This came as a pleasant surprise!
The world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago, and
data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for
much of this new foliage: China and India. A new study shows that the
two emerging countries with the world’s biggest populations are leading
the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious
tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both
countries.
The expected effects of climate change, according to organizations like the IPCC and the World Bank, are fairly terrifying.
They suggest the planet’s climate will change fast enough to cause widespread droughts and famines, the spread of insect-borne diseases, the displacement of populations, and a worsening of severe poverty.
But here’s one thing they don’t predict: mass civilizational collapse.
Most models warn that as a result of climate change, the incredibly rapid progress
humanity has been making in life expectancies and in ending extreme
poverty will stall; we could even lose decades of the progress we’ve
made. If extreme poverty gets as bad as it was in 1980 due to climate
change, that will be an immeasurable humanitarian failure, and hundreds
of millions of people will die. But the 1980s definitely did have human
civilization, and the future in this version would too.Another way of looking at it is that the predicted
effects of climate change are very bad, but not in a cinematic way. Sea
levels will rise, but not up to the Statue of Liberty’s neck (if all the
ice in the world melted, sea levels would rise to approximately the statue’s waist).
Lots of people will die, most of them low-income. It’s not surprising
that this gets less viral attention than extreme, extinction-focused
scenarios.But that isn’t to say extreme scenarios are made up from
nothing. Where do some people conclude that climate change might swallow
up civilization itself?
Also excellent: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qmHh-cshTCMT8LX0Y5wSQm8FMBhaxhQ8OlOeRLkXIF0
This is fairly clear to programmers and similarly tech-savvy folks, but unclear to many others.
Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we’ve got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.
You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise.
IPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.
And your iPhone doesn’t only feed data trackers while you sleep. In a single week, I encountered over 5,400 trackers, mostly in apps, not including the incessant Yelp traffic. According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T.
Excellent short essay on rethinking the meaning and nature of privacy in the Facebook age.
All of this leads me to see a parallel between privacy law and environmental law, another area where a technological shift forced us to protect a dwindling resource that earlier generations could take for granted.
The idea of passing laws to protect the natural world was not one that came naturally to early Americans. In their experience, the wilderness was something that hungry bears came out of, not an endangered resource that required lawyers to defend. Our mastery over nature was the very measure of our civilization.
But as the balance of power between humans and nature shifted, it became clear that wild spaces could not survive without some kind of protection. […]
In the span of a little more than a century, we went from treating nature as an inexhaustible resource, to defending it piecemeal, to our current recognition that human activity poses an ecological threat to the planet.
We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote. In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/1984-george-orwell/590638/
Here’s a good high-level summary of Elizabeth Warren’s policy proposals, with links to each of her plans.
“It’s rare, at this stage of a presidential campaign, somebody distinguishes themselves by the boldness and detail of their policies,” said Robert B. Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “She is asking the biggest questions that exist, and that is: How do you make a free market work? How do you make capitalism actually work for the many rather than the few?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-2020-policies-platform.html
This is a pretty fascinating analysis by an Asia scholar of China and our failure to engage with it in a realistic way.
The truth is that the Chinese have already chosen their path and no number of speeches on our part will convince them to abandon it. They do not want our rules based order. They have rejected it. They will continue to reject it unless compelled by overwhelming crisis to sleep on sticks and swallow gall and accept the rules we force upon them.
China has made its choice. The real decision that will determine the contours of the 21st century will not be made in Beijing, but in Washington.
Observers of Chinese affairs have come to recognize two uncomfortable truths. The first is that China is a growing power whose might will continue to grow in every dimension we can measure for decades. The second is that the Chinese system of government is a fundamentally illiberal one, and the system of international relations the leaders of this system prefer reflects their illiberalism. These two things are not determined in the stars; either may change, and may change quite suddenly. But Americans will be better served if we plan as if both of these truths will remain true to the end of our lives.
This is not what we have been doing. For the most part Americans were able to accommodate themselves to the first of these realities by pretending that the second was not true. China could become more powerful, we said, because it will not be illiberal for long. After all, on this Earth the arc of history bends towards justice. Those on the ‘wrong side’ of history do not last long. How can the illiberal hope to endure?
Last spring it finally sunk in. Chinese illiberalism not only can endure, it is enduring. The old consensus cracked apart. No new consensus on how to deal with China has yet formed to take its place.
http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/06/china-does-not-want-your-rules-based.html
Good article on why secure online voting is such a maddeningly difficult challenge, and why it’s really not ready for use, no matter what vendors may say.
The paradox of ensuring both verifiability and anonymity in internet voting has frustrated security researchers for decades.
The history of elections in the United States — to say nothing of how elections have proceeded in other, less democratic countries — demonstrates the importance of maintaining the secret ballot. In order to rule out corruption to the greatest extent possible, elections must feature what Stanford University computer science professor David Dill, a Verified Voting board member, calls “non-coercibility, or receipt-freeness,” which is the inability of a person to prove to anyone else how they voted. “I should be able,” Dill said, “to lie to them about the presidential candidate that I voted for, to defeat their bribing me or threatening me to get me to vote a particular way.” If bribery is possible, it will happen. Thus, in this most important of political activities, bribery must be made impossible.
But election administrators lose something when their internet voting platforms disentangle ballot data from the identity of the people casting those ballots. “When you have the requirement for anonymity,” said Daniel Zimmerman, a security researcher at the technology firm Galois, “you have a lot less audit data that you can work with.”
Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken.