel spoke to Die Weltwoche, a Swiss newspaper whose editor Roger Köppel is a member of the country’s national-conservative People’s Party. During an interview with Köppel, Thiel characterized the disease as a mental pathology rather than a physical one. “I see it as a psychological indicator that people know deep down: There is no way back to the old normal,” he said. He continued: “COVID-19 created a shift. There used to be this feeling that the future was being held back somehow.

But, as in 2008, when he’d secretly encouraged the forces of disruption—sending out sober-minded letters to Clarium’s investors warning of the dangers of anti-immigrant populism while secretly funding the very same movement—he’d also helped plant the seeds of the chaos that followed the spread of COVID-19. He’d helped Trump overcome Republicans who’d feared that his narcissism and authoritarian tendencies would be disastrous in a crisis, and he’d helped create and protect Facebook, which was now facilitating the spread of misinformation that encouraged Americans to shun masks, take unproven and potentially harmful treatments, like the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and even industrial bleach.

Keith Rabois, an original satellite in the Thielverse, is a partner at Founders Fund and has been, on a daily basis, amplifying Thiel’s message that the Bay Area should be abandoned by anyone with money or ambition. Rabois purchased a home in Miami Beach in December, complaining about California’s high taxes and its COVID-19 restrictions. Thiel also relocated, acquiring two properties in Miami Beach at the end of 2020, a good spot for him given that Florida, unlike California, doesn’t tax capital gains, and is not far from the de facto headquarters of the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. Founders Fund is opening an office in South Florida too.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

The weather is getting wilder. Populations are on the move. Exotic diseases—Ebola, AIDS, SARS, MERS, Zika, COVID-19, which is rampaging as I write—are vaulting from animals to humans every generation. Technology is decreasing in size and growing in power like an ever more tightly sprung trap. We’ve pampered and praised the knowledge machine, given it the autonomy it has needed to grow. Now we desperately need its advice. Figure 14.2. A cell heavily infected by SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 With enough evidence in—with Baconian convergence achieved or at least well on the way—there will exist a consensus among scientists that is functionally equivalent to science’s speaking with a single voice.

The aim of the reports is to summarize the state of scientific knowledge concerning the climate; among other things, they assign confidence levels to hypotheses, perhaps attaching “medium confidence” to one and “very high confidence” to another, and they assign likelihoods to particular events—such as a 3-degree increase in average global temperature by 2050 or a 5-inch increase in sea level by 2100—using expressions such as “more likely than not,” “likely,” “very likely,” and so on. (In the same way, the UK, US, and other governments have convened committees of experts during the COVID-19 crisis to extract predictions, as best they can, from a bewildering array of conflicting epidemiological models.) Such a panel, for all its expertise and hard work, cannot determine what science says. Science holds no determinate views. The IPCC’s numbers are created, as all such numbers must be, by infusing the scientific record with a set of plausibility rankings.

., 45, 83 Camptosaurus, 224, 225 Carson, Rachel, 265 Cartesian coordinates, 130 Catholic Church Cartesian rejection of intellectual authority, 242 Galileo and, 316n Martin Luther and, 242 in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe, 245–46 causation by collision, 244 See also collision, in Cartesian physics centrifugal force, 132, 306n CERN, 72, 81, 232 Chadwick, James, 228 Challenger expedition, 54 Chambers, Robert, 310n Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan, 227 charge, of subatomic particles, 48, 230, 231 Charles II (king of England), 250–52 Châtelet, Émilie du, 265 chess, 99–100, 102 Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 Christian Evidence Society, 181 chromatograms, 61–62 Church of England, See Anglican Church cigarettes, corporate-funded research and, 53 circle, in Aristotelian physics, 134 classical antiquity, 242 classification, biological, 214–20 climate change, 278–79, 288–89 Collins, Francis, 181 Collins, Harry, 64, 285–86 collision, in Cartesian physics, 132, 133, 136–38, 186 compartmentalization first modern scientists’ approach to, 265–67 Newton and, 189–90, 238, 272 in Principia, 249 scientists and, 263–64 confidence levels, 288–89 See also plausibility rankings confirmation holism, 302n consensus, procedural, See procedural consensus continental drift, 54–58, 55 continuity, 103 controlled experiments, 117 conventions, iron rule and, 103 convergence, See Baconian convergence conversion experience, 29, 31 Copernican paradigm, 31–32 Copernican revolution, 26–27 Copernicus, 227 coral reef analogy of science, 196–97 corporations, as sponsors of research, 52–53, 84 cosmic rays, 228 Cosmotron, 228 COVID-19, 287, 288 Cowley, Abraham, 105 criminal trials, 66–67 critical thought, 13, 25, 281–82 Cummings, E. E., 267 cuttlefish, 125–27 Daphne Major (Galápagos Islands), 35, 35 Darwin, Charles Dawkins on, 262 evolution, 28 and Kelvin’s estimation of age of Earth, 74–79, 81 lack of formal structure in organization of species, 236 On the Origin of Species, 206–7 and quinarian system, 218, 219 Whewell and, 177 Daston, Lorraine, 154 data, See empirical evidence data dredging, 309n Davy, Humphrey, 91 Dawkins, Richard, 262 Dear, Peter, 123, 124, 167 de Broglie, Louis, 148 decuplet (eightfold way), 231–32, 233 deductive reasoning, 311n–312n Democritus, 126 Descartes, René Aristotelian worldview vs., 133–35, 307n and collision as cause, 138 and consequences of causal principles, 147 death of, 135 and empirical inquiry, 244 God as critical to natural philosophy, 205–6 and light, 144 Newton and, 186, 188, 271–73 and philosophical reason, 134 philosophy of knowledge, 270–71 physics, 130–38, 270–71 rejection of prevailing intellectual authority, 242 on solid/fluid duality, 143 universe, 131 “Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, A” (Eddington, et al.), 157 Deutsch, David, 227 developmental genetics, 225–26 dimensions, wave function and, 148 Dirac, Paul, 227 discrimination, objectivity and, 85 DNA, 240 dogma, 258 duck/rabbit, 25 Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, 35, 36 Dyson, Sir Frank, 45 earth age of, 74–81, 75 rotation of, 27 Eccles, John, 20 eclipse expedition (Eddington), 42–50, 43, 44, 68–73, 155–61 École normale supérieure (ENS) (Paris), 50 Eddington, Arthur, 156 and auxiliary assumptions, 81 expedition to test Einstein’s gravitation theory, 42–50, 43, 44, 68–73, 155–61 and importance of small details, 114 and plausibility rankings, 81 and problems with observable facts, 111 subjective interpretation of data, 68–73, 83–84, 155–61 and theoretical cohorts, 139 wording of eclipse report, 167 education, See science education educational reform, 175 Ehrenfest, Paul, 145, 150 eightfold way, 230–32, 235, 236 Einstein, Albert, 145, 156 aesthetic/philosophical senses, 273 on beauty, 227 and Eddington expedition, 42–50, 156 gravity theory, see general theory of relativity as philosopher-scientist, 265 photoelectric effect, 144 Popper and, 15, 18 and quantum mechanics, 145–46 See also relativity theory electromagnetic radiation, 92 electrons, 144, 147 elegance, 227 Elegant Universe, The (Greene), 235 elementary particles, 143 Elohim Creating Adam (William Blake), 276 Empedocles, 126, 143 empirical evidence as by-product of scientific argument, 98, 103–4, 195–6 commonalities between Kuhn and Popper, 39 difficult for humans to produce, 33, 37–38, 116, 203 faulty, 47–48, 111 quantitative, 202–3, 244 radical subjectivism and, 63–64 and scientific method, 7, 8 and Scientific Revolution, 243–44 subjective interpretation of, 57–58, 62–65, 79–82, 92–93, 288–89 empirical facts, See empirical evidence empirical inquiry evolution in 1600s, 3 lack of schism in, 98 Newton’s effect on concept, 137–40 and shallow conception of explanation, 138–39 in seventeenth century, 243 empirical reasoning, 205, 258, 260 empirical testing; See also observation Aristotle’s not limiting inquiry to, 203–4 Einstein and, 15 iron rule of explanation as recipe for, 93, 96, 203 motivation and, 37–38, 195–196, 203 and Newton’s physics, 188 and science education, 256 string theory and, 284 supremacy of, 173 Whewell and, 180, 191 empiricists, 266 entomology, 214–18 Epicureans, 97–98 ether, 113 Everitt, Francis, 35 evidence, See empirical evidence evolution, 28, 175, 218; See also Darwin, Charles experimental philosophy, 137, 139, 144, 191 experimenter’s regress, 302n Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, An (Joseph Wright of Derby), 276–77, 277 explanation; See also shallow explanation prediction vs., 303n removal of philosophy from, 118 rhyming conception of, 121–22, 124, 140 explanatory power, 195 explanatory relativism defined, 124–25, 293 and Kuhn’s paradigms, 150–51 as obstacle to procedural consensus, 127–29 facts, observable, See empirical evidence faith, See religion falsification, 280–82; See also refutation and Bacon, 110 commonalities between Kuhn and Popper, 39–40 and Eddington experiment, 46 and plausibility rankings, 162 Popper and, 79–80 and theory, 19 Feingold, Mordechai, 142 Feyerabend, Paul, 6, 162 Feynman, Richard, 146, 173 fighting spirit (of scientists), 98–99, 195, 283 finches, 35, 36 fire, as fundamental substance, 2 fluid behavior, 143 Forbes, J.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

But it takes a leap of faith, Robert says. “And most people don’t have the courage for that, because you tend to hire what you know.” One last point on diversity: If you want a wide range of perspectives, don’t allow your company to be fenced in, geographically. There’s a strong movement now, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, toward remote offices or distributed companies. This trend may prove to be a boon to cognitive diversity, according to Wences Casares, founder and CEO of Xapo, the digital currency company. Xapo is not huge—only about three hundred employees—but they are spread out in sixty-two locations around the globe.

A tasker had come over to fix a light switch, and Stacy realized that this same person had previously delivered a birthday cake for her. So Stacy asked how he went from delivering cakes to doing electrical work. “Because of the TaskRabbit community,” he told her. “I took some classes, I learned, and now I’m making like twice as much as I was making before on the platform.” The rebound: Pivoting in a crisis As the COVID-19 crisis began to take hold in early 2020, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar noticed some interesting things happening on the Nextdoor platform, originally designed to make it easier for neighbors to get to know one another. First off, engagement levels were up about 80 percent. But beyond that, the nature of the interactions was changing.

Elizabeth’s preexisting conditions made her particularly vulnerable to the virus, and she couldn’t risk leaving the house—so Sarah picked up prescriptions and bagels for her. All of this inspired Sarah to create some new offerings and features on Nextdoor—and the platform quickly pivoted from mere neighborly networking to more of an active outreach and informational clearinghouse. Sarah began by creating the COVID-19 Help Center, a central resource for accurate pandemic information and ways to support local businesses. She followed that up by launching the Neighborhood Help Map, which made it easy for neighbors to find and offer help based on proximity to where they lived. Later in 2020, that map showed it had staying power as it morphed into a Voter Help Map, which matched up people who needed help printing out their voter registration materials with neighbors who could print at home.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Mallya also lived in the U.K. and was fending off attempts to extradite him to India, where he faced charges of fraud. Arif’s lawyers returned to Westminster Magistrates’ Court in June 2020 for his extradition trial. Arif wasn’t required to attend the trial in person because of changes to the court system that were introduced to help contain the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, he was allowed to participate via a video link from his apartment. But the video connection in Court One wasn’t working, so Hugo called his client on a mobile phone. Arif’s face peered out of the screen. His cheeks and chin were covered in white stubble and his white hair flopped uncharacteristically forward onto his forehead from a center parting.


pages: 252 words: 71,176

Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliott Morris

affirmative action, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, data science, Donald Trump, Francisco Pizarro, green new deal, lockdown, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, random walk, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, statistical model, Works Progress Administration

Pollsters had learned from their mistakes and fixed—or so some said—the methodological problems that caused them to underestimate the number of Donald Trump’s supporters in the electorate. Statistical forecasting models predicted a landslide victory for Joe Biden. Instead, the election was so razor-thin in several states, and ballot-counting so slow due to a surge in mail-in voting and other disruptions caused by the covid-19 pandemic, that the contest wasn’t called by major media networks for four days. The official post-election analysis from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), the United States’ association of pollsters, said the miss constituted the industry’s worst performance since 1980.

Nate Cohn, the New York Times’s pollster, adopted a version of Hartman’s method in 2020 and still overestimated Joe Biden’s vote margin by five percentage points in Pennsylvania, six in Florida, four in North Carolina, and five in Michigan, only barely exceeding the accuracy of the average poll in those states.5 One theory is that state-mandated lockdowns to stop the spread of the covid-19 virus made Democrats more likely to stay home, and they disproportionately live in areas with high population density and are more likely than Republicans to have college educations and white-collar jobs they can do remotely. This, in turn, may have made them more likely to pick up the phone. This new pandemic-fueled pattern of heightened partisan nonresponse would have been hard to pick up in historical data.

Joseph, 149 Cantril, Hadley, 41, 42 CAPI (computer-assisted personal interviewing), 94 Carolina Observer, 32–33 Carter, Jimmy, 78 Catalist, 140–42 CBS News, 81, 131 Centuriate Assembly, 15 Chicago Sun-Times, 74 Chicago Tribune, 43 Chilcot, John, 85 Chilcot Inquiry, 85, 86 child mortality rate, 82–86, 189 China, 8, 78 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 14–16 Cincinnati Enquirer, 34 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 169 Civiqs, 142–44, 146, 172 Clay, Henry, 31 Cleisthenes, 10–11 Clinton, Bill, 27, 170 Clinton, Hillary, ix, xi–xiii, 112, 114–16, 146, 150–54, 157 CNN, 97–98, 102–4, 113, 145 Cohen, Patricia Cline, 33 Cohn, Nate, 97, 129, 131, 145, 154, 156–57 Colbert Report, The, 95, 113 Collins, Susan, 155 Columbia University, xii, 51, 67, 68, 99, 131, 132, 141 Columbus Dispatch, 33, 34 Comey, James, 116 Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), 76, 77 computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), 94 computers and computerization, 55–58, 67–68, 124–28, 134, 143 Confessions, The (Rousseau), 17–18 Confucianism, 8 Congress, 6, 169–70 conservative Americans, xiii Constitution, US, 19, 51, 169 Converse, Philip, 22–23, 47, 105 Coolidge, Calvin, 34 Cornell University, 89 Couzin, Iain, 25 COVID-19 pandemic, 129 Crawford, William Harris, 31 CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President), 76 critical race theory (CRT), 175–76 Crossley, Archibald, 30, 35, 41, 42, 45, 47, 65, 186 D3 Systems, 89, 92 Daily Iowan, The, 36–37 Daily Kos, 142 Daily Telegraph, The, 149 D’Arcy Advertising Agency, 37 data aggregation, 173–74, 176–77 Data for Progress, 174–75 David, King, 9 debiasing, 110, 128, 136 Declaration of Independence, 17 Defense and Peace Economics, 87 Delli-Carpini, Michael, 21 demes, 11, 183 Demetrius of Phalereus, 9 democracy, v, 2, 10–17, 19–27, 176–78 Democracy for Realists (Achen and Bartels), 21–22 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 4, 20 “Democratic Campaign Manual, 1964, The,” 58 Democratic National Committee (DNC), xv, 60–62, 68, 124 Democratic-Republican Party, 3, 30–31 Democratic Vistas (Whitman), iii Democrats and Democratic Party, xv, 61–64, 68–70, 111, 115, 129, 153, 155, 157, 158, 170, 175 demos, 10, 14 Dent, Harry, 76 Denver Republican, 34 Derge, David, 75 design-based polls, 145 Des Moines Register, 38 Detroit Free Press, 43 Dewey, John, 20, 22, 26 Dewey, Thomas E., ix, 42–43, 66 Diderot, Denis, 17–18 differential partisan nonresponse, 128–29 Dimock, Michael, 94 DNC, see Democratic National Committee Duke University, 160 Dunkels, Andrejs, xx Economist, The, 99, 102, 119, 120, 155, 176 Edwards-Levy, Ariel, 109 Egypt, ancient, 9 Eisinger, Robert, 62 ekklesía, 10 elections and election forecasting, x–xx; see also midterm elections; presidential election(s); presidential primary(-ies) Electoral College, ix, 31, 34, 99, 112, 169, 174 Elmira Study, 188 Enlightenment, 16–17 Enns, Peter K., 159–60 Enten, Harry, 97–98 Ernst, Morris, 46–47 Evers, Tony, 152 excite.com, 133, 134 Expert Political Judgment (Tetlock), 117 Facebook, 109–10 Farley, James, 61–64 Farm Journal, 33 Fawzi, Mary Smith, 82–84, 86 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 116, 133 Federalist No. 10 (1787), 2 Federalist Party, 30 Field, Harry, 41, 42 Field Guide to Lies, A (Levitin), 101 Finland, 65 First Amendment, 24 First Step Act (2018), 170 fish, schools of, 25 FiveThirtyEight, 97, 112, 113, 118, 119–22, 155 Florida, 112, 115, 119, 129, 150, 155, 157, 176 Founding Fathers, 2, 17, 19 480, The (Burdick), 55–59 “foxes,” 117 Fox News, 97–98, 99, 113 Franklin, Charles, 104–7, 110, 114, 151–54 Freedom of Information Act, 89 Funk, Wilfred, 40, 43–44 Gallup, George, Jr., 40 Gallup, George, Sr., ix–xi, 35–42, 45, 47–52, 58, 59, 62, 64–67, 77, 80, 123, 131, 166–68 Gallup Institute, xv, 40, 42, 186 Gelman, Andrew, 99, 141 Ghitza, Yair, 139–42, 147 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, xv Gooding, Richard, 96 Google, 133, 136–37 Graham, David, 155 Greece, ancient, 9–15, 21 Greenfield, Ed, 67, 68 Green New Deal, 175 Grim, Ryan, 150 Haldeman, H.


pages: 392 words: 109,945

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

3D printing, Albert Einstein, biofilm, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, knapsack problem, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Lyft, microbiome, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, uber lyft

People went about their lives unaware of the multiplying viruses inside them or the clouds of infection they exhaled. They lingered over lunch at restaurants, they worked at call centers, they leaned on the railings of cruise ships plowing the Pacific. After infecting people around them, some of the virus’s hosts finally developed symptoms. Others never did. The unwittingly infected exported Covid-19 out of Wuhan. Some traveled across China to celebrate the Lunar New Year with their families. Planes delivered infected passengers to Europe, and from there to other continents. The virus mutated as it multiplied, and new lineages emerged, marked by different gene signatures. Scientists reconstructed their journeys from their mutations as they moved between countries and among cities.

The two scientists carried out a series of important new studies on lipids. They invented a syringe that could produce an abundance of liposomes of uniform size. Advances like these would turn liposomes into a medical tool. Drugmakers would later insert their compounds in liposomes to deliver them inside cells. When Covid-19 struck, vaccine makers slipped viral genes into liposomes, which could sneak them into our cells. One day in 1975, Bangham and Deamer took a drive to London. When they stopped by the side of the road for lunch, Deamer mentioned hearing that Bangham had ideas about how life began. He was curious to hear what they were.

“The system must be able to replicate”: Quoted in Crick 1982. “We’re talking about the search for life”: Quoted in Zimmer 2007. “Life is a self-sustained chemical system”: Quoted in Joyce 1994, p. xi. Part Four: Return to the Borderland Half Life “Mr. Burke”: Quoted in Campos 2015, p. 77. anthropause: Rutz et al. 2020. This page For Covid-19, see Mortensen 2020 and Zimmer 2021. couldn’t find bacteria or fungi: Bos 1999; López-García and Moreira 2012. “When one is asked”: Quoted in Pirie 1937. crucial features: Pierpont 1999. “According to the working definition”: Quoted in Mullen 2013. “Whereas the dream of a normal cell”: Quoted in Forterre 2016, p. 104.


pages: 402 words: 107,908

Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--And Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More by Christopher M. Palmer Md

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Drosophila, epigenetics, impulse control, it's over 9,000, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, neurotypical, personalized medicine, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, traumatic brain injury

If the culprit is the stress of our fast-paced modern society, why are all of the disorders increasing? Wouldn’t more stress simply lead to more depression and anxiety? Certainly, stress doesn’t cause autism and bipolar disorder. Or does it? These statistics raise more questions than they answer. To add insult to injury, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken an additional toll. In June 2020, an estimated 40 percent of all US adults reported struggling with mental health or substance use issues. Eleven percent of the adults surveyed said they had considered suicide in the past thirty days.10 The Price We Pay Mental disorders are costly to society.

Within one month, things began to improve. His tantrums at school stopped. His depression and his focus improved. School was becoming more manageable for him. The following year, in eighth grade, Kaleb got his best grades ever—straight As. In 2020, two years after beginning these interventions, he started high school during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although many of his peers were struggling with depression, anxiety, and social isolation, he thrived. He got straight As again and was taken off his IEP after the first semester. The new school couldn’t believe this well-behaved, top student was on an IEP in the first place. Kaleb has been on this treatment plan for four years now and continues to thrive.

S. Parish. “The Increasing Frequency of Mania and Bipolar Disorder: Causes and Potential Negative Impacts.” J Nerv Ment Dis. 200(5) (2012): 380–387. doi: 10.1097/NMD.0b013e3182531f17. 10M. É. Czeisler, R. I. Lane, E. Petrosky, et al. “Mental Health, Substance Use, and Suicidal Ideation During the COVID-19 Pandemic—United States, June 24–30, 2020.” MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 69 (2020): 1049–1057. doi: 10.15585/mmwr.mm6932a1external icon. 11The Lancet Global Health. “Mental Health Matters.” Lancet Glob Health 8(11) (November 2020): e1352. 12 Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network. “Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (GBD 2015) Life Expectancy, All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality 1980–2015.”


Fodor's Essential Belgium by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, bike sharing, blood diamond, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Easter island, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute cuisine, index card, Kickstarter, low cost airline, New Urbanism, out of africa, QR code, retail therapy, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Or for a more unusual underground adventure, head to a sewer tour of the historic subterranean canals of Antwerp, known as De Ruien. The smell is something else entirely, but kids will love dressing up in the overalls and stomping around this hidden world. Know Before You Go GET YOUR COVID-19 PAPERWORK SORTED For as long as COVID-19 is with us, all travelers to Belgium, even if entering overland from a neighboring country, need to complete a Passenger Locator Form (PLF) online (travel.info-coronavirus.be) , no more than 48 hours before arriving, providing a local address and other information; you’ll be sent a QR code to present at passport control.

Cafés and snack bars are sometimes open in the morning and serve coffee, tea, juice, and rolls, but don’t serve a full American-style breakfast. SMOKING Smoking is banned in all restaurants and bars. z Health and Safety Belgium is relatively disease-free and you are unlikely to encounter problems. If you do, the Belgian health service is regarded by many as the best in the world, so you’ll be in safe hands. Nevertheless, COVID-19 has disrupted travel since March 2020, and travelers should expect sporadic ongoing issues. Always travel with a mask in case it’s required, and keep up-to-date on the most recent testing and vaccination guidelines for Belgium. Pharmacies (pharmacie in French, apotheek in Flemish) are clearly identified by a green cross displayed over the storefront.

Women traveling alone should nonetheless avoid lingering around neighborhoods near train stations, as these neighborhoods are traditionally where prostitutes operate. If you carry a purse, choose one with a zipper and a thick strap that you can drape across your body; adjust the length so that the purse sits in front of you at or above hip level. w Immunizations All visitors to Belgium arriving by air must have a valid proof of COVID-19 vaccination and/or a booster, or proof of recent recovery from the disease; while the need and frequency of boosters is still being discussed in the medical community, it’s important to verify the most recent requirements with your physician before you travel. h Lodging Belgium offers a range of options, from the major international hotel chains and small, modern local hotels to family-run restored inns and historic houses.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

“Syria,” he said, referring to Putin’s intervention on behalf of Assad, which has been viewed as a strategic masterstroke by many Western analysts, “it doesn’t work at all. They wanted to repeat this trick from Crimea and the Ukraine War. But people are so annoyed. Syria?” he repeated, as if the absurdity was self-evident. “Why should we fight with these kinds of guys? We’re restoring Aleppo. Repair some roads here!” COVID-19 underscored this danger for Putin. As Navalny and I spoke, Russia’s economy was spiraling into a deeper hole, even as Putin was ramming through “constitutional reforms” to allow himself to stay in power well into the 2030s. The pandemic itself was mismanaged, alternatively denied and attacked, responsibility delegated down to lower-level officials who were never empowered to do their jobs.

But in recent years, the balance has also shifted. It is now America that is becoming more like China—a place of growing economic inequality, grievance-based nationalism, vast data collection, and creeping authoritarianism. The shifting position of our two nations has been on stark display through the ordeal of COVID-19, which spread from the Chinese city of Wuhan in part because the first instinct of a controlling Chinese government was to suppress the news about its lethality and risk of contagion. When COVID did inevitably spread, China was able to move its massive ship of state quickly to lock down whole cities and control the virus, while an America governed by a disinterested authoritarian regime proved incapable of any collective action.

Part IV WHO WE ARE: BEING AMERICAN American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. —James Baldwin 21 Who We Are In late February 2020, I sat in Barack Obama’s Washington office talking about what had gone so wrong in global politics. COVID-19 was gathering force but had not yet descended upon us like a hurricane. Lockdowns were weeks away. The economic, climate, and racial crises were still hidden underneath the surface brush of American life. The Trump impeachment had predictably passed as inconsequentially as a cable news segment. Obama was grinding away to finish his memoir, having methodically missed self-imposed deadlines.


pages: 350 words: 115,802

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy by Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud

activist lawyer, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, COVID-19, David Vincenzetti, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, food desert, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, operational security, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero day

This investigation, if we decided to undertake it, would have to contend with swords and shields wielded by a dozen or more very defensive state actors and by a billion-dollar private technology corporation operating under the protection of its own very powerful national government. The taxi ride was the last leg of a trip that seemed to portend a rise of obstacles. The limitations put in place during the latest wave of Covid-19 had laid waste to familiar routines. The simple two-hour trip from Paris to Berlin had taken triple that, and included a connection through the food desert of an airport in Frankfurt, and the indignity of German soldiers shoving cotton swabs up our nasal cavities before we were allowed to exit the airport in Berlin.

He had dispatched his chief archivist to dig up all of Regina’s stories from Proceso in the years before her death, and he asked us to loop another of his reporters into the top-secret Signal group used by key members of the Cartel Project. But the last Sandrine had heard from Jorge on the Signal app, not long before our trip to Berlin, he had sounded a little shaky—lamenting the ongoing damage done by Covid-19 to his magazine’s already slim and always wobbly profit margin. “I’m okay but worried,” he wrote. “Sales of Proceso are really falling.” * * * I WAS KEYED up when the buzzer to our East Berlin flat rang the next morning. We hadn’t yet mastered the electronic entry system to our short-term rental, so I raced down the stairs and opened the front door for our two guests.

The Post would be the fourth and final member of the first circle of the investigation, the crucial US partner. As we peered out the car window on the ride into town from the airport, it was hard to feel hopeful. The US capital city was a bleak and embattled landscape at that point, reeling from the four-year reign of Donald Trump, and braced for its last ugly spasms. The daily Covid-19 death toll in the country had passed three thousand and was still rising. The reflecting pool had been ringed with four hundred lanterns, each representing a thousand US citizens already lost. The medical trauma was like the handmaiden of the political. The Trump-led effort to overturn the election had been punctuated, less than two weeks before our arrival, by a deadly riot at the seat of national government.


pages: 426 words: 117,722

King Richard: Nixon and Watergate--An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, MITM: man-in-the-middle, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, éminence grise

I would like to thank all the archivists at the Nixon Library, but particularly Ryan Pettigrew, who had the foresight to assemble a huge electronic database of the Nixon photo archive several years ago. This database proved invaluable when the library, along with other branches of the National Archives, was compelled to close its doors to researchers during the coronavirus pandemic. Without this electronic treasure trove and Ryan’s assistance, I would been unable to obtain many of the photographs that appear in this book in time for publication. My interest in Nixon and Watergate was sparked in part by my work for The Washington Post over more than two decades, as both a foreign correspondent and a member of the investigative staff.


pages: 422 words: 114,817

Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable by Joanna Schwartz

Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, George Floyd, Jeffrey Epstein, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, Ronald Reagan

In June 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Gallup announced that public confidence in the police had dipped below 50 percent for the first time in several decades, prompting a flurry of headlines about changing perspectives about law enforcement. But trust in the police had only dipped to 48 percent. And it had only moved from the third to the fourth most trusted institution; in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the medical system had taken third place. Of course, not all people trust the police, and the demographics of differences of opinion on this point are noteworthy. Gallup’s 2020 poll found that 82 percent of Republicans had confidence in the police, as compared with 28 percent of Democrats.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

This happens even more frequently in the biotech space. Flagship Pioneering, a Boston-based venture-creation firm, has launched multiple large startups this way, including Moderna Therapeutics, which develops mRNA drugs and vaccines, and was one of the first companies to successfully develop a vaccine for COVID-19. Other ideas have sprung out of academic institutions. Google’s founders developed the PageRank algorithm while at Stanford and hosted Google on Stanford’s domain, as google.stanford.edu, until google.com was registered in 1997. Genentech, the biotechnology corporation, got its start from academic intellectual property.

And it’s no doubt that Silicon Valley startups had easier access to large pools of venture capital and a dense pool of talent, further contributing to their success. Until very recently, many venture capitalists were only investing in locations to which they could drive to attend a board meeting. Things have certainly changed since then. During the COVID-19-related pandemic in 2020, many venture capital firms made investments in startups, early stage or late stage, without having ever met the founders in person. This was a first for an industry that has put so much emphasis on a company’s location and on meeting entrepreneurs in person, and it was a turning point for the importance of geography in the success of startups.

Soon after, the financial crisis hit, and when Facebook attempted to raise its series D round, it got valued by most investors at $6 to $8 billion, half that of its previous round. (Eventually Facebook raised its series D round at a $10 billion valuation from DST Global, a Russian investment group.) Similarly, Airbnb raised $1 billion of new investment in April 2020, right after the COVID-19 pandemic, at $26 billion down round valuation. Only seven months later, the company did an IPO and was valued at over $100 billion. One reason why funding follows the markets is that venture capitalists themselves rely on funding from limited partners, the entities that invest in VC firms. LPs need to keep their portfolios balanced between public market securities, like hedge funds, and private markets, like venture capital.


pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

On the one hand, there’s the alarm about proliferating cyberattacks. Gone are the days when state actors used the internet only to spy. The internet has been weaponised. Now, it’s being wielded to influence public sentiment in other countries, to spread conspiracy theories about the origins of the Covid-19 virus, to take out power grids or damage equipment in foreign nuclear plants. On the other hand, Western countries bear just as much of the blame and are likewise exploiting the potential. In 2018, as Yahoo News later revealed, US President Donald Trump secretly authorised the CIA to carry out covert cyber operations that ‘gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries’, including China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

If Russia has its own internet, it will be shielded from that kind of attack. But there’s not always a clear line between espionage and sabotage or subversion, just as it’s not always clear when striking back is justified. In the autumn of 2020, while the European Medicines Agency (EMA) was working on the approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, Russian hackers moved to infiltrate the EMA network. Employees received cleverly composed emails appearing to be from colleagues; if they clicked on the enclosed link or attachment, it deposited an implant that let the hackers read all their messages. The hackers, who were part of Cozy Bear and probably also behind the SolarWinds affair, eventually saw a ZIP file go by containing a ‘new user token’.

., here, here ‘Business Club’, here BVD, here CareerBuilder.com, here Catal separatist movement, here Cellebrite, here certificate authorities (CAs), here Chaos Computer Club, here Chernobyl site, here, here child pornography, here, here Chinese cyber espionage, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chinese Unit 61398, here, here CIA, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Kaspersky Labs, here, here, here, here Cisco, here, here, here Clapper, James, here Clearview AI, here Clinton, Bill, here, here Clinton, Hillary, here, here, here CNN, here, here, here, here, here Combasca, here, here, here Common, here computer network exploitation (CNE), here, here Comverse, here Concord, here Cools, Ivo, here Covid-19 vaccines, here Cozy Bear, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cyber Intelligence, here de Boer, Hans, here de Bos, Tony, here, here De Croo, Alexander, here De Groene Amsterdammer, here de Jong, Erik, here, here De Standaard, here De Telegraaf, here de Volkskrant, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here de Vries, René, here deep packet inspection, here DEF CON, here Delft University of Technology, here Deloitte, here, here Denk party (Netherlands), here Der Spiegel, here, here, here Derix, Steven, here, here Di Rupio, Elio, here, here Die Hard, here, here DigiNotar, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here digital certificates, here DIGIWS146 workstation, here, here distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, here, here, here Donner, Piet Hein, here, here, here Dorfman, Zach, here DPG Media, here Drake, Thomas, here drone strikes, and civilian casualties, here ‘Droppy’, here DuckDuckGo, here Durbin, Richard, here Dutch Bar Association, here Dutch Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIE), here Dutch Cyber Security Council, here, here Dutch elections, here Dutch House of Representatives, here, here, here, here Dutch Independent Post and Telecommunications Authority, here Dutch Investigatory Powers Commission (TIB), here Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, here, here Dutch Ministry of General Affairs, viii, here Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV), here, here Dutch National Crime Squad, here Dutch National Crisis Centre, here, here Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), here, here, here, here Dutch National Forensic Research Agency, here Dutch National Police Internal Investigation Department, here Dutch National Police Services Agency, here Dutch Safety Board, here Dutch surveillance law and referendum, here, here, here Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, here, here, here ‘Dwaan’, here, here, here Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier, here Ecatel, here, here Effting, Maud, here El Chapo (Joaquín Guzmán Loera), here Elbit Systems, here Elderenbosch, Onno, here encryption, here, here Ericsson, here EU Copyright Directive, here European Commission, here, here European Medicines Agency (EMA), here European Parliament, here, here, here European Space Agency, here Europol, here EvoSwitch, here Evraz, here exploits, here, here, here Fabrika Trollei, here facial recognition, here Fancy Bear, here, here, here, here, here FBI, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Mexican drug cartel, here and Russian cyber espionage, here, here, here firewalls, here Five Eyes, here Fox-IT, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Belgacom, here, here and DigiNotar, here, here, here, here Fridman, Mikhail, here FSB, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gaddafi, Muammar, here, here Gallagher, Ryan, here, here, here Gamma Group, here Gemalto, here German CERT, here Glimmerglass, here Godane, Ahmed Abdi, here, here Google Maps, here, here GovCERT, here, here, here, here, here Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), here, here, here and Belgacom, here, here, here and Gemalto, here number of employees, here Grapperhaus, Ferdinand, here Greenberg, Andy, here Greenwald, Glenn, here, here, here Groenewegen, Frank, here, here GRU, here, here, here Gubarev, Aleksej, here, here, here Gurey, Nuur Osman, here hacking tools, online sales of, here Harvard Belfer Center, here Hayden, Michael, here Hennis, Jeanine, here, here, here, here Hentenaar, Joris, here Hermitage Museum, here Hijzen, Constant, here HNLMS Rotterdam, here Hoekstra, Pete, here HostExploit, here Howard, Philip, here HP Data Protector, here, here, here Huawei, here, here Hurricane Sandy, here iColumbo, here ICQ, here IMEI numbers, here in ’t Veld, Sophie, here ING, here Intellect Service, here Intercept, The, here, here, here Interfax press agency, here International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), here iPhones, here Iran, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG), here Islamic State, here, here Israel, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Jochem, Aart, here, here, here, here Joint Strige Fighter programme, here Juniper, here Kaspersky, Eugene, here Kapersky Labs, here, here, here, here, here, here KGB, here Khabarovsk conference, here Khan, Abdul Qadeer, here Kim Jong-un, here King Servers, here, here Klijnsma, Yonathan, here, here KPN, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kreling, Tom, here, here, here, here, here, here Leaseweb, here, here, here, here, here, here Ledgett, Richard, here Lewinsky, Monica, here Lockheed Martin, here LulzSec, here McCord, Mary, here McFaul, Michael, here machine translation, here McLaughlin, Jenna, here Maersk, here, here Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, here, here, here, here Mali, here, here Mandiant, here, here, here Marriott hotels, here Mastercard, here Máxima, Queen, here M.E.Doc, here, here Meeus, Jan, here, here Merck, here Merkel, Angela, here MI5, here, here, here Mikhailov, Sergei, here, here, here Millennium bug, here MIND CTI, here MIVD, vii, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here agency culture, here and Belgacom, here digital capabilities, here, here, here and Farsi translators, here Joint Sigint Cyber Unit, here, here relations with Americans, here, here, here, here and Russian cyber espionage, here, here Somali surveillance, here, here Mohammad Ali, Omar, here, here, here, here Mondelez, here Montenegro coup attempt, here Morozov, Evgeny, here Mossad, here, here, here, here, here MSD, here MV BBC China, here, here MyHeritage, here MySQL, here N., here, here, here Naomi, here NASA, here, here, here Natanz, here, here, here National Health Service (NHS), here, here National Security Agency (NSA), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Belgacom, here, here, here and Farsi translators, here ‘fishing with dynamite’, here and Gemalto, here and ‘Greek Watergate’, here hardware modifications, here number of employees, here relations with Netherlands, here, here, here Snowden files, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and SolarWinds attack, here and Somalia surveillance, here, here Tailored Access Operations, here NATO, here, here, here NCC Group, here ndsmovies.com, here New York City truck attack, here New York Times, here, here, here NICE Systems, here Nijmegen Queen’s Day festival, here Nixon, Richard, here North Korea, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Northwave, here Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), here NotPetya virus, here, here, here Novaja Gazeta, here NRC Handelsblad, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here NSO Group, here Obama, Barack, here, here, here, here Ocean’s Eleven, here, here OHM2013, here Operation Moonlight Maze, here Operation Olympic Games, here Opstelten, Ivo, here OPTA, here Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), here Oxford Internet Institute, here P10 filtering system, here Paauw, Frank, here Pakistan, here, here, here, here, here Pals, Ludo, here Paris bombings, here Paulissen, Wilbert, here PayPal, here, here, here Penn, Sean, here Pentagon, here, here Pérez Dolset, Javier, here Perlroth, Nicole, here Petri, Hans, here ‘Phed’, here phishing emails, here Plasterk, Ronald, here, here, here, here, here Pluijmers, René, here Poitras, Laura, here Politico, here PornHub, here Poroshenko Petro, here Port of Rotterdam, here, here, here, here, here Premier League, here Preneel, Bart, here PricewaterhouseCoopers, here Prigozhin, Yevgeny, here, here Prins, Ronald, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here privacy, here, here, here, here, here Project Victor, here Proximus, here Public Prosecution Service Rotterdam, here Putin, Vladimir, here, here, here, here, here, here Q-Park, here Raiu, Costin, here Rajoy, Mariano, here Regin virus, here, here, here, here Regional Internet Registry for Europe, here Remarque, Philippe, here Renault, here Replay, here Rheinmetall, here, here, here Rid, Thomas, here Robbe, Edwin, here, here Robbe, José, here, here, here, here Robbe, Ruud, here, here Robin, here, here, here Rosneft, here RSA Conference, here Russia Today, here Russian–Dutch relations, here Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), here Russian Unit 74455, here, here, here Rutte, Mark, vii, here, here, here ‘Sabu’, here Salisbury poisonings, here satellite communications, here, here, here Saudi Arabia, here, here Schiphol Airport, here, here, here, here, here Schneier, Bruce, here Schook, Dick, here SCM, here September 11 attacks, here ShimRatReporter, here Shymkiv, Dmytro, here SIGINT, here SIGINT Development Conference, here, here Signal, here Sinaloa Cartel, here Singapore Press Holdings, here Skripal, Sergei, here Smith, Brad, here SNAP, here Snowden, Edward, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sochi Winter Olympics, here, here SolarWinds, here, here Somalia, here Sony PlayStation network, here speech transcription software, here Spetsnaz, here SPÖ Social Democratic Party (Austria), here SSL certificates, here Standaert, Geert, here Starr, Barbara, here Startpage.com, here Stasi, here Steman, Jochem, here, here Stone, Chris, here Stoyanov, Ruslan, here STRAP system, here Stuxnet virus, here, here, here, here, here, here, here submarines, here surveillance software, Israeli, here SVR, here, here, here Symbolon project, here Tails OS, here, here Tamene, Yared, here telecommunications billing, here Thomas, Gordon, here Tiger telephones, here TNT Express, here Triton virus, here Trouw, here TrueCrypt, here Trump, Donald, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Turkey, here, here, here, here Turksema, Hans, here TV5 Monde, here Tweakers website, here U., Etienne, here UCN, here Uijlenbroek, Jaap, here UK Home Office, here UK National Crime Agency, here Ukraine, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and annexation of Crimea, here, here, here, here, here, here ultracentrifuges, here, here United Arab Emirates, here United Nations, here University of Tromsø, here University of Twente, here US Democratic Party, here, here, here, here, here, here US Department of Defense, here, here US Department of Homeland Security, here, here US Joint Chiefs of Staff, here, here US presidential elections, here, here, here, here, here, here US State Department, here, here Utrecht child support services, here V., Johan, here van Bergen, Jurre, here van de Beek, Martijn, here van der Heijden, A.


pages: 410 words: 120,234

Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings by Earl Swift

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, COVID-19, data acquisition, Internet Archive, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, zero-sum game

We’ve worked together for nearly twenty years, during which I’ve never stopped wondering how I could have so lucked out. He is fierce. He is brave. He is a warrior in the cause of righteousness—and me. Finally, I’m much obliged to those people who kept me moored to reality while I was chained to my keyboard, a period that coincided with the emergence of Covid-19 and the strange and terrible times that followed. Amy Walton has backed this project from its start, and supported me for nearly two decades. I’m deeply thankful to have her in my life. My dear friend Laura LaFay has read every word between these covers, several times. She’s one of the best writers I know, and an incisive reader and editor.

That said, the Horizon runabout so evokes Greg Bekker’s thinking (as does the report’s assertion that wheels would work just fine on the lunar surface, well before that became a popular view) that I’m moved to consider another possibility: that ABMA and Transportation Corps engineers working on Horizon conferred with Bekker’s lab at Detroit Arsenal, which was within the same army command. At this writing, that remains a speculation; amid the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have yet to find documentation that spells out such an arrangement. Another possibility is that Bekker wasn’t the only guy thinking as he did. Georg von Tiesenhausen, an ABMA and Marshall engineer whose papers are archived at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, is widely credited with producing the first design of a lunar roving vehicle—in fact, he’s often mistakenly said to have had a role in the eventual lunar rover, which he did not.

Don Beattie’s communication with Putty Mills, and the creation of the Grover, were detailed by both men in Schaber, U.S. Geological Survey. I also relied on an interview with Mills facilitated by his daughter, Denice Dogan, in November 2020. Mills, who was ninety-six at the time, was sufficiently hard of hearing that he couldn’t be interviewed by telephone, and couldn’t be visited due to Covid-19. Instead, using questions that I’d posed in an email, Dogan chatted with him by computer, then passed along his answers. Schaber described Mills and the Grover during our interview of October 11, 2019. Astronaut training in the Grover was detailed in Schaber, U.S. Geological Survey. Duke’s comments regarding the division of duties is from our interview of May 3, 2019.


Insight Guides South America (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Airbnb, anti-communist, Atahualpa, bike sharing, call centre, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, digital nomad, Easter island, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, invention of writing, Kickstarter, land reform, urban planning, urban renewal

In the cooler southern zones are Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, with vast empty spaces from the spine of the Andes to the last stop before Antarctica: Tierra del Fuego. A NOTE TO READERS At Insight Guides, we always strive to bring you the most up-to-date information. This book was produced during a period of continuing uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, so please note that content is more subject to change than usual. We recommend checking the latest restrictions and official guidance. Pre-Columbian decorative mask on display at the Gold Museum in Bogotá. MatthieuCattin/Shutterstock PRE-COLUMBIAN TIMELINE Human settlement in South America began with nomadic hunter-gatherers traveling southward, and reached its peak with the Inca Empire at the time of the Conquest. 20,000–4500 BC Earliest Origins The first humans arrived in South America in around 20,000 BC, and were related to hunter-gatherers who crossed the Bering Straits “ice-bridge” between Asia and the Americas, following herds in search of food.

Moreno pivoted to the center, though, quickly distancing himself from his former mentor. Economic necessity also forced a move back to orthodox economic policies two years later, and ended Ecuador’s alliance with Venezuela. Courts, meanwhile, found Correa guilty of corruption, and he remains in self-imposed exile in Belgium. Amid the Covid-19 crisis, Moreno was succeeded by conservative Guillermo Lasso in the 2021 elections, who is seeking to kickstart the economy after a wildly successful vaccination campaign. Quito: Ecuador’s expanding capital Modern Quito 1 [map] spreads north, south, and east into intra-Andean valleys each year, gobbling up rural farms.

In 2017, the Senate tried to amend the constitution to allow Cartes to run for a second term, sparking heavy protests in which the Congress building was set on fire. Amid accusations of an attempted coup, the amendment was overruled. In 2018, voters elected Colorado senator Mario Abdo Benítez for a five-year presidential term. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Paraguay was one of the fastest-growing countries in Latin America. Elegant Asunción Today, Asunción 1 [map] matches the dynamism of most South American cities while retaining a sleepy elegance, with handsome colonial mansions rubbing shoulders with luxury boutiques, duty-free shops, and neon lights.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”44 Recognize this interdependence, and empathy will spring naturally from it and, with it, a cleaner relationship with power. Sometimes, as we struggle to see through the fog of our self-focus, events much larger than ourselves remind us and rekindle our empathy. The COVID-19 pandemic helped some to see that the unilateral exercise of individual power is futile and counterproductive.45 And many more of us have awakened to the truth of scientists’ dire warnings about the boomerang effects of invading and destroying ecosystems46 and “the need for a more holistic ‘one health’ approach [that] views human, animal, and environmental health as interconnected.”47 Life-altering experiences such as the pandemic also make us more aware of our impermanence, which has long been one of the defenses humans put up against the other great danger of power: hubris.

Research in evolutionary psychology highlights how people internalize experiences of social acceptance and rejection in ways that can profoundly shape their assessment of their own worth.40 Kids understand early on the power of threatening to withdraw their friendship from another child, even if they don’t understand that the power derives from depriving a vulnerable peer of a key source of self-worth and a potential defense against mean-spirited bullies. Ultimately, the people we love matter more to us than anything else. Anyone who has come close to death will tell you that their loved ones were all they thought about in those final moments.41 The pain of being denied a last farewell to hospitalized family members was what made COVID-19 so heartbreaking for so many people. We can accept death, but not death without those we love.42 Love is easily leveraged as a source of power: Threaten someone I love, and I will yield to you to ensure the safety of my loved one. At the same time, I will do all that’s in my power to stop you. Affiliation can also be leveraged to divide us.

., 210n15, 227n23 Citizens United, 118 civic education and engagement, 184–88 civic vigilance, 184–86, 192, 257n74, 257n79 Civil Rights Act, 14 Clegg, Stewart, 236n64, 262n22 Cleisthenes, 182, 256n63 climate science, 45–46 Clinton, Bill, 80 Coats, Michael, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171 Code of Hammurabi, 100–01 codetermination, 181 Cohen, Joshua, 257n75, 259n96 collective action consolidation strategy, 11–12, 111, 112 Google employees story, 154–58 keeping power in check, 192 power distribution responsibility, 195 shifting power balance and, 115, 178–79 collective movements, 117–39 agitation, 118–20, 137, 154, 195, 196, 239n6 digital technology and, xvii, 137–39, 154–58, 242n40 innovation, 119–20, 125–30, 147–49, 154, 195, 196 orchestration, 119–20, 131–37, 154, 195, 196 public agenda and, 120–25 shifting power balance, 115 collective orientation, 32, 36, 195 collective responsibility, 189–92 Community Interest Companies, 176 concentration of wealth, 162, 175–76, 189–90 confirmation bias, 88 Confucius, 55 consolidation strategy, 8, 9, 11–12, 111, 112, 142, 194 Contract with America (Gingrich), 80 Cook, Tim, 158 cooperatives, 162–63, 179–81 Cordeiro, Vera, 27–29, 33, 38–39, 166 Courpasson, David, 247n57, 262n22 COVID-19, 38, 49, 176 Creighton, Mandell, 24 CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), 162, 164, 249n79 Crozier, Michel, 225n6 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 42 Cuddy, Amy J. C., 224n76 cultivation of empathy, 30–33, 36, 38, 135, 195 cultivation of humility, 30, 34–36, 36, 38, 195, 215n55 Dahl, Robert A., 259n98, 261n2 Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward (Lord Acton), 24 dangers of hubris awareness of impermanence, 38 cultivating humility and, 30, 34–36, 36 Greek myths of, 23 power sharing and accountability reinforced, 39, 166, 172–73 Davis, Gerald F., 253n31, 253n32, 255n44 De Beers, 11–13 Declaration of Independence, 189 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 125–26, 189 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen (De Gouges), 125–26 democracy, xiv, xvii, 68, 91, 156–58, 182–93, 197–98 See also civic education and engagement, participative democracy initiatives, separation of powers democratization of firms, 181, 197 democratization of power, 162–64, 197 demographic diversity, 168 DeSantola, Alicia, 169 Descartes, René, 146, 243n10 Developmental Path to Power, 36 Diamond, Jared M., 243n4 Diana (princess of Wales), 30 digital era power fundamentals, 141–64 algorithms and machine learning, 148–49, 150 big tech control, 148–54 control of algorithms, 149–51, 153, 159–61 control of personal information, 151–53, 158–59, 190 democratization of power, 162–64, 197 laws and regulations, 158–62 technology’s impacts on, 143–48, 190 timelessness of, 142–44 World Wide Web, 147–48 digital revolution, 147–54, 162–63 Dimaggio, Paul J., 233n46, 235n64 disability, xiii, 4, 104, 193 discrimination, 104, 132, 156, 170–71, 252n22 See also bias, gender inequality, racism Disney, Abigail, 114 disruption of power, 108–15, 141–54 distributive change, 108–9, 143–44, 147–48, 150–54, 168–72 imbalances and, 111–15, 158 motivation and opportunity convergence, 109–12 See also hierarchies of power distribution of power challenges to, 108–9 critical aspects of, 150–54 equitable and diverse, 168–72, 193–94, 197 technological change and, 143–44 World Wide Web and, 147–48 domestic workers’ Bill of Rights, 179 DoorDash, 179 Dorsey, Cheryl, 104–6, 107, 108 Dorsey, Jack, 153 Douglas, Mary, 229n1 Duflo, Esther, 114 Durkheim, David Émile, 223n58 dynastic rule, 91–92 Echoing Green, 107 Edmondson, Amy C., 35 Egyptian revolution (2011), 118 Eichmann, Adolf, 95, 96 elements of power, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 16, 39–40, 192, 194, 195 Elliott, Jane, 92–94, 99 Emerson, Richard M., 200, 210n10, 211n21, 261n10 empathic accuracy, 31 empathy, 30–33, 36, 38, 97, 98, 195 Enlightenment, 109 Enlightenment Now (Pinker), 146 Enron, 174 Epic Games, 113 Epicurus, 55 equitable power distribution, 168–72, 193–94, 197 ethical decisions on power, 20 eugenics, 102–3 European Union, 159, 248n67 evolutionary psychology, 49 expansion strategy, 8, 9, 12–13 experience of power, 22–25 Facebook, 152, 153, 157, 159, 184, 248n66 facial recognition algorithms, 150, 160, 161 fallacies of power, xii–xiv, 16, 20, 70 See also positional power fallacy, possession of power fallacy, power is dirty fallacy Fallone, Meagan, 146, 161 Farage, Nigel, 52 fascination for power, x–xii Ferreras, Isabelle, 181, 254n42, 255n44, 256n58, 256n59 Festinger, Leon, 213n30, 223n67 Fiske, Susan T., 218n16, 224n76 Fligstein, Neil, 235n63, 235n64 Floyd, George, 92 folk-Bildung, 187–88, 258n84 Follett, Mary Parker, 8 foot-binding, 48, 57, 220n33 formal power and networks, 70–71, 71 Foucault, Michel, 151, 202, 245n30, 261n16 Founding Fathers of the United States, 183 French Revolution, 47, 109 French Yellow Vests, 117 Frick, Henry Clay, 110 Fridays for Future, 56, 121–25 Friedman, Milton, 46, 219n27 fundamental attribution error, 16 fundamentals of power, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 16, 39–40, 192, 194, 195 Fung, Archon, 259n96, 262n22 g0v (gov zero), 191 Galinsky, Adam D., 211n7, 212n13, 217n11, 222n48, 230n12, 230n14, 230n18, 231n24, 232n39, 237n72, 240n15, 262n22 Galton, Francis, 102 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 56, 119, 124 Ganz, Marshall, 122, 139 Garza, Alicia, 139 Gates, Bill, 114 Gates, Melinda, 114 Geddes, Patrick, 102 Gelfand, Michele J., 67, 225n4 gender inequality, 91–92, 101–02, 106–08 gender solidarity, 4–8, 85–87 gene editing technology, 162, 249n79 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 159 Gergen, David, 24 gig economy, 163, 179, 181 Gingrich, Newt, 80 Giridharadas, Anand, 114 global climate strike (2019), 121–23 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), 127 global warming, 45–46, 120–25, 163 renewable energy, 144–46 Godfather II, The, 77, 227n21 Google employees story, 154–58 Epic Games and, 113 European legislators, 159, 248n66 privacy policies lawsuits, 159 Project Dragonfly, 156 Project Maven, 155, 156 search history, 124 user data and, 152–54 Gottfried, David, 127 Gouze, Marie (Olympe de Gouges), 125–26 Government of the Nine, 165, 166, 250n2 Gramsci, Antonio, 186–87 Grant, Adam M., 215n55 Great Depression, 9, 114 Great Society, 14 Green, Melanie C., 135 Greene, Robert, 19 greenhouse gas effect See global warming Grimanis, Lia, 1, 4–8, 10, 20 Gruenfeld, Deborah H., 212n7, 230n12, 230n14 Grunitzky, Claude, 228n39 Gutenberg, Johannes, 142, 143 Hammurabi (Babylonian king), 100 Harari, Yuval Noah, 243n3, 245n31, 250n85 Harry, Prince (Duke of Sussex), 30 Harvard Study of Adult Development, 49 Heimans, Jeremy, 141 Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (O’Toole), 52 hierarchies of power legitimacy narratives and, 100–04, 232n33 legitimization of, 92–94 obedience to authority, 94–97, 229n8 perpetuation of, 27 power infernal trio, 97–98 powerlessness and, 98–100 stability of, 90, 91–92, 197 stereotypes and, 104–8, 169 stickiness of, xvii, 91–92, 108 Hitler, Adolf, 9 Hobbit, The (Tolkien), ix Ho Chi Minh, 15, 16 Hollande, François, 24, 68 Holocaust, 20–21 Homer, 101 Homestead Strike, 111 Hominem te memento, 34, 214n49 L’Homme Providentiel, 16 Hossain, Mashroof, 34–35 hubris awareness of impermanence, 38 cultivating humility and, 30, 34–36, 36 Greek myths of, 23 power sharing and accountability reinforced, 39, 166, 172–73 Hughes, Debbie, 93 human needs See safety, self-esteem, valued resources human rights, xiv, 133–34, 136, 156, 157 humility, 30, 34–36, 36, 38, 195, 215n55 Huxley, Aldous, 164 imbalance of power, 111–15, 153–54, 182, 189–90, 194 impermanence, 34, 38, 115 impermanence awareness, 38, 115 Implicit Association Test, 104 Indignados, 118 infernal trio, 97–98, 102 informal power of networks, 72–74, 72, 84 innovation, 119–20, 125–30, 147–49, 154, 195, 196 In Praise of Scribes (Trithemius), 142, 143 Institutions, 104, 233n47 institutional change, 109, 235n64, 235n65, 235–36n66 interdependence awareness, xv, 32, 38, 97, 115, 195 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 120 interpersonal liking familiarity, 63 similarity, 63, 88–90 intoxication of power, 20–22, 173 Johnson, Boris, 52 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 14, 15, 16, 76 Johnson Space Center (JSC), 167, 168 Johnson treatment, 14 jointly developed power, 8, 162–63, 178–79 Jost, John, 231n19, 231n20, 231n22 Kant, Immanuel, 55 Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, 168–69 Karman, Tawakkol, 186 Kegan, Robert, 214n40, 258n84 Keltner, Dacher, 211n7, 212n16, 230n12, 230n17, 237n71 Kennedy, John F., 14 Keohane, Robert O., 261n14 Khan, Lina M., 159 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 33, 92, 119, 124 Kirchner, Nestór, 131, 132 Krackhardt, David, 71, 225n7, 226n8, 226n16 Lady Gaga, 85 Lasn, Kalle, 118, 119 Legion of Honor, 47, 219–20n30 legitimizing stories, 91–92, 101–04, 123 levers of persuasion, 10, 210n15 LGBTQ+, 88, 109, 117, 131–33, 136–37 LinkedIn, 153 Livingston, Robert W., 172 Lopez, Sandra, 177, 179–80 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), ix–x Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 165 Lukes, Steven, 261n5 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xvi, 19, 227n21 machine-learning algorithms, 148–49, 150 Magee, Joe C., 212n7, 230n14, 230n18, 231n24, 237n72, 262n22 Mandela, Nelson, 56, 119 Manuel’s story, 70–73 marriage equality, 131–37, 242n34 Marx, Karl, 110, 236n68 Maslow, Abraham, 217–18n15 Mayo, Tony, 171 McEvily, Bill, 86, 226n9 mechanical movable-type printing press, 142 Mencius (Mengzi), 55 meritocracy, 103, 169–70 #MeToo movement, 117, 137, 141, 147–48, 156 Meyer, John W., 233n46 Microsoft, 157 Milgram, Stanley, 95–96, 229n8 misunderstanding power fallacies of, xii–xiv Mjumbe, Nezuma, 144–46, 161 mobile health technology, 149 monopoly, 11 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat), 182–83 moral principles, 55, 56, 164, 192 moral purity, 25, 30, 212n21, 213n30 Morrison, Toni, 8 motivation See safety, self-esteem, valued resources movement fatigue, 137 mutual dependence, 3, 7, 114, 181, 200 Na’Allah, Bala Ibn, 184 Naím, Moisés, 141 NASA Innovation and Inclusion Council, 170 Johnson Space Center (JSC), 167–68 Transparency and Opportunity Program (TOP), 171–73 National Domestic Workers Alliance, 177–79 National Health Service, 67 Nazi concentration camps, 21 negativity bias, 19 neoliberal capitalist system, 46, 189 Netflix, 153 networks betweenness, 79, 80, 153 informal power, 70–74, 71, 77–81, 84–89 network diversity, 84–89 organizational networks, 73–90 popularity and prominence, 73, 79, 227n25 power mapping, 74–84, 88, 128, 143–46, 191, 194 similarity and social relationships, 82–83, 89–90 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57 Ning’s story, 61, 63–64 nonviolent civil disobedience, 123–24 Nosek, Brian A., 231n19, 231n20 #NoToSocialMediaBill, 184 Nye, Joseph S., 261n14 Obama Administration, 85 Occupy Wall Street, 118, 119 Ochoa, Ellen, 167–72 Odyssey (Homer), 101 Ogundipe, Tope, 184–85 O’Neil, Cathy, 150 online agitation, 137 Oppenheimer, Harry, 9, 10 orchestration, 119–20, 130–37, 154, 195, 196 organizational networks, 73 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 161 O’Toole, Fintan, 52 oversight and accountability, 173–77 panopticon, 151, 245n30 Pansardi, Pamela, 262n21 Paradigm, 184 Parsons, Talcott, 261n17 participative democracy initiatives, 191 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 57 perceptions of power, 25–27 personal development, 29–40, 97, 135, 163, 170–71, 195 Pettit, Philip, 43 Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 222n49, 260n7, 261n6, 261n13 Phillips, Nelson, 262n22 Pichai, Sundar, 155, 158 Piketty, Thomas, 219n28, 238n84 Pinker, Steven A., 146 Pitkin, Hanna F., 202, 262n20 Plato, ix, 198 Poo, Ai-jen, 178 positional power fallacy, xii–xiii possession of power fallacy, xii, 16, 211n25 Powell, Walter W., 233n46 power, definition of, 1–2, 199–202 power imbalance, 3, 7, 111–15, 201 power’s psychological effects, 20–40 cultivating empathy, 30–33, 36, 38, 195 cultivating humility, 30, 34–36, 36, 38, 195, 215n55 developmental process and, 29–30 experience of power, 22–25 intoxication of power, 20–22, 173 morality and, 27–29, 164, 192, 194 perceptions of power, 25–27 selection, 36–38 structural safeguards, 38–40 power is dirty fallacy, xiii, 19–40 power mapping accuracy levels, 75–77, 194, 227n18 challenging environments, 81–84 community, 191 diversity and accuracy of, 88 endorsers, fence-sitters, and resisters, 77–78 fundamentals of power and, 195 keys to, 40 reputational power, 74–75, 226n16 technological change and, 143, 146 power from rank and role, 69–70 power sharing and accountability organizational, 166, 167–73, 191–92 societal, 182–84, 192, 256n63 power vs. authority, xii–xiii, 58–61, 66–68, 73 power-with, 8 Pratto, Felicia, 231n26 Prince, The (Machiavelli), xvi, 19, 227n21 principal-agent problem, 173 Protestant Reformation, 143 pseudoscience, 94, 101–3 psychological resources, 2, 47–51 psychological safety, 35, 39 public narrative, 122–23, 239–40n14 transportation, 135 Purpose of Power, The: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (Garza), 139 #QuellaVoltaChe, 137 Rabelais, François, 164 Rachid, María, 131–37 racism, 82–84, 89–90, 91–92, 104–08, 117 See also stereotypes Ramarajan, Lakshmi, 169 Ranganathan, Aruna, 47 Rawls, John, 193 Reading the Mind in the Eyes, 22 rebalancing power, 8–13 attraction, 8–11, 9, 12, 194 consolidation, 8, 11–12, 111, 112, 142, 194 digital era and, 158–62 expansion and withdrawal, 8, 12–13, 194 redistribution of power, 170, 197 Renaissance, 143 representative democracy, 183 Republic (Plato), ix, 198 resistance, 123–24, 161, 199 to change, 74, 77–78, 127, 131 violent and nonviolent, 124 Ridgeway, Cecilia L., 233n46, 251n5 Ring des Nibelungen, Der (Wagner), x Ring of Gyges, ix, x, xiii, 198 Roberts, Laura Morgan, 171 Robinson, James A., 257n79 Rogers, Jean, 126–30, 176 Rohingya, 34 Ross, Lee, 16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 189 Rowan, Brian, 233n46 Roy, Bunker, 144, 161 Rubin, Andy, 156 Russell, Bertrand A.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

In the United States the Evening World newspaper in New York reported, “It is not deadly, not even necessarily dangerous, but it will afford a grand opportunity for the dealers to work off their surplus of bandanas.” Deaths in the United States peaked in January 1890. Globalization would continue to bring plagues, and the plagues spread rapidly throughout the world. More than 1 million people each were killed by the Asian flu of 1957–1958 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968–1970. The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 has so far killed an estimated 4.5 million, as of this writing, and the slow-moving plague of HIV/AIDS has to date killed around 35 million. But by far the most deadly plague in modern history remains the Spanish flu of 1918–1920, which killed perhaps 50 million people out of a world population then approaching 1.9 billion—about 2.5 percent.8 It was not, actually, a Spanish flu.

And so it came to pass that its attempt to head off a depression in the future brought one on in the present.9 Previous depressions had been—and future depressions would be—far smaller than the Great Depression. In the United States, the most recent economic downturns had inflicted significantly less damage: in 1894, the unemployment rate had peaked at 12 percent; in 1908, at 6 percent; and in 1921, at 11 percent. The highest unemployment rate reached between World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was 11 percent. In the Great Depression, the US unemployment rate peaked at 23 percent—and at 28 percent for nonfarm workers (in the family-farm sector, “unemployment” is harder to measure). Some of the greatness of the Great Depression was a result of the relative expansion of the nonfarm sector at the expense of the family-farm sector: working from the best available data, I estimate that the nonfarm unemployment rate peaked at 14 percent in 1921, and working backward in time, at 8 percent in 1908, 20 percent in 1894, and 11 percent in 1884.

Why did social democracies that had nationalized the “commanding heights” of their economies use that power not to accelerate technological progress, and keep employment high, but rather to prop up increasingly obsolete “sunset” industries? When judged by a technocratic logic of efficiency, all politically popular arrangements will turn out to be lacking to some degree. It is the broadness of the discontent and the rapidity of its reemergence after a decade that, compared to the Great Recession of 2008, or the COVID-19 plague of 2020–2022, does not appear to have been that large a shock—it is that that strikes me as interesting. A tripling of global-north living standards between 1938 and 1973 had not brought about utopia. Growth gets interrupted and slowed. And in less than a decade, all of this was felt to indicate that social democracy needed to be replaced.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

White also suggested that monetary policymakers might face trouble exiting from their ultra-low rates. A few years after White’s 2012 paper, the Fed embarked on a tentative tightening cycle but soon abandoned its attempt to take interest rates back to normal levels. Instead, the Fed returned to printing money and cutting rates, and after Covid-19 struck the policy rate went back down to zero. White anticipated that central banks would also be forced to play a greater role in the provision of credit. This too has come to pass. During the pandemic year of 2020, central banks moved closer to directly financing government spending, as White predicted (see Postscript: The World Turned Upside Down).

., 72 Charles II, King of England, 33, 38 Chase National Bank, 87, 88 Chaumont, the Widow, 54–5 Child, Sir Josiah, xxii, 33–4, 35, 36–7, 37*, 38–40, 41, 43, 44, 202 China: authoritarian relapse in recent years, 288–9; back-alley banking, 281–3; capital controls in, 262, 266, 285; capital flight from, 285–6; and ‘commodity super-cycle (from 2010), 173–4, 255–6; corporate zombies in, 277, 281, 285, 289; corruption in, 270, 274, 275, 287–8, 287*; currency devaluation (2015), 227; debt-deflation in, 280–81; Deng’s reform era, 265, 266, 267; and digital currencies concept, 294; economic stimulus plan (2008/9), 270, 271–81, 282, 289, 292; export driven expansion, 132, 182, 267–70; and financial repression, 264–5, 265*, 266–81, 268*, 283, 286–9, 292; foreign capital inflows, 254–5, 256, 265–6, 267, 270, 270*; garlic bulb bubble, 173, 271, 282; ‘great divergence’ from West, 288; growing inequality in, 287–8, 287†; high occurrence of elevator accidents, 274, 274*; high-speed rail expansion, 275; housing boom during Covid pandemic, 310; increased share of world trade, 260; ‘iron rice bowl’ removed, 268; joins WTO (2001), 267; as leading producer of greenhouse gases, 277–8; long tradition of impressive investments, 276; ‘national team’ of state enterprises, 272, 272*; and new technologies, 177, 276, 283, 284; paper money invented in, 265; ‘Red Capitalism’, 280, 284, 292; savings/current account surpluses, 129, 268–9, 270; ‘shadow banks’ in, 266, 270, 282*, 283–5, 286; SHIBOR lending rate, 284; and taper tantrum (June 2013), 256, 284; treatment of Uighurs, 288; Trump’s trade wars with, 262; uncoordinated investment in, 266, 269, 270, 272–4, 275–9, 280–81; undervalued exchange rate, 267–8, 270, 271; unscrupulous vested interests, 270, 286–9; unstable bubbles in, 270, 271–4, 282, 288; unsustainable debt in, 270, 279–81, 282–5, 289; US loss of manufacturing jobs to, 261, 261*; vast investment boom in, xxiii, 128, 267–81, 280*, 282–9; wealth management product (WMP), 283–4; Wenzhou’s credit crunch (2011), 282–3 Chu, Charlene, 280 Citigroup, 232† Clapham, Sir John, 79 Clarida, Richard, 310 classical economists, 12, 14, 27–8, 31, 41, 85*, 130–31, 132–3, 183 see also Smith, Adam Clifford & Sons, 63 climate change, 255, 277–8 cloth trade, 14–15, 22, 23 Cobham, Thomas of, 19–20, 26 Coffin, Charles, 156 Cole, Christopher, 229*, 231 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 116, 227 collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), 227 Commerzbank, Germany, 245 compound interest, xvii, 8–9, 190, 200, 202 Conard, Joseph, 141* Connally, John, 251, 262 Consols (British bonds), 62–3, 65, 65†, 70, 77, 79, 80, 126 Conti, Louis Armand II, Prince of, 55 Coolidge, Calvin, 87, 92–3 corporate sector: benefits of low interest rates for, xxii; the financialized firm, 166–7; ‘good will’ on balance sheets, 169, 180; profits bubble in post-crisis USA, 183, 185, 211; ‘shareholder value’ philosophy, 163–6, 167, 170–71 corruption, 63, 258, 274, 275, 287*, 288; in China, 270, 274, 275, 287–8, 287*; Galbraith coins ‘bezzle’ term, 287 Coughlin, Father Charles, 242 Coupe, Mike, 160 ‘coveitise’, practice of, 24 Covid-19 pandemic, xxii, 224*, 304, 305–7, 309–10 Cowen, Tyler, 198 Coxey’s Army, 201 credit: in ancient Near East, 3, 5–10, 11, 15; and Borio’s financial cycle, 132, 134, 135; causes of booms, 42, 43, 44, 118, 176–7, 220; central bank dominion over markets, xxii, 292–3, 293*; collapse in quality in post-crisis decade, 222–4, 231, 233, 237–8; decline in quality during booms, 112, 116, 135–6; Defoe on, 28; emergence of modern credit cycle, 62–4; expansion in 1920s USA, 87–91, 92–4, 96–8, 112, 203; growth before 2008 crisis, 112–13, 114, 115, 116; Law’s credit theory, 47, 60; in medieval Italy, 22–3, 35; poor quality in expanding China, 266; as pre-dating barter, 3, 14; psychological elements, 64; rationing under Bretton Woods system, 291; strong growth of as red flag, 132, 135; unequal access to, xxii, xxv, 14, 15, 215; vast investment boom in China, xxiii, 128, 267–81, 280*, 282–9; Wenzhou’s credit crunch (2011), 282–3 Credit Suisse, 229 Creditanstalt, collapse of (1931), 93, 93*, 243, 261 Cruz, Gaspar da, 276 cryptocurrencies, 173, 177–9, 307–8, 312 Culpeper, Sir Thomas, the Younger, 34–5, 44 Culpeper, Sir Thomas, ‘Tract Against Usury’ (1621), 34, 35 Cyprus, 262 Dalio, Ray, 217, 229, 291 Datini, Francesco, 21–3, 24 Dawes Loan (1924), 91 Deaton, Angus, 213 debt: after 2008 crisis, 138–9, 237, 237†; ancient debt tablets, 5–6; ‘balance sheet recessions’, 191; cancellation/jubilees/clean slates, 9, 300; dangers of cheap credit, 32, 44; debt bondage, 5, 9, 18; ‘debt supercycle’, 135; ‘debt trap’, 43, 135, 280; debt-deflation, 98–9, 100, 119, 280–81; debt–service ratio, 135; ‘evergreening’ of bad debts, 136, 145–6, 280; late payment penalties, 10, 14, 25; Lord King on (2019), 304; as missing link in secular stagnation narrative, 135–6, 138–9; mortgage equity withdrawal, 112–13, 191, 205; problem of compound interest, 8–9; Proudhon on, xvii, xviii; revival of subprime market, 215, 221, 224; student debt ‘bubble’, 212, 213; tax structures favour over equity, 164; transferable/heritable in Babylon, 7 deflation: after 1929 Crash, 98–9, 100, 101, 105, 108; Austrian economists’ view of, 100, 101, 105, 113, 133–4; crisis of 2008 revives fears of, 119, 122; debt-deflation, 98–9, 100, 119, 280–81; in early-1920s Britain, 85–6; and Fed’s post-2008 policies, 236–8; ‘forgotten depression’ (1921), 84, 86, 100, 143; and high rates of interest, 42, 43, 64; impact of zombies, 237, 237†; impact on working people, 99–100; in Japan from 1990s, 100–101, 107–8, 114, 119, 135, 136, 145–6, 147, 148, 182, 191, 193; in late nineteenth century, 78–80, 99, 101; in post-Great War period, 84, 85–6; as preoccupation of modern central bankers, xxiii, xxv, 76, 112, 115, 115†, 122; Say’s view of, 99; and Victorian era, 76; view of as good/not harmful, 99–101, 113–14, 132; and Wicksell’s view of interest, 42 Defoe, Daniel, 28, 46, 47, 56, 57, 202, 308 Del Monte Foods, 222 democracy, 293, 293†, 296, 297; the old as largest voting cohort, 211–12; rise of populism, xxii, 299; weakening support for, 299 demographics: ageing societies, 29, 127; ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’, 212; generational impact of 2008 crisis, 211–12, 213; Alvin Hansen on, 126; and interest, xxiv, 10, 12, 126–7, 131, 133; largest voting cohort as old, 211–12; life expectancy statistics, 198, 213; and secular stagnation argument, 125, 126, 129; student debt ‘bubble’, 212, 213; and ‘time preference’ theory, 29 Demosthenes, 18† Deng Xiaoping, 265, 266, 267 Denmark, 242, 244, 245, 247 Deutsche Bank, 147* Dodd, David, 90–91 Dodd–Frank Act (2010), 232 Dogecoin, 308 Dollar Standard, 118, 251–2, 253, 261, 262–3, 267 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 294 Dotcom bubble, 111–12, 136–7, 176, 204, 206 double-entry bookkeeping, 21–2 Douglas, C.

(ketchup-maker), 161, 169 helicopter money, 112, 131 Hilferding, Rudolf, Finance Capital (1910), 158 Hilton, Paris, 178 Hirst, Damian, ‘Golden Calf’, 208 Hoag, David, 246 Hoenig, Thomas, 116 Holland, Henry Lancelot, 75 Holmes, Elizabeth, 149 Homer, Sydney, 4, 11, 68, 109 Hong Kong, 175 Hoover, Herbert, 92, 100, 141–2 Horan, Hubert, 149 d’Horn, Antoine-Joseph, Count, 51 Houellebecq, Michel, 309 Hudson, Michael, 9* Hume, David, 12, 27, 41, 45, 85*, 130–31, 132–3 Hungary, 253 IBM, 166 Iceland, 252, 253, 253*, 262, 300–301 Icelandic Central Bank (ICB), 300 Immelt, Jeff, 170–71 India, 254–5, 258 Indonesia, 258 industrial sector: canal construction mania (1790s), 69, 74; Chinese dumping of surpluses, 277, 280–81; electrification, 89; expansion from 1750s in Britain, 62–3; extended supply chains, 261; high demand in developing world, 128; impact of Great Depression on, 142–3; mining stocks, 79; new technologies in 1920s, 89, 90, 96, 100; production gluts in China, 276–7, 280–81; time in production, 14–15, 22, 95, 95† inequality: Bastiat’s view, xviii–xix; central bankers and responsibility for, 214–17; in China, 287–8, 287†; and Covid-19 pandemic, 309–10; and elite displays of wealth, 209–10, 212; and ‘financial repression’, 287–8; and financialization, 203–8; good and bad types of, 299; and Hayek, 296, 299; impact of crisis on the 99 per cent, 210–13, 215–17, 237; and inflation targeting, 123; interest as always about justice, 202; Marshall on deflation, 99–100; moral arguments over interest, 17, 201–2; multi-decade decline in from Great Depression, 203; multi-decade increase from early 1980s, 203–17, 204*; Piketty’s theory on, 216–17; in post-crisis Iceland, 301; rich as benefitting from easy money, 12*, 44, 202–5, 205, 206–10, 211, 214–17, 237; as rising in post-crisis decade, 44, 206–17, and secular stagnation argument, 205–6; seventeenth century writers on, 34, 36; stress levels after 2008 crisis, 210–11; trickle-down effect, 55; unequal access to credit, xxii, xxv, 14, 15, 215; in USA of 1920s, 203 inflation, xxiii, xxv; and asset price bubbles, xxiii, 134, 135; ‘Cantillon effect’, 60*; case against, 108*; and Covid-19 pandemic, 310; global aspect of, 122; Greenspan’s focus on, 110–14; Hayek on, 302; inflation targeting, 119–20, 121–3, 241; and Law’s ‘System’, 56–7, 58, 59–61; and low rates of interest, 42, 43, 56–7, 58, 59–61; and ‘natural rate’ of interest, 133–5; in post-Great War period, 84; purged by high interest rates, 84; return of in 1960s, 302; after Second World War, 311; in USA during 1970s, 108–9; Volcker’s ‘practical monetarism’, 109–10; and Wicksell’s view of interest, 42 insurance: ‘catastrophe bonds’, 222; credit default swaps (CDS), 219, 221; ever-escalating life premiums, 198–9, 199*; and low-interest regimes, xxi, 193, 195, 196*, 245; and moral hazard, 220, 233; underwriting, 219–20, 219†, 233 interest: ancient connection with rent, 7; Austrian school’s view, 95–6, 100, 101, 105, 108; calculating of how much due, 6, 14; central banks’ influence on long-term rates, 133, 134–5; concealed in bills of exchange, 24; and ‘creative destruction’ idea, 140–43, 143*; determining of rate level, 10–13; feedback loop with globalization, 260–61, 311; as hard to predict, 310–11; Hazlitt on price system, xx; as at heart of capitalism, xxii, xxv, 16, 28, 141, 297; high levels under Volcker at Fed, 109; and inequality in modern capitalism, 17; inversely related to capital value, 31, 43, 44, 52–61, 88, 116*, 158, 172–5; and length of ‘time in production’, xxiv, 14–15, 16, 22, 95, 95†; loans related to consumption, 6, 9*, 25, 28–9, 30; long-term rates in US (1945–2021), 134; lucrum cessans (foregone profit) concept, 25; moral arguments over inequality, 17, 201–2; paid by taking possession of collateral, 6–7; politicization of rate setting, 85–6; rate of and cultural level of a nation, 13, 29; rates set by custom and law, 11, 12; ‘real’ and ‘monetary’ factors, xxiv, 10, 12–13, 41, 131, 132–3, 133*, 138–9; as the ‘time value of money’, xxiv, xxv–xxvi, 10, 14–15, 16, 20, 22, 26–7, 28–32; variety of different rates, xxv, 12, 13, 14; Thomas Wilson’s definition, 26–7, 28, 30 see also ‘natural rate’ of interest; usury interest, functions of, xxiii–xxvi; allocation of capital, xxi, xxiv, xxv, 11, 15–16, 32, 139, 141–50, 151–5, 264, 266; capitalization of wealth, 139, 173–87; discounted value of asset’s future income, 28, 90–91, 173, 297; distribution of wealth, xxv, 139, 201–17, 237; financing of companies, 139, 157–71; level of savings, xxiv, xxv, 139, 188–93, 194–9; measurement of risk, xxv, 139, 176–7, 218–19, 220–34; as the ‘price of leverage’, xxiv, xxv, 135; regulation of international capital flows, xxv, 139; Schumpeter’s view, 141; valuing of long-lasting assets, 15 interest, history of, xxii–xxiii; 1825 banking crisis, 64–7, 75; anticretic interest, 6; attitudes to usury, 17–24, 25–6, 200–201, 219; Babylonian origins, 3–4, 14–15; barter-to-money myth, 14; Child’s abatement of interest proposals, 33–4, 35, 36–7, 38–40, 41, 43, 44; consumer and commercial lending distinction, 6, 9*, 25–6; decline of rates in late Middle Ages, 35, 36; defence of interest in seventeenth century, 37, 38–41, 42–4, 236†; emergence of modern credit cycle, 62–4; etymologies of interest, xvii–xviii, 4–5, 7, 11, 17, 18, 25, 26, 200; European rates (1200–1800), 36; Fed’s tightening (1928), 108, 261; ‘forgotten depression’ (1921), 84, 86, 100, 143; gradual rate decline in early modern Europe, 49; interest as much older than coined money, 3–4, 14; invention of compound interest, 8–9; low rates in Amsterdam, 35–6, 39; low rates in late-nineteenth century USA, 157, 158–9; new concept of at start of modern era, 27–8; post-1571 debates on excessively high rates, 34–40; post-Great War period, 84, 85–6; Proudhon-Bastiat debate, xvii–xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 9; speculative manias (1630s-1890s), 64–6, 67–72, 73, 74, 75–6, 77–8, 79–80; stability of rates in ancient world, 10–12 see also Mesopotamia, ancient; Middle Ages; Mississippi bubble; Near East, Ancient; price-stabilization policy of 1920s interest, ultra-low/excessively low rates: and 1825 banking crisis, 64–7, 75; in 1980s/1990s Japan, 105–7, 106; Bagehot’s views, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 80–81, 220, 233; under Bernanke after 2008 crisis, 124, 131, 133, 137–8, 153, 155, 181–3, 207, 215, 230, 238–9, 240, 243–4, 262; under Bernanke before 2008 crisis, 111–12, 113, 115–17, 115†, 118–19; and British government debt conversions, 65, 65*, 69, 79; Buffett on, 308*; buyout barons as beneficiaries of, 160–63, 161*, 183†, 204, 207, 222, 237; Cantillon’s warning over, 58, 60–61; and capital-intensive industries, 62–3; as common feature of asset bubbles, xxiii, 116*, 123, 135, 172–87, 180, 220; consumer behaviour affected by, 32; and ‘financial repression’ in China, 266–81, 268*, 277*, 283, 292; ‘financial repression’ term, 191; under Alan Greenspan, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 134–5, 162, 186, 190–91, 204, 226–7, 238, 252–3, 267; Icelandic Counterfactual, 300–301; impact on emerging markets, xxiii, 253–60, 262–3; impact on stock market/bond investors, 193–4; and inequality, 205–17, 299; in late nineteenth century, 78–80; and Law, 49, 52–4, 56*, 58–61; ‘low rates beget lower rates’ thesis, 44, 135, 136, 139, 206, 231, 234; low real rates in 1920s USA, 87–91, 89, 92–4, 96–8, 203; misallocation of capital by, xxi, 32, 43, 114, 136, 141–50, 151–5, 266–81, 289; during Napoleonic Wars, 69–70; productivity collapse in post-crisis decade, 150–51, 152–3; ‘reversal interest rate’, 236; rich as benefitting from, 44, 202–10, 211, 214–17, 237; and rising profits in post-crisis USA, 183, 185, 211; and risk taking, xxi, 52–61, 64–73, 77–81, 121–2, 135–9, 145, 149, 176–9, 220–34, 283, 285, 291–2; robber baron era in USA, 156–9, 203; and saving, 44, 77, 190–93, 194–9, 205–6; and secular stagnation narratives, 126–7, 129, 131, 132–9; seventeenth-century debates on, 34–44, 236†; trouble exiting from policy, xxi–xxii, 57–9, 60–61; ‘unicorns’ feed on, 148–50, 153, 155, 173, 176–7; unintended consequences, xxi–xxii, 32, 44, 137–9, 238, 297–8; Paul Volcker’s view of, 108–9; as warning sign, 13, 114; warnings from economists at BIS, 113–14, 131–4, 135–9, 153; William White on, 114; and ‘yield-chasing’, 65–6, 67–9, 114, 116, 136, 221–6, 230–31, 230*, 233–4, 237–8, 256, 305; zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), xxi, 123, 131, 137–8, 141, 146, 172–3, 191, 192; and zombification, 146–8, 153, 155, 237, 240, 277, 289 see also Mississippi bubble; negative interest rates International Dynamite Trust, 159 International Monetary Fund, 119, 144, 147, 168 investment: and China’s rapid expansion, 266–7, 269–70, 271–81; Chinese stimulus plan (2008/9), 270, 271–81, 282, 289, 292; collapse of in post-crisis decade, 152; easy money as incentive for undue risks, xxi, 136, 149, 220, 221–4, 230–31, 283, 285, 291–2; ‘equity risk premium’, 176*; in listed ‘yieldcos, 222; long-term bonds, 69, 131*, 193, 224–6; ‘malinvestment’ term, 32, 95, 148; meme stocks, 307; and production gluts in China, 276–7, 280–81; with returns in distant future, 148–50, 158, 176–7; Terborgh on, 125*; ‘unicorn’ start-up companies, 148–50, 153, 155, 173, 176–7; valuation of by interest, xxiv, xxv, 30–31, 173; White on impact of low interest rates, xxi see also asset price bubbles Ireland, 144–5, 225, 253, 279 Irving, Washington, 55† Israel, ancient, 9, 17, 200 Istel, Yves-André, 214 Italy, 21–3, 23, 35, 144–5, 147–8, 225, 293, 304 Japan: ageing population in, xxiv, 29, 198; deflation since the early 1990s, 100–101, 107–8, 114, 119, 135, 136, 145–6, 147, 148, 182, 191, 193; falling savings levels in, 192; first foreign loan (1870), 78; great bubble economy (1980s), xxiii, 105–8, 145, 182, 184, 271, 273, 279, 285–6; inflation targeting in, 119, 122, 241; negative interest rates in, xxi, 29, 122, 224, 225, 242, 244–5; public debt in, 291*; quantitative easing in, 241, 242, 294; ‘retirement gap’ in, 198; zaitech practitioners, 106, 182, 185; zombification of economy, 145–6, 147 Jevons, W.


pages: 179 words: 49,805

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

4chan, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, COVID-19, gentrification, imposter syndrome, Snapchat, telemarketer

A NORMAL AFTERWORD I turned in my finished manuscript for this book on March 24, 2020, very pregnant and very satisfied with myself. It felt perfect that I finished a book all about my relationship with normalcy; after all, with a new human soon entering my life, my whole concept of “normal” was about to completely change. But fuck, I had no idea. As my due date drew closer, the COVID-19 pandemic was getting bad in the US, with New York City becoming the world’s epicenter. Because of this, I was getting induced to get ahead of the potentially devastating Los Angeles hospital rush as well as a potential ban on fathers being in the delivery room. Despite the state of the world, I let my husband do the bulk of the “pandemic worrying” while I focused on basking in the glow of my finished book and debating which song from Sunday in the Park with George would work best on my birthing playlist.

When we checked into the hospital, I had a mask on with a big smile beneath it. But then My daughter was born and she couldn’t breathe because she had fluid in her lungs so they put her on a ventilator in the NICU and that same night she was born I found out my songwriting partner Adam was in a New York hospital with COVID-19 and was also on a ventilator which was just so on-the-nose and as his life and my daughter’s life felt tethered together the concept of mortality suddenly hit me in a way it never had before and meanwhile the floor below the maternity ward was being turned into a COVID-only floor so everything was changing around us and furniture was being stored in the hallways and my doctor came to my room to check on me after birth and when she told us about maybe quarantining from her family to not infect them she burst into tears and then after we left the hospital my daughter was still in the NICU but my husband wasn’t allowed back because of COVID regulations so he sanitized everything that had been in our hospital bags including microwaving some papers because who knows how the virus spreads and he did this as I went back and forth from the NICU and meanwhile I hadn’t taken a shit in like five days but then we finally got to take our daughter home and Adam was getting better and I passed out in a blissful nap on the bed with the baby and the dog.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Twenty-five percent of these investigatory mechanisms (eight of them) have focused exclusively on Israel.10 Various other agencies of the UN, which are designed to focus on specific professional subjects, also tend to single out Israel for criticism. For example, member states of the World Health Organization, which should really be focused on keeping the world healthy (How are we doing on HIV or COVID-19, for example? Are we done with them?), pushed for a resolution that forces the organization to issue only one country-specific report annually. I’ll let you guess which country is singled out for criticism by the WHO: Israel, of course.11 Just so we are clear, Israel is a world leader in universal healthcare and medical technologies, not to mention being there for the wounded children of Syria.

There’s been an uptick in killings, harassment, vandalism, assault, and fatalities of Jews in the US. In the incredible social justice demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd, people spray painted “Jews we’re coming for you” at a park by my apartment. And, of course, there are the millions of posts and tweets about how the Jews are the ones who actually created COVID-19. Jews are only 2 percent of the United States population, but they are the target of 50 percent of national religion-based hate crimes. So, okay, antisemitism is still a thing, but it still seemed too simplistic to connect it to Israel hatred. Maajid continued: “Why do people judge Jews by one standard and the rest of the world by another?

My mom never asked me to do anything to follow in her footsteps, but her actions spoke louder. My words are the fulfillment of that promise not asked. THIS IS A LOVE SONG Midway through writing this book, the world tipped into the year 2020. It was June, and Los Angeles was under lockdown orders as COVID-19 was making its way through the known universe. I was holed up in our bedroom, trying to make my deadline for this book in the sporadic moments I wasn’t homeschooling our 4.5-year-old Ari, or cooking, cleaning, building Lego, cooking, cleaning, baking, cleaning, making art, or trying, like everyone else, to stay sane.


pages: 337 words: 100,260

British Rail by Christian Wolmar

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Beeching cuts, book value, Boris Johnson, COVID-19, driverless car, full employment, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, vertical integration, éminence grise

Rather, it explores how British Railways was a victim of its history and of the whim of politicians who had little understanding about its achievements and, indeed, its real failings. Many of Major’s arguments will be assessed. As the privatization experiment is now a quarter of a century old – half the time of BR’s existence – it has been given a good opportunity to prove its worth. In fact, as I write, and indeed since early March 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic began to reduce numbers using the railway, the industry has been in a state of turmoil unprecedented in peacetime. The railway is in a state of chaos, wrecked financially by the pandemic and by the subsequent government messaging, which turned a crisis into a long-term disaster by terrifying potential passengers about the risks of taking the train.

As I was finishing this book in the summer of 2021, the government at last published a long-awaited review of the industry. The process which had started in 2018 under the chairmanship of Keith Williams, a John Lewis executive and former British Airways chairman, had been much delayed both by arguments within government and by the Covid-19 pandemic. Taking the form of a government White Paper, Great British Railways set out plans for the future of the railway. The government is proposing to create a new ‘guiding mind’ for the industry – which is to be called Great British Railways, since it would be too embarrassing to simply reuse the British Railways name.

A. 62 Cab Secure Radio 296 Callaghan, Jim 149–50 Calvert, Margaret 110 Campbell, Ian 171 camping coaches 50–51 Cannon Street station rail crash 297 Capitalcard 281–2, 283 Captials Limited 35 car ownership 56, 78, 131–2, 187, 299, 322–3 Carlisle 67 Casey Jones 231 Castle, Barbara 128, 129–34, 135, 136, 156, 195–6, 271 catering cafeterias and tea trolleys 37 HST 180 InterCity 300, 301 privatization 231–3 sandwiches ix, x, xvii Causebrook, Mark 268 Centre for Policy Studies 246 Channel Tunnel 332 Channon, Paul 236, 263, 333 Charing Cross station 237 Chiltern line 316 City Link 192–3 Clapham Junction rail crash 291, 292–6 CLASP (Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme) 116–17 Clean Air Act 1956 33 clock-face timetabling 163 closures 1970s 139–42 1980s 324–6 Beeching 81–2, 83, 85–94, 95–101, 105–6, 138 Blue Paper 143–4, 156 by stealth 72, 325–6 Castle 132, 133–4 cost-benefit analysis 156–7 in privatization legislation 264 reopenings 324–5 Serpell report 152–3, 155, 260 Settle–Carlisle line 261–4 Stedeford committee 80–81 1960 White Paper 81 1974 White Paper 148 1977 White Paper 148, 149 coach services 190–91, 277, 299 coal wagons 92–3 Cockerell, Christopher 77 commercial railway 24, 135, 152, 258 common carrier obligation 24, 65 computerization 203–4 Concorde 175 Conran, Terence 109 consultants 239–40 container traffic 86, 92, 93, 131 continuous welded rail 201, 253, 281 Coopers & Lybrand 247 Cornwall Skippers 271, 319 cost-benefit analysis 61, 156–7 Cotton, Ron 262 Coventry station 10, 118 Covid-19 pandemic xv, 342 Crosland, Tony 144–6, 148 Cross Country 185, 186, 298 Cuisine 2000 232, 233 Cyclists Special (British Transport Film) 49 Daily Mail 172 Dalgleish, Angus 244 Dartmoor 72 Davies, Hunter 94, 95, 96 Day, Robin 109 Deltic diesel locomotives 5, 15, 84–5, 95, 185, 301 Deming, Edwards 313 Denning, Lord 78 Department of the Environment 353 closures 140 rail to road conversion 245 see also Ministry of Transport Department of Transport 353 Capitalcard 281 Great British Railways xvii rail privatization 331, 334, 335 see also Ministry of Transport Derbyshire, Nick 238 Design Panel 107, 111 Design Research Unit 107 The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes (second Beeching report) 95–8, 99, 101, 133, 240 diesel locomotives 5, 13, 84, 120–21, 125, 252 and APT 170 Deltics 5, 15, 84–5, 95, 185, 301 diesel-electrics 64, 125 diesel-hydraulics 64, 125–6 HST 162, 165, 176–86 and loading gauge 27 Modernisation Plan 63, 64–5, 72–3, 233 staffing 5–6, 123–4, 206–7 diesel multiple units 28–9, 121, 159, 269 Blue Pullmans 159–62 Pacers 269–71, 318–19 Sprinters 272–3, 319, 323 disabled travellers 43, 114 Disconnected!


Radiant Rest by Tracee Stanley

Albert Einstein, centre right, COVID-19, epigenetics, rewilding, source of truth

This existence leaves very little room for exploration of our internal landscape, devotion to practice, spiritual study, the things that bring us joy or relaxation just for the sake of our own sanity and well-being. MAKING CHOICES Tech companies are banking on the fact that we would rather distract ourselves than be present to life. This was evident during “stay-at-home” orders at the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when people ran to platforms like Instagram, Zoom, and Netflix to the point that they became overloaded and kept crashing. We are constantly making choices. But what influences the choices we make moment to moment? This reminds me of the simple but profound concept of desire and the idea that the seed of every thought, deed, and action is desire.

So why not make life a radiance sadhana? Weaving the Householder’s Flow into your practice can soften the masculine edges of discipline and transform discipline into devotion. Have compassion for yourself, and keep the thread of sadhana alive even when you can’t do a long practice each day. Under stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were all forced into a global sadhana of sorts—months of changing our habits, surrendering our preferences, and getting still. As a collective, we all endured something that we previously might have thought was intolerable. Many people faced the discomfort, adapted, and became stronger as a result.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

Finally, we have outlined how the challenge of a data monopoly, which is owned by all, can be shared and returned to rightful ownership. We can all benefit not just from the innovation, but from the economic value creation. Armed with these proposals, our politics can be changed. If it doesn’t, we should all get angry. Postscript: angrynomics in a pandemic In late March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic pushed the world into lockdown just as the proofs of this book landed on our desks. We immediately wondered, as the pandemic began to unfold, if what we had to say was still of relevance. We are convinced that it is. The key themes of this book are that any society encountering patched-up macroeconomic crashes (like 2008), the ever-increasing daily stressors of an aging society beset with rapid technological change, and rising inequality, was one that would produce an angry anti-system politics.

AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) 114 Afghanistan 6 aging population 10, 13, 14, 95, 106–11 and consumption 109–10 and government bonds 138–9, 152 and inequality 56–7, 58, 107–10 and inter-generational transfer 106–107 and poverty 57, 107 as stressor 57, 91, 106, 110, 111, 116, 118 and technological change 90, 106, 122 AIG 85, 124 Amazon 96, 98, 104, 142, 143–4 Anderson, Elizabeth 176 anger 2–3, 7–9, 10, 11–12, 159, 161 misplaced 13 as opportunity 16 and play 153 private see private anger public see public anger reducing see calming strategies anxiety/stress 9, 13–14, 50, 53, 55–6, 88, 118, 161 and cognitive effort 89–90, 91 and job insecurity 95–6 three causes of 91 and uncertainty see uncertainty Apple 96, 142, 143 Aristotle 59, 153 artificial intelligence (AI) 14, 102–106, 142 Asian financial crisis (1998) 77, 140 asset ownership 130–31, 133, 136, 140–41 Atkinson, Tony 80, 173 austerity policies 2–3, 6, 15, 34–5, 41, 48, 84 and euro crisis 44–5 and low interest rates 135 Australia 125 Austria 3 baby boomers 107–108, 110, 111, 175 Bank of England 84, 103, 120, 145, 148 TFS scheme 149–50, 166 banks 1, 6, 15, 33–5, 42, 44, 48, 145–50 and capital/liquidity ratios 126 and direct support for consumption 145–8 and dual interest rates 149–50 and economic models 3, 4 failure of 119–21, 122 and helicopter money 131, 146 independence of 78, 79 and leverage see financial leverage and problem of low interest rates 120–21, 122, 131, 135 regulations on 125–6, 127, 129, 132 restrictions on 72, 77 see also financial crisis (2008) Beck, Aaron 171–2 Bernanke, Ben 6, 148 Biden, Joe 106 billionaires 4 Bitcoin 102, 103 Blackrock 165 blockchain technology 14, 103 Blyth, Mark 172, 175 bonuses 81, 85, 124 Brazil 11, 127 Brexit 4, 7, 11, 22, 24, 37, 38, 55, 117, 154 and austerity policies 41, 45 and immigration 111, 112, 114, 116 and job insecurity 100–101 Brill, Stephen 175 Britain (UK) 3, 38, 119, 155, 162, 164 aging population in 107, 110 austerity policies in 41 dual interest rates in 149–50 and EU see Brexit fear of immigration in 27 gig economy in 100 and government bonds 135, 140 government spending in 71 immigration in 111, 112, 114, 115–16 inequality in 6 interest rates in 145 nationalism in 23 Thatcherism in 75, 76 Brittan, Samuel 151 Brynjolfsson, Erik 173 budget deficits 71, 75 Buffett, Warren 130 calming strategies 12, 15, 118, 122, 123–57 and data dividend see data dividend and direct support for consumption 145–8 and dual interest rates 149–50 and economic diversity 153–6 and inequality see inequality, strategies to reduce and national wealth fund see NWF and regulations on banks 125–6, 127, 129, 132 and sustainable investment see sustainable investment Canada 125 cancer 53, 87, 88, 106 capital 4 cost of 137, 139, 153 and dispersion 97–98 as “fictitious” commodity 65 formation, rate of 108 global 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 58 and labour 50, 60, 69, 72 and neoliberalism 75, 76, 77, 79 protection of, following financial crisis 85 versus capital 97, 98 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty) 49, 108–10 capital/liquidity ratios 126 capitalism 64–5 and commodities 65–6 capitalism as computer 11, 61–72 fixing 124–25 hardware of 62–3, 117 software of 63–4, 68–71 and unemployment/inequality 66–7 version 1.0 68–9 version 1.0 crash 64, 66, 67, 71, 73, 83, 118 version 2.0 69–73, 74, 75, 76, 116 version 2.0 crash 70–71, 73, 83–4, 118 version 3.0 74–80, 98–9, 117, 125, 140–41 version 3.0 crash 116 car industry 100–101 caring industry 104 Case, Anne 54, 176 centrism, political 38, 48, 118–19, 121, 160–61, 162 CEOs (chief executive officers) 4 Chamberlain, Joseph 66 Chile 3 China 42, 63, 64, 78, 93, 137, 151, 156 Citibank 81, 82 cities 55, 56 climate change 104, 111, 121, 129, 131, 153, 159–60 and investment see sustainable investment Clinton, Hillary 160 Coggan, Philip 172 cognitive effort 89–90, 91 Cold War 28, 48 ending/legacy of 5, 23, 26, 29, 30, 37, 116 communism 68, 71 competition/competitiveness 47, 65, 94, 95, 111, 116, 125 and technology 105 see also product market competition computer analogy see capitalism as computer constrained volatility 85 consumption, direct support for 145–8, 150–51, 160 consumption, distribution of 52–3, 58 Corbyn, Jeremy 119 corporations 6, 20, 57 and competition 95, 96 and data dividend see data dividend corruption 8, 29, 61, 130 Covid-19 163 culture 160 Czech Republic 146, 147, 155 data dividend 141–4, 160, 162 and monopolies 142, 143, 144 and privacy 141–2 and property rights 142–3 de-unionization 50, 95, 99 Deaton, Angus 54, 176 debt 75, 84, 120, 132, 145, 150 and demography 109, 111, 131 government 136–7, 151, 152 net 136 deflation 65, 69, 120, 128, 144, 148 demand management 44–5, 47, 126–7 democracy 16, 25, 29, 39, 40, 104, 117, 130 and markets 68 demography see aging population Denmark 64, 164 depression see recession deregulation 28, 40, 48, 50, 58, 75 and inflation 127 as micro-stressor 94, 96, 99, 101, 118 DGSE (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) models 3–4 Doughnut Economics (Raworth) 131–2, 165 dual interest rates 131–2, 149–50, 174 Dublin (Ireland) 17–18 economic change 9–10, 29, 43, 153 see also fiscal reform; recession economic growth 2, 6, 41, 69, 71, 86 and demography 108–10 and immigration 116 and inequality 76, 79–80 and quality of jobs/wages 46, 47, 85 economic ideology 28 economics 12, 54–5 shortcomings of models 3–5, 6, 7 education 24, 53, 58, 135, 141 tuition fees/student loans 107, 111 electoral politics 5–6, 104 and demographics 107, 110 and tribalism 13, 22, 24–7, 29, 30, 31 electric vehicles 153 elites 2–3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 37 in cities 55, 56 and corruption 8, 29 and ethical norms 20 and financial crisis 43–4 manipulation of tribal identity by 22, 24, 61, 116, 161 policy failures of 48–9 Engbom, Niklas 175–6 environmental degradation 29, 161 see also climate change environmental and social governance 168 ethical norms 20 euro crisis 7, 37, 44, 77, 144 Europe 34, 42, 137, 140 inequality in 41, 53, 56, 58 migrant crisis in 7 tribalism in 30 European Central Bank (ECB) 34, 84, 146, 155, 164–5 TLTRO programme 147–8, 166 European Union (EU) 22, 33, 34–5, 37, 43, 119 austerity policies in 2, 36, 48 and financial crisis (2008) 82 micro-stressors in 47–8 and nationalism 154–6 and neoliberalism 76, 77 unemployment in 44–5 see also Brexit eurozone 45, 65, 83, 148, 151, 155 exchange rates 72, 134 Extinction Rebellion 8, 131–2 Facebook 27, 96, 98, 142, 143 fake news 26 Farage, Nigel 17, 161 Farmer, Roger 174 fascism 45–6, 66, 67–8, 71 fear 16, 17, 94, 113, 117, 150, 161 and media 26, 27 and politics 7, 45 financial crisis (2008) 1–2, 6, 26, 29, 30, 39, 48, 127, 163 and automation 102–103 and bail-out of banks 84 fragility of recovery from 46, 85, 89, 121 further reading on 172–3 and globalized financial system 84 and growth of populism 85 and inequality 79–80 and low interest rates 135 and regulation of banks 129 financial leverage 72, 81–3, 85, 99, 126, 157 and credit crunch 83 and interest rates 81–2 financial market deregulation 77 fiscal councils 150–51 fiscal reform 15, 150–53, 162 Fischer, Stan 148, 165 Florence (Italy) 87–8 foodbanks 6, 53 football fans 8, 19, 56 France 2, 3, 20, 55, 56, 71, 101, 154, 156 and NWF 135 Franklin, Benjamin 87 free markets 30, 69, 118 Friedman, Milton 118 full employment 40, 47, 60, 66, 71–2, 79, 85, 175 and inflation 73–4, 76 without inflation 121, 125, 126 future 101–102, 111 Garcia family, parable of 33–5, 43 Gates, Bill 130 GDP (gross domestic product) 5, 44, 76, 79, 100–101, 106, 151, 152 and NWF 135, 141 Germany 3, 11, 34, 38, 42, 62–3, 66, 151, 154, 156, 167 and migrant crisis 111, 113–14 and NWF 135 Gibley, Bruce Cannon 175 gig economy 94, 98, 99–100 global economy 12, 39–40, 50, 53, 58, 133 and nationalism 154 and neoliberalism 77 globalization 5, 39, 41, 42–3, 48, 77, 117 hyper- 40 and inequality 80 and inflation 127 and insecurity 101 and labour market 42, 43 and nationalism 154 Gold Standard 65, 67 Google 96, 98, 104, 142 government bonds 72, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138–9, 152 as insurance policies 139, 140 government borrowing 134–5, 137, 152–3 and cost of capital 137, 139, 153 and low inflation 128, 138–40, 150 and NWF 136–137, 138–40 Great Depression 40, 44, 66, 69, 120 Great Moderation 6, 120 Greece 35, 38, 44, 45, 106–07, 110, 144 green revolution see sustainable investment gross domestic product see GDP Guilluy, Christophe 55 Gulf States 133, 134 Hayek, Friedrich 118 healthcare 47, 53–4, 58, 123–4, 135, 139 and access to data 141–2 and NWF 141 and uncertainty/probability 92 hedge fund managers 4 helicopter money 131, 146, 166 Hildebrand, Philipp 165 Hong Kong 2–3, 140, 164 Hopkin, Jonathan 172 Hopkins, Ellen 123 housing 71, 113, 114, 135 Hungary 11, 23, 30 Iceland 1–2, 8, 20 immigration 5, 7, 26, 27, 111–17, 164 economic effects of 115–16 and housing/training 113, 114 and income distribution 112, 113, 114–15 and manipulation by media/politicians 111, 115 as stressor 113, 115 and technological change 106 and tribalism 95, 111, 112, 113 income see wages income distribution 43, 50, 51 and Keynesian economics 71 and neoliberalism 80, 81 independent fiscal councils 150–51 India 23, 127 individualism 29, 154 Indonesia 3 inequality 3, 4, 6, 15, 29, 30, 40–41, 43, 49–57, 58, 61, 79, 118 difficulties in measuring 50–53 and distribution of income/consumption 53–4 and financial crisis (2008) 79–80, 83, 85 further reading on 173, 176 intergenerational 56–7, 107–10 and populism 54–5 and uncertainty 49–50 inequality, strategies to reduce 121–2, 129–31, 132, 162 asset ownership 130–31, 133, 136, 140–41 and data dividend 141–4 National Wealth Fund see NWF optimal/effective 132–3 and universal basic income (UBI) 141, 144 wealth tax 130, 132 inflation 5, 40, 51–2, 53, 69 death of 126, 128 and full employment 73–4, 76, 121, 122, 125 and global financial markets 78 and interest rates 75, 81–2, 120 low see low inflation and oil prices 96–7 and printing money 78, 128, 145 and raising taxes 129 and recession 144–5 and regulation of banks 125–6, 127, 132 and stagflation 40, 74, 120, 128 inheritance 132, 133, 160 national 136 innovation see technological change insurance industry 93 interest rates 15, 33–4, 75, 81–2, 165–6 dual, and sustainable investment 131–2, 149–50 low, problem of 120–21, 122, 131, 132, 135, 146–8, 152 negative, problem of 15, 148, 149, 150 and spending 147 internet 25 investment spending 40, 60, 69 and future expectations 103 and global capital flows 77–8 and inflation 74 public sector 67, 70–71 sustainable see sustainable investment IRA (Irish Republican Army) 17 Iraq 6 Ireland 17–18, 23, 24 Islam 27 Italy 35, 37, 38, 39, 44, 66, 71, 87–8, 144, 156, 167 aging population in 110 poverty in 47 tribalism in 45–6 Japan 26, 84, 110, 137, 140, 148 job security/insecurity 34, 50, 56, 61, 94, 95–6, 100–101 and technology 102 Kalecki, Michał 60–61, 73–5, 120, 121, 127 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesian economics 60, 66–7, 68–70, 92, 103, 118, 127, 151 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 66, 175 and inflation 67, 69, 128 labour market 35, 40–41, 42, 43, 44 and automation 102–106 deregulation 50, 95, 99, 122, 127 dispersion in 98–9 and full employment see full employment and immigration 115–16 in Keynesian system 71–2 and labour as commodity 59, 60, 65–6, 73, 85 and protectionism 59–61, 66 and secular stability 125, 126 and training 62–3 see also wages Lagarde, Christine 167 Lerner, Abba 118 libertarianism 63 Lonergan, Eric 174 Los Indignatios 85 low inflation 79, 134, 157 and full employment/secular stability 126 and government spending/borrowing 128, 138–40, 150, 152 and recession 144–5, 150, 162 Luce, Edward 164 Ludd, Ned/Luddites 102 machine learning (MI) 102–104 see also artificial intelligence macroeconomics 9, 13, 47, 89 failure of 119–20 and uncertainty 94 Macron, Emmanuel 162 Mair, Peter 172 markets 30, 59–61, 62, 66–7 and democracy 68 and quantity theory of money 68–9 see also labour market Mauss, Marcel 21–2 Mazzucato, Mariana 156 media 11, 43, 47 and technological change 98, 102–103, 105 and tribalism 24–5, 26–7, 29, 31, 61, 116, 161 Merkel, Angela 114 Mexico 63 micro-stressors 47–8, 53, 84, 91 and aging populations see aging populations and change 94 and fourth industrial revolution 94 and immigration see immigration microeconomics 9, 13–14, 160 migrant crisis 7, 111 Milanovic, Branko 52, 80 minimal group paradigm 21 Minsky, Hyman 128 mobile phones 53, 96, 97, 142 modern monetary theory (MMT) 118, 128–9 money, printing 78, 128, 145 monopolies 142, 143, 144 moral outrage 8, 13, 15, 35–6, 57–8, 117, 130, 161 and inequality see inequality as rational 36 and tribalism, compared 19, 20, 22, 29, 30–31, 36 triggers for 36 mortgages 34, 35, 38, 82, 111, 137, 145 nation state 39–40, 48, 50, 117, 119 national wealth fund see NWF nationalism 5, 11, 23, 29, 31, 39, 41, 116, 119 as positive 153–6 neoliberalism 4, 28–9, 37, 75–8, 122 and global capital flows 77–8 and inequality 51, 52, 53 NHS (National Health Service) 107 Nissan 100–101 Nixon, Richard 26 Northern Ireland 17–18, 23, 24 Norway 133, 134 Nussbaum, Martha 16, 35, 36 NWF (national wealth fund) 15, 132, 133–41, 143, 152, 168 and aging population 138–9 and asset ownership 133, 136, 140–41 and government borrowing/debt 136–7, 138–40 and growth of global stock market 137–8 and individual trust funds 135 and negative interest rates 134–5, 136 and risk 136, 137–8 sovereign 133–4 and trade surplus 134 Obama, Barack 29, 46 oil prices 96–7 Orban, Viktor 23, 30, 161 “Panama Papers” 2, 20 pensions 57, 63, 106–107, 138 perpetual loans 147–8 Philadelphia Eagles 20 Pickett, Kate 168 Piketty, Thomas 49, 52, 80, 108–10 play 153 Poland 11, 30 Polanyi, Karl 59–61, 64–5, 67, 175 political centrism 38, 48, 118–19, 121, 160–61, 162 political disengagement 29 political economy 12, 13 political identity 22–3, 29–30, 37, 48, 116, 117 further reading on 172 political parties 5–6, 7, 28 politics, new 15–16, 58, 160 populism 11, 27, 39 and financial crisis 86 three genres of 54–5 Portugal 35, 38, 44, 144 poverty 47, 67, 72, 80, 115 and demographics 57, 107 power 4, 48 powerlessness 9, 41 price stability 76, 79, 128, 147 private anger 7, 8, 9, 10, 13–14, 36, 117 and cognitive effort 89–90, 91 see also anxiety/stress private sector debt 131, 145 and government borrowing 134–5, 137, 138–40 investment 67, 70, 149–50, 151 liability in financial crisis 85, 127 privatization 28, 40, 96, 107 probability 91–3 product market competition 94, 95–8, 116, 125 and deregulation/privatization 96–7 and dispersion 97, 98–9 intensification of 96, 101 and technological change 96, 97–8, 99 productivity 40 and technological innovation 9, 10, 15, 102, 104–105 and wages 71, 72, 74, 76 profit margins 98, 101, 105, 143 property prices 34, 38 property rights 142, 143, 154 protectionism 59–60, 61, 66 public anger 7, 8–9, 10, 89, 98, 117–18 economic causes of 13 see also moral outrage; tribalism/tribal anger public housing 71, 113, 114 public sector investment 67, 70–71 public services 24, 115, 116 quantitative easing (QE) 146–7, 167 quantity theory of money 68–9, 78 racism 26, 54, 55, 115 Raworth, Kate 131–2, 173 Reagan, Ronald 26, 75, 118 recession 15, 29, 30, 34–5, 44, 49, 55, 58, 84, 152, 153 and dual interest rates 150 and interest rates 75, 120–21 and investment spending 60, 70, 71 and low inflation 144–5, 150, 162 and MMT 128–9 and stock markets 139, 140 see also euro crisis referenda 37 regeneration, economic 132 regional development 15, 115, 116, 149, 153, 156 Renzi, Matteo 37 risk 91–2, 127, 136, 137, 153 Roberts, Carys 174 robotics see artificial intelligence Rodrik, Dani 4, 39, 40 Russia 11, 41 Sahm, Claudia 150–51 Salvo, Francesca 87–8 Sandbu, Martin 174 Sanders, Bernie 128, 164 savings 93 scale economies 98, 99, 142 Scottish nationalism 7, 119 secular stability 125, 126, 127 service-based economy 52 Singapore 133, 134, 162 SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) 164–5, 166 social democracy 63–4 social media 26, 27, 90, 98 Solow growth model 109 sovereign wealth funds 133–4 sovereignty 39 Spain 33–5, 38, 44, 45, 144 protests against austerity in 85 spending increasing 145, 147, 151 investment 40, 60 power 145 public sector 67, 70–71, 128, 151 restrictions on 41, 44, 149 sports fans 8, 19–20, 21, 25 sports industry 99 stagflation 40, 74, 120, 128 status-injury 36, 54 stock markets 63, 137–8, 139–40 stress see anxiety/stress strikes 73, 74 student loans 111 supply–demand 60, 96, 104 sustainable investment 131–2, 149–50, 152, 153 Sweden 63–4, 72–3 Syria 111, 113 Tavris, Carol 36, 171 taxes 40, 50, 57, 108, 116, 124 cuts in 34, 44, 111, 151 dodging 2, 6, 20, 132–3, 143 political opposition to 129, 130, 132, 133 raising 152 on wealth 129, 130, 132, 140 Tea Party movement 85 technocracy 37, 42–3, 48, 160–61 technological change 29, 58, 96, 109 and aging population 90, 106, 122 and competition 96, 97–8 and dispersion of returns 97 and fourth industrial revolution 94 further reading on 173–4 and inequality 50, 53 and labour market 102–104 and media 24–5, 27 as micro-stressor 88, 91, 94, 96, 97–8, 99, 101–102, 105, 116, 118 and productivity 9, 10, 15, 105, 122 and rate of diffusion 14 and uncertainty 101–102 telecommunications 96, 97, 142 terrorism 17, 18, 27 Thatcher, Margaret 75, 76, 118, 131 Thunberg, Greta 150 TLTRO programme (European Central Bank) 147–8 trade 21–2, 26, 42, 78, 154 and neoliberalism 78 trade surplus 134 trade unions 28, 42, 63, 66, 72, 73, 76, 79 trade wars 21–2, 26 training 62–3, 93, 113, 114, 141 tribalism/tribal anger 8–9, 11, 18–31, 41, 45–6, 117 and central/eastern Europe 23, 30 destructiveness of 24 and ethical norms 20 and fascism 68 and financial crisis 86, 89 and global politics 21–2, 26, 28–9 and immigration 95, 111, 112, 113 manipulation by politicians/media of 13, 22, 24–7, 29, 30, 31, 35, 61, 95, 116, 161 and minimal group paradigm 21 and moral outrage, compared 19, 20, 22, 29, 30–31, 36 and political identity 22–23, 29–30 social function of 20–21 and sport fans 19–20, 25 see also nationalism trickling down/up 79–80 trilemma, political 39 trucking industry 103 Trump, Donald 11, 22, 23, 25–6, 27, 33, 38, 119, 126, 161 and deregulation 129 election of 41–2, 54 tax cuts of 11 Turkey 11 universal basic income (UBI) 141, 144 Ukraine 11 uncertainty 9–10, 43, 49–50, 65, 91–4, 99, 118, 161 and aging populations see aging populations and emerging technologies 102–103, 106 and healthcare 92 and immigration see immigration reducing 93–4 and risk/probability 91–3 and skills development 93 unemployment 2, 30, 34, 44–5, 48, 58, 66, 72, 84, 167 and inflation/interest rates 74, 75, 125 unfairness 25, 36, 105 United States (US) 3, 38, 93, 118, 129, 164 aging population in 107–108, 110, 111 automation in 103, 104–105 financial crisis in (2008) 82–3, 84, 85 gig economy in 100 healthcare in 47–8, 53–4, 58, 106, 123–4 independent fiscal councils in 150–51 inequality in 50, 51, 53–4, 58, 80–81 Keynesian system in 71, 72–3 labour market in 42, 44, 46, 62 micro-stressors in 47–8 neoliberalism in 76 and NWF 135 stock market in 63 tribalism in 23, 25, 29 wealth tax in 130 US Federal Reserve 6, 46, 84, 108, 110, 120, 148, 151 voice, loss of 37–9, 43, 48, 58 Volcker, Paul 75, 81–2 voting 37–8 see also electoral politics wages 2, 60 and automation 105 and competition 96–7, 98 and consumption 53–4, 58, 72 distribution of see income distribution growth in, without inflation 125 and immigration 115–16 and inequality 4, 50–53, 58 and neoliberalism 76, 77 and oil prices 96–7 and productivity 72, 76 stagnation in 34, 47, 58, 80–81, 83, 84, 85 and supply/demand 65–6 Wall Street Crash 67 Warren, Elizabeth 130, 132 Watson’s Analytics 19 wealth, distribution of 4, 15, 29, 30 welfare state 71 WhatsApp 2 Wilkinson, Richard 176 wind power, investment in 150 Wolf, Martin 80, 173 World Trade Organization (WTO) 42 Wren-Lewis, Simon 151 Yates, Tony 151 “Yellow Jackets” protests 2, 20, 55, 56


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Global data for total passenger-kilometers (pkm) are the single best indicator to capture the expansion of flying. During the propeller era the annual total rose from 96 million pkm in 1929 to 28 billion pkm by 1950, but the total reached 2.8 trillion pkm in 2000 and 6.6 trillion pkm by 2015, and the pre-COVID-19 forecasts expected further substantial increases during the 2020s and beyond (ICAO 2018; Figure 4.4). Figure 4.4 Growth of global commercial aviation (in passenger-kilometers), 1930–2020. IATA (International Air Transport Association) forecast is for further strong growth, with 8.2 billion passengers carried by 2037 compared to 4 billion transported in 2017.

And during the first 18 years of the 21st century total primary energy use, largely because of China’s economic expansion, grew by almost 50%, the share of fossil fuels remained flat (about 85% according to BP, about 90% by using UN’s conversions), and record volume of fossil carbon (about 9.2 Gt) was returned to the atmosphere as CO2 (BP 2020; LeQuéré et al. 2018). Moreover, nothing indicates any rapid reversals. The direct effect of the COVID-19-driven decline of CO2 emissions will be negligible (Forster et al. 2020), and even if the pandemic experience were to accelerate the energy transition in affluent countries it will not have a similar effect in today’s low-energy economies. During the first two decades of the 21st century, consumption of all primary energy remained flat in Europe; it was up only about 5% in North America, but the global aggregate has been growing by more than 2% a year, driven by Asia and Africa (BP 2020).

Brill, pp. 1–133. Ford, H. 1922. My Life and Work. New York: Doubleday. Fores, M. 1981. The myth of a British Industrial Revolution. History 66:181–198. Forrester, J. 1971. World Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press. Forster, P. et al. 2020. Current and future global climate impacts resulting from COVID-19. Nature Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0883-0 Foster, D.R. and J.D. Aber. 2004. Forests in Time: The Environmental Consequences of 1,000 Years of Change in New England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Foster-McGregor, N. and B. Verspagen. 2016. Role of structural change in the economic development of Asian economies.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Kuo, The Diplomat, May 5, 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/tokyo-prods-japanese-firms-to-leave-china/; Isabel Reynolds and Emi Urabe, “Japan to Fund Firms to Shift Production Out of China,” Bloomberg, April 8, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/japan-to-fund-firms-to-shift-production-out-of-china. 76French pharmaceutical companies: Ail Laidi, “Covid-19 Forces France to Look at Relocating Its Pharmaceutical Industry,” France 24, May 14, 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200514-covid-19-forces-france-to-look-at-relocating-its-pharmaceutical-industry. 76reduce American dependency on China: Lin Yang, “Pandemic Exposes Perils of Global Reliance on China for Drug Supplies,” voanews.com, May 20, 2020, https://www.voanews.com/science-health/pandemic-exposes-perils-global-reliance-china-drug-supplies; David J.

By better aligning individuals with the jobs they are most likely to excel at, AI could help build a more capable Army overall. Easley and his Task Force are bringing AI into the Army in other roles as well. In a major military exercise in Europe called Europe Defender, planned for 2020 but cancelled due to COVID-19, the Army planned to use a prototype image classification system to aid in targeting for long-range precision fires. The AI system can sift through images from satellites or drones to help look for military objects, such as tanks, speeding up the intelligence and targeting cycle, a process that currently can take up to twelve hours.

Department of Defense, 2018), 1, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf. 74in search of what might come next: Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, “After the Responsible Stakeholder, What? Debating America’s China Strategy,” Texas National Security Review 2, no. 2 (February 2019), http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1943. 74The pandemic slammed the brakes on the global economy: James K. Jackson, Global Economic Effects of COVID-19 (Congressional Research Service, updated July 9, 2021), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R46270.pdf. 74dictators who fall from power: For example, Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife were executed by firing squad after a perfunctory show trial in December 1989. 74“China’s Chernobyl”: Shawn Yuan, “Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Cover-Up,” Wired, May 1, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-early-days-of-chinas-coronavirus-coverup/. 75the West is “falling apart”: Zhou Bo, “Why the US and Europe Need to Draw Closer to China and Drop the Hubris,” South China Morning Post, April 24, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3081079/why-us-and-europe-need-draw-closer-china-and-drop-hubris. 75coercive diplomacy to pressure countries: Shahank Bengali and Alice Su, “‘Put on a mask and shut up’: China’s new ‘Wolf Warriors’ spread hoaxes and attack a world of critics,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-04/wolf-warrior-diplomats-defend-china-handling-coronavirus; Fergus Hanson, Emilia Currey, and Tracy Beattie, The Chinese Communist Party’s Coercive Diplomacy (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, September 1, 2020), https://www.aspi.org.au/report/chinese-communist-partys-coercive-diplomacy; Jamil Anderlini, “China Is Escalating Its Punishment Diplomacy,” Financial Times, September 22, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/e76a835b-27d5-4750-9749-04921d6bf1eb. 75requests that receiving governments praise China: Alexandra Ma, “China Is Attempting to Win Political Points from the Coronavirus With ‘Mask Diplomacy’—but It Mostly Isn’t Working,” Business Insider, April 18, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/analysis-china-coronavirus-political-points-mostly-not-working-2020-4. 75China’s “global disinformation campaign”: Michael Peel and Tom Mitchell, “China Warned EU 3 Times over Virus Propaganda Report,” Financial Times, April 26, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/a2f66f6a-50cb-46fe-a160-3854e4702f1c; Matt Apuzzo, “Top E.U.


Sustainable Minimalism: Embrace Zero Waste, Build Sustainability Habits That Last, and Become a Minimalist Without Sacrificing the Planet (Green Housecleaning, Zero Waste Living) by Stephanie Marie Seferian

8-hour work day, Airbnb, big-box store, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, do what you love, emotional labour, food desert, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lifestyle creep, Mason jar, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, ride hailing / ride sharing

While refusing good deals requires self-control, it is certainly possible. If you’re heading to a brick-and-mortar store, write out a list of what you need before you leave, then stick to the list. Part 3 The Highest-Hanging Fruit: Self-Sufficiency Chapter 10 Why Self-Sufficiency Matters In the tail-end of 2019, COVID-19 quietly spread around the world. By March of 2020, it swiftly and silently crippled most nations, both developed and developing. As economies around the world sputtered to a halt, many Americans found themselves facing uncertain futures. Shoppers panicked, abandoning decorum as they cleared supermarket shelves, hoarded supplies, and left little for others.

I believe sustainable minimalism provides renewed hope for my children and for yours. Acknowledgements Before sitting down to write this book, I had idyllic expectations of the process that included a silent working space, minimal (if any!) setbacks, and copious amounts of black coffee. But then, COVID-19. I wrote as I homeschooled and podcasted. I stole minutes here and there in the hopes of tapping out a few words. I woke up early—too early, if I’m honest—to write when the house was quiet. Thank you to everyone who supported me and therefore made this book possible. To Haig, for knowing this book should be written and for believing I was the perfect person to write it.


pages: 375 words: 105,586

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

It’s just that modernisation has had different consequences for different people and different countries. These differential tracks of modernisation, and their links to farming, become especially evident in the origins and spread of new infectious diseases like Ebola, novel flu strains and the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The full story of these diseases is still emerging and is far too complex to tell here, but it involves worldwide disease transmission pathways established not only by cheap mass travel but also by a globalised meat industry dominated by a few vertically integrated multinational companies, a focus on intensive production of pigs and poultry with whom humans share certain virus susceptibilities, the disturbance of wild ecosystems for agriculture and bushmeat harvesting, and the disturbance of human geographies.95 In any given outbreak, the initial smoking gun may be a large industrial poultry or pig unit, a backyard one where poultry more readily interact with wild birds, or poor farmers and foragers pushing into wilderness frontiers and harvesting bushmeat.

The country serves the city, the city’s hinterland becomes the whole world, and therein lie many of our contemporary ecological problems. Some analysts argue that the densely networked and globally connected aspects of modern cities make them disproportionately productive of human benefits, though others have questioned this result.49 Indeed, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the global city suddenly lost some of its lustre as a space-erasing, physical-contact-enhancing, economic-efficiency-promoting network that connects people worldwide without firewalls, redundancies or local autonomies of the kind that are built into agrarian localism. As the complex network consequences of the pandemic rippled across the global food supply chain, new customer enquiries at my small farm serving its immediate local market increased by two orders of magnitude.

If it and its successors can pull this balance off long term, then my analysis of the supersedure state will be disproven, at least for Britain. But I doubt they can, and I’m not ready to withdraw my analysis yet. As this book is going to press, tensions between municipal, regional and national politicians in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world concerning not only the COVID-19 pandemic but also worldwide protests arising from the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States suggest on the contrary that the balancing act is already getting harder, even before the political, economic and ecological blowback of present crises is fully apparent. So in supersedure situations, state centres can still direct resources outwards to serve their interests, but they’re limited in their ability to fully organise their peripheral zones.


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

As physics inches its way towards the simplest possible theories, biologists struggle to extract simple theories from the accelerating stream of data pouring out of genomics and other ‘omics’ technologies. It also remains as controversial today as it was in Occam’s time. Statisticians constantly debate its value and significance. Recently a group of French scientists published a paper arguing that simple models, honed by the razor, make better sense of the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping their country than the bulky cumbersome models used by most epidemiologists. At the cutting edge of science, simplicity continues to present us with the most profound, enigmatic and sometimes unsettling insights. Perhaps most surprisingly, it is increasingly clear that the value of Occam’s razor is not limited to science.

Like all useful models, it is simple yet has amazing predictive power. The science of molecular biology has harnessed the simple gene model to deliver countless health benefits including new drugs, therapies and novel crops that feed a fast-growing population, as well as the vaccines that as I write are being rolled out to protect the world’s population against Covid-19. Yet genes play another, and perhaps paradoxical, role in my argument that life is simple. This time a rather ugly rodent is involved, and some bees. The fate of unwanted genes Eusocial insects (a group that includes bees and ants) are characterised by complex social structures including division of labour, highly complex nests, often a single reproductive queen attended by sterile workers, and sophisticated forms of communication, such as the figure-eight dance of honeybees.

Use it or lose it is as true for evolution as it is for physical fitness but there may be a more sinister side to this story. A deadly simplicity As I write at the end of 2020, like hundreds of millions of people around the world, I am in lockdown caused by the arrival of a 100-nanometre sphere, around 10 million times smaller than a football, the Covid-19 virus. This tiny particle, completely inert outside a living cell, has brought nearly the entire human world to its knees. Although it is arguable whether viruses are alive since they are not actually capable of self-replicating, they are the simplest replicating organisms. Rather than replicating themselves, they have opted to dispense with nearly all cellular machinery and instead perform just one task with deadly efficiency: injecting their genomes into our cells where they cajole our cellular machinery to make more viral proteins.


pages: 415 words: 136,343

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul

Anthropocene, assortative mating, coronavirus, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Earth, jitney, long peace, low earth orbit, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, off grid, phenotype, quantum entanglement, SpaceX Starlink, the scientific method

Not a rat or a sign of a rat was found, and conservationists were delightfully shocked by how quickly the island’s imperiled birds responded to the release from predatory pressure. After years of preparation, and some delays caused by its incredibly remote location, a similar eradication campaign was poised to begin on Gough Island in February 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic struck. The team of 12 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds conservationists had to be evacuated, and the eradication program was delayed by at least a year. Assuming its success, however, the same folks will then shift their attention to Marion Island, home of the bird-scalping mice.


pages: 196 words: 61,981

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

As ASF unfolds in China, it’s clear that optimization has wrought a complex system with consequences humans could never have imagined in our precise models and calculations. These consequences expose that sense of control as a total delusion. Yet the quest for optimization continues. Our own lives are being threatened by this hubristic optimization process. The appearance of new human diseases such as bird flu and other novel influenzas like COVID-19—zoonotic diseases that cross from animal to human—coincide with our modern era of optimizing life, of industrialized agriculture and subsequent habitat loss. The evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace has shown how this highly optimized, industrial farming of meat is leading to the unchecked creation of devastating new pathogens.

On a gray, chilly day in Hangzhou, I visit Alibaba Cloud to try to understand the company’s pledge of using artificial intelligence to help raise pigs in partnership with the Sichuan-based Tequ Group, a sprawling food company with a focus on industrial agriculture. Tequ had pork-yield plans of ten million pigs by 2020 (though they were stymied by failure to contain ASF and labor disruptions from COVID-19). Alibaba Cloud’s new campus is a half hour outside the city center, in a place called Cloud Town. The lush green setting reminds me of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) campus in Seattle, including the rain that occasionally pours down in sheets. The main building is generic, just like the main AWS building, with gray carpets, convenient beverage fridges, and uninspired office furniture.


pages: 287 words: 62,824

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli

Airbnb, asset allocation, Big Tech, bitcoin, buy and hold, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial independence, Hans Rosling, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, lifestyle creep, mass affluent, mortgage debt, oil shock, payday loans, phenotype, price anchoring, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Sam Altman, side hustle, side project, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, time value of money, transaction costs, very high income, William Bengen, yield curve

For example, if you lose your job because of a financial panic, you will be pleased to know that you should be able to rely on the bond portion of your portfolio to get you through these tough times; in other words, you can sell some bonds to generate cash. You can visualize how much bonds help to stabilize a portfolio by examining what happened to various portfolios during the Covid-19 related crash in early 2020. As the following chart illustrates, portfolios with more bonds (U.S. Treasuries) declined less than those with fewer bonds. In this instance, the 60/40 and 80/20 portfolios both declined less than the S&P 500 only portfolio during March 2020. More importantly, those investors that had bond exposure and rebalanced during the crash saw an even bigger benefit during the recovery that followed.

Losing 10% requires an 11.11% gain to recover, losing 20% requires a 25% gain to recover, and losing 50% requires a 100% gain (a doubling) to recover. You can see this exponential relationship more clearly in the next chart. On March 22, 2020, when I had the realization that the world was going to make it through the COVID-19 pandemic, the S&P 500 was down about 33%. From the previous chart, this implied that the market would have to gain 50% to get back to even. Every dollar invested on March 23, 2020 (the next trading day) would eventually grow to $1.50, assuming the market recovered to its previous level at some point in the future.


pages: 268 words: 64,786

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien Saunders, Kiersten Saunders

barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, digital divide, diversification, do what you love, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, index fund, job automation, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lifestyle creep, Lyft, microaggression, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, passive income, passive investing, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, side hustle, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , young professional

Our feelings were no different, having spent the majority of the year in a daily battle against the intense sadness forced upon us by a global pandemic. Simple everyday acts like going to the grocery store, taking a walk, or opening mail became matters of life or death. As parents of a toddler, we struggled with the decision of whether to send our son to day care and assume the increased risk of COVID-19 exposure. Having been in day care for only a short while and having just begun to build his first relationships outside home, our son, like most kids, hated having to learn and socialize through a screen. He’d had a taste of what the world looked like outside the walls of our home, and he craved more of it.

See investment/brokerage accounts Broughton, Philip Delves, 138 Browning, Chris, 218 budgeting, importance of, 16 Buffett, Warren, 163 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 59 burnout, 31–33 Business Insider, 32, 76 Butler, Jason, 135 buying power, Black, 52–55 C cable television, 64 CampFI, 37–38, 212, 219 car dealerships, 61 career, fifteen-year, 74–102 caveats regarding, 75–76 rules and richuals for, 82, 89–90, 95, 101–2 and skeptics, 99–100 years 1–5: paying off debt, 76–82 years 6–10: building an income portfolio, 83–90 years 11–15: building an escape hatch, 90–95 “The Case Against Tokenism’ ” (King), 41 cash bonuses from banks, 130–31 Center for American Progress, 165 certainty in financial markets, lack of, 111, 114–16 children and childcare costs, 30 and fifteen-year careers, 75, 76 and 529 plans, 168, 205 funding investment accounts for, 94 choices, right to make own, 100 churches, Black, 36 civil institutions, faith in, 36–37 Clahar, Erica “Umi,” 221–22 community, time to dedicate to, 25 comparison, avoiding trap of, 224 compound interest and author’s early investments, 155 and investment fees, 172 power of, 67–68, 140, 172 confidence and the “Dwayne Johnson Effect,” 112–13 and FI community, 209 and identifying strengths, 89–90 and investing expertise, 116 conflict in relationships avoidance/fear of, 170, 195 from competing objectives, 42 as a constant, 198, 199 in couples, 11, 189–90, 190 and 51 percent rule, 198 and fighting about money, 198, 199 normalizing, 189 as opportunity for growth, 15 connectedness, false sense of, 25 consumerism and spending as addiction/compulsion, 44–45, 210 and authors’ first conversation about money, 179–88 and Black buying power, 52–55 breaking the cycle of, 45 and budgeting, 16 conversations about, 190–93 in excess of income, 210 and Fast Spenders personality type, 48–50, 51, 52, 61, 69 and identities tied to belongings, 59 and labeling people as “spenders,” 191 and “lifestyle inflation,” 39, 61 and living below your means, 72 of Middle personality type, 50–51 and purpose of income, 51–52 and stealth wealth, 38, 39 See also expenses; frugality content creators, 141–45 conversations about money about debt, 195–96 about future plans, 193–94 about saving, 193–94 about spending, 190–93 authors’ first, 11, 179–88 and constraints of labels, 191–92 exercising curiosity in, 192 and normalizing conflict, 189 pause button in, 202–3 scheduling short but frequent, 202 using “I” statements in, 194 using “tell me more” prompt in, 196–97 couples, 179–203 authors’ first conversation about money, 11, 179–88 and backgrounds of individuals, 180–81, 184–85, 187, 188 challenges faced by, 201 conversations about debt, 195–96 conversations about future plans, 193–94 conversations about saving, 193–94 conversations about spending, 190–93 and divorces, 75, 199, 201, 234 emotional attunement in, 189–90, 193, 195, 196, 202 and expectations for happiness, 200–201, 202 and 51 percent rule, 200–201, 202, 231 and fighting about money, 189, 198, 199 interaction patterns in, 189 and money-related conflicts, 189 rules and richuals for, 202–3 shared goals of, 192–93 courage to accelerate your income, 139 and the “Dwayne Johnson Effect,” 112–14 and making financial progress, 108, 111 and paying yourself first, 118 small acts of, 117–18 courses, digital, 135–37 COVID-19 pandemic changes brought by, 228–29 and FI community, 231–33 lessons learned from, 15, 229–31 and Umi Feeds (nonprofit), 222 unknown financial impact on Black America, 54 Craigslist, 134 credit cards and authors’ first conversation about money, 182–83, 186 cash bonuses from, 131 debt from, 4 high balances on, 45 and Jannese’s success story, 123, 124 paying off, 6, 82 credit scoring, 3 cryptocurrency, 114, 129, 174 curiosity, 116, 192, 196–97 D debt and authors’ first conversation about money, 179–88, 195, 197 authors’ freedom from, 6, 11 avalanche method of paying off, 79, 80 conversations about, 195–96 of couples, 195–96 and living paycheck to paycheck, 77–78 paying off, 6, 76–82, 99, 195–96 and rewarding yourself, 81–82 snowball method to paying off, 80–81, 81 student loans, 4, 6, 59, 76–77, 123, 124, 210 treated like moral failing, 195 See also credit cards Delish D’Lites, 123–24 Deutsche Bank, 128 digital divide, 128.


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

Both brokers were indicted in absentia, but they and the Lazarus hackers themselves remained beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement, and only a few million dollars’ worth of the thieves’ total haul have been reclaimed. One summer afternoon in 2020 during that North Korean hacker investigation—in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic—Twitter suddenly blew up with strange messages, seemingly posted by many of its most high-profile users. Hackers, it soon became clear, had simultaneously taken over the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Apple, and the then presidential candidate Joe Biden, all to deliver the same message: “I’m feeling generous because of COVID-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!” The scam netted nearly $120,000 in just minutes before the messages could be deleted.

“I’m very, very delighted to welcome many new customers from the banking sector,” Gronager told the crowd. “Crypto is about how we, as an industry, change the course of finance.” He began rattling off numbers about exactly how much the cryptocurrency industry had changed since just 2019, the last time Chainalysis held its conference, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years earlier, a bitcoin had been worth just over $8,000. On the day of Gronager’s speech, it was worth more than $66,000, a new record. The total value of all bitcoins had grown from being measured in billions of dollars to rocketing past $3 trillion. “Virtually any single metric in crypto has 10x-ed over the last two years,” he said.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Consequently, new algorithms for automated grading or automated teaching could appear more attractive to them. The same is true in health care. Despite the $4 trillion that the United States spends on health care, hospitals also face budget pressure, and a shortage of nurses became painfully evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. New technologies that increase nurses’ capabilities and responsibilities would mean hiring more nurses for higher-quality health care. This observation reiterates a key point: human-complementary machines are not attractive to organizations when they are intent on cost cutting. Another challenge is that new platforms and methods of aggregating and providing information to users also open up possibilities for novel exploitative uses.

It involves a “presidential hackathon,” which allows citizens to make proposals to the executive. Another platform, g0v, provides open data from several Taiwanese ministries, which civic hackers can use to develop alternative versions of bureaucratic services. These technologies helped Taiwan’s early and effective response to COVID-19, in which the private sector and civil society collaborated with the government to develop tools for testing and contact tracing. New forums for virtual participation can of course repeat the same mistakes that social media commits today, exacerbating echo chambers and extremism. Once such tools start being used extensively, some parties will come up with strategies to spread disinformation, whereas others might use such platforms for demagoguery.

The same combination was important for many postwar scientific breakthroughs where the US government had articulated a strategic need, including for air defense, sensors, satellites, and computers. The recipe often brought together leading scientists to work on the problem and subsequently generated a sizable demand for these technologies, encouraging the private sector to jump in. A variant of this approach led to rapid vaccine development during the COVID-19 pandemic. A similar combination could be effective in redirecting digital technology. When the social value of new research directions is established, it can draw many researchers in. Guaranteed demand for successful technologies can additionally incentivize private companies. For instance, the US government could convene and fund research teams to develop digital technologies that complement human skills to be used in education and health care, and commit to deploying them in US schools and Veterans Administration hospitals, provided that they meet the requisite technical standards.


pages: 940 words: 16,301

Routes to Rejoin by Stay European

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, lockdown, Rishi Sunak

Brexit is ‘going OK’ only and precisely to the extent that it still has not happened yet. The end of the transition period on 31 December 2020 was the clearest moment so far when a large number of new rules (though far from all of them) came into effect. But it arrived almost a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, nine months since the first UK lockdown and only days before the third (!) national lockdown on 6 January 2021. People are, for the most part, not travelling at the moment, or travelling as little as they can. Far from looking for opportunities to work around Europe, those who can are still working from home.


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Our thanks should go to people like Janus Fris, the Danish co-inventor of Skype, who had no formal education and dropped out of high school. And night and day, in molecular biology laboratories, hyper-systemizers are working tirelessly to invent a new vaccine that will outsmart the invisible killer that is COVID-19, the new coronavirus. And as we look beyond COVID-19 at the other major challenge our planet faces—climate destruction—we look to hyper-systemizers to invent new solutions. The great physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a book called Maker of Patterns to describe his life exploring patterns in mathematics and physics. This book joins the dots between pattern-seeking in our world’s greatest scientists and inventors, and pattern-seeking in autistic people.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Closing Thoughts Notes Index Acknowledgments About the Author Foreword Roger Martin turned in the final draft of this book on January 19, 2020, right around the time that most of us were first hearing about the novel coronavirus and first finding ways to believe that it posed no great threat to our lives or plans. Two months later, most Western nations were in lockdown and almost everything about the future was suddenly unknown. As I write these words, confined to my apartment in New York City, the national death toll from COVID-19 is approaching 20,000, and tens of millions of our fellow citizens are facing financial ruin. Yet one of the most promising reactions to this global catastrophe has been the growing realization that it offers us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to change things—big things that seemed immutable just a few months ago.

In 2014 I had the great fortune to be selected as a Fellow at the MPI, where I and six other researchers met and collaborated over the course of five years to explore ways to strengthen democratic capitalism—to make it simultaneously more dynamic and more fair. This book is the most important of many works that emerged from those discussions. It represents Martin’s best thinking about how we can cultivate the best garden. The COVID-19 crisis, along with its incalculable losses and disruptions, also gives us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rethink the foundations of our economy and society. But to seize that chance we must improve our thinking—our mental representations of the systems that need changing. The book you are about to read will do that.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

We’ll be fighting for food, not tweeting from our fridges. Others believe that developing super-intelligent AI, as swiftly as we can, is our best chance at survival. Until 2020, none of us was thinking about viruses as the wipe-out call. Now we are. Ironically, although the world may become much poorer because of Covid-19, the virus is a chance for the tech giants to get much richer, and to get more control. And not just Amazon doing home delivery. Eric Schmidt has been talking enthusiastically about home-schooling for all (except the rich, you can be sure), using the platforms that have begun to replace contact during the pandemic.

There is such a thing as love at first sight, but relationships of any kind develop slowly. * * * Relationships matter to humans. Some of our relationships are wonderful. Some are instrumental. Some are basic and boring. Some are toxic. People without relationships suffer from both physical and mental-health issues. Being alone is fine. Being lonely is not fine. * * * The Covid-19 crisis has triggered many unwelcome outcomes: death, illness, job loss, mental turmoil, economic stress. And a relationship crisis. People found themselves forced apart from their loved ones. Simultaneously, we were denied those daily interactions that make a difference. Shopping isn’t only about purchasing.


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

After the Crocodile replaced Mugabe in 2017, he imported Chinese facial recognition technology similar to that used to monitor Uighurs in Xinjiang province. And to that used in the Kazakh capital, previously known as Astana, now, after the father of the nation, as Nursultan. As they hoarded secrecy, the kleptocrats set about harvesting privacy. Covid-19 came as a gift. It was the perfect pretext to assume sweeping powers, expand surveillance states and empty public treasuries with even less scrutiny than usual. They formed a new five families, these international kleptocrats: the Nats, the Brits, the Sprooks, the Petros and the Party. The Nats, they declare themselves the saviours of besieged nations while overseeing the plunder of those nations.

(moneyman), 54–5, 56, 280–1, 282–3, 351–2n Cohen, Michael (Trump fixer), 317, 324–6, 415n, 418n Colchester, 243, 271 Colombian drug cartels, 201 Congo, 49–54, 56, 276, 277, 279, 280–3, 284, 307–8, 402–3n, 404–5n, 413n Congo Cobalt Corporation (CCC), 406n Connolly, John, 86 Conservative Party, 121, 215; and ‘City grandees’, 13; May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, 257; and Patrick Robertson, 262; Temerko’s donations to, 337, 423n Conté, Lansana, 201 Coppa, Frank, 83 copper, 10, 51–2, 55, 278–9 Corporation of London, 120, 136–7 Courchevel (French ski resort), 124–5, 183, 235 Covid-19 pandemic, 296, 336 Crédit Agricole, 29 Credit Suisse, 13, 14, 171, 214, 241, 278–9, 394n CrowdStrike (cybersecurity firm), 414n Cyprus, 246, 379n, 396n Czechoslovakia, 31–2 Dagan, Meir, 258 Dalman, Mehmet, 174, 335, 374n, 421–3n David, Craig, 209 Dawkins, Richard, 176, 377n Delimkhanov, Adam, 234–5, 237, 391n Deloitte & Touche, 13, 179 Deltour, Antoine, 231, 390n Democratic Choice for Kazakhstan, 166 Deutsche Bank, 13 Dezita prospect (Congo), 402–3n DiBartolomeo, Joseph, 258 Diligence (corporate intelligence firm), 103–5, 117, 160, 304, 362n Dinmore, Guy, 253 Docklands development (London), 118–19 drug trade, 72, 86, 87, 99, 170, 177, 201, 246 drugs, use of, 15 Dubai, 144, 289, 331, 391n Dudley, Bob, 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 342–3n, 343n, 344n, 345n Duterte, Rodrigo, 337 Earhardt, Ainsley, 310 Edmonds, Phil, 56, 185–6, 336 EFG (Swiss bank), 329, 420n Egypt, 119 Eliot, T.S., ‘Macavity’, 243 Elmer, Rudolf, 230 Elson, Monya, 342n Epstein, Gideon, 365n Equatorial Guinea, 201, 246 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 324, 337 Erskine, John, 353n Erste Resources SA, 403n Escobar, Pablo, 201, 384n Esper, Mark, 318, 416n Eural Trans Gas, 381n Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC): listed on London Stock Exchange, 12–15, 23–4, 121–2, 128–31, 335, 367n; buys Camec, 73, 276, 401–2n; and Rudny (iron mine), 94–5, 128–31, 133–5; and corporate governance, 121–2, 128–31, 367n; Gerrard’s investigation into in Kazakhstan, 128–31, 133–5, 158, 172–3, 307, 367–8n, 368–9n; Russian Trading Scheme, 129–30; Trio retain control of after flotation, 129–30, 174, 367n; SFO’s ultimatum to (January 2013), 173–4; Gerrard’s investigation into in Africa, 173, 174, 210, 276–9, 281–2, 283, 284, 285, 307; and Victor Hanna, 174, 275–7, 278, 279, 280, 281–2, 283–4, 285, 300, 400–1n; formal SFO investigation into, 210–11, 212, 276, 282, 284–7, 299–304, 308, 309, 402–3n, 410n; moved to Luxembourg, 210–12; the Trio’s buyout/delisting scheme, 210–12, 387n; buys Chambishi copper smelter, 278–9; Trio extract money from, 279–80, 281–2, 283; Dezita prospect purchase, 279, 402–3n; Och-Ziff bribery case in US, 282–3, 307; series of deaths relating to, 283–7, 308–9, 405–8n; McCormick as employee, 284–6, 300, 410n; Trio’s alternative facts on Gerrard, 299–302, 411n; Mirakhmedov’s role with, 334–5, 421n Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, 212–13, 387n European Court of Human Rights, 42, 268–9 European Union (EU), 114, 251, 262, 277, 306–7, 412n Evans, Sir Dick, 161–2, 372n extraordinary rendition, 254 Exxon, 45, 201 Facebook, 256, 270, 313 facial recognition technology, 336, 423n fake news and alternative realities, 238, 295, 303, 304–6, 311–12, 317–19, 414n; and FSB, 16–23, 342–5n; and expropriation of Yukos, 35–6, 38–43, 64, 65; and Trump, 274–5, 303, 311–12, 313, 317–19, 322–3, 400n, 414n, 417–18n; Trio and Gerrard/SFO, 299–304; strategy of projection, 317, 320, 416n; and the anti-corruption campaign, 320, 417n; malleable public record under Trump, 322–3, 417–18n Falciani, Hervé, 230–1 Farage, Nigel, 337 Fayulu, Martin, 308 FBI, 78, 156, 375n, 377n, 381n; Michael Sheferovsky as informant, 79–80; Felix Sater as informant, 82–4, 87, 199, 249, 313; Whitey Bulger scandal, 86, 87; and Solntsevskaya brotherhood, 99; and Semyon Mogilevich, 176, 179, 180, 183; takes over Bethel and Strydom case (2020), 309 FBME Bank, 203, 246, 385n, 396n Ferguson, Alistair, 344–5n Ferguson, Ian, 263 Financial Conduct Authority, 185, 187, 382n; management ‘concerns’ over Wilkins, 207–8, 386n; Wilkins’ email (June 2014), 217, 228–9, 389n; Wilkins suspended by, 229, 230, 231–2, 358n; fires Wilkins for gross misconduct, 232, 239, 272; Wilkins’ Employment Tribunal case against, 239–40, 241, 242–3; Osborne removes Wheatley from, 241, 395n; Wilkins’ settlement with, 242–3, 272; disciplinary report on Wilkins, 347n financial crash, global (2008), 7, 15; bailout of financial system, 8, 61, 62, 70, 117, 271, 354n; the masses left with the bill for, 8, 14, 29; increased scrutiny of City after, 58–9, 70–1, 353n; US unemployment rate, 74; sovereign debt crises after, 88, 358n; worldwide recessions following, 88 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 70, 71, 342n; Wilkins’ post at, 5–6, 59, 120, 137–8, 185–7; Wilkins’ view of performance of, 6, 137–8, 185–7; warning to BSI (2004), 59, 137, 187, 353n; Wilkins warns about BSI (2008), 71, 88–9, 137, 187–8, 214–15, 216, 231, 240, 329–30; and tax schemes, 186–7 Firtash, Dmytro, 182, 289, 378–81n Fisherman, Igor, 376n Five Star movement (Italy), 254 FL Group, 367n Fleury-Mérogis prison (Paris), 252 Flint, Martin, 29, 332–3, 347n Florida, 78, 199, 200–1, 202, 315, 415n Flynn, Michael, 324, 418n Forbes, Dr M.J., 386n Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (USA), 156 Formula One motor racing, 224 Foster, Norman, 63 Foucher, Laurent, 193, 247–8, 396n Fox News, 310–11 Fraenkel, Ernst, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, 36–9, 268, 348n Franzese, Michael, 77, 78 Franzese, Sonny, 77 Freeland, Chrystia, Sale of the Century (2005), 35, 347n, 348n Freeman, Andrew, 388n, 389n FSB (Federal Security Service), 18–23, 174, 183–4, 234, 342–5n FTI Consulting, 257–8, 398n FTSE 100 list, 13, 126, 157, 210 Fusion GPS, 302–3 Gaddafi, Muammar, 120 Galeotti, Mark, 374–5n; The Vory (2018), 342n, 356n, 360n Gambino family, 356n Gangi, Rosario, 357n Garske, Peder, 395n gas industry, 18, 20, 21, 22, 181–2, 183, 226, 344–5n, 344n, 379–81n; Ukraine pipeline, 100, 222, 224, 289, 331, 389n Gazprom, 18, 20, 21, 22, 181–2, 344–5n, 344n, 381n Geithner, Tim, 170 Geneva, 100, 108–9, 110, 123–4, 156, 190, 199–200, 247–8, 361n Geremeyev, Ruslan, 234 Gerrard, Neil, 128–9, 367n; investigation into ENRC in Kazakhstan, 128–31, 133–5, 158, 172–3, 210, 307, 367–8n, 368–9n; investigation into ENRC in Africa, 173, 174, 210, 276–9, 281–2, 283, 284, 285, 307; fired by Sasha, 184, 210, 276, 282, 284, 300; Trio’s alternative facts on, 299–302, 411n; threats to and surveillance of, 303–4 Gertler, Dan, 280–1, 282–3, 307–8, 404–5n, 404n Giangamboni, Carla Maria, 409n Gibson, John, 304, 309 Giffen, James, 156–7, 161, 370n Gigante, Vincent, 79, 356n Giles, Andrew, 347n Giuliani, Rudy, 317 Glasenberg, Ivan, 9, 23–4, 162, 281, 308 Glasser, I.

., 248–9, 395n, 396n Hungarian revolution (1956), 96 IBM, 13, 99 Ibragimov, Alijan (one of Trio), 13, 94, 130, 131–2, 332–5, 420–3n Ibragimov, Dostan, 334–5, 421n Ibragimov, Farhad, 94, 135, 369n Ibrahim, Rania, 288–9 Iceland, 126, 367n Ilis Management (front company), 376n Imperial College London, 13 intelligence agencies, private, 29, 105–7, 244, 247, 248–9, 257–60, 266, 294, 304, 332–3, 338, 362n intelligence services, US, 17, 21, 106 International Finance Corporation (IFC), 235–6, 392n International Mineral Resources, 279 Iorizzo, Lawrence (Fat Larry), 76–7, 78–9, 179, 201 Iran, 321–2, 331–2 iron, 10, 55, 94–5, 133–5, 201 Islamist terrorism, 82 Israel, 75, 77, 95, 174–5, 180, 212–13, 294, 337, 376n, 387n Itera (Russian gas company), 379–81n Ivankov, Vyacheslav, 76, 99, 315, 356n Ivashko, Vladimir, 96 Jackson, Clement, 308, 405n Jacksonville (Florida), 201 Jardemalie, Bota, 60–6, 160, 190–2, 193, 256, 267, 292, 354n; at meeting with Ron Wahid, 106–7, 258, 362n; granted asylum in Belgium, 292–3; and Kazakh pressure/intimidation, 292–4, 409n Jewels, Bruce, 52–3, 280, 350n Jews: Nazi persecution, 26, 37, 38; ex-Soviet in USA, 75–6; ex-Soviet in Israel, 174–5, 376n; Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, 212–13, 387n; Soviet émigrés to Canada, 222–3; as Other for global kleptocrats, 338 Johannesburg, 278, 283–4, 308 Johnson, Boris, 337, 423n Jones Day (law firm), 13 JP Morgan, 162 Judge, Sir Paul, 13, 121–2, 366n Judt, Tony, 163, 372n Julius Bär (Swiss bank), 230 Kabila, Joseph, 280, 282–3, 307, 308 Kabila, Laurent, 50–1, 52, 53, 280 Kadyrov, Ramzan, 234–5, 236–7, 337–8, 391–2n Kalmanovich, Shabtai, 376n Karimov, Salavat, 40, 348–9n Katumba Mwanke, Augustin, 52, 280, 281, 282–3, 351n Kay, Lord Justice, 196 Kazakhmys (copper corporation), 157–8, 371n Kazakhstan, 10–12, 13–14, 60–4, 66–7, 68–9, 107–8, 111–16, 123–7, 159–60; demands for political reform, 12, 67–8, 111; political murders in, 12, 111, 113, 166; Nazarbayev’s expropriation of BTA, 62–3, 64–6, 69, 103–5, 116–17, 144, 190–1, 205, 235; Rudny (iron mine), 94–5, 133–5; ‘Project Super Khan’, 115; privatisation programme, 126, 132–3, 158, 368n; the Trio takes over industries, 126, 132–3, 158, 175, 211, 368n; transition to capitalism, 140–4; Zhanaozen massacre (December 2011), 140–53, 154–5, 163, 165–8, 195, 292, 297–8, 369–70n; and Tony Blair, 154–5, 161, 163, 166, 372n; kidnapping of Ablyazov family, 189, 192–7, 198, 247, 251, 252–5, 263, 291–2, 383n, 397n, 408–9n; Kenes Rakishev in, 235–6, 237, 238, 392n, 393n; Kazaword material, 256–7, 258, 259–60, 264–5, 292, 392n, 398n; and Fraenkel’s Dual State, 268; Ablyazov convicted in absentia (2017), 293–4, 409n; protests and unrest at 2019 elections, 295, 409n; continued lawsuits against Ablyazov circle, 296–7 see also Ablyazov, Mukhtar; Nazarbayev, Nursultan; the Trio Kazaword web page, 256–7, 258, 259–60, 264–5, 292, 392n, 398n KazChrome, 132 Kazhegeldin, Akezhan, 112, 114, 155, 158, 302, 364n, 371n, 411n Kazminerals, 371n KazMunaiGas, 144 Keating, Kelly, 407n Kelimbetov, Kairat, 211–12 Kendirli (Caspian Sea resort), 142 Kenzhebaev, Bazarbai, 150, 370n KGB, 18, 23, 34, 78, 97–8, 183–4 Khashoggi, Jamal, 321, 417n Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 34, 35–6, 38–9, 40–3, 64, 65, 190, 347n Khrapunov, Iliyas, 108–10, 123–5, 126–7, 193, 194, 198–9, 238, 362n, 366n; real estate project with Sater, 110, 198, 199–200, 203–5, 245, 246–7, 314, 324, 385–6n; pursuit of in US courts, 244–9, 324, 395–6n; and Kazaword material, 256; Arcanum’s ‘Raptor II’ targets, 259–60; continued lawsuits against in Western courts, 296–7 Khrapunov, Viktor, 107–8, 110, 123–5, 126–7, 158, 198–9, 235, 245, 246; Arcanum’s ‘Raptor II’ targets, 259–60 Khrapunova, Leila, 110, 124–5 Kieber, Heinrich, 44–5, 216 Kim Jong-un, 322 Kissinger, Henry, 50 kleptocracy: and loyalty to the boss, 10–12, 67–9, 111–15, 116, 123–5, 127, 172–3, 303, 337–8; corruption as primary mechanism of power, 100, 328–9; use of Western courts, 116–17, 159–60, 190–1, 192, 196, 237, 238, 246–8, 255–6, 296–7, 394n; and Arab Spring, 119–20, 365n; BSI as international facilitator for, 138–9, 231–2, 329–35, 420n; and propaganda, 161, 196, 233, 256, 264, 302, 303, 307; and selective justice, 327–9; Wilkins maps global network, 335–6; ‘the Nats’, 336–7; new five families of, 336–8; Covid-19 as a gift to, 336; ‘the Sprooks’, 337–8; ‘the Brits’, 337; immunity from prosecution while in power, 337; honesty as antidote to, 338–9; ‘the Party’, 338; ‘the Petros’, 338; use of Others, 338 see also entries for individual kleptocrats and countries Kongoni manganese prospect (South Africa), 279, 283, 308, 403–4n, 405n Kowenhoven, Peter, 183 Kozlov, Andrei, 231 Kozlov, Vladimir, 166–8, 373n Kravchuk, Leonid, 222 Kriss, Jody, 366n, 367n Kroll (private intelligence firm), 379–81n Krotov, Pavel, 237, 393–4n Kruchina, Nikolay, 96 Kryuchkov, Vladimir, 96 Kuchma, Leonid, 222, 224, 388n Kulibayev, Timur, 61–2, 107, 124, 143–4, 235, 236, 297, 392–3n Kuwait, 162 Kyrgyzstan, 9, 98, 165 Labour Party, 3–4, 5 Lady Lara (Machkevitch’s yacht), 274, 400n Lagarde, Christine, 230 Lansky, Meyer, 215 Lebedev, Alexander, 337, 423n Lefortovo prison (Moscow), 21 legal system, Russian: and Peter Sahlas, 30, 33, 34, 36, 38–9, 40, 42, 43; civil code for post-communist era, 33, 34, 36; Khodorkovsky prosecution, 35–6, 38–9, 40–3, 64, 65; and Fraenkel’s Dual State, 36, 38–9; persecution of Vasily Aleksanyan, 39–43, 348–9n legal system, Western: pursuit of Ablyazov in UK courts, 116–17, 159–60, 190–1, 192, 196, 237, 238, 246–8, 255–6, 296–7, 394n; UK corporate law, 117, 128–31, 367n; Ablyazov kidnapping in Rome, 189, 192–7, 198, 247, 251, 252–5, 263, 291–2, 383n, 397n, 408–9n; Pavlov’s arrest in Madrid, 191, 195, 268, 383n, 399n; courts as centres of ‘truth’, 196, 295; pursuit of Ablyazov in US courts, 238, 244–9, 324, 395n; Ablyazov extradition case in Paris, 251–2, 255, 257–8, 260–70, 291, 297, 398–9n; posting of documents online, 256; continued lawsuits against Ablyazov circle, 296–7; legal privilege in UK, 299–300, 410n Lehman Brothers, 48, 58, 59, 75, 137, 315 Leigh-Pemberton, James, 14, 342n Letta, Enrico, 253–4 Levin, Carl, 45–7, 58, 119, 170, 239, 240–1, 349n, 373n Levinson, Bob, 180, 330–2, 360n, 361n, 374–6n, 378n, 388n, 420n LGT (bank), 44–5 Libya, 120 Liechtenstein, 44–5, 240 limited liability companies (LLCs), 200–1, 202, 203 Litco (Sater front company), 395n, 418n Litvinenko, Alexander, 18, 20–1, 344n, 382n Loffredi, Stefano, 353n Lombers, Malcolm, 276 Lough, John, 16–20, 21–2, 23, 182, 342–3n, 344–5n, 344n the Loving Cup, Ceremony of, 188 Low, Jho, 324, 327, 418n, 419n Lugano (Switzerland), 25–6, 58–9, 335–6 Lugovoy, Andrey, 20–1, 344n Luxembourg, 210–12, 231 Lynch, Loretta, 79, 357n Machado, Tony, 276–7, 401n Machkevitch, Alexander (Sasha), 341n, 376n; at the Banqueting House (February 2008), 8, 9–10, 12–13, 23–4; background of, 9; and Nazarbayev, 10, 12, 123–5, 158, 198, 235, 245; ENRC listed on London Stock Exchange, 12–15, 23–4, 121–2, 128–31, 335, 367n; as Damien Hirst collector, 48, 304, 350n; wealth of, 93–4; and chairmanship of ENRC, 121–2, 174, 305; and corporate governance, 121–2, 128–31, 367n; Savarona scandal, 122–3, 125, 127, 366n; and Tevfik Arif, 125–7, 366–7n; and Felix Sater, 126, 303, 314, 366–7n; and Russian Trading Scheme, 130; and SFO, 172, 276, 300, 302, 309, 374n; and Semyon Mogilevich, 174–5, 181, 183, 184, 374–5n; and firing of Gerrard, 184, 210, 276, 282, 284, 300; sixtieth birthday celebrations (2014), 209–10, 386n; and the information battlefield, 212–13, 300–4; as celebrated philanthropist, 212, 387n; and Donald J.


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Despite announcing $108 billion in commitments the prior year, little if any of that was binding. Yet Son’s troubles weren’t over. An activist investor, Elliott Management, took a big stake in SoftBank and began pressuring SoftBank to sell more of its assets—to spend more money boosting the stock through buybacks rather than pouring money into startups. Another dagger came from COVID-19. The onset of the pandemic sent the ride-hailing market into a tailspin, reversing an early 2020 rally in Uber’s shares. Son, again on his back foot, took to PowerPoint. In May 2020, during a call with investors, he featured a slide of horses stampeding into what he called “the valley of the coronavirus” with some unicorns flying out.

Through attrition, outsourcing, and more rounds of layoffs, WeWork’s head count eventually fell by more than 8,000 from its peak of over 14,000 to 5,600 by mid-2020. SoftBank’s cash provided an important cushion; some competitors were even more strained. It still had plenty of longer-term commitments. Executives felt the uncertainty caused by COVID-19 might actually be able to play in their favor once everyone went back to the office. There were convincing signs that whenever normalcy returned, flexible space would be in demand. While it surely didn’t have the novelty of a “physical social network,” real estate arbitrage might yet turn into a viable business

Days before the money was supposed to roll into Neumann’s bank account—as well as those of former employees and other investors—SoftBank reneged. Citing multiple provisions in the deal documents that it thought gave it an out—a China financing deal hadn’t happened, and WeWork was dealing with investigations from regulators—SoftBank simply refused to pay up. COVID-19 was sweeping the globe. WeWork’s finances were looking dire. Masayoshi Son didn’t want to spend another $3 billion on WeWork, even if he’d agreed to do it. As he’d told Marcelo Claure in an email later unearthed in a court fight, “Don’t do the tender.” Claure emailed that it showed Son was realizing he needed more discipline.


pages: 362 words: 134,405

Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic of the Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic by James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Neil Armstrong, Skype, social distancing, UNCLOS

For the 1,080 seconds of “Ocean Cloud,” the listener is away from Earth—or as one line of the song’s lyrics say: Between two planets In between the points of light Between two distant shorelines Here am I Listening to “Ocean Cloud,” we, too, are in a rowboat, alone, on the open sea. When the song ends, we have fallen in love with Don Allum and with the ocean. Some of us who really cherish the song feel like we have become a better person. By early 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I became seriously interested in writing the story of Don Allum. I exhausted the internet, reading everything I could find about him. The best source was the website of the Ocean Rowing Society International. Founded in 1983, it is the governing body for international ocean rowing and the official adjudicator of ocean rowing records.

Outside of the ocean rowing community, however, very little about this drama was at all well known, which made it even more important for me to bring the extraordinary story to the wider world. Critically important was whether there was sufficient source material for telling the story of their race across the Atlantic in 1969. Though the shutdowns brought on by COVID-19 would make it impossible for me to conduct the necessary research abroad, I became convinced that there was a way to do it. I exhausted what could be found via the internet. That research started by scouring the website of the Ocean Rowing Society International. Since its establishment in 1983, the ORSI had documented all known ocean rows while adjudicating records and firsts in consultation with Guinness World Records.

Even before my outrigger made it all the way across the ocean, he gave me a thorough critique of the ocean route I was navigating and making suggestions to correct and improve it. The toughest decision of who to put on the boat and who to leave on shore came when considering what to do with my wife, Peggy. As it turned out, she had to be on the vessel but at a distance. An outbreak of a new plague called COVID-19 required that Completely Mad be conceived, built, and taken across to its destination in an unusual type of ship quarantine. My outrigger had to stay on a very strict navigational course, which restricted me—if I can be rightfully be called “the skipper”—as well as my laptop and books, to an exposed position at the helm (i.e., the island in our kitchen) while all sorts of noisy, intervening actions took place hourly all around me.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

Related to this are potentially radical changes in the ways we make and consume. The manufacture, movement and consumption of foodstuffs, commodities and goods around the world is less often talked about in a political sense than the movement of people—that became painfully evident in the way Brexit was discussed in the UK, for instance—but the Covid-19 pandemic quickly brought the subject into sharp focus, although the changes had been bubbling up for decades. Clocks have always been at the heart of markets, finance, trade, manufacture and global transportation networks, which will not change, but the way the landscape of production and consumption is configured certainly will.

., 187, 188 Chávez, Hugo, 193 China, 14–15, 24–25, 193–94, 205 Chioggia, Italy, 16–17, 18–19 Christianity astronomical clocks and, 34–35 Bohemian Reformation, 38–39 monasteries, 30, 32 Puritanism, 40–41 temperance and, 54 Christie, William, 167, 168 Churchill, Winston, 154 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 53 Civil War, 190–92 climate change, 224 clockmaking trade Bennett’s plans for, 131–32 entertainment and, 127–28 imports and, 128–29 industrial machinery and, 129–30, 135–36 marketing and, 121, 123–28, 134–35 mass production and, 133–34, 135 satellite navigation systems and, 205 Clock of the Long Now, 218–21, 222 Clock of Wisdom (Heinrich Suso), 54, 56–58, 57 clocks definitions of, 8 as holders of identity, 186–89 coastal time signals, 99–100, 102, 104–5, 111–14 Cold War, 94–96, 199, 202 Congreve, William, 201–2, 202 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 91 Covid-19 pandemic, 224 Crawford Market clock, Bombay, 174–75, 175 Curtis v. March, 150 Danse Macabre (Dance of Death), 60–61 da Silva, Pedro, 87 Daylight Saving Time, 73, 153–56, 203–4 death, hourglass as symbol of, 59–62 de Figueredo, Manuel, 87 Dengfeng observatory, 90–91 Dickinson, Henry, 137–38 Dingle, Anthony, 150 discipline, 41 Dixon, Mary, 177–78, 179, 181–82, 181 domestic clocks, 58 Dondi, Giovanni de, 17, 18, 32–33, 34 Dondi, Jacopo de, 17, 18 Doomsday Clock, 203, 204 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 154 du Bois, Joseph, 87–88 Dundas, James, 109 Dunkin, Edwin, 109 Dunt, Ian, 196 Edison, Thomas, 144 Efratom, 197–99, 198, 201, 204–5 Einstein, Albert, 156, 197, 198 electric time systems, 143–45, 143 time standardization and, 144–46, 148, 149, 153–54 empires astronomy and, 91–92 public clocks and, 14–15, 23–24 See also imperialism/colonialism; political identity and power engine clocks, 163–64 Eno, Brian, 219, 220, 221 Epistle of Othéa, The (Christine de Pizan), 56 European Southern Observatory, 86 Exposition Universelle, Paris (1878), 134–35 Factory Act (1844) (UK), 151, 152 Factory Act (1901) (UK), 152 faith astrology and, 34 astronomical clocks and, 27–29, 33, 34–38 automaton clocks and, 27–29, 33, 34–38, 37 Buddhism, 31 Christianity, 30, 34–35, 38–39, 40–41, 54 Hinduism, 31 Islam, 26–29, 27, 30 Judaism, 30–31 limitation of early clocks for, 31–32 political identity and power and, 43, 44, 45 Sikhism, 31 wasting time and, 40–41 Fallows, Fearon, 102, 103 Farage, Nigel, 195 Father Time, 59 Fayrer, James, 103 Ferguson, Adam, 141 fiber-optic time services, 79–81, 80 financial markets, 74–77 abstract nature of, 69–70 daylight saving and, 73 early securities exchanges, 67 fiber-optic time services and, 79–81, 80 intermediate roles in, 67 Royal Exchange, London, 70–71, 71 synchronization and, 72–73, 74, 75 time-stamping and, 75–77, 79, 81 trading methods, 74–75 Finer, Jem, 221 First Punic War, 9 Flamsteed, John, 88, 91 flying Dutchman, 106 Ford, Henry, 137–42 Francois, Mark, 195 Franklin, Benjamin, 41, 74, 164 free-pendulum clocks, 118–19 Gabelsperger, Anton, 88 Galileo satellite network, 205 globalization, 207, 209 Global Positioning System.


pages: 277 words: 86,352

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

Thibodeau, fifty-two, was no longer the scrawny musician he had been the day Doyle followed him through a hole a tank had made in a wall so they could escape the fire. Graying at the temples and much heavier than he was in those days, he joked about his size, calling himself “the poster boy for COVID risk.” After living through the deadliest day in US law enforcement history, he didn’t want to fall victim to the latest variant of COVID-19. At the Golden Corral, they put tableware on trays and lined up for their meals, just as they had in Mount Carmel’s cafeteria three decades before. The mood was festive. Compared to the beans, bananas, and popcorn that constituted much of the menu at the compound, to say nothing of the MREs that got them through the siege, the Golden Corral’s fare was a cornucopia: fried chicken, fried shrimp, corn on the cob, pizza, macaroni and cheese, carrot cake, cinnamon apples, and dessert kebabs of chocolate-dipped Rice Krispies Treats.

See Haldeman, Bonnie Clark, Erline (Koresh’s grandmother) Clarke, Floyd Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton Presidential History Project Cohen, Pablo Columbia University combat engineering vehicles (CEVs) conspiracy theories Constantino, Keith “Constitutional Defenders” (McVeigh) Control Risks Council on Foreign Relations COVID-19 Cox, John (John 1) Cox, Mike Craddock, Graeme “Crackers,” Crowley, Tom CS tear gas ferret rounds Culkin, Rory cult behavior Cuomo, Mario Cyrus the Great Dallas Cowboys Dallas Morning News Dallas Times Herald Danforth, John David, biblical king of Israel Dead Sea Scrolls deep state DeGuerin, Dick Koresh letter to Delta Force Democrats Dennis, Edward Denton, John (John 4) Dettelbach, Steve DiBetta, Dave Dietz, Park Dillinger, John Dog Day Afternoon (film) Dolan, John domestic extremism Doxsee, Catrina Doyle, Clive Doyle, Shari drugs DT Analytics Dubose, Lou Duong, Fi “Monkey King,” Eakin, Florence Houteff Easter “Eden to Eden” (Koresh) Edwards, Jonathan Elijah England England, Mark Equal Rights Amendment evangelical Christians Evers, Eric Ezekiel Facebook Fagan, Doris Fagan, Livingstone Fagan, Nehara Fagan, Renae Fagan, Yvette Falwell, Jerry Fatta, Paul Feazell, Vic Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) action plan of aftermath of raid and Alex Jones and army and Behavioral Science Unit behavioral scientists offer advice to Bible scholars offer advice to Bill Clinton and Breault and child abuse stories and children’s deaths in fire and children’s releases and commands siege, after failed ATF raid compound’s electricity cut off by compound’s phone connection cut off by cost of siege and CS gas and ferret rounds and cultbuster Ross offers advice to Danforth inquiry and Davidian religion and Davidians’ families and Davidians’ murder trials and Davidians’ siege video and Dietz report and DOJ report on Doyle questioned by hardliners and Hostage Rescue Team Koresh’s CBN broadcast and Koresh’s Good Friday letter and Koresh’s Seven Seals manuscript and Koresh’s wounds and lights aimed at compound by mass suicide fears of McVeigh and media and militia movement and negotiations and noise blasted at compound by psychiatry professors offer advice to public opinion and raid and fires of April 19, and religion professors Tabor and Arnold spurned by Reno and Ruby Ridge siege and rules for standoffs changed by rules of engagement and Silence of the Lambs Behavioral Science Unit Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) supplies and milk sent to compound by surrender demands by tanks moved toward compound by Whitmer kidnapping and Ferguson, Misty Filipinos Finkelstein, Lawrence First Amendment Florida Southern College Floyd, Charles “Pretty Boy,” Foghat Foreman, Tom Fort Hood Foster, Vincent Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Fox & Friends (TV show) Fox TV Freeh, Louis French, David Full Metal Jacket (film) Garcia, Henry gas masks Genesee County Volunteer Militia Genesis, book of Gent, Dayland Gent, Peter Gent Little, Nikki German, Michael Gingrich, Newt globalists Goins, Eddie Goins, Ron Golden Corral restaurant (Waco) Gonzalez, Robert.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In the subsequent fifty-plus years since Fama’s seminal study, markets have witnessed numerous additional occasions of fat-tail events. For example, on October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones stocks declined on average by an unprecedented 22.6 percent. Yet two days later, the same stocks increased in price by 10.1 percent. During the financial crisis of 2007–2009 and in the early stages of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, extreme daily gains and losses of several percentage points were common. These fat-tail events, more recently called “black swan” events, are no longer believed to be as rare as previously thought.21 The important conclusion is that given fatter tails, stock returns are much riskier than the widely used normal distribution models predict.

He starts from the assumption that what matters to you the most is your terminal wealth, such as the retirement nest egg that will allow you to retire in the lifestyle you want. Your investment success will depend most on avoiding the downside “tail risks,” those relatively rare but severe stock market downturns, such as the financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic, while capitalizing on the positive “tail gains.” To manage your risk properly, you’ll need to pay attention to what derivatives markets such as the VIX are telling you. For example, when the VIX is at a level below its historical average, you may feel more comfortable investing a greater proportion of your assets in risky stocks.

See “OTC Derivatives Statistics at End-December 2019,” Bank for International Settlements, May 7, 2020, https://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy2005.htm. 66. Trading on the VIX index commenced in 2004. The levels back to 1986 are based on CBOE back-testing, showing what the level would have been given S&P 500 option prices at the time. While the official record closing high on the VIX of 82.69 occurred on March 16, 2020, near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the October 19, 1987, level would have been almost twice as high, at 150.19. 67. Interview with authors. 68. Interview with authors. 69. Interview with authors. 70. See Warren E. Buffett, “Berkshire’s Corporate Performance vs. the S&P 500,” Berkshire Hathaway, February 21, 2003, http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2002pdf.pdf. 71.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Snoop Dogg is standing: T-Mobile, “Paris Hilton-T-Mobile-Fabric Softener,” AdForum Talent, uploaded by Publicis Seattle, January 1, 2005, www.adforum.com/talent/62231-paris-hilton/work/46280. Hackers are information junkies: Hackers are well-known for “dumpster diving,” searching through dumpsters or trash cans for information. See, e.g., Elizabeth Montalbano, “Hackers Dumpster Dive for Taxpayer Data in COVID-19 Relief Money Scams,” Threatpost, May 7, 2020, https://threatpost.com/hackers-dumpster-dive-covid-19-relief-scams/155537/. See also Michele Slatalla and Joshua Quittner, Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995). security information over the phone: Krebs, “Paris Hilton Hack Started.” generous with session tokens: “Paris Hilton’s Phonebook Hacked, Posted Online (+ How It Could Have Been Done),” Rootsecure.Net, June 26, 2010, web.archive.org/web/20100626030043/http://www.rootsecure.

In September 2019, Judge Wolf revoked his parole and held Cameron to the promise made in the 2014 plea agreement. He would accept the highest sentence suggested by the Sentencing Guidelines—five years. Since he had already served three years, he had two more to go. He was sent back to federal prison. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr announced a program to release prisoners who posed a minimal risk to the community. Cameron, however, was not eligible. Since he had phoned in a bomb threat to the Florida high school when he was fifteen, he was deemed violent and kept in a low-security prison (a higher level of security than a minimum-security one).


China's Good War by Rana Mitter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, land reform, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, sexual politics, South China Sea, Washington Consensus

China is creating a circuit of memory to enhance its standing and authority domestically and internationally, as well as to compete with the long-established circuit of memory that nurtures the narrative of the United States liberating the Asia-Pacific.6 In March 2020, as the globe was swept by the COVID-19 pandemic, China declared that it had overcome the virus first in the world, and most effectively. The language Xi Jinping used to describe this event was “Victory for China” in a “people’s war,” a term that referenced the narrative of the “people’s war” of guerrilla warfare led by Mao Zedong during World War II.7 As China becomes more powerful, the world will have to pay more attention to the stories that it wants to tell.

On China’s use of ideas of human security in international order, see Rosemary Foot, China, the United Nations, and Human Protection: Beliefs, Power, Image (Oxford, 2020). 6. An excellent example of the sort of memories contained within the US liberation circuit are the fine “Road to Tokyo” galleries at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. 7. “Moment of Truth: Xi Leads War on COVID-19,” Xinhuanet (10 March 2020), http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/10/c_138863611.htm. Pieces using similar language in Chinese about victory in the People’s War against the virus are here: http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/leaders/2020-02/10/c_1125555826.htm and http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-03/10/c_1125689049.htm.


pages: 319 words: 89,192

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

“I don’t agree that the facts given me by the source are false,” he testified. “I agree that one of the points made is false.” Steele never got to complete his testimony in the case. Midway through his second day on the witness stand, he was notified that his wife had been taken to a hospital near their home in Farnham after showing symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. He was excused so he could join her and the case was completed without him. Several months later, the judge overseeing the case issued his ruling. He found that Orbis had not violated the Data Protection Act, the law under which the oligarchs had sued.

See also specific firms and cases activists as targets of, 50–52 defenses against, 275–277 illegal activities of, 46–47 journalism’s potential impaction, 277–278 lawyers as clients for, 58 London as informational trade center, 71–74, 80–82, 137 phone record acquisitions through, 44–45 self-due diligence reviews by, 47–48 start of, 38–41 targets of, 42–44 Courier (typeface), 262–263 COVID-19, 254, 255 Cowell, Alan, 261 CPW Consulting (online ghost), 197, 201, 203 Credit Suisse, 4, 285 Crime in Progress (Simpson & Fritsch), 2–3, 135, 146, 160, 187, 234–236, 238 Crispin, Shawn, 62–63 Crossfire Hurricane investigation, 159–161 Cuddehe, Mary, 37, 287 Cullison, Alan, 143–144, 183–185 cyber spying, 195–196, 198, 199–200 Cymrot, Mark, 58, 83, 113, 114, 124–125 The Daily Caller, 209, 239, 252 The Daily Show (late-night TV program), 116 Dakar (Senegal), 197 Dalai Lama, 195 Danchenko, Igor, 263–266, 267–270, 303 Dangate, 226 Dark Money (Mayer), 86 Data Protection Act, 255 Day, Nick, 43–44 Dayton Daily News, 97 dead drop technique, 44 de Córdoba, Jóse, 89–90 “deep state” conspiracy, 213, 233, 260 Democracy Integrity Project, 208–212, 252, 273, 299 Democratic National Committee, 64–65, 135 Democratic Party (U.S.), 2, 153, 160, 208, 244, 256 Deripaska, Oleg background, 21, 22 Carr and, 50 Fusion GPS’s connection to, 272 Global Witness and, 101 Steele’s connection to, 58, 138–140, 153, 180, 217, 271–272 Derwick Associates, 89–90, 129, 292 Deutsche Bank, 148 Diligence International, 43–44, 224–225, 226, 252, 285 Dirty Little Secrets (Simpson & Sabato), 65–66, 68 Divyekin, Igor, 145 double agents, 165, 168–169, 226–227.


pages: 306 words: 88,545

Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex by Rachel Feltman

COVID-19, disintermediation, double helix, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Internet Archive, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, moral panic, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, TikTok, University of East Anglia, white flight

Look at it this way: You’re not going to spend the rest of your life inside just because you know another virus like SARS-CoV-2 could emerge at any time and probably will at some point in the future. But you can still recognize that there are steps we should all take as a society to keep the COVID-19 pandemic from happening all over again. People should have access to paid sick leave so they’re not pressured to sneeze all over the subway. Governments should invest in shoring up each nation’s ability to produce personal protective equipment at a moment’s notice. Motherfuckers should wash their hands. And so on. If the COVID-19 pandemic teaches us anything, I hope it will teach us that we can recognize the potential danger of a pathogen—and take steps to avoid catching and spreading it—without focusing on outsize fear or stigmatizing people who are most at risk.


pages: 456 words: 101,959

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

Sky’s shop features a wide variety of colorful, comfortable items for people of all genders and sizes: bodysuits assembled from panels of fishnet and neon fabric, gender-affirming chest binders that aren’t too restrictive or tight, and a large array of brightly patterned T-shirts, bandanas, and pins. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rebirth Garments was one of the first shops to offer face masks with clear vinyl windows that make it possible to read the wearer’s lips. For many disabled people (including Autistics), being able to read a person’s lips makes it much easier to follow a conversation. With everyone wearing masks, I struggled to tell when someone was speaking to me, because I relied on the visual cue of their lips moving to tune my attention toward them.

See defining Autism terminology, 46–50 use of term, 46, 67 Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), 42 Autism National Committee, 225 Autism Speaks, 6, 225, 229 Autistic brains, 20–23, 70, 114, 206–7 Autistic identity, 44, 85–88, 139–40 identity-first language, 46–47 integration and, 254–62 Autistic life, building an, 164–90 divergent design, 168–73 doing your own thing, 179–82 Mariah’s experience, 168–69 Marta Rose’s experience, 168–70, 171, 173, 177–78 Moorea Seal’s experience, 164–67, 170 radical visibility, 183–90 reimagining success and time, 173–78 Rhi’s experience, 180–81 Rory’s experience, 179–80 Sue’s experience, 173–74 Autistic relationships, cultivating, 191–228 communicating clearly and honestly, 207–13 cultivating unmasked friendships, 200–207 finding and making your community, 218–28 James Finn’s experience, 191–93, 195 letting go of neurotypical expectations, 213–17 Reese Piper’s experience, 213–14, 224–25 self-disclosing, 195–200 standing up for yourself, 190, 191–93 Tisa’s experience, 218–19, 223–24 Autistics Against Curing Autism, 28, 85, 86, 221–22 Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), 83, 85, 86, 87, 222, 225, 236 awkwardness, 5, 20, 39, 51, 57, 93, 94, 102, 107, 148, 158, 174, 185, 186, 194, 195, 219 B Baron-Cohen, Simon, 77 belief systems, adherence to, 112, 129–33, 159, 229 Andrew’s experience, 129–30 Bobbi’s experience, 52 warning signs of high-control groups, 132–33 biases, 24, 40, 43, 56–57, 134, 186, 195, 239–40 Big Bang Theory (TV series), 4, 37, 133, 134 biological markers, 20–23 Bipolar Disorder, 55, 73, 113 Bird, Geoff, 126 Black Autistics, 9, 36, 60–67, 194, 197, 232, 240, 246–47 Anand Prahlad’s experience, 49, 53, 65–66, 67 Catina Burkett’s experience, 63, 64, 67 Mariah’s experience, 64, 168–69 racial disparities in diagnosis, 33, 36–37, 40, 61–62 Timotheus Gordon’s experience, 28, 65–66, 68, 86, 92–93, 94, 97, 222–23, 247 Black Lives Matter, 166 Bleuler, Eugen, 46, 67 Blume, Harvey, 30 Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), 9, 29, 53, 55, 75–77 bottom-up processing style, 24–25, 114 Braille signs, 231, 234, 235–36 brain injuries, 11, 30, 80 Bridges, Dorian, 119–20, 121, 123 brown Autistics, 36, 40, 60–67, 194, 222, 246–47 Burkett, Catina, 63, 64, 67 burnout, 3, 11, 18, 75, 176, 199, 238 Burns, Pete, 150–51 C calorie restriction, 55, 108, 110 camouflaging, 15–16, 39, 96–98, 108, 140, 163, 167–68 ABA therapy and, 100–103 as an overcorrection, 104–5 gender and, 8, 57 Thomas’s case, 119, 128 capitalism, 81–82, 85, 152, 177 chewelry, 141, 187 child development, 21, 32–33 childishness, 93–94, 102, 107, 124, 145, 148 Cliffe, Nicole, 7, 196 clothing and radical visibility, 183–89 cluelessness, 57, 89, 107, 139, 148 code switching, 63–64 cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), 74, 118 cold and unfeeling, 63, 68, 102, 106, 147, 192 collaborative contact, 238–40 collectibles, 170–71 coming out, 32, 145, 195–200 communication needs, 207–13, 208–9 community, finding your place in, 85–88, 218–28 Community Emergency Services and Support Act (CESSA), 222–23, 247 comorbid conditions, 72–81 compensation, 37, 96–98, 100, 108, 140, 163, 167–68, 179, 182 ABA therapy and, 100–103 connective tissue disorders, 28 conspiracy theory groups, 129, 131 cooking, 214, 217 costs of masking, 109–38 adherence to rigid rules and belief systems, 112, 129–33 Andrew’s experience, 129–30 Angel’s experience, 123–24 detachment and dissociation, 111, 123–28 Dorian Bridges’s experience, 119–20, 121, 123 eating-disordered behavior, 111, 119–23 fawning and compulsive people pleasing, 112, 133–37 problematic coping strategies, 111–12, 112 problem drinking and substance use, 111, 113–19 Thomas’s experience, 109–10, 113–14, 118–19 courage, 158, 259 standing up for yourself, 143, 147, 190, 191–93, 259, 260 COVID-19 pandemic, 183, 210–11 “crazy,” 30, 115, 125, 252–53 “creepiness,” 57, 181, 185 criminal justice system, 246–47 crying, 34, 55, 92, 93, 114, 165 Cubacub, Sky, 183–84, 186–87 cults, 108, 110, 129–30, 130, 132–33 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 4 D Dale, Laura Kate, 59–60 Deaf people, 46, 212, 230–31, 288n defining Autism, 19–32 bottom-up processing style, 24–25 deliberative processing style, 23–24 diversity, 31–32 neurodivergence, 29–31 neurological markers, 20–23 repetitive behaviors, 26–27 risk factors, 28–29 touching every part of Autistic person’s life, 25–26 deinstitutionalization, 239 deliberative processing style, 23–24 depression, 11, 23, 29, 55, 72–73, 118 detachment, 111, 123–28 diagnosis, 9, 39–46, 244 access to, 9, 33, 40–41, 44–45, 53, 62 gender and racial disparities in, 6–7, 33, 35–39, 53–54, 61–62 identifying specialists, 41–42 misdiagnosis, 53, 62, 75–78 positive experience with, 41, 42–45 questions to ask, 41 rate, 40, 40–41, 244 white Autistic boys, 6–7, 35–39 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 27, 82–83, 151 disability accommodations and benefits, 43, 234–38, 242, 245 comorbid and overlapping conditions, 72–81 medical model of, 229–30 social model of, 230–31 use of term, 46–47, 48 “disability first” language, 47 discernment, 125, 146, 193 discounting, 197 discrimination, 42–43, 234–38 dissociation, 111, 123–28 Angel’s experience, 123–24 distractibility, 21, 31, 70, 72, 78, 114, 144, 170, 175, 179, 236 divergent design, 168–73 Mariah’s experience, 168–69 Marta Rose’s experience, 168–70, 171, 173, 177–78 diversity of Autism, 31–32 domestic abuse, 110, 129, 136 drinking.


pages: 461 words: 106,027

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business by Arvid Kahl

business logic, business process, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, content marketing, continuous integration, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, domain-specific language, financial independence, functional programming, Google Chrome, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, information retrieval, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kanban, Kubernetes, machine readable, minimum viable product, Network effects, performance metric, post-work, premature optimization, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, software as a service, solopreneur, source of truth, statistical model, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, the long tail, trickle-down economics, value engineering, web application

Will funding sources in your market dry up, or will investors spend more? What kinds of businesses will they fund? Will businesses that were not generating revenue because they had a lot of funding suddenly have to make a profit in a way that impacts your market? Which default-alive businesses are turning into default-dead? The COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of how to anticipate these types of changes. Governments responded to the pandemic with social isolation policies, massively disrupting existing consumption patterns. As a consequence of quarantine efforts, work-from-home became a necessity for many, resulting in an explosive increase in the need for enabling technologies like videoconferencing and collaboration tools.

Companies who had until recently only marginally served these fields started intensifying their efforts to move into that market, increasing competition among the available solutions. Other markets started drying up temporarily, mostly in industries related to tourism and non-virtual entertainment. Virtual entertainment businesses began to see sharp uptakes in usage, and delivery businesses were overrun with orders. All of this happened within the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The long-term repercussions of this event are unclear at this point, but the forces set in motion will result in lasting changes to industries, professions, and personal lives. Adaptation: Implementing a Response You'll need to be on your toes to be able to react to changes quickly and reliably during a recession.


Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

When I ran into him having a chilly outdoor pandemic dinner at a West Village restaurant in late 2021, he had grown philosophical about Gawker’s fall. “We can blame ourselves, as liberals always do. Or remember that a hard-right billionaire set up a law firm and spent eight figures in order to crucify an outlet that dared to criticize him,” he texted me. Nick spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic in SoHo. And he was still working on his app. “Like Andreessen, I think there’s a Talmudic internet still to be made,” he told me, referring to an internet that would find a way to, technically, achieve the old blogger dream of integrating news and commentary. “So I tinker.” That new internet could be about transparency, too, he believed.

., 32, 41, 44, 102, 284 Business Insider, 61, 149, 269 BusinessWeek, 66 BuzzFeed and AOL’s purchase of Huffington Post, 149 “Buzz Detection” tool, 74 BuzzFeed News feature, 238, 247, 299 and competition with old media, 145 and devaluation of traffic, 264–70 Disney purchase negotiations, 195–202 and Facebook’s political content, 238–40, 244–45 and Gawker’s competition, 139 and Gionet, 297 and growth of Twitter, 115 launch of BuzzFeed Politics, 165 layoffs and labor tensions, 279–85 and meetings with New York Times board, 219–20, 223 news and social content, 157–64, 165–69, 172–73 origins of, 72–76 and product marketing, 287–89 and Ratter’s launch, 217 relationship with Huffington Post, 78–79, 107 reliance on Google searches, 151–54, 154–56 and revival of legacy media, 228–30 and right-wing media, 185–88, 190–94, 290–94 rivalry with Gawker, 170–71, 174 and social engagement on Facebook, 271–77 SPAC deal, 300–303, 324n302 and splintering of internet media, 299 and the Steele Dossier, 247, 249, 250–52, 254, 256–57, 260 and tech financing boom, 147 and “the Dress” viral post, 209–12 traffic growth, 122–27, 129–30, 203–12 and Upworthy, 179–83 Zuckerberg’s purchase offer for, 160–62, 165 “BuzzFeed Meme Machine” (memo), 123 C cable networks, 127–28, 269 Calacanis, Jason, 216 Cambridge Analytica, 242, 261 Camp, Garrett, 150–51 Campbell, Pamela, 231 Camp Bowery, 19, 54, 138 Canada, 226 Canvas Networks, 127 Carlson, Nicholas, 84–85, 120 Carson, Ben, 240 Case, Steve, 25 censorship, 211, 296–97 Cerami, Kassie, 112, 114 Charles, Michael, 188 Charlottesville rally, 294 Chartbeat, 204 Chateau Marmont, 199 Chatroulette, 151 Cheney, Dick, 71 Chinese Communist Party, 211 Chomsky, Noam, 4 Christie, Chris, 239 Claremont Middle School, 5 clickbait, 182–83 “click meter” tool, 105 Clinton, Bill, 27, 32, 94, 110, 119 Clinton, Hillary Rodham and Facebook’s political content, 239–42, 244–45 and Gionet, 293 presidential primary campaign, 102–3, 106 and the Steele Dossier, 248, 250, 253–54 support from women’s media, 94 and Weiner scandal, 144 WikiLeaks email controversy, 254, 259 Clooney, George, 56 CNET News, 41 CNN, 127–28, 167, 243, 249–51, 253 Coen, Jessica and author’s background, 246 and Denton’s parties, 53–56 and Denton’s wedding, 174 and Durst sex tape scandal, 63–64 and Gawker’s sexual content, 140 and Huffington Post’s traffic, 68–69 influence at Gawker, 53–56 and Jezebel’s style and content, 87, 95 Cohen, Michael, 250 Colbert, Stephen, 152 Coleman, Greg, 266 College Preparatory School, 5 Columbia Journalism School, 53 Comcast, 269 Comey, James, 249 Complex, 300 Comscore, 150, 179, 287 Condé Nast, 54, 88, 94, 156, 218 Conspiracy (Holiday), 234, 262 conspiracy theories and websites, 184, 258 Contagious Media, 27–28, 47–51, 71–72, 103 content management systems, 82 Conway, Ron, 285–86 Coppins, McKay, 166 Cormier, Anthony, 254, 257 Couric, Katie, 3–4, 8 COVID-19 pandemic, 299 Cox, Ana Marie, 29–31 Cox, Chris, 162–63, 206, 211 CPM (cost per thousand views) measure, 22–23, 45, 83, 169 Craigslist, 281 Cronkite, Walter, 28 CrowdTangle, 275 Cruz, Ted, 239, 240 Crying while Eating meme, 49, 50 cryptocurrency, 283, 299 Cuban, Mark, 216 Cube, the, 2, 11, 47 culture jamming, 9, 27 curiosity gap, 181, 205.


pages: 382 words: 105,657

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

That consensus was just starting to fray when Milton Friedman, the Reaganites’ favorite economist, argued what was then still the contrarian viewpoint in the New York Times Magazine in 1970: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Fifty years later, communities are fragile, workers insecure, and families stressed. It isn’t hard to see the connection to a half century’s embrace of narrow corporate self-interest over collective responsibility. The federal government’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis was only the most visible sign of decay in American institutions—the effects are felt in virtually every aspect of life, from soaring health-care costs to skyrocketing inequality to wildfire smoke blanketing American cities for weeks on end because of escalating carbon emissions. All stem at least in part from the failed belief that corporations will police themselves and shower us in riches if they’re just left alone to do so (and are lightly taxed all the while).

Calhoun even considered: Douglas MacMillan, “Nikki Haley Quits Boeing Board, Citing Disagreement with Company’s Bailout Request,” Washington Post, March 19, 2020. The company ultimately: Molly Smith and Julie Johnsson, “Boeing Rules Out Federal Aid After Raising $25 Billion of Bonds,” Bloomberg, April 30, 2020. The air force: Valerie Insinna, “Boeing to Get $882M in Withheld KC-46 Funds Back for COVID-19,” Defense News, April 2, 2020. “We’ll never have”: Julie Johnsson, “Boeing Mulls Revamped Factory Footprint for Shrinking Jet Market,” Bloomberg, July 29, 2020. Calhoun raised hell: Author interview with anonymous source, April 2020. The CEO and his board: Author interview with anonymous source, April 2020.


pages: 430 words: 111,038

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

And it happened in 2020 around the Black Lives Matter movement, and around the coronavirus crisis when the public suddenly seemed to appreciate that BAME staff not only accounted for a disproportionate segment of NHS medical staff (44 per cent, when the 2011 Census puts the BAME population in England and Wales at 14 per cent) but were dying at seven times the rate of white colleagues. I met some relatives of black and Asian doctors who had died of Covid-19 for Channel 4 News and The Times. It was emotional. Medicine runs in many immigrant families, and some of the bereaved were themselves doctors, going back to work to face the virus that had killed their loved ones. Many of the deceased had experienced racism even as they built the NHS: studies confirm that not only are BAME doctors routinely racially abused, but they’re also pushed towards ‘Cinderella’ specialities such as geriatric medicine rather than the higher-status disciplines.

Johnson talked about how we needed a ‘world-beating’ testing regime when just getting a world-equalling one would have been progress. Later he promised a ‘world-beating’ track-and-trace system to stop a second coronavirus peak, which Britain’s newspapers then revealed was a failure.fn2 Even when Johnson contracted Covid-19 himself, there was a view among his supporters that he was somehow immune to an illness that had killed thousands just because he was a British leader, with Toby Young confessing in the Spectator to ‘a kind of mystical belief in Britain’s greatness and her ability to occasionally bring forth remarkable individuals … who can serve her at critical junctures.


pages: 268 words: 35,416

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

TRAVEL SAFETY ADVICE Before you travel – and while you’re here – always keep tabs on the latest regulations in San Francisco, and the US. www.sanfranciscopolice.org Safety tips, precinct news, and inform­ation on how to report various crimes. www.sfnightministry.org Multi-faith nonprofit providing referral services, counseling, and a crisis helpline. www.sf.gov COVID-19 news and advice from the City and County of San Francisco. www.stopaapihate.org Website for reporting hate crimes against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. www.travel.state.gov Latest travel safety information. www.twitter.com/sf_emergency Real-time safety alerts. ACCESSIBILITY Most venues in San Francisco do a good job of being accessible, as do surrounding state beaches and parks.


pages: 405 words: 112,470

Together by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.

Airbnb, call centre, cognitive bias, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, gentrification, gig economy, income inequality, index card, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, medical residency, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, stem cell, TED Talk, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

As a physician, I felt compelled to address these issues because of the rising physical and emotional toll of social disconnection that I’ve watched throughout society over the past few decades. What I could not anticipate, however, was the unprecedented test that our global community would face just as this book was going to press. In the first weeks of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic turned physical human contact into a potentially mortal threat. The novel coronavirus was on the loose, like an invisible stalker, and any of our fellow human beings could have been its carrier. Almost overnight, it seemed, getting close enough to breathe on another person became synonymous with danger.

Alongside the looming specter of a global financial recession rose an equally disturbing prospect of a social recession—a fraying of communal bonds that deepens in severity the longer we go without human interaction. As the pandemic continues, however, it becomes ever clearer that social distancing is a misnomer. To be sure, we must practice physical distancing to stop the spread of COVID-19, but socially, we may emerge from this crisis feeling closer to friends and family members than ever before. Each day brings new examples of our communal ingenuity as we meet this crisis together. In Italy, one of the hardest hit countries, neighbors isolated in their homes have found shared comfort by singing from their windows in unison.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

See Starlink Compaq Computer, 66 computer programming EM’s childhood interest in, 29, 33–34 EM’s college years and, 50 EM’s Silicon Valley internship and, 55–56 See also Zip2 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), 595 Confinity, 76 Cook, Tim, 261, 559 Corcoran, Kyle, Twitter acquisition and, 511 COVID-19 pandemic conspiracy theories and, 578–80 EM’s reconciliation with Kimbal and, 346 EM’s resistance to authority and, 379, 417–18 Tesla and, 408, 417–18, 441 Twitter content moderation and, 572–73 Cramer, Jim, 293 Crawford, Esther, 509, 540 Crider, Johnna, 290 Culture, The novels (Banks), 400 Cyberpunk video games, 310, 318, 485 Daimler, 193 Davenport, Christian, 357 David, Larry, 491 Davis, Steve The Boring Company and, 257, 258 EM’s management of Twitter and, 547, 583 flamethrowing and, 299, 496 Model 3 production surge and, 271 Twitter server move and, 584, 585 DeepMind, 240–41, 600, 601, 605 Deese, Brian, 421 Demolition Man, 591 Denholm, Robyn, 580 Depp, Johnny, 263 Dharamsi, Tejas, 514 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 381 Diez, Shana, 478, 608 Diplomacy, 46 Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, The (Thiel and Musk), 424 Dojo, 244, 394, 397, 487, 596 Dontchev, Kiko, 347, 349–51, 362, 385 Doohan, James, 176 Dorsey, Jack, 440, 444, 461, 510, 567 Dow, Brian, 271, 369, 370–71, 372, 373–74 Downey, Robert, Jr., 142 Drexler, Mickey, 143 Dreyer, Lauren, 428–29 Drori, Ze’ev, 167 Duan, Phil, 499 Dungeons & Dragons, 32–33, 50, 309 Durban, Egon, 492 Dyer, Deborah Anne (Skin), 344 eBay PayPal and, 85, 86–87 X.com and, 76, 77, 78–79 Eberhard, Martin, 124, 162 component outsourcing and, 132–33, 156 departure of, 163–64 development mule and, 133 electric car ideas, 127–28, 129, 130 EM’s attacks on, 164–65 EM’s design input and, 136–37 EM’s enmity and, 164, 192 EM’s sensitivity about credit and, 139, 141–42 legal settlement with EM, 164 Roadster launch and, 140–41, 143 Roadster production costs and, 160 Tesla financial issues and, 161, 163 Tesla founding and, 130, 133, 139, 164 Tesla leadership conflicts and, 134, 137, 139–40 economic crisis (2007–2008), 179–81, 193 Edgett, Sean, 513 effective altruism movement, 460 Ehrenpreis, Ira, 167 Einhorn, David, 278 Ekenstam, Felix, 425 Elden Ring, 7, 455, 588 electric cars AC Propulsion and, 126–27, 129 auto industry abandonment of, 193 Biden and, 420–21 Eberhard and, 127–28, 129, 130 EM’s college interest in, 51, 55, 57–58 Rosen meeting and, 125–26 Tesla Motors and, 127–28, 129–30 tzero prototype, 126–27, 128 See also Tesla Ellison, Larry, 7, 218, 451, 459–60, 461, 558–59, 590–91 Elluswamy, Ashok, 596–97, 598 Emanuel, Ari, 488, 491, 494, 497, 554 EM’s management of Twitter advertiser boycotts and, 537–38 advertisers and, 533–35, 537–38, 547, 559–60, 580 Apple and, 559–60 content moderation and, 524–31, 537, 554, 566, 567, 572–73, 574–77 desk-siding, 552 EM’s demon mode and, 537–39 EM’s management style and, 367 EM’s personality and, 534 EM’s stress and, 544–45, 547–48 engineering integration and, 79, 494, 557 financial issues and, 541 firings and, 509, 510, 521–22, 540, 547–50, 555–57 government agencies and, 568, 572 hardcore culture and, 220, 349, 508, 522, 547, 550–51 hardcore opt-in, 550–51, 556 impulsive tweets and, 533, 534, 577–78 in-person vs. remote work, 519, 541–42 journalist suspensions, 575–77 layoff reviews, 515, 516–19, 536, 548–49 product changes, 514 product review, 508–9 risk and, 522, 555 Roth departure, 542–44 server move, 581, 582–86, 588–90, 598 survival, 558 top management question, 520–21 troll/bot campaign and, 530–31 Twitter Blue, 539–40, 542–43, 547, 613 Twitter Files, 529, 566–68, 569–73, 575, 576, 579 visibility filtering, 529, 571, 572–73, 575 X.com and, 87, 507, 509, 560 Yaccarino as CEO, 613 Endeavor, 491 Engelbart, Doug, 399 Epstein, Jeffrey, 296 Fabricant, James, 173, 174 Falcon 1 launch attempts EM’s stress and, 5, 173, 179 first attempt (Mar. 2006), 150–52 second attempt (Mar. 2007), 153–54 third attempt (Aug. 2008), 175, 176–77, 197–98 fourth attempt (Sept. 2008), 184–88, 206 Kimbal’s support and, 150, 151, 186–87, 300 Obama administration and, 206 Farooq, Navaid, 44, 235 EM’s friendship with, 45 on EM’s grief, 103–4 EM’s marriage to Justine and, 71–72 EM’s marriage to Talulah and, 215 strategy games and, 46, 47, 51 Twitter and, 455–56 Zip2 and, 62 Farooq, Nyame, 61 Fath, Joe, 291, 334 Fauci, Anthony, 577–78, 587 Favreau, Jon, 142 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 351–52, 360, 362 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 355–56 Fedorov, Mykhailo, 428, 431, 433, 434 Felsenthal, Ed, 416 Ferguson, Niall, 430 Fermi, Enrico, 93 Fermi’s Paradox, 93 Fibonacci Sequence, 37 Field, Doug, 301 Fisker, Henrik, 196, 197 Flesh without Blood, 306 Fletcher, Winnifred.

See Musk, Justine Wilson; Riley, Talulah meeting with pope, 471–72 Nevada’s birth and death and, 103–4, 105, 554 philanthropy and, 437, 438, 439 press coverage, 63–64, 75, 357, 558, 567, 575 press relationships, 357 sexual harassment accusation, 419 as Time magazine Person of the Year, 416 U.S. citizenship, 95 —BELIEF IN HUMANITY: artificial intelligence and, 31, 241, 242, 243, 600, 602, 606 automation/de-automation and, 281 birthrates and, 413, 468, 475–76, 498 Inspiration4 mission and, 386 internet and, 58 reality of, 6 space travel and, 93–94, 100, 240 —BUSINESS PRINCIPLES: automation/de-automation and, 57, 272, 274–75, 280, 281–82 cost-effectiveness, 112–13, 148, 246, 337, 374 engineering integration, 79, 109, 200, 219, 372, 390, 494, 557 founder qualifications, 109, 133 hardcore culture and, 64, 220, 349, 350, 508, 522, 547, 550–51 idiot index, 99–100, 363–65 improvisation, 116–17, 148, 210, 211, 212, 282–83 in-house component manufacturing, 112–13, 132 iterative design approach, 114–15 overview, 112–17 Polytopia lessons, 426–27 responsibility and, 152 sense of mission and, 92–93, 129, 249–50 See also production algorithm and unrealistic deadlines and below —CHILDHOOD, 1, 15, 21, 22, 35 abuse and trauma during, 2–6, 7, 19, 21, 36–38, 104, 171, 264, 309, 458 computer programming and, 29, 33–34, 36, 43 cousins and, 25–26, 27, 28, 32–33, 252 determination and, 17–18, 33 Dungeons & Dragons and, 32–33 entrepreneurship and, 27 existential crisis, 30–32 gambling, 36–37 living with father, 23–24, 25 loneliness, 17 overseas trips, 24 parents’ divorce and, 20 reading, 20, 27, 30–32 religion and, 30 school experiences, 3–4, 16–17, 26–27 space travel interest, 27–28 violent environment of, 2, 25, 41, 64–65 —CHILDREN OF: caring and, 5, 38 with Grimes, 340, 341–42, 379, 415–16, 466, 468 with Justine, 5, 169, 342 parenting, 18, 341, 414–15, 475, 481, 612 Talulah and, 471 wealth and, 344–45 with Zilis, 412, 413–15, 467–68, 599, 603 See also specific children —COLLEGE YEARS, 45–53 friendships, 45, 50–51, 52 Nicholson mentorship, 47–48 partying, 52–53 relationship with Justine, 69–70 road trips, 56–57 Silicon Valley internships, 54, 55–56 strategy games, 46–47, 51 —COMPANIES: The Boring Company, 257–59, 288, 298, 441, 472, 496, 585 X.AI, 244, 605–6 X.com, 73, 74–79, 81, 87, 447 See also EM’s management of Twitter; Neuralink; SpaceX; Tesla; Twitter acquisition; Zip2 —DRAMA ATTRACTION: artificial intelligence and, 601 childhood trauma and, 6 contentment aversion and, 410, 442 EM’s admission of, 7 Grimes and, 308 Heard and, 263–64 Justine and, 70–71, 169 SpaceX and, 380–81 surges and, 362 tailspin (2018) and, 288 Talulah and, 216, 471 Twitter acquisition and, 547 —HARSHNESS: Agrawal and, 445 Baglino on, 199 childhood, 17 childhood trauma and, 169 Lucas Hughes and, 363–65 Kimbal and, 64 lack of memory of, 396, 497 Marks on, 165–66 Salzman on, 191 Straubel on, 273 Twitter acquisition and, 489 —HEALTH ISSUES: back and neck pain, 237, 378, 396 COVID, 346 dieting, 497, 603 malaria, 88–89 See also mental health issues below —HUMOR: anti-wokeness and, 419 birthrates and, 468 Falcon 1 launch attempts and, 152 flamethrowing and, 298–99, 496 irony and, 80–81 management of Twitter and, 549 Mechazilla and, 360 naming and, 257 Optimus and, 485, 498 Roadster space launch, 299–300 Starship launch and, 609 Teller’s management of, 230 Tesla automation/de-automation and, 282 Tesla Chinese manufacturing and, 313 Tesla fart app, 303 Twitter acquisition and, 507 —IMPULSIVE TWEETS: attempts to prevent, 614–15 children and, 472 competition with Bezos and, 356 EM’s sons and, 587, 588 Gates and, 438 Kimbal on, 578, 586–87 management of Twitter and, 533, 534, 577–78 Polytopia lessons and, 427 proposal to take Tesla private, 292–93, 294 Spiro and, 512 Thai cave rescue and, 289–91 Twitter acquisition and, 490 Twitter Files and, 567 —INTERESTS: Burning Man, 252, 310, 378–79 computer programming, 29, 33–34, 36 engineering, 27, 55, 56, 57–58, 326–27, 354–55, 388 flying, 90 internet, 57–59 mechanics, 56–57 partying, 52–53, 169, 190, 215–16, 237 reading, 20, 27, 30–32, 51 strategy games, 46–47, 51, 425 See also space travel; video games —MANAGEMENT STYLE, 445 firings and, 220, 273, 313, 333–34, 352, 363, 374–75, 518 See also under EM’s management of Twitter future imaginings and, 150 Lucas Hughes on, 366–67 job interviews and, 204–5 Andy Krebs on, 367–68 Marks on, 165–66, 167 Neuralink and, 402 participation, 480–81 sense of mission and, 249–50 SpaceX and, 64, 110, 113–14, 150 surges, 270–73, 279, 281, 314, 361–62, 583–86 Tesla and, 140, 165–66 “walk to the red,” 278–79, 283 X.com and, 74–75 Zip2 and, 64–65 See also harshness above; personality and unrealistic deadlines and below —MARS MISSION: college years, 51 Gates on, 436–37 Mars Society inspiration for, 92 Optimus and, 485 SpaceX founding and, 92–94, 100, 321 Starlink founding and, 321 Starship system and, 326, 362, 391, 604–5, 608, 611 unrealistic deadlines and, 391 vision/hype mixing and, 230, 604 —MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES: Joe Rogan show and, 295, 297–98 Kimbal’s Ayahuasca suggestion and, 346 open-loop warnings and, 291, 586 stress-induced stomach pains, 173, 180, 409–10 tailspin (2018), 268–70, 288–91, 296–97, 307, 311, 317 —NAMING AND: children and, 103, 341, 415 humor and, 257 rocket engines and, 110 SpaceX company name and, 101 X.com and, 74, 79 Zip2 and, 62, 64, 65 —PERSONALITY: accomplishments and, 7 apocalyptic outlook, 431 Asperger’s and, 18–19, 120–21, 158, 166, 170, 310–11, 377 attempts to restrain, 615 caring, 5, 38, 158 changeability, 5–6, 16, 36, 38, 214, 222, 268, 302, 310, 424 college years and, 53 combativeness, 70–71, 170 competitiveness, 25–26, 46, 76–77, 110, 200 conspiratorial mindset, 357, 418, 533, 566, 578, 586–87 contentment aversion, 5, 409, 410–11, 441–42 decision-making and, 405, 490 demon mode, 5, 299, 310, 311, 424, 537–39 determination, 17–18, 33, 69–70, 138, 176–77, 524 emotional repression, 5, 104, 170–71 empathy deficit, 19, 64, 71, 120–21, 249, 385, 426, 612 enemies and, 164, 192 future imaginings as refuge and, 150, 240, 317–18, 385, 608 gentleness, 32 impatience, 147 impulsivity, 66, 392, 455, 527, 584 Justine on, 104, 170–71 love of celebrity, 66, 85, 95, 139, 142, 169, 381, 491, 524 management of Twitter and, 534 non-collegiality, 64, 85, 119 OCD and, 218 positive effects of, 7, 615 processing trances, 16–17, 191, 240, 257, 479, 591, 608 reality distortion, 110, 114, 584 resistance to authority, 261, 272, 320, 351, 379, 417, 424, 476 Saturday Night Live appearance and, 377 sense of mission, 6, 66, 92–94, 100, 129, 249, 334, 457–58 sensitivity about credit, 139 spaciness, 17, 18 stubbornness, 503 vision/hype mixing, 230, 249–50, 303, 328–29, 334, 604, 613 work obsession, 236, 237–38, 307 See also drama attraction, harshness, humor, and management style above; risk attraction below —POLITICS AND, 417–24, 447 anti-wokeness and, 418–19, 420, 424, 443, 458, 465, 530, 569 Biden and, 420–23 changeability and, 424 COVID-19 pandemic and, 417–18 Larry David on, 491–92 Democratic criticism and, 420 disdain for Trump, 261, 420, 443, 555 friends and, 423–24 libertarianism and, 423, 443–44, 447, 457 James and Elisabeth Murdoch and, 471 Obama support and, 261, 418 right-wing shift, 419–20, 424 Twitter and, 465 —PRODUCTION ALGORITHM: Giga Texas, 337–38 Neuralink and, 402–3 overview, 284–86 questioning requirements and, 113, 272, 284–85, 286, 351, 370–71, 401–2 SolarCity and, 370–72, 373 SpaceX and, 113, 152 Starlink and, 322, 323–24 Starship system and, 328, 365, 378, 477–78 Tesla and, 274, 278–81 X.com and, 76 —RISK ATTRACTION, 613–14 childhood and, 5, 6, 10, 25 family background and, 12, 94, 252, 612 flying and, 91 management of Twitter and, 522, 555 parenting and, 18, 481, 612 parties and, 237 PayPal and, 77, 86 public criticism of, 293 Tesla and, 86, 613 See also SpaceX, risk and —UNREALISTIC DEADLINES AND: PayPal, 101 SpaceX, 101, 113–14, 177, 184 Starship system, 360–61, 362, 391, 477 Tesla, 165, 269, 319, 333 Tesla server move, 590 X.com, 75 —WEALTH OF, 74, 408–11 ambivalence about, 66–67 lifestyle downsizing and, 344–46, 409 marriage with Justine and, 170 public criticisms and, 409, 420 rift with daughter Jenna and, 343–44, 408–9, 418–19, 467 taxes and, 409 Musk, Errol (EM’s father), 9, 260 abuse by, 3–4, 7, 36, 37–38, 169 background of, 12–13 changeability of, 36 computer programming and, 33 conspiratorial mindset, 36, 578–79 Dad of a Genius on, 470 divorce, 19–20 EM’s and Kimbal’s visit to (2016), 265 EM’s childhood determination and, 18 EM’s childhood years with, 23–24, 25 EM’s financial support for, 469–70 EM’s marriage to Justine and, 68 EM’s name and, 16 EM’s school experiences and, 17 gambling and, 36–37 marriage of, 13–14 move to Los Angeles, 102, 104–5 racism and, 13 reality distortion and, 24, 37, 39, 264 religion and, 30 stepdaughter Jana and, 105, 265–66, 268, 470 Zip2 and, 61, 66 Musk, Griffin (EM’s son), 217 birth of, 169 EM’s fiftieth birthday celebration and, 378 EM’s marriage to Talulah and, 215 personality of, 343, 587, 588 Starship launch and, 607 Talulah on, 471 Twitter and, 448 video games and, 588 Musk, James (EM’s cousin), 546, 553 Autopilot project and, 333, 334 EM’s impulsive tweets and, 577, 587 family gatherings (2022) and, 586 Model 3 production and, 271 Neuralink and, 564 server move and, 581, 583–85, 588–90 Trump Twitter reinstatement issue and, 555 Twitter Files and, 569, 571 Twitter firings and, 515, 518, 519, 521, 522, 536, 547–48, 549, 555, 556, 557 Twitter hardcore opt-in and, 550, 551 Musk, Jenna (EM’s daughter).

See Tesla Autopilot project Seo, DJ, 400, 497 Sheehan, Neil, 573 Shelby, Richard, 207 Shotwell, Gwynne, 118 background of, 119–20 Cape Canaveral Pad 40 and, 205 DoD TacSat contract and, 121 Dontchev and, 350 EM’s management style and, 364, 365, 366 Falcon 1 launch attempts and, 152 Kistler NASA contract and, 122 Malaysia contract, 145 on Patel, 477 as SpaceX president, 188–89 Starlink for Ukraine and, 428, 432–33, 434 Starship system and, 328–29, 362, 363, 364, 478–79, 611 working relationship with EM, 119, 121, 328–29, 613 Shroff, Dhaval Autopilot project and, 246 neural network planner project and, 592, 593–97, 614 Twitter firings and, 515, 518, 519, 522, 536, 548, 549, 556 Singh, Dolly, 177 Siri, 399 Skarsgård, Alexander, 377 Skoll, Jeff, 138, 180 solar power, 51 See also SolarCity; Tesla Energy SolarCity, 252–56, 457 See also Tesla Energy Sorkin, Andrew Ross, 278 Sorkin, Rich, 63, 65 Sotira Composites, 159 South Africa EM’s childhood in, 2–6, 22 EM’s departure from, 38–39 EM’s family background in, 11–13 EM’s malaria and, 87–89 violent environment of, 2, 25, 41, 64–65 Space Exploration Technologies, 101 Space Shuttle Challenger mission, 119–20, 385 retirement of, 188, 206, 210, 212, 348 space travel Bezos and, 224 Challenger mission, 119, 385 EM’s childhood interest in, 27–28, 31 as tourism, 353, 356, 383 Trump on, 261–62 See also Musk, Elon (EM), Mars mission; SpaceX Spaceballs, 298–99 Spacewar, 399 SpaceX artificial intelligence projects of, 401 astronaut transport and, 212, 225, 348–49, 441 Bezos competition with, 226, 227–28, 231–32, 233–34 Biden administration and, 535 Cantrell and, 95–96 Cape Canaveral Pad 39A, 225–26 Cape Canaveral Pad 40, 204–5 concept for, 91–92, 99 cost-effectiveness focus and, 112–13, 148, 153 DoD TacSat contract, 121 Dontchev and, 349–51 economic crisis (2007–2008) and, 180–81 EM’s determination and, 176–77 EM’s management style and, 64, 113–14 EM’s sense of mission and, 92–94, 100, 321 engineering integration and, 79, 109, 390 Falcon 1 rocket, 110, 121 Falcon 9 failures, 230–31 Falcon 9 rocket, 188, 204–5, 324, 326, 328, 359 Falcon 9 successes, 209, 210, 232–34, 326, 441 Falcon Heavy rocket, 300, 326, 328–29, 535 first rocket plans, 100–101 Founders Fund investment in, 183–84 Gates and, 436–37 government contracting system and, 122, 123, 145, 205, 206 hardcore culture and, 349, 350 idiot index and, 99–100, 363–65 improvisation and, 116–17, 148, 210, 212 influence of, 416 Inspiration4 mission, 381, 382, 383–86, 388 International Space Station manned missions and, 441 International Space Station supply contract, 188, 189, 204 Iron Man movies and, 142 iterative design approach and, 114–15 Kistler contract and, 122 Koenigsmann and, 120 Kwajalein Island launch site and, 144, 146–48, 149 launch location search, 145 1337 engine, 390–92 Los Angeles move and, 94–95 Malaysia contract, 145 Mars Oasis project, 95 Merlin engines, 110, 112, 113, 116, 151, 153–54, 176 moon lander and, 422 Mueller recruitment, 108–9 Obama administration and, 203, 206–8, 210–12, 226 public awareness and, 121–22 regulations and, 113, 114–15, 145, 205, 608 reusable rockets and, 226–27, 230, 359, 441 Roadster launch, 299–300 Russia trip and, 96, 97, 98–99 safety and, 351–52 science fiction and, 31 Shotwell and, 119 Shotwell as president, 188–89 space capsule return and, 211, 614 Starshield, 434 success of, 7, 288, 441 Tesla design and, 136, 317 testing, 111, 115–17 Thai cave rescue and, 288 Twitter server move and, 585 unrealistic deadlines and, 101, 113–14, 177, 184, 330 See also Falcon 1 launch attempts; SpaceX, risk and; Starlink; Starship system SpaceX, risk and Falcon 1 launch attempts and, 153, 154, 186 Falcon 1 rocket and, 110 Falcon 9 successes and, 232–33 founding and, 100 Inspiration4 mission and, 383–85 iterative design approach and, 115 Starship system and, 608–9, 610–11 testing and, 116 Thiel on, 86 SpaceX test stand, 111 Spiro, Alex, 488 EM’s impulsive tweets and, 294 EM’s management of Twitter and, 521–22, 527–28, 543, 556 Twitter acquisition and, 464, 490, 493, 512, 513 Spy Who Loved Me, The, 316 Stanley, Christopher, 546, 552 Star Wars, 5, 110 Starlink Bezos competition with, 355–56 creation of, 321–22 Gates on, 437 production algorithm and, 322, 323–24 Russian invasion of Ukraine and, 428–31, 432–34 Starship system and, 476–77, 513 success of, 441 Starship system, 325, 358 B7 booster, 474, 477–80 Boca Chica facility and, 329–30 design of, 326–28 EM’s Mars mission and, 326, 362, 391, 604–5, 608, 611 EM’s vision for, 326, 591 EM’s vision/hype mixing and, 328–29 experimental launch and explosion of, 607, 608–12, 615 management shake-up, 477, 478 Mechazilla, 359–60 production algorithm and, 378, 477–78 public presentation of, 475, 476 Raptor engine, 363–64, 388–92, 402, 410–11, 474 risk and, 608–9, 610–11 Starlink and, 476–77, 513 surge, 361–65 unrealistic deadlines and, 360–61, 362, 391, 477 Steel, Robert, 489–90 Stoppelman, Jeremy, 85 strategy games, 46–47, 51, 425 See also video games Straubel, Jeffrey Brian (JB), 124 battery factory and, 221–22 de-automation and, 274 departure of, 302–4 development mule and, 133 EM’s emotional pain and, 269 EM’s management style and, 199–200, 273 leadership conflicts and, 134 Musk as CEO and, 167 Roadster launch and, 131 Rosen meeting and, 125–26 as Tesla board member, 304 Tesla founding and, 130 Strauss, Neil, 266 Street Fighter, 75, 84 Substack, 508–9, 569 Sullivan, Jake, 431 Sutskever, Ilya, 243–44 Swaminathan, Anand, 334, 495 Swan, Bob, 489 Sweeney, Jack, 575 Switzer, Jessica, 140 TacSat, 121 Taibbi, Matt, 565, 566–68, 573 Tarpenning, Marc, 124 component outsourcing and, 132–33 departure of, 164 EM’s design input and, 135 Tesla financing issues and, 137, 138, 163 Tesla founding and, 130, 139 Tesla Motors and, 128, 129 Taylor, Bret, 444, 452, 454 Teller, Sam Autopilot project and, 247 DeepMind and, 241 departure of, 334 EM’s impulsive tweets and, 290 on EM’s vision/hype mixing, 230, 604 Amber Heard and, 263 Model 3 production and, 275, 279 Neuralink and, 399 Thai cave rescue and, 289 Trump meeting and, 261 Terminator, The, 92 Tesla AI Days, 394, 395–97, 482, 487, 496–97, 498–500, 518 anti-union actions and, 421 artificial intelligence and, 243 artificial intelligence projects of, 401 assembly outsourcing proposals, 166–67 automation/de-automation and, 57, 272, 274–75, 280, 281–82 Biden and, 420–23 Boca Chica tented facility, 282–83, 360, 387 Chinese manufacturing, 313–14, 417, 570 component outsourcing and, 132–33, 137, 156, 159–60 cost-effectiveness and, 246, 337 COVID-19 pandemic and, 408, 417–18, 441 Cybertruck project, 315, 316–20 Daimler Smart car prototype, 193–94 development mule, 133 Drori as CEO, 167 Eberhard departure, 163–64 electric vehicle charging stations and, 422–23 EM removal attempts, 191 Emanuel and, 491 EM’s compensation, 278, 408 EM’s design input, 135–37, 160, 196 EM’s humor and, 299, 303, 313 EM’s love of celebrity and, 139 EM’s management style and, 140 EM’s sense of mission and, 129, 249 EM’s sensitivity about credit and, 139, 141–42 EM’s wealth and, 408 engineering integration and, 79, 200, 219 executive departures (2018), 301–2 founding of, 130, 133 Fremont assembly factory, 217, 218–19, 276, 277–84, 336 Giga Texas, 336–38, 448–49, 472 government regulations and, 201 hardcore culture and, 220 improvisation and, 282–83 in-house component manufacturing, 132 influence of, 416 investment in, 138–39, 179–80 IPO, 217, 219 Jupiter conference room, 276, 278 leadership conflicts, 133–34, 137, 138–40 Marks as CEO, 165–68 Model 3 production hell, 269–70, 277–84, 288, 314 Model 3 success, 303 Model S, 196, 197–202, 219–20, 407 Model Y, 249–50, 318, 338, 407, 417, 439 Musk as CEO, 167 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigations of, 406 Nevada battery Gigafactory, 221–22, 253, 267, 270–75 next generation platform, 504–5 OpenAI and, 244 Phoenix radar system and, 405, 407 production quality issues, 219–20, 281 proposal to take private, 291–94 risk and, 86, 613 Roadster, 131, 132–33, 135, 140, 162 Roadster launch, 140–41, 143, 179 Roadster production costs, 156, 158, 159–61 SEC deal, 293–94, 300, 309 sexual harassment accusation and, 419 solar energy and, 253–54 SolarCity purchase, 253–55, 370, 375 SpaceX design and, 136, 317 Straubel departure, 302–4 success of, 7, 303, 408, 441, 442 supply-chain issues, 159–60 toy industry and, 338–39 unrealistic deadlines and, 269, 319, 333 von Holzhausen hiring, 197–98 White House invitation snub and, 420–21 See also Optimus; Tesla Autopilot project; Tesla Energy; Tesla financial issues Tesla, Nikola, 128, 448 Tesla Autopilot project, 244, 404 accidents and, 248–49, 406–7 as AI data source, 243, 598, 603, 605 AI Days and, 487, 496–97, 498 EM’s testing, 246–47 EM’s vision/hype mixing and, 249–50, 303, 332–33, 334 financial issues and, 332–33 Grimes and, 307 in-car cameras and, 243, 406–7, 598, 603, 605 neural network planner, 592, 593–98, 614 Optimus and, 394, 396, 397 public debate on, 406 radar issue, 246, 247–48, 405–6, 407 See also Robotaxi Tesla Energy, 369, 370–75 Tesla financial issues Autopilot project and, 332–33 Daimler Smart car prototype and, 194 Eberhard departure and, 163 EM removal attempts and, 191 EM’s stress and, 5, 173, 180–81 Energy Department loan and, 193 investment and, 138, 179–80, 183–84 Roadster production costs and, 156, 161 short-sellers and, 277–78, 282, 292, 437–38 Twitter acquisition and, 580 VantagePoint Capital and, 138–39, 191–93 Tesla Motors, 127–29 Teulon, Mark (EM’s cousin), 41–42 Thai cave rescue (2018), 287, 288–90, 314 Thank You for Smoking, 183 Thiel, Peter, 73 anti-wokeness and, 424 artificial intelligence and, 242 on EM’s life insurance policy, 88–89 on EM’s personality, 6 EM’s reconciliation with, 87, 183–84 Founders Fund and, 183–84, 240 libertarianism and, 423 OpenAI and, 242 PayPal coup and, 82, 83–84, 85, 86 “PayPal mafia” and, 183 PayPal merger and, 76, 77, 78, 79 Trump and, 261 Thompson, Chris, 149, 150, 151, 185 three musketeers (Twitter).


pages: 149 words: 43,747

How I Invest My Money: Finance Experts Reveal How They Save, Spend, and Invest by Brian Portnoy, Joshua Brown

asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, buy and hold, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, housing crisis, index fund, John Bogle, low interest rates, mental accounting, passive investing, prediction markets, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, time value of money, underbanked, Vanguard fund

Absolute return: Generates uncorrelated returns less dependent on the direction of equity and fixed income markets. Equities: Offers long-term capital appreciation. Real assets: Hedges against unexpected inflation and produces long-term total return. Sounds simple, but present-day investors continue to dissect far-reaching policy implications of COVID-19 government actions in 2020, which include fiscal policy and global monetary policy adding yet another round of stimulus to markets in an effort to rescue the US economy. Asset allocators are faced with recalibrating allocation models to incorporate increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.


pages: 424 words: 123,180

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

After the citizenship question controversy, the Trump administration had kept up its efforts to generate data about citizenship status—a series of efforts that failed to produce any usable data but probably succeeded in dissuading many people from cooperating with any shape or size of census taker. And in early March, as the first round of census self-response invitations went out in the mail, the COVID-19 pandemic had crashed the party. Our family hunkered down in New York City. We sewed our first masks from old dish towels. The Census Bureau paused its operations in the field. People started talking about “delaying” the release of census data, which sounded crazy to me.49 I didn’t realize how serious this crisis was.

Cohen, Lizabeth Cohen, Patricia Cline columns; deportations related to; for head of household; for income; for “Indians not taxed”; for migration; for occupation; padding affecting; race indicated in; for relation Combs, George Combs, Henry Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) Communists completeness computers concentration camps confidentiality: of census; Census Bureau promising; Congress tightening of; of data; draft and; World War II breaking Congress,7; census authorized by; census confidentiality tightened by; disfranchisement data presented to; see also House of Representatives congressional districts Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Conner, Eugene E. Constitution cooperation: census requiring; with enumerators; officials needing; wage reporting “Counting for Dollars 2020” (report) COVID-19 pandemic Craig, David R. Curtis, Cathrine data: for African American genealogies; algorithms trained by; Big; British colonial; in census; in China; computers impacting; confidentiality of; in controversy; democracy linked to; on disfranchisement; Douglass, F., in; Dublin, L., and; enumerators influencing; errors in; fear of; frame of; fraud deterred by; genealogies and histories of; House of Representatives divided by; of individuals; of Japanese Americans; machines reading; names in; as numbers; objectivity of; partners in; poem reframing; politics shaping; Question Men and; race in; reform directed by; representation shaped by; of sampling; silences in; small-area; in South Africa; stories in; as text; for training enumerators; World War II weaponization of Davis, Lillian Rita Dearborn, Mina H.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

The San Isidro Movement—a growing collective that includes many young Afro-Cuban artists and writers—was targeted by the new policies, and its members recorded and broadcast their own harassment and arrests over social media. Meanwhile, international human rights organizations documented an increase in arbitrary detentions. Even as the government sent doctors around the world to help other countries handle the Covid-19 crisis and as it organized a robust public health response on the island, it also used the pandemic to increase surveillance and to suppress protests, including one in June 2020 against police violence.20 * * * WHILE THE DEATH OF FIDEL Castro did not seem to change much in Cuba, the election of Donald Trump and the ensuing change in US Cuba policy had a substantial impact.

People woke up at 5 a.m. to get in line for chicken; bread prices increased by 20 percent; electricity rates tripled. Everywhere people began to talk about another Special Period, like the one that had followed the fall of the Soviet Union. The new crisis, said some, was even worse than that. It was not all Trump’s doing—there was the Covid-19 pandemic and a long history of low domestic productivity and inefficient central planning. After delaying for a long time, the government embarked on a policy to eliminate its long-standing dual currency system and unify the currency, a very painful process felt more acutely by people without access to hard currency, a group that grew in size during the Trump presidency.

., 86, 87, 112 Camagüey (province), 130, 134, 149, 188–89, 242, 245, 330 Camp Columbia, 237, 270, 318–19 Capablanca, José Raúl, 223 Cárdenas, Matanzas, 94, 102, 113, 123 Caridad del Cobre (Virgin of Charity), 34–39 cobrero community and cult of, 35–38, 74 cultural symbolism of, 2, 38–39, 129, 164, 208, 215, 413 story behind discovery of, 34–35, 39 Carter, Jimmy, 408, 412, 448, 449 Castellanos, Rosa, 131 Castro, Alejandro, 456 Castro, Fidel agrarian reform and, 328–31 Angolan alliance and, 426–29, 430–31 anti-American stand of, 322–23, 342–44, 347, 365 background of, 277–78 Batista’s military campaign against, 297–98, 311 Bay of Pigs invasion and, 356, 359, 361, 362 concerns about imminent US attack and, 375–76, 451 concerns about influence of communism on, 331–32, 336–37 consolidation of power in new government of, 320 Cuban exiles’ dialogue with, 409, 413 death of, 462–63 early revolutionary laws and, 323–25 foreign coverage of guerrilla struggle and, 300–305 fund raising by, 294–95 guerrilla warfare strategy of, 298, 299–300, 306, 307–8, 309–10 Guevara and, 291 Havana arrival of in 1959, 315, 316, 318–19 “History Will Absolve Me” speech of, 281–82, 339, 421 illness of, 453 Kennedy’s promise not to invade Cuba and, 381 La Plata victory of, 299–300 manifestos of, 278, 294, 337 Martí invoked by, 278, 281, 286–87, 304 Marxism and, 285–86 Mexican exile of, 294–96 Miami Pact against Batista and, 309 missile crisis and, 374, 375–76, 377–78, 379–80 Moncada barracks attack by, 278–83, 286, 290, 421 naming of 26th of July movement by, 294 nationalization of US property by, 347–49 Nixon’s meeting and report on, 327–28 Obama’s policy and, 431, 455, 462, 463 organizational alliances within Cuba and, 295 popular support for, at 1959 Moncada celebration, 332–33 prime minister position of, 323, 331, 332–33 propaganda used by, 300–302 public opinion used by, 279–80 purging of Batista officials by, 320–22 reading on revolution by, 283–85 Rectification campaign and, 436 return from Mexico and Cuban landing of, 296–98 revolutionary movements in other countries and, 421–23, 424 Sierra Maestra Manifesto of, 307–8, 309 Soviet withdrawal of troops from Cuba and, 437–38 Trump’s election and, 463 US monitoring of new government of, 325–26 US visit by, 325–28 Castro, Raúl, 347 Angolan alliance and, 426 Fidel’s illness and interim presidency of, 453–54 foreign investment and, 443 military actions of, 297, 310, 316 missile crisis and, 370–71 Moncada barracks attack by, 278–79, 282 Obama’s Cuba policy and, 457–58 Obama’s meeting with, 431 presidency of, 454–55, 463 reforms under, 463 Soviet visit of, 370–71 Trump’s election and, 463 US-Cuba relationship and, 454, 457–58 Cazneau, Jane McManus, 112 Céspedes, Carlos Manuel de (father), 129, 130–32, 133, 281 Céspedes, Carlos Manuel de (son), 236, 238, 239 Chaparra Sugar Company, 188–90, 204, 210, 214, 240, 242, 244 Charleston (city), 60, 74, 108, 119 Chávez, Hugo, 448 Chibás, Eduardo, 252, 265–70, 271, 277 Chibás, Raúl, 307, 309 children and Cuban Revolution, 387–89 China contract workers from, 124–25, 133, 134 trade with Cuba and, 465 Chinese Cubans, migration of, 406 Christianity, and Spain’s colonization of Cuba, 13, 15, 16–17, 18–19, 20 Christophe, Henri, 75, 468 Churchill, Winston, 147, 389 CIA Bay of Pigs invasion and, 356–57, 358–61, 362, 363–64 Cuban exiles working for, 404–5 Eisenhower’s Cuba policy and, 345–46 Cienfuegos, Camilo, 292, 316 Civil War (US), 119–25, 154, 157, 159 Cleaver, Eldridge, 394 Clinton, Bill, 417, 441, 447, 450 Clinton, Hillary, 462, 463 Cocking, Francis Ross, 99–100 Cold War, 5–6, 335–36, 337, 349, 407, 451, 459 coletillas, 339–40 Columbus, Christopher, 7, 9–15, 16, 29, 224, 353 celebrations of discovery myth of, 10–11 Cuba landings by, 9, 11, 13–14, 15 first permanent settlement by, 14 Spanish backing for, 9–10, 13, 14–15 US origin stories and, 11–13 Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), 348, 366, 389, 414, 448 communism Castro and, 285–87, 303, 325, 335–37, 367, 438 concerns about influence on 1959 revolution of, 331–32, 336–37 concerns about influence on 1933 revolution of, 241, 246 Communist Party Batista’s legalization of, 250 Castro’s presidency of, 454 founding of, 227 Mella’s shooting and, 228 1940 constitutional convention and, 251–52, 254–55 26th of July Movement and, 311 Concilio Cubano, 448–49, 450 Confederacy (Civil War), 119–25 Conservative Party, 197, 198, 201, 210 Constitution (1869), 132, 257 Constitution (1901) Grau’s desire for rewriting of, 238, 244 Platt Amendment and, 179–80, 187, 192, 238, 251 US occupation and, 176–80 Constitution (1940) anti-discrimination amendment debates in, 254–57 Batista and, 251, 468 convention for drafting of, 251–57 rights under sections of, 257–58 Constitution (1976) foreign investment under, 443 petition for political and economic reforms under, 449 socialism affirmed in, 408–9, 449, 463 Constitution (2019), 463 Constitutional Army, 202 Continental Congress, 57, 59, 60–61 conuco system, 17–18, 70 Coolidge, Calvin, 224–26, 228, 240 copper mining, 33–39 Cortés, Hernán, 21, 24 Cortina, Manuel, 252 Cosme Osorio, Gregorio, 37–38 Coubre ship explosion, 342–43, 344 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), 399, 436 Covid-19 crisis, 464, 465 Crittenden, William, 113–14 Crowder, Enoch, 219, 226 Cruz, Celia, 332 Cuba American Revolution and, 3, 59, 60, 61–62, 63, 64, 164, 165 annexationism and, 3–4, 82–87, 90–91, 100, 105, 112–13, 115–16, 123 Bay of Pigs invasion and, 354–68, 398 Columbus and, 9, 11, 13–14, 15 conquest and colonization of by Spain, 13–14, 16–17, 18–21, 28–29 cultural production in, 98, 195–96, 264–65 Eisenhower’s breaking of diplomatic relations with, 349 foreign policy of after 1959, 338, 421–31, 443, 449, 465 geography of, 13–14, 15, 24, 82, 84, 133 Haitian Revolution’s impact on, 72–73 independence celebrations in, 185–86 Indigenous people in, 14, 16–22 missile crisis and, 369–82, 398 Monroe Doctrine’s protection of US stake in, 94–95 Soviet relations with 338–39, 381, 399, 424, 436–38 suppression of dissident groups in, 448–49, 450, 454, 464 trade between United States and before 1959, 85–86, 91–93, 186, 191–92 US economic embargo against, 379, 382, 441, 450, 458, 460, 461, 465 US interventions in, 153, 163–64, 204, 210, 219 US military occupations of, 168–81, 185, 204–5 Cuba Land, Loan and Title Guarantee Company, 187 Cuban Adjustment Act (1966; US), 407 Cuban American National Foundation, 418, 441 Cuban Americans.


Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

Since a preprint can be posted online without any oversight, we should certainly be extra sceptical about them, while scientists should have the intellectual humility not to publicise their work before it’s been at least looked over by their peers.86 As the scientific ecosystem changes, journalists will become more aware that there are different ‘stages’ of scientific publication and that they should be particularly cautious of papers that are still at the earlier ones. Soon after the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020, preprints appeared on a major biological preprint server that sparked widespread discussion about the origins and effects of the virus. Some of the papers were of obviously low quality, rushed out to capitalise on the media frenzy about the pandemic. Others included phrasing that, whether inadvertently or otherwise, seemed to stoke conspiracy theories about the virus having been designed deliberately as a biological weapon.

ABC News abortion Abu Ghraib prison abuse (2003) accidental discoveries Acta Crystallographica Section E acupuncture Afghan hounds Agence France-Presse AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) Alchemist, The (Bega) Alexander, Benita Alexander, Scott algorithms allergies Alzheimer, Aloysius Alzheimer’s Disease Amazon American Journal of Potato Research Amgen amygdala amyloid cascade hypothesis anaesthesia awareness Fujii affair (2012) outcome switching Anaesthesia & Analgesia animal studies antidepressants antipsychotics archaeology Arnold, Frances arsenic artificial tracheas asthma austerity Australia Austria autism aviation Babbage, Charles Bacon, Francis bacteria Bargh, John Bayer Bayes, Thomas Bayesian statistics BDNF gene Before You Know It (Bargh) Bega, Cornelis Begley, Sharon Belgium Bell Labs Bem, Daryl benzodiazepines bias blinding and conflict of interest De Vries’ study (2018) funding and groupthink and meaning well bias Morton’s skull studies p-hacking politics and publication bias randomisation and sexism and Bik, Elisabeth Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Biomaterials biology amyloid cascade hypothesis Bik’s fake images study (2016) Boldt affair (2010) cell lines China, misconduct in Hwang affair (2005–6) Macchiarini affair (2015–16) meta-scientific research microbiome studies Morton’s skull studies Obokata affair (2014) outcome switching preprints publication bias replication crisis Reuben affair (2009) spin and statistical power and Summerlin affair (1974) Wakefield affair (1998–2010) biomedical papers bird flu bispectral index monitor black holes Black Lives Matter blinding blotting BMJ, The Boldt, Joachim books Borges, Jorge Luis Boulez, Pierre Boyle, Robert brain imaging Brass Eye vii British Medical Journal Brock, Jon bronchoscopy Broockman, David Brown, Nick Bush, George Walker business studies BuzzFeed News California Walnut Commission California wildfires (2017) Canada cancer cell lines collaborative projects faecal transplants food and publication bias and replication crisis and sleep and spin and candidate genes carbon-based transistors Cardiff University cardiovascular disease Carlisle, John Carlsmith, James Carney, Dana cash-for-publication schemes cataracts Cell cell lines Cell Transplantation Center for Open Science CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) chi-squared tests childbirth China cash-for-publication schemes cell line mix-ups in Great Famine (1959–1961) misconduct cases in randomisation fraud in chrysalis effect Churchill, Winston churnalism Cifu, Adam citations clickbait climate change cloning Clostridium difficile cochlear implants Cochrane Collaboration coercive citation coffee cognitive dissonance cognitive psychology cognitive tests coin flipping Colbert Report, The Cold War collaborative projects colonic irrigation communality COMPare Trials COMT gene confidence interval conflict of interest Conservative Party conspicuous consumption Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) ‘Coping with Chaos’ (Stapel) Cornell University coronavirus (COVID-19) Corps of Engineers correlation versus causation corticosteroids Cotton, Charles Caleb creationism Crowe, Russell Csiszar, Alex Cuddy, Amy CV (curriculum vitae) cyber-bullying cystic fibrosis Daily Mail Daily Telegraph Darwin Memorial, The’ (Huxley) Darwin, Charles Das, Dipak datasets fraudulent Observational publication bias Davies, Phil Dawkins, Richard De Niro, Robert De Vries, Ymkje Anna debt-to-GDP ratio Deer, Brian democratic peace theory Denmark Department of Agriculture, US depression desk rejections Deutsche Bank disabilities discontinuous mind disinterestedness DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) domestication syndrome doveryai, no proveryai Duarte, José Duke University duloxetine Dutch Golden Age Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research Dweck, Carol economics austerity preprints statistical power and effect size Einstein, Albert Elmo Elsevier engineering epigenetics euthanasia evolutionary biology exaggeration exercise Experiment, The exploratory analyses extrasensory perception faecal transplants false-positive errors Fanelli, Daniele Festinger, Leon file-drawer problem financial crisis (2007–8) Fine, Cordelia Fisher, Ronald 5 sigma evidence 5-HT2a gene 5-HTTLPR gene fixed mindset Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Frequency Questionnaires food psychology Formosus, Pope foxes France Francis, Pope Franco, Annie fraud images investigation of motives for numbers Open Science and peer review randomisation Freedom of Information Acts French, Chris Fryer, Roland Fujii, Yoshitaka funding bias and fraud and hype and long-term funding perverse incentive and replication crisis and statistical power and taxpayer money funnel plots Future of Science, The (Nielsen) gay marriage Gelman, Andrew genetically modified crops genetics autocorrect errors candidate genes collaborative projects gene therapy genome-wide association studies (GWASs) hype in salami-slicing in Geneva, Switzerland geoscience Germany Getty Center GFAJ-1 Giner-Sorolla, Roger Glasgow Effect Goldacre, Ben Goldsmiths, University of London Golgi Apparatus good bacteria Good Morning America good scientific citizenship Goodhart’s Law Goodstein, David Google Scholar Górecki, Henryk Gould, Stephen Jay Gran Sasso, Italy grants, see funding Granularity-Related Inconsistency of Means (GRIM) grapes Great Recession (2007–9) Great Red Spot of Jupiter Green, Donald Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Gross, Charles ground-breaking results groupthink ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’ (Reinhart and Rogoff) growth mindset Guzey, Alexey gynaecology h-index H5N1 Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson Hankins, Matthew HARKing Harris, Sidney Harvard University headache pills heart attacks heart disease Heathers, James height Heilongjiang University Heino, Matti Henry IV (Shakespeare) Higgs Boson Hirsch, Jorge HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) homosexuality Hong Kong Hooke, Robert Hossenfelder, Sabine Houston, Texas Hume, David Huxley, Thomas Henry Hwang, Woo-Suk hydroxyethyl starch hype arsenic life affair (2010) books correlation versus causation cross-species leap language and microbiome studies news stories nutrition and press releases spin unwarranted advice hypotheses Ig Nobel Prize images, fraudulent impact factor India insomnia International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology Ioannidis, John IQ tests Iraq War (2003–11) Italy Japan John, Elton Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology Journal of Environmental Quality Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine Journal of Personality and Social Psychology journals conflict of interest disclosure fraud and hype and impact factor language in mega-journals negligence and Open Science and peer review, see peer review predatory journals preprints publication bias rent-seeking replication studies retraction salami slicing subscription fees Jupiter Kahneman, Daniel Kalla, Joshua Karolinska Institute Krasnodar, Russia Krugman, Paul Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words (Cotton) LaCour, Michael Lancet Fine’s ‘feminist science’ article (2018) Macchiarini affair (2015–16) Wakefield affair (1998–2010) language Large Hadron Collider Le Texier, Thibault Lewis, Jason Lexington Herald-Leader Leyser, Ottoline Lilienfeld, Scott Loken, Eric Lost in Math (Hossenfelder) low-fat diet low-powered studies Lumley, Thomas Lysenko, Trofim Macbeth (Shakespeare) Macbeth effect Macchiarini, Paolo MacDonald, Norman machine learning Macleod, Malcolm Macroeconomics major depressive disorder Malaysia Mao Zedong MARCH1 Marcus, Adam marine biology Markowetz, Florian Matthew Effect Maxims and Moral Reflections (MacDonald) McCartney, Gerry McCloskey, Deirdre McElreath, Richard meaning well bias Measles, Mumps & Rubella (MMR) measurement errors Medawar, Peter medical research amyloid cascade hypothesis Boldt affair (2010) cell lines China, misconduct in collaborative projects Fujii affair (2012) Hwang affair (2005–6) Macchiarini affair (2015–16) meta-scientific research Obokata affair (2014) outcome switching pharmaceutical companies preprints pre-registration publication bias replication crisis Reuben affair (2009) spin and statistical power and Summerlin affair (1974) Wakefield affair (1998–2010) medical reversal Medical Science Monitor Mediterranean Diet Merton, Robert Mertonian Norms communality disinterestedness organised scepticism universalism meta-science Boldt affair (2010) chrysalis effect De Vries’ study (2018) Fanelli’s study (2010) Ioannidis’ article (2005) Macleod’s studies mindset studies (2018) saturated fats studies spin and stereotype threat studies mice microbiome Microsoft Excel Milgram, Stanley Mill, John Stuart Mindset (Dweck) mindset concept Mismeasure of Man, The (Gould) Modi, Narendra money priming Mono Lake, California Moon, Hyung-In Morton, Samuel Motyl, Matt multiverse analysis nanotechnology National Academy of Sciences National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Institutes of Health National Science Foundation Nature cash-for-publication and cell line editorial (1981) impact factor language in Obokata affair (2014) Open Access and open letter on statistical significance (2019) replication research Schön affair (2002) Stapel affair (2011) Nature Neuroscience Nature Reviews Cancer NBC negligence cell line mix-ups numerical errors statistical power typos Netflix Netherlands replication studies in Stapel’s racism studies statcheck research neuroscience amyloid cascade hypothesis collaborative projects Macleod’s animal research studies replication crisis sexism and statistical significance and Walker’s sleep studies neutrinos New England Journal of Medicine New York Times New Zealand news media Newton, Isaac Nielsen, Michael Nimoy, Leonard No Country for Old Men Nobel Prize northern blots Nosek, Brian Novella, Steven novelty Novum Organum (Bacon) Nuijten, Michèle nullius in verba, numerical errors nutrition Obama, Barack obesity Obokata, Haruko observational datasets obstetrics ocean acidification oesophagus ‘Of Essay-Writing’ (Hume) Office for Research Integrity, US Oldenburg, Henry Open Access Open Science OPERA experiment (2011) Oransky, Ivan Orben, Amy Organic Syntheses organised scepticism Osborne, George outcome-switching overfitting Oxford University p-value/hacking alternatives to Fine and low-powered studies and microbiome studies and nutritional studies and Open Science and outcome-switching perverse incentive and pre-registration and screen time studies and spin and statcheck and papers abstracts citations growth rates h-index introductions method sections results sections salami slicing self-plagiarism university ranks and Parkinson’s disease particle-accelerator experiments peanut allergies peer review coercive citation fraudulent groupthink and LaCour affair (2014–15) Preprints productivity incentives and randomisation and toxoplasma gondii scandal (1961) volunteer Wakefield affair (1998–2010) penicillin Peoria, Illinois Perspectives in Psychological Science perverse incentive cash for publications competition CVs and evolutionary analogy funding impact factor predatory journals salami slicing self-plagiarism Pett, Joel pharmaceutical companies PhDs Philosophical Transactions phlogiston phosphorus Photoshop Physical Review physics placebos plagiarism Plan S Planck, Max plane crashes PLOS ONE pluripotency Poehlman, Eric politics polygenes polyunsaturated fatty acids Popper, Karl populism pornography positive feedback loops positive versus null results, see publication bias post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) power posing Prasad, Vinay pre-registration preclinical studies predatory journals preprints Presence (Cuddy) press releases Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea (PREDIMED) priming Princeton University Private Eye probiotics Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences prosthetic limbs Przybylski, Andrew psychic precognition Psychological Medicine psychology Bargh’s priming study (1996) Bem’s precognition studies books Carney and Cuddy’s power posing studies collaborative projects data sharing study (2006) Dweck’s mindset concept Festinger and Carlsmith’s cognitive dissonance studies Kahneman’s priming studies LaCour’s gay marriage experiment politics and preprints publication bias in Shanks’ priming studies Stanford Prison Experiment Stapel’s racism studies statistical power and Wansink’s food studies publication bias publish or perish Pubpeer Pythagoras’s theorem Qatar quantum entanglement racism Bargh’s priming studies Morton’s skull studies Stapel’s environmental studies randomisation Randy Schekman Reagan, Ronald recommendation algorithms red grapes Redfield, Rosemary Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (Babbage) Reinhart, Carmen Rennie, Drummond rent-seeking replication; replication crisis Bargh’s priming study Bem’s precognition studies biology and Carney and Cuddy’s power posing studies chemistry and economics and engineering and geoscience and journals and Kahneman’s priming studies marine biology and medical research and neuroscience and physics and Schön’s carbon-based transistor Stanford Prison Experiment Stapel’s racism studies Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life study reproducibility Republican Party research grants research parasites resveratrol retraction Arnold Boldt Fujii LaCour Macchiarini Moon Obokata Reuben Schön Stapel Wakefield Wansink Retraction Watch Reuben, Scott Reuters RIKEN Rogoff, Kenneth romantic priming Royal Society Rundgren, Todd Russia doveryai, no proveryai foxes, domestication of Macchiarini affair (2015–16) plagiarism in salami slicing same-sex marriage sample size sampling errors Sanna, Lawrence Sasai, Yoshiki saturated fats Saturn Saudi Arabia schizophrenia Schoenfeld, Jonathan Schön, Jan Hendrik School Psychology International Schopenhauer, Arthur Science acceptance rate Arnold affair (2020) arsenic life affair (2010) cash-for-publication and Hwang affair (2005) impact factor LaCour affair (2014–15) language in Macbeth effect study (2006) Open Access and pre-registration investigation (2020) replication research Schön affair (2002) Stapel affair (2011) toxoplasma gondii scandal (1961) Science Europe Science Media Centre scientific journals, see journals scientific papers, see papers Scientific World Journal, The Scotland Scottish Socialist Party screen time self-citation self-correction self-plagiarism self-sustaining systems Seoul National University SEPT2 Sesame Street sexism sexual selection Shakespeare, William Shanks, David Shansky, Rebecca Simmons, Joseph Simonsohn, Uri Simpsons, The skin grafts Slate Star Codex Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute Smaldino, Paul Smeesters, Dirk Smith, Richard Snuppy social media South Korea Southern blot Southern, Edwin Soviet Union space science special relativity specification-curve analysis speed-accuracy trade-off Spies, Jeffrey spin Springer Srivastava, Sanjay Stalin, Joseph Stanford University Dweck’s mindset concept file-drawer project (2014) Prison Experiment (1971) Schön affair (2002) STAP (Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency) Stapel, Diederik statcheck statistical flukes statistical power statistical significance statistical tests Status Quo stem cells Stephen VI, Pope stereotype threat Sternberg, Robert strokes subscription fees Summerlin, William Sweden Swift, Jonathan Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Sydney Morning Herald Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Górecki) t-tests Taiwan taps-aff.co.uk tax policies team science TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Texas sharpshooter analogy Thatcher, Margaret theory of special relativity Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman) Thomson Reuters Tilburg University Titan totalitarianism toxoplasma gondii trachea translational research transparency Tribeca Film Festival triplepay system Trump, Donald trust in science ‘trust, but verify’ Tumor Biology Turkey Tuulik, Julia Twitter typos UK Reproducibility Network Ulysses pact United Kingdom austerity cash-for-publication schemes image duplication in multiverse analysis study (2019) National Institute for Health Research pre-registration in Royal Society submarines trust in science university ranks in Wakefield affair (1998–2010) United States Arnold affair (2020) arsenic life affair (2010) austerity Bargh’s priming study (1996) Bem’s precognition studies California wildfires (2017) Carney and Cuddy’s power posing studies Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion climate science in creationism in Das affair (2012) De Vries’ drug study (2018) Department of Agriculture Dweck’s mindset concept Fryer’s police brutality study (2016) image duplication in Kahneman’s priming studies LaCour affair (2014–15) Morton’s skull studies Office for Research Integrity Poehlman affair (2006) pre-registration in public domain laws Reuben affair (2009) Stanford Prison Experiment Summerlin affair (1974) tenure Walker’s sleep studies Wansink affair (2016) universalism universities cash-for-publication schemes fraud and subscription fees and team science University College London University of British Columbia University of California Berkeley Los Angeles University of Connecticut University of East Anglia University of Edinburgh University of Hertfordshire University of London University of Pennsylvania unsaturated fats unwarranted advice vaccines Vamplew, Peter Vanity Fair Vatican Vaxxed Viagra vibration-of-effects analysis virology Wakefield, Andrew Walker, Matthew Wansink, Brian Washington Post weasel wording Weisberg, Michael Wellcome Trust western blots Westfall, Jake ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’ (Ioannidis) Why We Sleep (Walker) Wiley Wiseman, Richard Wolfe-Simon, Felisa World as Will and Presentation, The (Schopenhauer) World Health Organisation (WHO) Yale University Yarkoni, Tal Yes Men Yezhov, Nikolai Z-tests Ziliak, Stephen Zimbardo, Philip Zola, Émile About the Author Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

This year, the arrival of the swallows was tinged with tragedy. The birds we encountered on the beach, which seemed so vital and alert, were storm-tossed and exhausted. The preceding days had seen high winds over the Mediterranean and the Aegean, which proved a disaster for the migrating birds – and thousands died. The first summer of Covid-19 was also, in many parts of Europe, a summer without swallows.1 Nonetheless, the swallows’ appearance that April morning had a transformative effect on me, shocking me out of lockdown stasis and giving me a renewed sense of attention and purpose. Having lived in cities all my adult life, I was exposed, for what felt like the first time, to the exuberance of spring: the arrival of the swallows, the blooming of euphorbia and saxifrage, budding anemone and bougainvillea.

Ross 181–3, 185 aspens 77 astrobiology 87 atomic bomb 224–5 Augustin, Regynald 156 Australopithecus 88 Author of the Acacia Seeds, The 169–71 automatic machine see Turing machine Autonomous Trap 26–7, 26, 204 autonomous vehicles 23–6, 65, 275 avocados 108 Babbage, Charles 30 baboons 32, 52–55, 64, 74 bacteria 17, 87–8, 104–10, 236–7, 248, 300 badgers 291 Barabási, Albert-László 81 Barad, Karen 84–6, 130, 249 Basilicata 138, 140–43 bears 1, 89–90, 92, 266, 290–91, 293–4 beavers 256 BeeAdHoc (computer programme) 262 beech 125, 142 Beer, Stafford 184–91, 211, 214–15, 230 bees 145, 187, 258–62 Bergson, Henri 279 Berners-Lee, Tim 81 birch 60, 118, 124, 138, 279 Black Language 168 Black Lives Matter 155 Blake, William 16 Blas, Zach 208 Boeing X-37 136 Bonner, John Tyler 238–9 bonobos 37, 50, 98 Boran (people) 146 Bornmuellera tymphaea 309 Boulez, Pierre 229 Boulle, Marcellin 90 Bouvet, Joachim 234 bow-wow theory 148 Brainfuck (programming language) 161–2 Brassica juncea 310 Bruniquel cave 92 buen vivir 268 cacti 64, 235, 294 Cage, John 227–35, 241, 242, 312 Cambridge Analytica 155 cantu a tenòre 148 capuchin monkeys 163 Caputo, Francesco 143 Caputo, Matteo 143 caribou 120 Carrol, Lewis 180 Carson, Rachel 12, 15 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 18 caterpillars 65 Cecilia (chimpanzee) 265 cedars 138 cephalopods 47–51 CERN 81 Charlotte (gibbon) 32 Chassenée, Bartholomew 252 Chaucer, Geoffrey 152 Chernobyl 293 Chesapeake Bay Model 202, 203, 204 chestnuts 61, 118 Children of Time 49 chimpanzees 36–37, 50, 55–6, 88, 98, 145 choice machine see oracle machine Christ Stopped at Eboli 140 Christmas Island 293, 295 Chua, Leon O. 194 Chucho (bear) 266 Churchill, Winston 18 Citizens’ Assembly 243–5 Clarke, Arthur C. 158 climate change 5–6, 121–4, 242–5, 282, 301–2 climate modelling 78–9 Cloud (computing) 111–12, 158–9 Cochran, William 285, 297 cockatoos 163 Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot see Roachbot cockroaches 212, 258 cognitive diversity 246–8 Colossus (computer) 220 ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ 29 Conway’s Game of Life 161 corn 75 Corraro, Rosina 143 cougars 290 Covid-19 114 cows 140, 143, 149, 265, 302 crabs 48, 195–7, 256, 293, 293–5, 293, 307, 312 cuckoos 118 cuttlefish 47, 49 Cybernetic Factory 185, 186, 189–90 Cybernetic Serendipity 231 cybernetics 181–90, 214 Dallol see Danakil Depression Danakil Depression 86–8, 104 Daphnia 188–9, 191, 198 Darwin, Charles 12, 34–6, 72, 89, 127–30, 129, 235, 239 Darwin, Francis 127–30, 129 De Anima 122 de Martino, Ernesto 141–2 de Waal, Frans 39 Debord, Guy 24 decentralization 49, 208–10, 213, 280 DeepMind 8, 275 deer 65, 77, 258, 290–93, 298–9, 299 Delphi 174, 177 demilitarized zone (DMZ) 292 Denisova Cave 96 denisovans 96–8, 100 Denny (denisovan) 97, 100 Descartes, René 16 Descent of Man, The 36 Dimkaroski, Ljubem 90 ding-dong theory 147 Dinkinesh (Australopithecus) 88 distributed computing 209 Divje Babe 90–91, 91 DNA 95–7, 103–7 dodder vine 75 dogs 147–8, 163, 302 spinal dog 184, 212 Dolphin Embassy 165–6, 165 dolphins 37–8, 41–2, 145, 166, 170, 263, 286 Doolittle, Ford 109–10 Duchamp, Marcel 128–31, 129 ducks 256 earthquakes 302–3 Ebonics 168 EDVAC (computer) 223, 230 Eglash, Ron 156 elephants 34, 38–9, 40–44, 41, 64, 250–51, 263–5, 278, 291–2, 296, 312 Elmer (robot tortoise) 180 Elsie (robot tortoise) 180 email apnea 155 Emojicode (programming language) 161, 173 endosymbiosis 108 ENIAC (computer) 225, 230 Epirus 1–5, 308–9, 311 Epstein, Jean 138 ERNIE (computer) 220–22, 221, 222, 226, 236 Euglena 188–91 Euler, Leonhard 81 European Green Belt 292 evolution 12, 54, 67, 71, 96, 102, 146, 164, 235, 241, 247, 311 of computers 222 convergent evolution 42, 51, 231, 262 Darwin’s theories 36, 89, 128, 132, 235, 256 process 107–12 randomness 235–40 tree of evolution 47, 50–51, 96, 100 Explanation of Binary Arithmetic 234 Facebook 154, 275 ethics 277 gender categories 111–12, 208 language applications 167–9, 173 Fensom, Harry 220 finches 132, 235, 239 firs 60, 142, 279 Flowers, Tommy 220 Folding@home 209 Forte, Giovanni 143, 144 fossil fuels 3–6 Franklin, Benjamin 248 Fredkin, Edward 195 Frisch, Karl von 259 fungi 11, 17, 60–63, 78–82, 106–8, 128, 192, 290 Gagliano, Monica 71–5, 127, 303, 319 Gaia (goddess) 174, 190, 215 Gaia theory 190 Gallup, Gordon G., Jr 36, 39 Ganges River 266 gannets 132 Gates, Bill 8, 275 Gaup, Ingor Ántte Áilu 150 Gebru, Timnit 277 geese 164, 170 General Morphology of Organisms 11 ghost populations 88, 98 gibbons 32–4, 33, 38–9, 42, 52, 64, 312 goats 1, 140, 143, 148, 293, 302 Göbekli Tepe 93–4, 93 Godfrey-Smith, Peter 50 Gombe Stream National Park 55 gomphotheres 108 Goodall, Jane 55–6, 263 Google 8, 111, 154, 211, 241, 269, 275 ethics 156, 277 oil and gas applications 5–6 language applications 163, 167, 169 gorillas 44–7, 44, 98 Grant, Peter 236 Grant, Rosemary 236 graph theory 81 Great Chain of Being 123 Greece 1–5, 114, 216 Greenpeace 5 Griffith, Frederick 105 grouse 150 Grumpy (elephant) 40 Guantánamo Bay 296 Gudynas, Eduardo 268 gulls 133, 256 habeas corpus 41, 264–6, 270, 296 Hadza (people) 146 Haeckel, Ernst 11–12, 105, 239–40, 240 Hagenback, Karl 254 Half-Earth Project 305–6 Happy (elephant) 39–41, 41, 263–5, 273, 296 Haudenosaunee see Iroquois Confederacy Hawira, Turama 267 hawks 256 hawthorn 118 Heritage Foundation 277 Herodotus 3 Hertz, Garnet 212–13 Hilbert, David 178 Hiller, Lejaren 230–31, 233 Hofstadter, Douglas 262 Holmes, Rob 203 homeostat, 181–3, 182, 187, 206, 215 honey 143–6 honeyguides 143–6, 164 horizontal gene transfer 105–7 hornbeam 118 Hotbits 222 HPSCHD (composition) 230–32 Hribal, Jason 253–5 Hubble Space Telescope 135 HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee 154 Humboldt, Alexander von 239 Huxley, Aldous 113, 208 hyenas 257 hyperaccumulators 308–10 I Ching 228–231, 228, 234, 242 IBM 4–5 ICARUS (animal tracking) 284, 300, 302–3 ICHING (computer programme) 230–31 iguanas 296 ILLIAC (computer) 230 IM see instant messaging Inky (octopus) 48 instant messaging 152–3, 172–3 Institute of Contemporary Art 231 International Meridian Conference 116 International Space Station (ISS) 284 internet 80–82 Iroquois Confederacy 248 Island (novel) 113 Israeli Defense Forces 295 jackdaws 163 jaguars 294 jaguarundi cats 294 James Webb Space Telescope 135 jellyfish 180 Jenny (orang-utan) 34–6, 35 joik 149–50, 312 Keyhole (satellite) 136 Khan-Dossos, Navine 140 khoomei 149 Kidder, Tracy 117 King, William 89 King Solomon’s Ring 163 klepsydra 216–17, 217 klerotereion 218–19, 243 Koko (gorilla) 44, 45, 47 Konstantinou, Maria 309 Kowalsczewski, Bruno 91 Kropotkin, Peter 256–7, 279 Kunstforum der Natur 239, 240 Lack, David 132–3, 285 Land Art 203 Landsat 137, 137–9, 139 lapwing 256 laurel 174 Lavarand 222 Le Guin, Ursula 13, 169–71 Leakey, Louis 56 Lederberg, Esther 105 Lederberg, Joshua 105 Legg, Shane 8, 275 lemurs 163 Leptoplax emarginata 309 Levi, Carlo 141 lichens 107, 171 Liebniz, Gottfried 234 Lindauer, Martin 259–60, 284 lions 77, 257 Lord, Rexford 285, 297 Lorenz, Konrad 163–4 Lovelace, Ada 30 Lovelock, James 190 LUCA (last universal common ancestor) 103 Lucy (Australopithecus) see Dinkinesh Lukyanov, Valdimir 199–200, 199 lynx 290 macaques 42–4, 64, 254 machine learning 30, 63 Mandelbrot, Benoit 102 mangroves 138 Mansfield, Lord (William Murray) 264 Margulis, Lyn 108, 110, 112 Marino, Lori 38 Marsham, Robert 118 Marsham record 118–21 Matera 140 Maxine (elephant) 39 Maxwell, Sarah 301 McLuhan, Marshall 18 memristors 124–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 150 Metropolis, Nick 225 mice 187 Michael (gorilla) 45, 47 Microsoft 5, 8, 154 Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, A 226, 226 mimosa 71–4, 127–8, 192, 195, 303 Mimosa pudica see mimosa Ministry for the Future, The 282 mirror test 36–46, 181 Mississippi Basin Model 201–2, 204 Mondrian, Piet 161 MONIAC 205, 205–7 Monte Carlo 225–7, 242 Moore, Michael 135 Morgan-Mar, David 161 moths 180 mouse-eared cress see rock cress Muir, John 11 Müller, Max 146–8 Müller, Urban 161 Museum of the Ancient Agora 216–18 Musk, Elon 8, 158, 275 Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution 256 mycorrhiza 60–62, 77–9, 81–2, 194 mynah birds 113 NASA see National Aeronautics and Space Administration Nasser, Ramsey 160–61 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 135, 137–9, 284, 286 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 137–8, 286 National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) 135 neanderthals 89–92, 94–8, 100 network theory 81 neural networks 24–5, 25, 82, 166, 275, 312 NEXRAD (Next-generation radar) 133, 134 Niassa National Reserve 143 nightingales 118 nightjars 118 non-binary activism 208 computing 208–9, 213, 312 identity 112 Nonhuman Rights Project 41, 263–5, 296 nutation 128, 197 oak 118–19, 124 ocelots 294 octopuses 111, 47–51, 73, 197, 209 oil industry 4–6 oleander 174 On the Origin of Species 11, 36, 89 Ook!


pages: 191 words: 51,242

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

INEQUALITY, HEALTH, AND ANXIETY How does economic inequality affect the physical and mental health of individuals? Wilkinson and Pickett insist on the cardinal importance of public services. The high quality of such services in the least inegalitarian societies, especially in connection with health care, has positive effects that are almost universally felt. This became evident in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the United States and countries without universal health care. Deprived of affordable health care, the poorest segments of society cannot be properly treated, placing them as well as society as a whole at high risk. Inequality in access to basic services such as health care affects all social groups: this is the idea that underlay the introduction of national health insurance schemes in the United Kingdom and France right after World War II.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

And Americans pride themselves on being independent and resourceful in a crisis. The same spirit that drove Clara Barton, a government clerk with no training in health care, to bring medical supplies and comforting words to wounded Union soldiers in Washington at the start of the Civil War would carry Americans through the plague of COVID-19. Here finally was a crisis that could pull Americans together as hadn’t happened in the two decades since September 11, 2001. The biology of a pandemic is designed to show the limits of individualism and affirm a truth that’s too hard to keep in mind—our common humanity. Everyone is vulnerable.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Graham Burnett, and also to Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Jesse Prinz, John Tresch, Natasha Dow Schüll, and all the other participants. I extend special thanks to all the brave pioneers who participated in the open and experimental Zoom seminar that I conducted on Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment from March to May 2020, while under quarantine in New York and suffering from COVID-19 and its after-effects (another sort of viral hit). I thank in particular Ognian Kassabov, Jake McNulty, Catherine Wilson, and Johanna Winant for their contributions. That seminar was an absolute lifeline for me, and its impact on my thinking is evident on nearly every page—not only the ones that discuss Kant.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Millennials ephemeralized against their will, with rent replacing ownership and housing costs contributing to a fall in mobility. As Airbnb caused prices in its neighborhoods to rise, its single most popular property was a geodesic cabin in California. The greatest test of Fuller’s philosophy was the coronavirus pandemic, which initially seemed like a definitive moment of emergence through emergency. Fuller blamed his daughter’s death, which changed his life, on the conditions that contributed to the Spanish flu, and his views on decentralization, efficient manufacturing, online education, and remote working are more relevant now than ever.


pages: 184 words: 60,229

Re-Educated: Why It’s Never Too Late to Change Your Life by Lucy Kellaway

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, lockdown, Martin Wolf, stakhanovite, wage slave

Nick Robinson, who was doing the interview, cut in briskly: ‘So what you are talking about is basically a luxury for privileged older people.’ I snapped that in just ten minutes’ time, before most journalists got out of bed, I would be on playground duty in the pouring rain. That wasn’t luxury as I understood it. ‘Point taken,’ he said. About a year after this, Now Teach got a boost from an even more unexpected quarter, Covid-19. As the working world came to a virtual stop, furloughed or Zoomed, people started to wonder what were the things in life that really mattered. The conclusion, for many, was that teaching mattered, and maybe they should try it. Every month in the pre-Covid era, we would hold an information evening for middle-aged professionals who wanted to know more about teaching.


pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

The company has perfected reusable rocket technology, allowing it to bring rocket bodies back to Earth and fly them again, while its rivals continue to dump their once-used hardware into the ocean. SpaceX has also started a satellite business and manufactures and flies more of them than any company in history. In 2020, while covid-19 made the world stand still, SpaceX sent six astronauts to the International Space Station, restoring the United States’ ability to put humans into space for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Meanwhile, in south Texas, SpaceX is busy building Starship, a vehicle meant to fulfill Musk’s ultimate ambition of forming a human colony on Mars.

The CEO took the abuse because he needed Polyakov’s money. Max owned about 80 percent of Firefly, which meant he owned Markusic’s path to Providence. THE PANDEMIC MAY HAVE SLOWED down lots of people but not Polyakov. Though he’d flown commercially in the past, he decided to deal with some of the annoyances of covid-19 by using private jets. It turned out that he really liked flying private and that the quick travel times made it more convenient for him to check up on Markusic. Where Polyakov used to visit Firefly’s headquarters once a quarter or so, he was now taking trips to Texas every couple of weeks throughout the early part of 2020.


Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

I’m just a human who didn’t see the comfort found in separating work and home, who didn’t understand that cancelling plans in the evening because you’re already home and closer to bed is completely valid and not anti-social, even if it makes you feel worse. What I learned from my work-from-home struggles was how to know myself, my boundaries and shortcomings, and it changed my life and my productivity: my work was better in quality and quantity, and so was my time off. So when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, and many people began working from home for the first time, I posted an Instagram story in which I shared a ‘work-from-home’ tip. I recommended that people who struggle to concentrate after lunch watch a TED Talk during their break and give it their full attention. For me, this distracts enough from my work to give me a much-needed break, without the risk of falling into a full-on YouTube hole which ends up with me being so engrossed in an instruction video on how to make an Ikea elfstödt into a loo roll holder that I miss my 3pm call.


pages: 274 words: 63,679

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

Brown Introduction: Outline of an Epidemic Chapter 1: The Geography of Risk Chapter 2: The Profile of a Victim Chapter 3: Blaming the Victim Chapter 4: The Criminalization of Walking Chapter 5: Killer Cars Chapter 6: The Ideology of Flow Chapter 7: A Hard Right Turn Chapter 8: Pedestrian Safety on the Technological Frontier Chapter 9: The International Context Chapter 10: Families for Safe Streets Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes About the Author Author’s Note The writing portion of this book was completed in early February 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States. In other words, it was written in what people have already started referring to as the Before. The publishing process is such that there is about a six-month lag between the completion of writing and the first sale, so I want to briefly address this consciousness-altering event that took place in between.


pages: 287 words: 69,655

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

But many competitors entered, including many poorer people who were willing to charge far less than he was. Now, when the train from New York City arrives, riders are accosted by a large number of cabdrivers. Customers generally just pick whoever will offer the lowest price. The taxi driver’s profits have largely disappeared. Moreover, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, his business collapsed, forcing him to move back in with his parents. To consistently keep profits, a business owner must somehow avoid competitors undercutting them on prices until the profits disappear. How can this be done? Well, businesses in the Big Six all have a way to do it.


pages: 481 words: 72,071

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Dr. Julie Smith

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, fake news, fear of failure, meta-analysis, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, side hustle, TikTok

28: Why reducing stress is not the only answer 29: When good stress goes bad 30: Making stress work for you 31: Coping when it counts 8: On a Meaningful Life 32: The problem with ‘I just want to be happy’ 33: Working out what matters 34: How to create a life with meaning 35: Relationships 36: When to seek help References Resources Acknowledgements Spare tools Index About the Author DR JULIE SMITH has over ten years’ experience as a clinical psychologist and was the first professional to use TikTok to give insights on therapy. After running her own private practice, Julie launched her TikTok channel with the mission of making top-quality mental health education accessible to all. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her audience grew astronomically to 3 million followers as users related to the bite-sized self-help videos she was sharing and put her advice into practice. Those videos have clocked up around half a billion views across her platforms. She was named by TikTok as one of its Top 100 creators.


pages: 206 words: 64,212

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

airport security, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, defund the police, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, index card, McMansion, Minecraft, pre–internet, QAnon, Skype, social distancing, Transnistria

Hugh headed indoors to make fresh drinks for himself and Amy. “I could have spelled Schenectady for you.” “Yes, well, you weren’t there, were you?” I said. “You’re never there when I really need you.” He and I had just returned from two weeks at the Sea Section. The New York we’d left behind us had already been changed by COVID-19, but now that we’d returned, it felt doubly different. For the first time since February, the virus was no longer the only news: the unrest was. The country had gone from one massive headline story to another, and it felt like anything might happen next: a cataclysmic natural disaster, an alien invasion.


pages: 887 words: 242,125

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe by Mark Mazower

classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Monroe Doctrine, éminence grise

But then I thought again: was it unreasonable – given the divisions that had opened up in Greece as a result of the years of austerity – to try to figure out what might bring people together in an understanding of the past that was inclusionary not exclusionary? Was that not better than acquiescing in the kind of political polarization that had torn Greece apart in the past? If this invitation thus made me reassess my stance towards the subject, what I really wanted to say about it became evident only during the coronavirus pandemic. Living in Manhattan at an epicentre of the catastrophe, I followed Greece’s response in those first months, which formed such a contrast with that of the United States. The two governments could scarcely have taken more different approaches. But the real differences lay deeper. There is nothing like a public health emergency to illuminate the degree of a people’s trust in their state.


pages: 264 words: 74,785

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

During the coronavirus crisis of 2020, workers at an Amazon delivery center in Chicago organized a movement that led to the company’s granting paid time off to all employees, both full and part time. Amazon workers also walked off the job to demand that the company shut down the facility after an employee tested positive for covid-19. During the crisis, workers deemed “essential” such as grocery clerks, waiters, baristas, and package handlers were among those who generally receive the lowest pay and fewest benefits. Indeed, Amazon hired a hundred thousand new package handlers to handle the surge in online shopping that resulted from stay-at-home orders.


pages: 297 words: 84,447

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

But these punishing timescales aren’t unusual among the new wave of private sector star builders, such as General Fusion, LPP Fusion, Lockheed Martin, TAE Technologies, HyperJet Fusion Corporation, MIFTI, Proton Scientific, Helion Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Renaissance Fusion, Zap Energy, HB11-Energy, Pulsar Fusion, and the list goes on. There are now more than twenty-five private sector fusion firms. Most are promising to deliver energy from nuclear fusion reactions in years rather than decades. Commonwealth Fusion Systems says it will achieve net energy gain by 2025 and a pilot power plant by 2033. The deadly Covid-19 pandemic may slow these timescales, but the intention is clear: fusion sooner rather than later.9 There’s fierce competition between the star-building start-ups. It’s hard not to imagine the race to demonstrate gain—and, even more so, to build a prototype power plant—being a winner-take-all contest.


pages: 278 words: 82,771

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money by Owen Walker

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, fixed income, G4S, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, liquidity trap, lockdown, mass affluent, popular capitalism, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Winter of Discontent

Some industry analysts had long suspected that, while he was good at making big sector calls, he struggled to identify individual performers within industries, especially start-ups. This meant that when it came to unquoted companies, for every potential winner – such as Oxford Nanopore, whose DNA analysis technology was the first to sequence the Covid-19 virus – there was a stack of duds. Even in listed companies, where Woodford spent most of his career investing, his record in the final few years was awful. An analysis by Stockopedia, an investment data provider, found that of the seventy-two companies Equity Income held in 2016, just nineteen had produced a positive return by the time the fund closed in October 2019.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

There’s every danger that the reconstruction will be worse. Yet this nuanced and sophisticated study also shows, through the analysis of gig economy workers themselves, that flexibility, a shared sense of purpose, and a commitment to sharing more is well within our grasp. As we turn to imagine what kind of economy and society we want after COVID-19, the work of Schor and her students will be indispensable.” —RAJ PATEL, Research Professor, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things “While others have batted around the gig economy with melodrama and polemic, Schor comes to the subject with incisive, challenging questions for both the alarm raisers and the boosters.


pages: 290 words: 82,220

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

biofilm, Black Lives Matter, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Graeber, Easter island, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, megacity, off-the-grid, rent control, the built environment, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

I decided to stick it out and hope the city would survive. It did. In fact, San Francisco today is suffering through the opposite kind of crisis, as the population explodes and the city government struggles to remake our infrastructure to support it. The second generation of tech companies is raking in cash. Though the COVID-19 pandemic changes this calculus a little, wealthy techies are gentrifying the city, driving out working-class people and other longtime residents. Developers are transforming the grid in areas like Mission Bay, which was once full of factories and warehouses, but now welcomes artisanal ice cream shops and digital production studios.


pages: 294 words: 81,850

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, messenger bag, printed gun

But it tells her things she needs to hear, things she can’t rely on others to tell her. So she goes on listening. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I can remember exactly when I thought of the idea for this book—it was on 7th February 2020, during my last trip to the cinema before the UK was locked down to protect against COVID-19. The film was Parasite, and it was followed by a Q&A with director Bong Joon-ho and star Song Kang-ho, accompanied by translator Sharon Choi. It got me thinking about the future of translation as a job, and whether technology would ever replace it entirely, and what circumstances might make that impossible.


pages: 279 words: 85,552

Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen by Peter Apps

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, COVID-19, forensic accounting, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, the built environment, University of East Anglia, value engineering

Over the years, they have listened as the corporations and public bodies responsible have given carefully constructed statements, full of vapid expressions of sympathy and detailed explanations of why their company is not to blame for what happened at the tower. The inquiry’s own barrister has described the attitudes as ‘a merry-go-round of buck passing’. They have also had to see the revelations pushed out of the public eye, as Brexit negotiations, political turmoil, Covid-19 and war distract attention from the evidence that has slowly played out in the hearing rooms in west London. When Eric Pickles, the minister to whom the Lakanal House coroner’s letter was addressed, finally gave evidence in April 2022, he berated the barrister questioning him for spending too long on a topic saying he had ‘promised we will be away this morning’ as he had ‘an extremely busy day meeting people’.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

Facebook's human settlement data has received a lot of interest from researchers. Studies it spawned include understanding water vulnerability in the area known as High Mountain Asia; planning electrification, geomarketing in telecom, and other planning initiatives in Ethiopia; planning electrification in Uganda; and, most recently, the COVID-19 response in Sierra Leone.32 There are nineteen countries for which demographic data is currently available for download. According to CIESIN people have downloaded data about approximately half of them at a rate of 100 to 300 times per month per country, and about the other half roughly 50 to 100 times per month per country.33 The countries whose data has been most often downloaded are the five from the initial release: Haiti, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Ghana, and Malawi.


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

If my TAs are undergraduates, I’ll add an extra step in which we have a prescheduled thirty-minute meeting to look through the problem sets and update the grading notes together. When I use graduate TAs, however, I trust them to figure this out on their own, saving me this extra thirty minutes. When Georgetown’s campus was closed due to COVID-19, we used a software tool called Canvas to make all the paper handling virtual; students submitted digital copies of their assignments, and the TAs graded them online. The process was easily adapted to this new fully electronic setup. 11. Rory Vaden, “The 30x Rule: How Great Managers Multiply Performance,” American Management Association, February 3, 2015, https://playbook.amanet.org/30x-rule-great-managers-multiply-performance/.


pages: 396 words: 96,049

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

bioinformatics, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deepfake, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hyperloop, independent contractor, job automation, low earth orbit, messenger bag, mirror neurons, off grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, ride hailing / ride sharing, supervolcano, time dilation

It’s the number of cases expected to be caused by a single infected person. Measles, the most contagious virus known to humankind, has an R0 of 12 to 18, which means that each infected person would be expected to infect 12 to 18 others. By comparison, the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed fifty million, had a much lower R0 of between 1.4 to 2.8. COVID-19 had been around 5.7. I said, “If you expose every human being to the upgrade, and if the Glasgow percentages hold, you’re talking about killing a billion people. That won’t keep you up at night?” “Fuck yeah it’ll keep me up at night. But it’d be selfish not to do what needs to be done just because it plagues the remnants of my conscience.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

No one expected Adam to leave New York forever, having gotten a taste of the success his skills could bring, and Gold wanted to set up an off-the-record call in advance of a possible meeting in the city. But the call never happened, and Adam’s return to New York was delayed. If Adam’s billion-dollar parachute represented the climax to a decade of excess and growth, Covid-19, which had just begun its rampage around the world, brought an end to that era for good. Everything had changed for WeWork all over again. With the world mired in lockdown and uncertainty, SoftBank reneged on its deal. It was now refusing to buy the $3 billion worth of shares that would fund Adam’s exit package, citing various issues—including investigations into WeWork’s IPO that had been launched by the SEC, the Justice Department, and several state attorneys general.


pages: 309 words: 97,320

Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System by Natalie Starkey

active measures, carbon-based life, COVID-19, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, global pandemic, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, lockdown, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, supervolcano

Nevertheless, this book eventually got written and the breaks from writing I’ve had to take over the two and a half years working on it helped to give me some perspective. I absolutely love the process of writing, shutting myself away in the office for hours on end to research and write about these fascinating Solar System worlds. Towards the end of this book, when the Covid-19 lockdown began and I had my daughter at home all day, it would have been easier to take another break from writing. But, thanks to the commitment of my amazing husband, who took the reins on childcare at the weekends, I was able to continue pushing through the words to complete my first draft. This gave me such joy (and a break from the endless hours of entertaining my daughter) and a big boost to know I had the space to think during such unprecedented times.


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

Business-friendly political administrations like to starve it of funds, believing that the agency really enjoys getting in the way of innovation. But when the FDA can’t do its job properly, you get things like vaginal mesh implant disasters and breast implants that leak. It’s thanks to the FDA that faulty ventilators were recalled during the Covid-19 pandemic before they could kill someone. However, as the oscillating field stimulator was going through its tribulations, the FDA was very different from the agency it is today, and this played a part in the device’s demise. Like James Cavuoto, Jennifer French was frustrated by the way the agency handled the Andara device’s approval.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

Many nations are experiencing immense economic and political instability. The seas are rising. Systemic racism persists and adapts. The chasm between the wealthy and the rest of us grows larger every day. Climate change and pandemics (as was starkly apparent to me while working on final edits to this book in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis) increasingly force us to reimagine how we live, travel, and interact, sometimes making digital connection the best or only option. Each year, immense new challenges emerge on an unprecedentedly global scale, and as we move more important pieces of our lives to digital spaces (at times by necessity), we find ourselves not only more aware of the world’s problems but also left feeling powerless to do anything (or, at least, enough) about them.


The Fiume Crisis by Dominique Kirchner Reill

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, British Empire, business climate, COVID-19, financial independence, full employment, sexual politics

While I was finishing the last chapter, my ­mother and partner in crime and cards, French Steele Prescott, became very ill and eventually died. The day I celebrated my first peer review on the manuscript, the man who taught me to giggle, my ­father Peter Hanns Reill, tripped and died suddenly. A few months before receiving the copyedits, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Over the arc of this book, I lost most of my ­family. Actually, I lost my favorite ­people. The only ­thing I can take heart from is that they knew this book so well. They ­were part of it. I’m glad this ­thing we made together has a life beyond. Illustration Credits Page 3 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 7 Courtesy of Archivio Museo Storico di Fiume a Roma—­Società di Studi Fiumani 8 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 10 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 11 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 15 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 19 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 27 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 31 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 34 Courtesy of Pomorski i povijesni muzej Hrvatskog primorja Rijeka 37 Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Cartes et plans, GE C-4853 49 Author’s collection 51 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 64 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 76 Courtesy of Hrvatski Državni Arhiv u Rijeci 84 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 86 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 88 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 97 Courtesy of Hrvatski Državni Arhiv u Rijeci 116 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 128 Courtesy of Hrvatski Državni Arhiv u Rijeci 160 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 169 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 171 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 180 Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico 284 185 190 212 219 226 Illustration Credits Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico Author’s collection Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico Courtesy of Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani—­Archivio Iconografico Index Alsace-­Lorraine, 40, 44 Arditi, 15, 61–62, 164, 173, 193, 205 Auschwitz, 231 Ausgleich.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

Yet we know we’d never go back; our futures depend on us mastering the technologies that connect, soothe, and bind us. If there is any one lesson to learn from the heroes of the stories that unfolded in these pages, it is that the way out of the strange post-capitalist techno-political hellscape we find ourselves in is to create. Take the COVID-19 epidemic, which profoundly disrupted public life beginning in early 2020. As orders to “shelter in place” and “socially distance” turned people around the world into involuntary hikikomori, many turned to the old tools of the otaku to soothe their loneliness: games, videos, and playthings. A surge in demand at streaming services such as Netflix and PlayStation Network forced the companies to throttle back server speeds as the sheer volume of entertainment data began to overwhelm European telecom networks.


pages: 399 words: 107,932

Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, dark matter, Donald Trump, East Village, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Milgram experiment, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, systems thinking, TED Talk, white picket fence, work culture

“It has taken me three years and a substantial amount of space from your manipulation to realize that the shame that has been weighing so heavily on my shoulders is not mine to carry,” Nicole said. “It’s yours.” APPENDIX LETTER TO RANIERE Hi Keith, I’m reaching out in the fourth month of COVID-19 lockdown at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center; I hope this letter makes it to you. I’m Sarah Berman, a reporter and editor based in Vancouver. I’ve been following NXIVM and the charges against you since 2017. I’d like to offer a chance to respond to questions that I think only you can answer.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

But even when Americans were at their poorest during the Great Depression, we managed to establish Social Security and the minimum wage, electrify rural communities, provide federal housing loans, and fund a massive jobs program. Like Dorothy and her companions in The Wizard of Oz, we need to see through the myths and remember once again that we’ve had the power all along. As this book was going to press, the COVID-19 virus hit with full force, giving us a vivid, real-world demonstration of the power of the MMT way of thinking. Entire industries are shutting down. Job losses are mounting, and there is the potential for an economic collapse that could put unemployment on par with the percentages last seen during the Great Depression.


pages: 400 words: 108,843

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

Indeed, much of my education about the modern Senate itself came from rolling conversations with reporters about Senate politics, procedure, and history that began when I started working in Harry Reid’s press office in 2010 and have not stopped; I will not name them here, since that is probably what they would prefer. And I could not have completed this book during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020 without the invaluable work of digital archivists. The Senate colleagues who shaped my thinking are too many to name, but a few directly influenced the ideas and understanding that went into this book. William Dauster has been my Senate rabbi for years and his guidance was irreplaceable.


pages: 322 words: 106,663

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

Many of the affected people don’t know what’s making them sick. Most of them cannot afford to live anywhere else. Of course, all of these realities—which communities are most endangered by pollution and chemicals; who can afford to live in healthier areas—have been underscored and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s no accident that Covid has especially ravaged low-income communities of color, in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The neighborhoods close to oil wells and freeways and trash-burning facilities, the neighborhoods filled with lead or chemicals, are also the ones most likely to be home to essential workers, who have not had the option—as I have—of staying home.


pages: 366 words: 110,374

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

For whatever reason, even with all the problems and all the terrible things that have happened here over the years, I step off the plane in Beirut and I feel strangely, inexplicably comfortable, happy, at home.” As of this writing, Beirut is reeling from the combined effects of deep political unrest, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a hugely destructive explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020 that killed nearly two hundred people, injured thousands more, and left hundreds of thousands homeless. In short, current conditions are far from ideal for tourism in Lebanon, but we remain hopeful that this resilient country will overcome these latest challenges.


pages: 394 words: 107,778

The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

airport security, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, COVID-19, crew resource management, glass ceiling, human-factors engineering, index card, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking

The idea of writing a book was simply not a realistic option, as my life was still progressing on fast-forward. And so, fifteen years passed quickly by. I have never been a professional author, so I continued to resist writing a memoir despite knowing that it was the right thing to do. The tipping point came when my coauthor, Jonathan Ward, contacted me just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. He convinced me the time was right for this book, and I knew he was the missing link in getting this story completed. My thanks to him for his perfect timing. His willingness to work with me and his research, writing, and industry experience were foundational. It would not have happened without him.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

But Amazon’s revenue and market share kept increasing, and if the firm wasn’t raking in profits, it wasn’t losing money, either. As a binary bet on the monopolization of online retail, Amazon was stubbornly strong, and after enduring the 2008 economic crisis, the stock price went on an incredible run, from a low under $36 up to a shocking high of $3,719 in the summer of 2021. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, global shutdowns sent capitalists hustling to lay money at dominant web retailer Jeff’s feet, adding more than $1,000 to the stock price during what the rest of us experienced as disastrous months. How did Bezos succeed in linking the internet to the world of physical objects when so many others, similarly situated, failed?

Anyone who crafted an Aristotelian tragic narrative out of the 2008 crisis would have seen it as a correction for 10 years or so of financial-engineering shenanigans and irrational exuberance. But it was the investors who never read any Greek, the ones who were ready to roll the dice on the newly cheap housing stock, who made the right call. Some of the most extravagant financial instruments were done for, but housing prices rebounded nearly as fast as they fell. By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, prices were vertical, rising faster than they ever did in the bubble. Maybe by the time this book is printed housing prices will have popped again, but I doubt it, at least in the medium term. As you’ve seen, the production glut has induced the shift to asset-based growth, and that constraint is not an illusion.


pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

Arrangements were made with medical staff to attend, if needed. One of Marsalek’s gophers was dispatched to Moscow, collecting a suitcase full of pills from the airport and flying straight back. The villa’s medicine cabinet included Tamiflu, and a full box of the HIV treatment Lopinavir which some thought at the time might be effective against Covid-19. A cupboard was filled with emergency dressings, bandages, masks, gloves and bottles of gin-based hand sanitizers from a Hamburg distillery that made anyone who used them smell like an alcoholic. For his personal use Marsalek had a full-face gas mask with Corpro F1100 filters. Dr Rami was a regular presence by this time.


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The singing and the dancing ratchet up, and the game never breaks, but the singing and the dancing don’t break either, and for a second it feels like we have created an alternate world, a tableau spinning sovereign in the pitch darkness of the galaxy, where this impossible group of women have gathered together to sing, and the game of cards never ceases, and we belong to each other, jubilantly, wholly, completely, in a way we will outside of that moment never be able to maintain in our daily lives, and if we pause to think it through, the moment might turn to ash as we consider all the complicity and inequality we each carry in us, but which is, drunk and dancing and laying down cards, for a flash, a kind of heaven on earth. LIVING Then the global COVID-19 pandemic hit. As the various shelter-in-place orders came down the pipeline, we haphazardly gathered together a veritable ark of friends, who ended up at the Mutual Aid Society for different and temporary reasons, mostly having to do with avoiding what might be several months of isolation: Robert, Jenny, Lina, and Greg.


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

But now, along with the millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, quasi-Asiatic Russia threatens to slowly undermine Europe, just as some of the early modern philosophers feared. Everything I see here is so beautiful, I realize—erotic even. It is like paradise. But there is a sense of poignancy, even before the outbreak of Covid-19. It is as though what I am seeing in the streets and the cafés is already being consigned to the past. What is Europe? I ask myself. Where does it begin and end? And what will it become? * * * — The questions are becoming clear now. Rimini has started me on an inner journey whose terminus I cannot yet foresee.


pages: 400 words: 121,988

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets by Donald MacKenzie

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, level 1 cache, light touch regulation, linked data, lockdown, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Satoshi Nakamoto, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, UUNET, zero-sum game

Schifrin, Matthew, and Scott McCormack. 1998. “Free Enterprise Comes to Wall Street.” Forbes, April 6. Available at https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0406/6107114a.html#18473b5d5300, accessed September 21, 2020. Schrimpf, Andreas, Hyun Song Shin, and Vladyslav Sushko. 2020. “Leverage and Margin Spirals in Fixed Income Markets during the Covid-19 Crisis.” Bank for International Settlements, Bulletin No. 2, April 2. Available at https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull02.pdf, accessed April 20, 2020. Seabrooke, Leonard, and Eleni Tsingou. 2009. “Revolving Doors and Linked Ecologies in the World Economy: Policy Locations and Practice of International Financial Reform.”


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

v=512389702820097 16 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/7182362/Return-of-original-Fairy-Liquid-bottle-for-John-Noakes-generation.html 17 Chaired by Victoria Coren-Mitchell, the thinking man’s fentanyl. 18 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037367/ 19 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5052956/Britons-spent-six-months-queuing.html 20 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5052956/Britons-spent-six-months-queuing.html 21 https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/Covid-19/information/physical-distancing 22 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52874615 23 He became big in Albania. 24 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1083452/ 25 http://www.aceldama.com/~tomr/media/dalek/blueprints/dal2_.gif 26 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11653529/Blakes-7-the-low-budget-late-70s-British-sci-fi-is-now-a-genuine-classic.html 27 http://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules/laws/football-11-11/law-11---offside 28 https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/new_research_the_length_of_tolley_s_tax_guides 29 https://www.britannica.com/place/London-Eye 30 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3574331/Pull-down-the-London-Eye.html 31 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/socialcapitalintheuk/may2017 2 WHAT ARE WE GOOD AT?


pages: 384 words: 121,574

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption by Patrick Alley

airport security, blood diamond, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, fake news, Global Witness, lockdown, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, satellite internet, Steve Bannon, Ted Sorensen

‘We contacted loads of private-sector firms that we knew on the TI side of things, asking them to write letters to the minister or to No. 10. We got Conservatives in the House of Lords to write to No. 10.’ Together we succeeded in holding the Boris Johnson government to Cameron’s original pledge. But then another curveball came in the form of Covid-19, which completely subsumed parliamentary business. We hope that the pledge will survive into the next parliamentary session, but we’re not complacent about that. On 29 May 2019, a ten-bedroom mansion in The Bishops Avenue, Hampstead – one of London’s most expensive streets – was hit by an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO) secured by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA).


Unknown Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

3D printing, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, diversification, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, fixed income, forward guidance, index fund, Jim Simons, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Nick Leeson, performance metric, placebo effect, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short squeeze, side project, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs

If someone comes on talking about something I’m interested in, I’ll turn the volume up. I already know what they’re going to say because they all say the same thing. If the market has been going down, they will make the bearish argument. Recently, on this rebound off the March low [the March 2020 low, which followed the huge selloff triggered by events related to the COVID-19 pandemic], you kept on hearing lines like: “The market doesn’t make any sense right here.” “The low is not in.” “The market has gone up too far, too fast.” In the meantime, the market has continued to rally further. All these people think they are smarter than the market. Again, I’ve been there.


pages: 448 words: 123,273

Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food by Chris van Tulleken

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, COVID-19, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, food desert, Gary Taubes, George Floyd, global supply chain, Helicobacter pylori, Kinder Surprise, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, microbiome, NOVA classification, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, twin studies, ultra-processed food, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, Wayback Machine

Abbott, 65, 179, 201, 296 ABC News, 101n Aboriginal Australians, 175 Accum, Frederick, 46 acetate, 88 Ad Hoc Joint Task Force, 65 Adane, Christina, 142–3 Addicted to Food (podcast), 168 Addicted to Food (Smith), 304 addiction, 9, 106, 151–68, 179, 206–7, 271, 303–4 additives, 208–21, 271, 272 regulation of, 225–33 ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), 209 Advertising Association, 205n Advertising Standards Agency, 209 advertising, see marketing Africa, 246–7, 286 agriculture antibiotic resistance and, 266 meat production, 259–63 oil production, 258–9 Agyemang, Charles, 247 AIBMR Life Sciences, 233 Air Canada, 151 airline food, 151 alcohol, 9, 128n, 164, 166, 199 Aldi, 159, 160, 264 Algeria, 25 alginate, 22 allergic diseases, 216 Alliance for Potato Research and Education (APRE), 101n Alliance to Save our Antibiotics, 266 Allison, David, 100n Alpen, 52 Alzheimer’s disease, 62 Amazon, 264 Amazon region, 238–43, 248–9, 262, 263 American Academy of Paediatrics, 292 American Beverage Association, 101n American College of Sports Medicine, 133 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,202 American Society for Nutrition, 65 Angola, 246, 286 anti-fat bias, 6 antibiotics, 216, 226, 230, 255, 266–7 antioxidant supplements, 47 anxiety, 156, 233 appetite regulation, 31, 34, 37, 41, 56–9, 104, 106–8, 160, 173 Apple, 140 Applebaum, Rhona, 133 apples, 171–2 Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), 240, 272, 277 Argentina, 262, 263 arms races, 1–4, 47, 74, 84, 86 arrowroot starch, 21 artificial colours, 205n artificial sweeteners, 5, 23, 90–91, 194n, 200–206, 209, 272 Asda, 159, 205n, 296 asthma, 214n, 216 astrology, 49–50 Atkins, Robert, 111, 116 atoms, 81 ATP (adenosine triphosphate), 82 Attia, Peter, 112 Auschwitz concentration camp, 73 Australasian Guideline, 292 Australia, 6, 80, 84, 140–41, 256 autoimmune diseases, 216 Avena, Nicole, 153–5, 167n, 168, 189 Awesome Chips, 140 baby food/formula, 93, 172n, 236, 274, 288–90 bacteria, 3, 4 butter and, 24 exudate, 22 first age of eating, 80–83 microbiome, 87–8, 155, 204, 213–21, 271, 272–3, 289 baked beans, 157–8 Ballarin, Oswaldo, 288, 289–90 Bank of England, 282 Barabási, Albert-László, 189 Barbosa, Felipe, 237 Barcarena, Brazil, 239–40, 265 BASF, 73 Batterham, Rachel, 35–7, 59, 61, 66, 145–6, 152 Bayer, 73 beef, 141–2, 189 farming of, 85–8, 92, 99, 190, 215, 260–61, 267, 274 protein isolates, 154 Belém, Brazil, 238, 248 Bellini, Alessandra, 297 BENEO, 65 Benin, 286 beriberi, 42 Berridge, Kent, 156n Bert, Paul, 103 beta-carotene, 47, 71 Bethesda, Maryland, 53 Better Food Index, 298 Biggest Loser, The, 54 Bilott, Rob, 212 Binley, Gary, 275 bisphenol A, 227 Bite Back, 297–8 bitter tastes, 194, 195, 196, 198–9 Black communities, 245–6 BlackRock, 282 bladder, 194n Blair, Steven, 122, 133, 134 blood fat profiles, 62 blood pressure, 109 blue whales, 102 Bluebell Capital, 282 BMI (body mass index), 50, 54, 138n, 242 body fat, 100–104 Bolton, Lizzie, 31 bones, 72, 85, 95–7, 175, 271 bonobos, 100 Boots, 296 Borneo, 259 Boston, Massachusetts, 139, 143 Boyland, Emma, 141 Boyle, Bob, 292 Bozer, Ahmet, 283 Brabeck-Letmathe, Peter, 284 Brazil, 6, 32, 41–5, 60, 75, 118, 157, 159, 236–43, 248–9 meat production in, 262, 263 plastic waste in, 268 soy industry, 239–40 traditional diet, displacement of, 43–4, 197–8, 236–49 bread, 173–4, 208–9 Break Free From Plastic, 267 breast cancer, 60, 62 breastfeeding, 42, 94–6, 130, 185, 187, 195, 214, 288–94 Brecon Beacons, Wales, 52 Bristol University, 25 British and Irish Legal Information Institute, 250 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 53, 125, 139, 168 British Dietetic Association, 296 British Heart Foundation, 128, 296 British Journal of Nutrition, 75 British Medical Journal, 49, 60, 236 British Museum, London, 180 British Nutrition Foundation, 295 Broad Leib, Emily, 231, 233, 234, 243 Brochet, Frédéric, 182n Brown, Alan, 93 Brown, Amy, 293 Bunge Limited, 277 Burger King, 140, 173 Burkina Faso, 286 Burmese pythons, 88 butter, 24–7, 28n, 70–75 butyrate, 88 buy-one-get-one-free deals, 283 C-reactive protein, 160 Cabo Verde, 286 caesarean delivery, 214n caffeine, 198, 199 calcium, 85, 120, 191, 195 Caldwell, Carlyle ‘Corky’, 21 calories, 4–5, 38, 40, 92 artificial sweeteners, 23 energy-dense foods, 66, 176–7, 271, 301 exercise and, 122–36 regulation system, 102–8 restriction of, 54 UPF, 10, 11, 32, 36, 45, 48, 57, 58, 65–6, 72, 90 Cambridge University, 59, 107, 125, 252, 291 Cameroon, 286 Campbell Soup Company, 65 Canada, 6, 80, 106, 151 Cancer Research UK, 296 cancer, 6, 9, 45, 60, 189, 216, 218, 227, 232, 267 Cannon, Geoffrey, 119n canola oil, 28 Cant, Alasdair, 148, 167 Carb Killa, 154, 155 carbohydrates, 43, 109, 111–17 carbon dioxide, 80, 81, 260, 263, 272 carbon, 80, 81–2, 85 carbon-chain saturation, 24 carboxymethylcellulose, 211, 217–19, 302 cardiovascular disease, 61, 62, 137, 189, 231 Cargill, 142, 277, 295 Carmody, Rachel, 88–9 Carney, Mark, 282, 283 carnivores, 85 carotenoids, 188 Carr, Allen, 11, 153 carrageenan, 15, 22 cattle, 85–8, 92, 99, 190, 215, 274 Cell Metabolism, 34 cells, 1–3 cellulose, 87 Center for Science in the Public Interest, 112 Central African Republic, 286 Centre for Industrial Rheology, 23 Centre for Social Justice, 296 Centre for the Study of the Senses, 180 Cereal Partners Worldwide, 64 Chad, 286 Change4 Life, 205 Channel 4 News, 125 Chauvin, Derek, 245 cheese, 46 Cheeselets, 254 Cheetos, 299 chemotherapy, 267 chewing, 174–5, 177, 183, 272 chewing gum, 212 Chi-Med, 285 Chicago, Illinois, 93, 130 chicken, 261–2, 264 chicken nuggets, 159 Chile, 299 chimpanzees, 3, 46, 89n, 100 China, 61, 247, 268, 291 chlorine, 81n, 85 chlorine dioxide, 229 cholecystokinin, 105n Christianity, 101 Chukotka, Russia, 186n cigarettes, see smoking CIMMYT, 65 cinnamon, 185n Citigroup, 276 climate change, 6, 255–68, 272 Clooney, George, 290 Clostridium difficile, 221 coal, 69–75, 90 cobalt, 85 Coca-Cola, 101n, 120, 121, 158, 187, 198–202, 283–4 cocaine and, 198 plastic waste, 267–8 research funding, 133–6, 295, 296 sugar in, 198–202 cocaine, 164, 166, 198, 199 Coco Pops, 30–31, 37, 38–40, 48, 172, 173 cocoa mass, 31 coconut fat, 29 coconut palms, 258 cod liver oil, 97 Code, The, 290 Colloid and Polymer Science, 71 Columbian exchange, 255n Compass Group/Chartwells UK, 297 Compass, 296 Conagra, 295 conflicts of interest, 64, 132–6, 178–9 Congo region, 118, 286 constipation, 157 Co-operative Group, 159, 205n, 264 copper, 85 Cordara, Roderick, 252, 254 corn, 21, 118, 225–6, 228, 229–30, 273 Corn Oil ONE, 225–6, 228, 229–30 coronary thrombosis, 45 cortisol, 143 cost-of-living crisis (2022–), 17–18 Costa Coffee, 140, 217, 297, 301 Costa Ferreira, Paula, 241, 243 Costcutter, 205n Côte d’Ivoire, 286 cottonseed oil, 27, 28 Covid-19 pandemic, 147 cows, see cattle COZ corn oil, 225–6, 228, 229–30 Cranswick’s, Hull, 264 Crawley, Helen, 295 Cream o’ Galloway, 19 Creed, Greg, 247 Crisco, 28 Crohn’s disease, 62, 216, 219 Crunchy Nut Clusters, 52 cyclamate, 201 Da Costa Louzada, Maria, 159–60, 301, 303 damascenone, 188 dandruff, 90 Danone, 65, 179, 201, 281, 282, 286, 292, 295, 296, 297 DATEM, 208, 211–13, 302 Davis, Clara, 46, 93–9 De Graaf, Kees, 178 Death in the Pot (Accum), 46 death, 6, 7, 47, 62, 189 Degesch, 73 dehydration, 198 delayed gratification, 148–9 Deliveroo, 297 Deltas, 254 dementia, 7, 62, 189 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 286 Denmark, 191 Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (UK), 124, 132 Department of Agriculture (US), 112, 189 depression, 62, 132, 227, 233 Deutsche Fettsäure Werke, 70 diabetes, 35, 62, 110, 198, 201–4, 216, 218, 220, 227, 241 Diabetes UK, 296 diacetyl, 70–71 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 164 diamorphine, 164 Dicken, Sam, 59–64, 66, 152 Dickinsonia costata, 83–4 diet experiments Hall, 55–9, 66, 175–6 Taubes, 112–15 van Tulleken, 35–7, 66, 102, 152–63 digestion ponds, 212 dimethylpolysiloxane, 244 diphosphates, 151 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 2–3, 85 dogs, 184–5 dolphins, 197 Domino’s Pizza, 247n dopamine, 105n, 156n Dorito Effect, The (Schatzker), 187 Doritos, 52, 251, 254 dose-dependent effects, 60 doubly labelled water sub-studies, 126–7, 129–30 Dr Pepper, 299 dreams, 156 dryness, 176 Duke University, 129 DuPont, 212–13, 229 Dusty Knuckle Potato Sourdough, 174 dysbiosis, 216–17, 234 dyspepsia, 62 E numbers, 210, 211, 244 Easy Way to Stop Smoking, The (Carr), 11, 153 eating, 4, 76, 79–99 first age of, 76, 79–83 second age of, 83–90, 100 third age of, 90–99, 108 emotional problems and, 147 instinct, 92–99 speed of, 177–8 Ebersole, Kara, 130 ecstasy, 68 edamame, 240, 261 Ediacara Hills, South Australia, 84 Edmonton, Alberta, 106 Egypt, ancient, 101 electrons, 82 elephants, 100 emulsifiers, 15, 17, 18, 19, 36, 154, 155, 160, 211 microbiome and, 217–19, 271, 272–3 endocrine system, 104, 108, 131, 272 Endres, John, 233 energy density, 66, 176–7, 271, 301 Eno, 285 Environmental Protection Agency (US), 212 environmental, social and governance (ESG), 278, 282 enzymes, 25, 26, 27n, 81n, 85, 86, 89 epilepsy, 116 Equatorial Guinea, 286 European Food Information Council, 66 European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 113 European Union (EU), 210, 233–4 Evonik Industries, 73 exercise, 122–36 Exercise is Medicine campaign, 133, 134, 136 Faber, Emmanuel, 282 Fahlberg, Constantin, 90 Fanta, 299 Fardet, Anthony, 171 Farooqi, Sadaf, 107 fats, 24–9, 43 hydrogenation, 26–7, 33, 231, 246 RBD (Refined, Bleached & Deodorized), 28–9 weight gain and, 110 fatty acids, 188–9 fatty liver disease, 62 feedback systems, 104, 108 Feingold, Ben, 209 FermaSure XL, 229 fertilisers, 257 fertility, 27, 131, 155, 227, 230, 233, 272 fibre, 55, 57, 60, 87, 155, 157, 171, 189, 215 Fidelity, 281 Finland, 175 First Steps Nutrition, 205, 295 fish oil, 47 Fisher, Franz, 69 Fitness Industry Association, 205n Five Guys, 140 fizzy drinks, 120–21 Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA) 232 flavour; flavouring, 180–92, 193–207 enhancers, 193–4, 209–10 Fletcher, Paul, 163 Flössner, Otto, 71–2, 75 Floyd, George, 245 fluorine, 81n, 85 Food Additives Amendment (US, 1958), 227 Food and Drug Administration (US), 210, 225–32 food deserts/swamps, 139–40, 142–4 Food Foundation, 17–18 food matrix, 171, 191, 271 Food Standards Agency (UK), 40n, 210, 292 food waste, 128 FooDB database, 189 Forde, Ciarán, 64–5, 178–9 ‘forever chemicals’, 212 frailty, 62 France, 17, 60 free school meals, 142 Freeze Pops, 15 fried chicken, 245 Friedman, Milton, 282 Froneri, 279–81 Frosties, 299–300 fruit, 183 concentrate, 157 Gabon, 286 Galilei, Galileo, 109, 117 Gambia, 286 garlic, 189 Gearhardt, Ashley, 165 General Mills, 65 generally recognized as safe (GRAS), 228, 229, 230, 232 genes; genome, 1–3, 126, 138, 144–5, 147, 148, 177 Germany, 17, 68–75, 90–91 Ghana, 246–7, 286 ghrelin, 105n Gibney, Mike, 64 gingerbread men, 251 Global Energy Balance Network, 123, 133 glucose, 15, 31 glutamate, 193, 195 glycerine, 17, 18 ‘Good Cook, The’ (Olney), 44 Google, 140 Gordon, Aubrey, 50n Göring, Hermann, 71 gossypol, 27 Greece, ancient, 101 Greenland, 80 Greenpeace, 298 Greggs, 140, 302 Grenade, 154, 155 Grocer, The, 151 Growing Up in Singapore, 177 GSK, 285 Gü, 156n guanylate, 193, 195, 196 guar gum, 15, 17, 19, 22 Guardian, 245 Guinea, 286 Guinea Bissau, 286 gums, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 220, 272 Hackney Gelato, 15, 16 Hadean period, 79–80 Hadza people, 129–32 haem iron, 192 Haleon, 285 Hall, Kevin, 32, 34, 35, 51, 53–9, 60, 63, 106–7, 113, 168, 172 diet experiments, 55–9, 66, 175–6 Haribo, 52 Harper’s Weekly, 28n Hart, Paul, 16–29, 33, 66–7, 154, 188, 189, 206, 275–6 Harvard University, 88, 109, 114, 116, 159, 175, 231 Harvest Frost, MV, 240 heart disease, see cardiovascular disease Heath, Allister, 125 heavy water, 127 hedonic overdrive, 107 height, 8, 191 Heinz, 23, 158 Helicobacter pylori, 218 Hellmann’s, 23, 36 Henderson, Earl, 94–8 Henkel, Hugo, 70 herbicides, 257 herbivores, 85–8 heroin, 164, 199 Hershey, 295 Hervey, G.


pages: 470 words: 137,882

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Then the worst pandemic: Dan Diamond, “Trump’s Mismanagement Helped Fuel Coronavirus Crisis,” Politico, March 7, 2020, https://www.politico.com/​amp/​news/​2020/​03/​07/​trump-coronavirus-management-style-123465; Michael D. Shear et al., “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19,” New York Times, March 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/​2020/​03/​28/​us/​testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html; David Frum, “This Is Trump’s Fault: The President Is Failing, and Americans Are Paying for His Failures,” Atlantic, April 7, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/​ideas/​archive/​2020/​04/​americans-are-paying-the-price-for-trumps-failures/​609532/.


Machine Learning Design Patterns: Solutions to Common Challenges in Data Preparation, Model Building, and MLOps by Valliappa Lakshmanan, Sara Robinson, Michael Munn

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, business intelligence, business logic, business process, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, continuous integration, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, DevOps, discrete time, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, industrial research laboratory, iterative process, Kubernetes, machine translation, microservices, mobile money, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, statistical model, the payments system, web application

To my parents, thank you for being my biggest fans since day one and encouraging my love of technology and writing for as long as I can remember. To Ally, Katie, Randi, and Sophie—thank you for being a constant source of light and laughter in these uncertain times. Lak: I took on this book thinking I’d get to work on it while waiting in airports. COVID-19 made it so that much of the work was done at home. Thanks Abirami, Sidharth, and Sarada for all your forbearance as I hunkered down to write yet again. More hikes on weekends now! The three of us are donating 100% of the royalties from this book to Girls Who Code, an organization whose mission is to build a large pipeline of future female engineers.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

It relies on a labor pool of agricultural workers who, like garment workers, often toil in dangerous conditions without hope of union protections. The products travel along pathways carved by centuries of colonial control. The system devastates the land, it is wasteful, and as we learned when the COVID-19 crisis erupted—it is insecure. It is designed to realize returns on capital rather than to nurture bodies. It is cheap for the consumer because it externalizes cost. Avoiding the system entirely can have connotations of privilege and elitism. As we spoke, I felt more and more hopelessness over the situation.


pages: 373 words: 132,377

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, imposter syndrome, Mason jar, microdosing, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, rolodex, Saturday Night Live

Defenders of the ad might argue that the “only” was simply about identifying those whom the AIDS epidemic was affecting, and not a statement of this demographic’s value to the community. To which I would say: If you’re such a genius at mass messaging then you should be aware of how the word “only” would work in the minds of those who are already looking for ways to subjugate the humanity of the people who are listed after the word “only.” Take the early framing of the COVID-19 pandemic as a case in point: to say that at first it “only” affected old people is both wrong and wrong. The Grim Reaper ad campaign was supposedly cut short because it gave children nightmares. That nobody predicted this outcome at the pitch meeting is thoroughly astounding to me. Despite the fact that it only ran for a few months, this ad is seared into my mind alongside all the other ads, but for very different reasons.


pages: 393 words: 127,847

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

I’m off to Heathrow, to board an airliner that will carry many tons of cargo to Miami, and less than a dozen passengers, though every seat in several entirely empty sections of the cabin will be carefully arranged with still-wrapped blankets and headsets. For several months after the pandemic began, I flew nowhere. In this period several friends became ill with COVID-19, and an elderly relative died from it. Some of my colleagues retired early. A number of others, including many of those who had come to aviation most recently, were furloughed or lost their jobs, along with so many who work in travel and tourism all around the world. Eventually, I began to fly perhaps half a normal schedule, including some flights with entirely empty passenger cabins but bellies full of cargo: pets, bags of letters, enough gold and pallets of banknotes to remind me that the world’s financial system isn’t yet entirely virtual, tens of tons of Scottish salmon, and medical supplies whose technical descriptions my colleagues and I would read out to each other from the cargo manifest with heightened interest and a new kind of pride: “diagnostic probes,” “reagents,” and “perishable cargo—antibody.”


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

It also has a much larger aim, in that it seeks to show how that crisis led to the creation of a global financial architecture that produced the biggest debt boom in history. It is a debt boom that has, by 2021, already led to spectacular economic busts, mass insolvency, crippling unemployment, the displacement of millions of people and radical political change. With world debt-to-GDP ratios at record highs even before the impact of the Covid-19 induced economic crisis, the negative direct economic, social and political consequences from this age of debt will likely plague the global outlook for at least another generation. How the Asian financial crisis established the foundations for this new age of debt relates to the policy choices of the Asian authorities that were a direct consequence of the crisis.


pages: 482 words: 150,822

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Black Lives Matter, classic study, colonial rule, COVID-19, critical race theory, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Several scholars generously provided aid and counsel along the way. Sir Hew Strachan of the University of St. Andrews, perhaps the preeminent writer on strategy today, gave the manuscript a reading with an eye to that subject. At the University of Texas at Austin, Paul Edgar and Catherine Evans helped me navigate the obstacles to research posed by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2022. My old friend Thomas Remington of Harvard University posed a series of helpful questions, both when I was writing and then in reviewing an early draft of the manuscript. His wife, Nancy Roth Remington, provided a gimlet-eyed line edit that resulted in literally hundreds of changes.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Cook had fulfilled his promise to double the size of services, which delivered $53 billion in sales in fiscal year 2020. Its revenue equaled that of Goldman Sachs and Caterpillar. He continued to introduce new Apple subscription services, including one for fitness, and the company benefited from a surge in App Store purchases by people who were stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Investors cheered the sales growth. They began to see Apple as more than a legacy hardware business that rose and fell depending on the popularity of each iPhone release. The company’s price-to-earnings ratio jumped from its average of sixteen times earnings to more than thirty times earnings in 2020.


pages: 469 words: 149,526

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine by Christopher Miller

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Bellingcat, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, false flag, friendly fire, game design, global pandemic, military-industrial complex, Ponzi scheme, private military company, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, special economic zone, stakhanovite, wikimedia commons

Shevchenko) here censorship, press here, here, here, here Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) here, here champagne, Ukrainian here chanson music here Chazin, Natan here checkpoints, Kyiv here checkpoint run-ins, CM’s here Chernichkin, Kostya here, here Chernov, Mstyslav here Chernyshov, Oleksiy here child exploitation and propaganda here children’s hospital attack, Mariupol here China here Chornovol, Tetyana here, here Chubarov, Refat here Churchill, Winston here CNN here coal industry, Ukrainian here Communist Party of Ukraine here Cossacks here, here, here, here, here, here, here Covid-19 global pandemic here Crimea here, here, here Belbek air force base here forced referendum on secession (2014) 134-here invasion and annexation of (2014) here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kerch Strait bridge here, here Privolnoye infantry base here pro-Kyiv activists here pro-Moscow militia forces here, here, here, here, here, here pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine demonstrations here relationship with the Ukraine here Sevastopol port here takeover of parliament at Simferopol here Tatars here, here cyberwarfare here Daily Telegraph here, here, here Danilov, Oleksiy here, here, here Debaltseve army base here Debaltseve (2015), Battle of here, here Debaltseve city here, here, here Demchenko, Captain Oleksandr here, here, here Denisova, Lyudmila here Derevyanko, Borys here ‘dictatorship laws’ here Dnipro Battalion here Dnipropetrovsk here Dolgopolov, Alexandr here Dombrovsky Quarry here the Donbas here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here civilian front line devastation here escalation of fighting pre-2022 war here executions by firing squad here, here lack of evacuation programs (2014) here Moscow ‘Russifying’ here presidential election (2014) here pro-Kyiv militia (2014) here pro-Russian demonstrations (2014) here pro-Russian militant forces take power (2014) here referendum on secession here, here, here, here see also individual places by name; Artemivsk; Bakhmut; Battle of the Donbas (2022); Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR); Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR); Mariupol; Slovyansk Donbas Battalion here, here Donetsk here, here, here, here, here, here anti-government demonstrations (2014) here, here, here see also Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Donetsk National University here Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘anti-independence’ celebrations (2014) here Battle of Debaltseve (2015) here, here Battle of Donetsk Airport (2014) here, here, here central morgue here Cossack bomb-disposal squad here forces shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 here, here forces shoot down Ukrainian military aircraft (2014) here kidnappings and interrogation here, here life at the Ramada hotel here Minsk I here, here Minsk II here, here, here pro-Russian/separatist forces here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here propaganda here, here puppet leadership here, here, here, here referendum on secession here, here Russian forces here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ukrainian presidential election (2014) here Unity Day bus attack (2014) here Victory Day celebrations (2014) here Donetsk soccer stadium here Donetsk Airport (2014), Battle of here, here, here Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic here Donetskie Novosti newspaper here drones, Shahed here, here drones, use of domestic here Dubchak, Andriy here Duliby village here Dzhaparova, Emine here Eastern Partnership Summit here The Economist here election (2014), presidential here election (2019), presidential here Elizabeth II, Queen here Emelyanenko, Captain Maksym here Energoatom – National Nuclear Energy Generating Company here energy/fuel shortages, Kyiv here Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity here armed assaults, 20 February here the Berkut here, here, here, here, here, here conflicts, 1 December here, here, here, here conflicts following ‘dictatorship laws’ here extremist groups here, here, here, here formation of the EuromaidanPR group here Lenin statue toppled here Maidan encampment here, here march on parliament, 18 February here party leaders negotiation with Yanukovych here Party of Regions paid-for demonstration here regional demonstrations here reporters and activists kidnapped and beaten here speakers and performers here, here, here, here, here, here volunteer security corps/samooborona here, here women’s sotnya here Yanukovych flees Mezhyhirya estate here European Commission here European Union here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here evacuation programs here, here, here, here, here, here, here Evening Kvartal TV program here extremist groups, Ukraine here, here, here, here, here, here Fabius, Laurent here Facebook here, here, here, here, here, here Federal Security Service (FSB), Russian here, here, here, here, here, here Fedonyuk, Ruslan here Fedotav, Pyotr here Feldman, Evgeny here, here, here, here Fil, Rima here filtration camps, Russian here, here Financial Times here, here First Strike Company bomb-disposal squad here First World War here, here flags here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Forbes Ukraine here France here, here funerals and memorials, military here Garanich, Gleb here gas industry, Dnipropetrovsk here, here Georgia, invasion of (2008) here, here Germany here, here, here Gilmour, David here Girkin, Igor ‘Strelkov’ here, here, here, here, here, here Glazyev, Sergey here GlobalPost here The Glory of Sevastopol newspaper here Gongadze, Georgiy here Gorchinskaya, Katya here, here, here, here, here, here Gordeyeva, Valentina here Great Patriotic War here, here GRU here, here Grytsenko, Oksana here Gulf War (1990–91) here Hadeyev, Alexander here Haidai, Serhiy here, here hair trade, blonde here Halyna, Dr here Haran, Olexiy here Havryliuk, Mykhailo here Heavenly Hundred - Nebesna Sotnya here Higgins, Eliot here Hilsum, Lindsey here Hitler, Adolf here HIV/AIDS here, here Hollande, François here Holodomor here Holtsyev, Mark here, here Horlivka Institute for Foreign Languages here, here Hromadske TV here Hryluk, Serhiy here Ibraimov, Ildar here, here illegal mines here Ilovaisk here Ilovaisk (2014), Battle of here, here Ilya (Donbas separatist) here, here, here, here Independence Day (2022), Ukrainian here Independence Day (2014), Ukrainian here independence demonstration, 1980s Ukrainian here Independent here Instagram here Irpin, Kyiv Oblast here Irvanets, Oleksandr here Ivan (Ukrainian Orthodox priest), Father here Ivanov, Volodymyr here Ivashchenko, Denis here Izyum here Jakub (Kyiv Post journalist) here Japarov, Eskander here Jews here, here, here, here Johnson, Boris here journalists and activist kidnappings here, here murders/disappearances here, here, here, here Kanayeva, Vera here Kazachenko, Olga Yevgenyevna here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kazakhstan here Kerch Strait bridge, Crimea here, here Kharkiv here, here, here, here, here Kharkiv Pact here, here Kherson here, here Khersones ancient ruins here Khlyvnyuk, Andriy here Khodakovsky, Alexander here Khokholya, Sergei here Khomyak, Albert here Khrushchev, Nikita here, here, here kidnappings in Crimea here kidnappings, journalist/activist here, here Kiehart, Pete here, here, here, here, here, here Klitschko, Vitali here, here, here, here, here, here Klopotenko, Ievgen here Klymentyev, Vasyl here Kohikov, Petro here Kolomoisky, Igor here Komunar here Konstantin (CM’s friend and language tutor) here Konstantinov, Vladimir here kopanki – illegal mines here Korostylev, Oleg here Koshel, Vitaly here Koshikova, Olena here Koshiw, Isobel here, here, here Kosse, Alina here Kostiuk, Yuriy here Kostyantynivka here Kovalenko, Iryna here Kozak, Dmitry here Kramatorsk here, here, here, here, here Krasne village school here, here, here Krasnoarmiisk here Kravchenko, Yuriy here Kravchuk, Leonid here Kremlin, Russian government in the here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Moscow, Russian government in; Putin, Vladimir; Russian Federation; Russian military Kryvonozhko, Lieutenant General Anatoliy here, here, here Kryvoruchko, General Serhiy here Kuchma, Leonid here, here, here, here, here Kukharchenko, Colonel Viktor here Kuleba, Dmytro here, here Kulish, Andriy here Kvartal 95 here, here Kyiv city here, here, here, here air strikes, October (2022) here bomb shelters here central railway station here checkpoints here distribution of rifles to civilians here energy conservation here first strikes against (2022) here, here, here Lenin statue toppled here pre-war atmosphere (2022) here road and traffic signs here summertime, post-siege (2022) here Tymoshenko protests here see also Battle of Kyiv (2022); Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity Kyiv City State Administration here, here, here Kyiv Post here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kyiv, Ukrainian government in here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity; Kuchma, Leonid; Kyiv city; Ukraine; Yanukovych, Viktor; Yushchenko, Viktor; Zelensky, Volodymyr Kyivan Rus here Kyivskiye Vedomosti here Kyrpach, Lyudmyla and Oleksandr here languages, Russian and Ukrainian here, here, here, here Lenin statue toppled, Kyiv here Leninopad here Levin, Maks here ‘little green men’ here, here, here, here Livadia Palace, Crimea here LiveJournal blog here, here Lopushanska, Mariana here Luhansk here, here, here, here, here, here, here morgue and hospital here Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lukyanchenko, Oleksandr here Lukyanov, Mykola here Lutsenko, Ihor here Lviv here, here Lyagin, Roman here, here Lyashko, Oleh here, here Lyman here Macron, Emmanuel here Maidan camp settlement here Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 here, here search for the missile launch site here Maloletka, Evgeniy here Malyar, Hanna here Malyovana, Viktoria here Malyshev, Mikhail here Mamchur, Colonel Yuli here Manafort, Paul here Mariinka here, here Marinovka here Maritime Guards of the Border Guard Service, Ukrainian here Mariupol here attack and Russian siege (2022) here, here, here Donbas war (2014) here police station shootout here Ukrainian Navy here Markosian, Olena here Markushyn, Oleksandr here, here Martinovskaya, Vera here Mashable here Matchenko, Andriy here Matsuka, Oleksiy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mazur, Valentina here McDonald’s here medals of honor here, here, here Medvedchuk, Viktor here, here, here, here Medvedev, Dmitry here, here, here Mejlis here, here Men’s Day here mental health issues, veteran here Merkel, Angela here, here Mezhyhirya estate, Yanukovych’s here Miller, Christopher here accommodation in Artemivsk here in Ana-Yurt, Crimea (2014) here Artemivsk library English club here, here Artwinery, Artemivsk here attacked by Cossacks in Crimea here banned from the DNR and LNR here Battle of Donetsk Airport (2014) here checkpoint run-ins here City Hall in Artemivsk here, here in Crimea (2014) here, here, here in Crimea (2022) here detained by masked rebel fighters here detained by Strelkov here in the Donbas (2014) here, here in the Donbas (2019–22) here, here, here, here, here the Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity here, here exploring the Donbas here first strikes against Ukraine (February 2022) here food in Artemivsk here friends in Artemivsk here, here, here ‘Fuel Duel’ Kyiv Post article here interview with Oleksandr Turchynov here interviews with Volodymyr Zelensky here joins the United States Peace Corps here Krasne village school here, here, here in Kyiv (2022–23) here, here, here, here, here, here in Kyiv (2013–14) here, here Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 here, here in Mariupol here Ministry of Education meeting in Artemivsk here missile strikes against Kramatorsk here, here neighbors in Artemivsk here nightlife and celebrations in Artemivsk here Peace Corps writing grants here, here politics in Artemivsk here Russian and Ukrainian languages here, here, here, here, here Russian Cossack bomb-disposal squad here Russian-Ukrainian Interregional Economic Forum here salary and cost of living in Artemivsk here, here salt mines in Artemivsk here, here uncovering Strelkov’s records here, here visits kopanki illegal mines here Milley, General Mark here Ministry of Education, Ukraine here Ministry of the Interior, Ukraine here Minsk I/Minsk Protocol here, here, here Minsk II/Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements here, here, here, here, here missile systems development, Ukrainian here Moldova here Monastyrsky, Denis here morgue, Donetsk here Moroz, Igor here, here, here, here, here, here Moscow, Russian government in here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here The Moscow Times here Moskva here, here, here murder and disappearances of journalists here, here, here, here Musiy, Oleh here Mykolaivka here Nalyvaichenko, Valentyn here Natasha (CM’s friend in Artemivsk) here, here National Guard, Ukrainian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here National Memory Union here National Security and Defense Council, Ukrainian here, here Navy, Ukrainian here Nayyem, Mustafa here, here, here Nazar, Natalia here Nazi Germany here, here, here, here, here, here, here occupation of Artemivsk here New Citizen here New York Times here, here New York, Ukraine here Nicholas II, Tsar here Night Wolves biker group here Nihoyan, Serhiy here Nikolaychuk, Andriy here NKVD, DNR here Normandy Format Group here North American Treaty Organization (NATO) here, here, here Novosti Donbassa here, here, here, here, here, here, here Novy Stil here nuclear fuel supplies here Nuland, Victoria here, here Nykyforov here Obama, Barack here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Obolon district, Kyiv here, here Odesa here, here Odnorih, Halyna here ‘Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,’ Ukrainian battle hymn here Okean Elzy here, here Oksana and Daria (displaced Mariupol residents) here Oleksiivna, Katerina here Olenivka prison here oligarchs, Ukrainian here, here, here, here, here Oliphant, Roland here, here, here openDemocracy here Oplot here Opposition Bloc – For Life party here Opytne here Orange Revolution here, here, here, here Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) here, here Osmolovska, Aliona here Ostaltsev, Leonid here, here Paevska, Julia ‘Taira’ here Palace of Culture, Mariupol here Pan, Cor here Panchenko, Valentina here Paradise nightclub, Artemivsk here Parasiuk, Volodymyr here Party of Regions here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity; Yanukovych, Viktor Parubiy, Andriy here, here Paton Walsh, Nick here Patriot of Ukraine here Patrushev, Nikolai here Pavlov, Arsen here Peter the Great here Petsa, Myroslava here Pichko, Maria and Oleksiy here, here Pinchuk, Viktor here, here Podufalov, Pavel here Pokrovsk here, here Poland/Polish people here, here, here, here, here, here police force, Ukrainian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here war time recruits in Kyiv here station shootout, Mariupol here Ponomarev, Vyacheslav here Poroshenko, Petro here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD here Potemkin demonstrations here Povalyaeva, Svitlana here Pravda here presidential election (2014), Ukrainian here presidential election (2019), Ukrainian here press/media bribes here censorship here, here, here control in the Donbas here, here Priazovskii rabochii newspaper here Prigozhin, Evgeny here, here prisoner exchanges here, here Prisoners of War here, here, here, here, here, here, here Privolnoye infantry base, Crimea here pro-Kyiv militia in the Donbas (2014) here Prokhanov, Alexander here propaganda, Russian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Pukach, Oleksiy here Purgin, Andrei here, here Pushilin, Denis here Putin, Vladimir here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here announces ‘special military operation’ (2022) here, here Customs Union proposal here, here invasion and annexation of Crimea here, here, here, here, here, here Kerch Strait bridge here, here Minsk II here, here, here, here Mariupol Port here and Volodymyr Zelensky here, here, here Wagner Group here, here see also Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR); Kremlin, Russian government in the; Moscow, Russian government in, Russian Federation; Russian Military Pyatt, Geoffrey here Pyrozhenko, Alexander here Radical Party here railway station, Kyiv central here Ramada Hotel, Donetsk here, here Ratushnyi, Roman and Taras here Red Army Day here Red Cross here refugee crisis here rent-a-crowd protests here, here, here Reporters Without Borders here Reva, Mayor Oleksiy here, here, here Revolution of Dignity see Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity Revolution on Granite here Reznikov, Oleksiy here, here RIA Novosti newspaper here ribbon of St George – kolorady here Right Sector here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here riot police – Berkut here, here, here, here, here, here Road Control here Rogozin, Dmitry here Roosevelt, Franklin D. here Rostislav ‘Slava’ (CM’s friend) here, here Ruslana here Russian Empire here Russian Federation here Customs Union proposal here, here, here, here expulsion of US Peace Corps here financial support for Ukraine here, here Federal Security Service (FSB) here, here, here, here, here, here, here nuclear fuel supplies here President Zelensky’s address to here pro-Russian demonstrations, Ukraine here propaganda here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Putin announces ‘special military operation’ here, here see also Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR); Kremlin, Russian government in the; Moscow, Russian government in; Putin, Vladimir; Russian military Russian military here, here atrocities in Bucha here attack and siege of Mariupol (2022) here, here attacks against civilians here, here, here, here Baltic Fleet at Mariupol here Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol here, here, here, here, here bomb the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security, Yavoriv here conflict escalation in the Donbas, pre-2022 war here detention and interrogation civilians here first attacks against Ukraine (2022) here injured soldiers pose as Ukrainians here Izyum – Donbas front line here Kyiv airstrikes October (2022) here in the Donbas (2014) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here in the Obolon district, Kyiv here, here invasion and annexation of Crimea here, here, here, here, here Privolnoye infantry base here Prisoners of War here, here recruitment of state prisoners here second day strikes on Kyiv (2022) here seizure of Ukrainian navy ships, Sevastopol here shoot down civilian Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 here, here target Antonov Airport here target Bakhmut here, here, here, here target Irpin district here unprepared and uninformed troops here US intelligence regarding here, here, here withdrawal from Kyiv Oblast here, here Russian Revolution here Russian Spring/pro-Russian demonstrations here Russian-Ukrainian Interregional Economic Forum here Russian Unity party here Rybachuk, Oleg here, here Rybakova, Iryna here, here, here, here, here Rychkov, Vadym here, here Rychkova, Tetiana ‘Tanya’ here saboteurs, Russian here, here, here Sadokhin, Colonel Ihor here St Michael’s Monastery and Cathedral, Kyiv here, here, here, here Salim, Mohd Ali bin Md here salt mines, Artemivsk here, here samooborona/volunteer security corps 97 here sanctions and travel bans, Western here, here, here, here Savur-Mohyla here, here Sea of Azov here Second World War here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Seddon, Max here, here Semenchenko, Semen here, here Sentsov, Oleg here Sergatskova, Katya here Sergei Prokofiev International Airport here Sergeyev, Fyodor ‘Artyom’ here Servant of the People party here Servant of the People TV program here, here Sevastopol, Crimea here, here, here Severodonetsk here Shakhtar Donetsk FC here Shanghai here, here Shevchenko, Petro here Shevchenko, Taras here, here Shevchuk, Oleg here Shmyhal, Denys here Sikorski, Radosław here Simmonds, Julian here Sisenko, Oleksandra here Sizov, Vitaliy here Skibitsky, General Vadym here Skuratovsky, Ivan here Slava (CM’s friend from Artemivsk) here, here, here, here, here Slavov, Dmytro here Slavutych warship, Ukrainian here Slok, Gary here Slovyansk here, here, here Snake Island border guards here Sneider, Noah here, here, here, here, here Snizhne here Sobytiya newspaper here Social–National Party of the Ukraine (SNPU) here Sokolov, Nikolai Georgievich here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Soledar, Ukraine here, here sotnya units here, here South Ossetia here Soviet Air Force here Soviet Union here, here, here, here collapse of here, here, here, here Great Patriotic War/WWII here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here persecution and exile of Tatars here propaganda here Soviet-era weapons and vehicles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ukraine as part of here, here war in Afghanistan here, here St Paul Pioneer Press here The St Petersburg Times here Stakhanov, Aleksey here Stalin, Joseph here, here, here, here, here statues and monuments here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stefanchuk, Ruslan here Steinmeier, Frank-Walter here Stepanov, Anatoliy here, here, here Stoyanov, Serhiy here Strashko, Nina here Strutynska, Senior Lieutenant Valentina here, here, here Strutynskyi, Yevhen here student newspaper, Donetsk National University here student protesters here, here, here, here supply runs to troops, civilian here Supreme Court, Ukraine here Surkov, Vladislav here Surovikin, General Sergei here surzhyk here, here, here Svoboda here, here, here, here, here Sybirtsev, Oleksandr here Sydor, Father Ivan here Syrova, Tetyana here Taganrog prison, Russia here Tarasenko, Andriy here Tatars, Crimean here, here, here, here Ternopil corvette, Ukrainian here Territorial Defense Force here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here The Times here Thorez, Maurice here Time magazine here Tinkalyuk, Ruslan here, here, here titushki here, here, here, here, here Torez here, here, here trade agreement proposal, EU here Trade Unions Building, Kyiv here, here Transfiguration of The Lord Pentecostal Church, Slovyansk here Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine here Trump, Donald here Trusov, Platoon Commander Valentin here tryzub here, here Tryzub (paramilitary group) here, here, here Tsybulska, Liubov here, here Tsyupa, Oksana here Turchynov, Oleksandr here, here, here, here, here, here Turevich, Anatoliy here Twitter here, here, here, here Tyahnybok, Oleh here, here, here, here, here, here Tychyna, Private Ihor here Tykhomirova, Nina here Tymoshenko, Yevheniya here Tymoshenko, Yulia here, here, here, here, here, here, here Tyshchenko family here UDAR party here UEFA European Football Championship (2012) here Ukraine artificial famine/Holodomor here declaration of independence (1991) here, here, here decommunization program here emergence of nation here first strikes against (February 2022) here HIV/AIDS epidemic here illegal mining industry here Independence Day celebrations (2014) here industrial water pollution here journalist murders and disappearances here, here, here, here Minsk I here, here, here Minsk II here, here, here, here nuclear fuel supplies here Orange Revolution here, here, here as part of the Soviet Union here, here, here pre-war atmosphere (2022) here presidential campaign and election (2019) here presidential election (2014) here pro-Russian demonstrations (2014) here Putin’s Customs Union proposal here, here, here, here relationship with Crimea here relationship with the European Union here, here response to US intelligence warnings here, here Tymoshenko protests here see also individual places by name; Artemivsk; Crimea; the Donbas; Donetsk; Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR); Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity; Kyiv city; Kyiv, Ukrainian government in; Miller, Christopher; Ukrainian military Ukrainian Front here Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) here, here Ukrainian military here, here airborne forces here, here, here, here airstrike on Snizhne here Antonov Airport attack here Battle for Bakhmut (2022) here, here Battle of Debaltseve (2015) here, here Battle of Donetsk Airport (2014) here, here Battle of Ilovaisk (2014) here, here Central Air Command here, here death of two brothers here defending Irpin here dismantled by Yanukovych here forces at Belbek air force base, Crimea here forces at Privolnoye infantry base, Crimea here, here front line, Izyum here funerals and memorial services here Independence Day celebrations (2014) here Maritime Guards of the Border Guard Service here the navy here, here outbreak of war (2022) here pre-2022 war in the Donbas here Prisoners of War here, here, here, here, here Putin addresses here retake Slovyansk here, here siege of Mariupol (2022) here surrender in the Donbas here take out Moskva, Russian flagship here, here Tanya Rychkova’s supply runs here, here volunteer food supplies here, here weapons development here, here Western arms and ammunition supplies here withdrawal from Crimea here withdrawal from Debaltseve here see also Berkut; National Guard; police force, Ukrainian; Security Service of Ukraine (SBU); Territorial Defense Force Ukrainian War of Independence (1917–21) here Ukrainska Pravda newspaper here, here, here Ukrainskiy Vybor organization here Ukravtodor here ultranationalists, Ukraine here, here, here, here, here United Kingdom here, here United Nations here, here United States Embassy, Ukraine here United States of America here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘Fuck the EU’ - Victoria Nuland YouTube conversation here intelligence warnings to the Ukraine here, here, here, here offer to evacuate Zelensky here sanctions and travel bans here, here, here United States Peace Corps here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Unity Day bus attack (2014), Donetsk here Unity Day clashes, Kyiv (2014) here Vakarchuk, Svyatoslav here Valeryevna, Maria here Varenytsia, Inna here, here Varianitsyn, Second Captain Roman here Vasylkiv here, here Vechernyaya Odesa here Velyka Novosilka here Verbytsky, Yuriy here Veremiy, Vyacheslav here Verkhnya Krynka here Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine parliament here, here, here, here, here Vesti newspaper here Victory Day celebrations and referendum here, here Vika (CM’s language tutor and friend) here Viktor (kopanki miner) here Vindman, Alexander here Vitaliy (apprentice surgeon in Kyiv) here Vitko, Vice-Admiral Aleksandr here VKontakte here, here Vlasova, Anastasia here, here Volodymyr (pro-Russian Crimean militiaman) here Voronenko, Oleksandr here, here, here Vpered newspaper here Vyacheslav, Yarko here Vyshyvana, Ahafiya here Vyshyvaniy, Kyrylo and Vasyl here vyshyvanky shirts here, here, here Wagner Group here, here war crimes/atrocities, Russian here Warners, Tom here water pollution, industrial here water supplies here weapon depot, Paraskoviivka here, here weapon supplies, Western here, here Webb, Isaac here, here, here Westinghouse here White Hammerhere Wild Ducks volunteer unit here Wings of Phoenix here Women’s Day here women’s sotnya here writing grants, Peace Corps here, here Yakymenko, Oleksandr here Yalta Conference (1945) here Yanukovych, Viktor here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Euromaidan protests and revolt here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mezhyhirya estate and destruction of state secrets here Yarosh, Dmytro here, here, here Yatchenko, Sergei here Yatsenyuk, Arseniy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Yavoriv here Yelets, Volodymyr here Yermak, Andriy here, here, here YouTube here, here, here, here, here, here Yurash, Sviatoslav here, here Yushchenko, Viktor here, here, here Zahoor, Kamaliya here Zahoor, Mohammad here, here Zaitsev, Denis ‘Raven’ here Zakharchenko, Alexander here Zakharchenko, Vitaliy here Zaldastanov, Aleksandr here Zaluzhny, Valery here, here, here Zaporozhzhia here Zarivna, Daria here Zavtra newspaper here Zelenska, Olena here, here, here Zelensky, Volodymyr here address to the Russian federation here addresses the Ukraine here, here, here, here, here, here, here civilian mobilization here Donald Trump scandal here economic forum in Mariupol (2020) here outbreak of war (Feb 2022) here, here presidential campaign (2019) here press conference (Jan 2022) here refuses option to evacuate Kyiv here response to US warnings about Russia here television career here, here visits remains of Bucha here and Vladimir Putin here, here, here Zhilin, Evgeny here Zhilkin ‘the Body Collector’, Yaroslav here Zhyzneuski, Mikhail here Ziyatdinov, Aziz here, here Zverkovsky, Danil here BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This electronic edition first published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Christopher Miller 2023 Christopher Miller has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work Map credits: Ukraine © PeterHermesFurian/Getty Images; The Donbas © Goran_tek-en, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons; Crimea © PeterHermesFurian/Getty Images All rights reserved.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

As it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the anger is especially acute toward those running the new factories. FEAR FACTORIES REDUX Christian Smalls March 2020 At the beginning of March 2020, an assistant warehouse manager named Christian Smalls at Amazon’s JFK8 facility noticed that more and more of his fellow employees were showing up to work pale and fatigued. The Covid-19 virus had just begun to spread across the nation for the first time, and it paralyzed much of the economy in the process. It was, however, a boon to the company where Smalls worked. Hundreds of millions of people were suddenly stuck indoors around the clock, ordering goods online—often through Amazon.


pages: 632 words: 163,143

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

But digitisation gets at the very atoms of sound itself, transforming continuous soundwaves into a row of zeros and ones, into code.18 As binary data, sampled at a frequency of 44,100 cycles per second, music can be copied, pasted, manipulated, transmitted, downloaded and infinitely re-edited with no loss of data quality, making extinct the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘copy’.19 If everything is number, and the only reality is information flow, there is no difference between the Covid-19 virus, the coronavirus, computer code, the prime minister and the ‘Ode to Joy’. And yet, for all its shock, awe and wonder, the digital revolution is arguably no such thing: it is an evolution extrapolating old tendencies. The idea that the world was governed by mathematical proportions that music reveals goes back to the ancient Greeks and Babylonians, as we have seen (Chapter 6).


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

* * * I became friends with Chris and Stephen in the course of writing this book, well after they had been paroled. After prison, Stephen used his programming talents to run a software consultancy, then built a start-up whose logistics technology helped schools, companies, and other venues remain open during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stephen even earned a patent—US10417204B2, “Method and system for creation and delivery of dynamic communications”—for his work on natural language processing. Chris wasn’t far behind. He started two businesses, wrote a widely praised book, and launched a second career as a globe-trotting artist—a remarkable post-prison trajectory culminating with an appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah to promote his book, The Master Plan.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

According to one Israeli military engineer, their software is able to predict ‘the most likely areas [rocket] launchers will be set up and at what hours. That enables us to know in advance what will happen and what areas should be attacked.’ Security is also a major driver of AI investment in the UAE. The Emirati security services are already using facial-recognition software to track the population and stifle political dissent. During the COVID-19 pandemic, police in Dubai even used the same software to monitor whether individuals were adhering to social distancing guidelines.13 The forces of globalization and nationalism are shaping the growth of AI as the New Cold War plays out across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The same is true of another major field of scientific research, one that has echoes of the original Cold War of the twentieth century.


pages: 725 words: 168,262

API Design Patterns by Jj Geewax

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, cognitive load, continuous integration, COVID-19, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, imposter syndrome, Internet of things, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, loose coupling, machine readable, microservices, natural language processing, Paradox of Choice, ride hailing / ride sharing, social graph, sorting algorithm

In the summer of 2019, a friend of mine got me into drumming with an electronic kit, and I embraced it wholeheartedly. Sometimes I would actually play the drums, but I spent a rather larger proportion of my time writing code to interact with my drum kit’s configuration using MIDI SysEx commands. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I suddenly had rather different priorities in terms of considering the audio/visual needs of my local church, both while we were worshiping remotely and considering how we might meet in person again. This involved learning about protocols such as VISCA, NDI, and OSC (for cameras and audio mixers) as well as more software-oriented integration with Zoom, VLC, PowerPoint, Stream Deck, and more.


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

., Complaint for Damages and Injunctive Relief, Alameda County Superior Court, no. RG17850153, February 21, 2017. 35. Ibid. 36. Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham, “Did an Oakland Cop Kill His Wife?,” East Bay Express (Oakland), November 8, 2016. 37. Caesar Basa passed away in December 2021 after contracting Covid-19; therefore we were unable to get his account of what happened in the interview room and the hallway outside with Brendan O’Brien and Mike Gantt. 38. For the accounts of what took place among Gantt, Basa, and Lois, we rely on Mike Gantt’s 2017 press conference and documents from his wrongful termination lawsuit.


pages: 1,520 words: 221,543

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941 by Alan Allport

Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Downton Abbey, hydroponic farming, imperial preference, lone genius, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, new economy, plutocrats, trade route, éminence grise

Lastly, I want to thank my wife Barbara and my children Thomas, Katharine and Lizzie, for being part of this adventure. As I write in May 2020, the five of us are in house-bound quarantine in circumstances that I could not have possibly imagined five years ago when I began this book. Many comparisons, most of them not very convincing, have been made between the Covid-19 pandemic emergency of this year and the home front experience of the Second World War. Specious analogies aside, there has been something about the way in which our lives have been turned upside down over the past few months to offer a glimpse, however slight, of what it must have felt like to be an ordinary observer of the great and unsettling drama of the 1940s.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Cited television footage from the 1986 documentary The Made for TV Election is linked to the exact timestamp in which it appears in the program on YouTube.com, last accessed May 24, 2020. When I cite bestseller statistics, my source is the downloadable New York Times lists at http://www.hawes.com. Because of the closure of the Hoover Institution and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library during the COVID-19 crisis, it was impossible to confirm some of the citations; these will be updated online when it becomes possible to do so, and in future editions. Scholars having problems finding documents cited here should contact me directly at Reaganland2020@gmail.com, for assistance. ABBREVIATIONS AA: Annelise Anderson Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford, California ABCIA: 1980 ABC News transcripts, Internet Archive AP: Associated Press newspaper syndicate APP: American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucbs.edu BG: Boston Globe CFTRN: Citizens for the Republic Newsletter, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Ronald Reagan Presidential Campaign Papers, boxes 38–39.