Donald Trump

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pages: 369 words: 105,819

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

Time, March 24. http://amp.timeinc.net/time/4713187/donald-trump-obama-wiretap-fact-check/?source=dam. Kruse, Michael, and Noah Weiland. 2016. “Donald Trump’s Greatest Self Contradictions.” Politico Magazine, May 5. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-contradictions-213869. “Mental Health Experts Say Donald Trump Is Unfit to Serve.” 2017. The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. MSNBC, February 21. www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/mental-health-experts-say-trump-is-unfit-to-serve-882688067737. Psychology Today Editorial Staff. 2017. “Shrinks Battle Over Diagnosing Donald Trump,” January 31. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/201701/shrinks-battle-over-diagnosing-donald-trump.

“APA Remains Committed to Supporting Goldwater Rule.” www.psychiatry.org/news-room/apa-blogs/apa-blog/2017/03/apa-remains-committed-to-supporting-goldwater-rule. Bulman, May. 2017. “Donald Trump Has ‘Dangerous Mental Illness,’ Say Psychiatry Experts at Yale Conference.” Independent, April 21. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-dangerous-mental-illness-yale-psychiatrist-conference-us-president-unfit-james-gartner-a7694316.html. DeVega, Chauncey. 2017. “Psychiatrist Bandy Lee: ‘We Have an Obligation to Speak About Donald Trump’s Mental Health Issues … Our Survival as a Species May Be at Stake.’” Salon, May 25. www.salon.com/2017/05/25/psychiatrist-bandy-lee-we-have-an-obligation-to-speak-about-donald-trumps-mental-health-issues-our-survival-as-a-species-may-be-at-stake/.

Kaczynski, Andrew. “Donald Trump to Howard Stern: It’s Okay to Call My Daughter a ‘Piece of Ass.’” CNN, October 9, 2016. Accessed April 9, 2017. www.cnn.com/2016/10/08/politics/trump-on-howard-stern/. King, Shaun. “Donald Trump Is a Pervert.” New York Daily News, June 22, 2016. www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/king-donald-trump-pervert-article-1.2683705. LaMotte, Sandee. “Is the ‘Trump Effect’ Damaging Our Psyches?” CNN, October 14, 2016. Accessed April 7, 2017. www.cnn.com/2016/10/14/health/trump-effect-damaging-american-psyche/. “A Letter from G.O.P. National Security Officials Opposing Donald Trump.” 2006.


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

,” CNN Money, January 22, 2017, http://money.com/money/4641093/vladimir-putin-net-worth/.   7.   “Donald Trump’s 2014 Political Predictions,” Fox News, February 10, 2014, https://video.foxnews.com/v/3179604851001/donald-trumps-2014-political-predictions/?#sp=show-clips.   8.   “Дональд Трамп: Хватит придираться к России!” [“Donald Trump: Stop Picking on Russia!”], RT, February 11, 2014, https://russian.rt.com/article/22064.   9.   Sarah Kendzior, “Donald Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin underscores an unsettling truth about the two leaders,” Quartz, August 19, 2016, https://qz.com/761656/donald-trumps-bromance-with-vladimir-putin-underscores-an-unsettling-truth-about-the-two-leaders/. 10.   

James Briggs, “In Gary, Memories of Donald Trump’s Casino Promises,” Indianapolis Star, April 24, 2016, https://www.indystar.com/story/money/2016/04/24/gary-memories-donald-trumps-casino-promises/82886050/; Russ Buettner and Charles V. Bagli, “How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions,” New York Times, June 11, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html. 30.   Hans-Wilhelm Saure, “Czech Stasi Spied on the Trumps,” Bild, December 15, 2016, https://www.bild.de/news/ausland/donald-trump/czech-stasi-spied-on-the-trumps-49326256.bild.html; “Czech secret agents spied on Trump: He’s ‘completely tax-exempt for the next 30 years.’”

The 1980s: Roy Cohn’s Orwellian America   1.   Lois Romano, “Donald Trump, Holding All the Cards: The Tower! The Team! The Money! The Future!” Washington Post, November 15, 1984, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1984/11/15/donald-trump-holding-all-the-cards-the-tower-the-team-the-money-the-future/8be79254-7793-4812-a153-f2b88e81fa54/?utm_term=.c610b02e7d79.   2.   Susan Mulcahy, “Confessions of a Trump Tabloid Scribe,” Politico Magazine, May/June 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/2016-donald-trump-tabloids-new-york-post-daily-news-media-213842.   3.   Marcus Baram, “Donald Trump Was Once Sued by Justice Department for Not Renting to Blacks,” Huffington Post, April 29, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-blacks-lawsuit_n_855553.   4.   


pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

Cristiano Lima, “Trump Calls Trade Deal ‘a Rape of Our Country,’” Politico, June 28, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/donald-trump-trans-pacific-partnership-224916. 8. Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, March 2, 2018, 5:50 a.m., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/969525362580484098. 9. Trump, Twitter, June 1, 2019, 6:20 p.m., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1134947966320553986. 10. Niraj Chokshi, “The 100-Plus Times Donald Trump Assured Us That America Is a Laughingstock,” Washington Post, January 27, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/27/the-100-plus-times-donald-trump-has-assured-us-the-united-states-is-a-laughingstock/. 11.

Should Stop Paying to Defend Countries That Can Protect Selves,” Associated Press, September 2, 1987, https://apnews.com/05133dbe63ace98766527ec7d16ede08; Donald Trump, “There’s Nothing Wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy That a Little Backbone Can’t Cure,” Washington Post, September 2, 1987, A9, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4404425/Ad-in-The-Washington-Post-from-Donald-Trump.pdf. 15. “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views,” New York Times, March 26, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/us/politics/donald-trump-transcript.html. 16. Richard Wike, Bruce Stokes, Jacob Poushter, Laura Silver, Janell Fetterolf, and Kat Devlin, “Trump’s International Ratings Remain Low, Especially among Key Allies,” Pew Research Center, October 1, 2018, http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/10/01/2-faith-in-the-u-s-president-remains-low/. 17.

Pappas, “Trump, in a Fox News Interview.” 42. Jeremy Diamond, “Trump Praises Saddam Hussein’s Efficient Killing of ‘Terrorists,’ Calls Today’s Iraq ‘Harvard for Terrorism,’” CNN, July 6, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/05/politics/donald-trump-saddam-hussein-iraq-terrorism/index.html. 43. “Playboy Interview: Donald Trump,” Playboy, March 1990, https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-donald-trump-1990. 44. Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland,” July 6, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-people-poland/. 45. Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on the Canadian Elections and Free Trade,” November 26, 1988, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/112688a.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

February 25, 2013: WWE Hall of Fame Inductee Donald Trump and the WWE Hall of Fame “Donald Trump: Bio,” WWE.com, http://www.wwe.com/​superstars/​donald-trump. Donald Trump and “Battle of the Billionaires” “The Battle of the Billionaires Takes Place at WrestleMania,” YouTube video, 4:29, posted by WWE, July 19, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=5NsrwH9I9vE. Donald Trump and dropping money on WWE fans “Donald Trump Gives Away Mr. McMahon’s Money,” YouTube video, 1:31, posted by WWE, July 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=ybtwzNpJ0YA. Donald Trump appoints former CEO of WWE, Linda McMahon, to his cabinet White House, “Swearing-in of Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon,” video, 5:25, February 14, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/​featured-videos/​video/​2017/​02/​14/​swearing-small-business-administrator-linda-mcmahon.

The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC f/k/a Trump Universirty LLC, August 24, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/​public/​resources/​documents/​trump.pdf. Donald Trump: “I can turn anyone…” The People of the State of New York v. The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC f/k/a/ Trump University LLC, p. 10, http://online.wsj.com/​public/​resources/​documents/​trump.pdf. Reveling in the Fake on the Road to White House Donald Trump: “It’s very possible…” Jeremy Useem, “What Does Donald Trump Really Want?” Fortune, April 3, 2000, http://fortune.com/​2000/​04/​03/​what-does-donald-trump-really-want/. The Tyndall Report: 32 minutes on “issues coverage” Andrew Tyndall, The Tyndall Report (website), October 25, 2016, http://tyndallreport.com/​comment/​20/​5778/.

Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article Matt Taibbi, “How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable,” Rolling Stone, February 24, 2016, http://www.rollingstone.com/​politics/​news/​how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224. Donald Trump: “Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted” “Trump Calls Rubio ‘Little Marco,’ Rubio Calls Him, ‘Big Donald,’ ” YouTube video, 0:29, posted by Flat Water, March 3, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=TmJMFEJoNfo. “Trump Already Back to Using ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ ” YouTube video, 4:35, posted by CNN, April 20, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=F8a4krfAJbI. Donald Trump: “Lock her up!” “Killary” “Audience to Trump: Lock Her Up,” video, 1:01, CNN.com, February 21, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/​videos/​politics/​2017/​02/​24/​donald-trump-cpac-clinton-lock-her-up-sot.cnn.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

After methodically working through the field of 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls, he arrived at his real target. “And then, of course, there’s Donald Trump,” Meyers said, with a devilish grin. “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican—which is surprising, because I just assumed that he was running as a joke.” Trump reddened. “Donald Trump often appears on Fox,” Meyers continued, “which is ironic, because a fox often appears on Donald Trump’s head. If you’re at the Washington Post table with Trump and can’t finish your entrée, don’t worry: the fox will eat it.” More laughter. “Gary Busey said recently that Donald Trump would make a great president. Of course, he said the same thing about an old, rusty birdcage he found.”

“I’m fine with this stuff”: Roxanne Roberts, “I Sat Next to Donald Trump at the Infamous 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Washington Post, April 28, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/i-sat-next-to-donald-trump-at-the-infamous-2011-white-house-correspondents-dinner/2016/04/27/5cf46b74-0bea-11e6-8ab8-9ad050f76d7d_story.html. “incredibly gracious and engaged”: Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns, “Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature,” New York Times, March 12, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html?_r=0. Trump had indeed toyed: “Before 2016, Donald Trump Had a History of Toying with a Presidential Run,” PBS NewsHour transcript, PBS.org, July 20, 2106, www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/2016-donald-trump-history-toying-presidential-run/.

Trump had indeed toyed: “Before 2016, Donald Trump Had a History of Toying with a Presidential Run,” PBS NewsHour transcript, PBS.org, July 20, 2106, www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/2016-donald-trump-history-toying-presidential-run/. One day that fall: Michael Kruse, “The True Story of Donald Trump’s First Campaign Speech—in 1987,” Politico, February 5, 2016, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/donald-trump-first-campaign-speech-new-hampshire-1987-213595. “People have birth certificates”: “Trump on Obama’s Birth Certificate: ‘Maybe It Says He’s a Muslim,’” FoxNews.com, nation.foxnews.com/donald-trump/2011/03/30/trump-obama-maybe-hes-muslim. National polls taken in mid-April: “Poll: Donald Trump Leads 2012 GOP Field,” USNews.com, April 15, 2011, www.usnews.com/news/articles/2011/04/15/poll-donald-trump-leads-2012-gop-field.


pages: 359 words: 113,847

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

Inside the White House, the view was that if the video did exist, the incident had happened in Los Angeles, probably in 2014 after a meeting with lawyers that had been arranged precisely to negotiate a revision in their marital agreement. The deal was always about letting Donald Trump be Donald Trump. “I only fuck beautiful girls—you can attest to that,” he said to a Hollywood friend who visited the White House. (He had once left a voice-mail message for Tucker Carlson, who had criticized Trump’s hair: “It’s true you have better hair than I do, but I get more pussy than you do.”) Being Donald Trump—the Donald Trump, unfettered Donald Trump—was the most important thing to him. And he would compensate Melania handsomely for that. But the stakes, and Melania’s leverage, had risen astronomically since Trump entered the White House

The most resonant issue was Donald Trump himself: the people who elected him would be galvanized by the effort to take him from them. Bannon was horrified by mainstream Republican efforts to run the coming election on the strength of the recent Republican tax cut. “Are you kidding? Oh my fucking god, are you kidding?” This election was about the fate of Donald Trump. “Let’s have a do-over election. That’s what the libs want. They can have it. Let’s do it. Up or down, Trump or no Trump.” Impeachment was not to be feared, it was to be embraced. “That’s what you’re voting for: to impeach Donald Trump or to save him from impeachment.”

* * * Trump was personally offended by the FBI’s behavior during the raid of Cohen’s home and office, citing the “Gestapo tactics” used on his lawyer, in which he saw the heavy hand of the Justice Department. But he was also oddly sanguine. “I have deniability,” he repeated, reassuring nobody. The truth was, nobody knew what Michael Cohen knew. The Trump Organization was a freelance affair, with everyone acting on the whim of Donald Trump or in the name of Donald Trump or trying to satisfy the anticipated urges of Donald Trump. And anyway, Trump believed, whatever Cohen knew, he wouldn’t talk about it, because Trump could always pardon him—that, for both Trump and Cohen, was money in the bank. Indeed, Trump felt uniquely protected by his pardon power, and uniquely powerful because of it.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Nick Wing, “Ted Cruz: An Atheist ‘Isn’t Fit to Be’ President,” Huffington Post (November 9, 2015). 31. Leonardo Blair, “Donald Trump Tells Christians ‘I’m Presbyterian’ and ‘Proud of It,’” Christian Post (June 22, 2015). 32. Madeline Conway, “9 Times Ted Cruz Insulted Donald Trump Before Endorsing Him,” Politico (September 23, 2016). 33. Jack Jenkins, “A List of Faith Leaders Calling Out the Religious Right for Failing to Abandon Trump,” Think Progress (October 9, 2016). 34. Howard Kurtz, “A Reporter with Lust in Her Heart,” Washington Post (July 6, 1998). 35. Trip Gabriel and Michael Luo, “A Born-Again Donald Trump? Believe It, Evangelical Leader Says,” New York Times (June 25, 2016). 36.

Through the ensuing decades of the postwar era, the real-life equivalents of Al, Fred, and Homer, including my own parents, if not perhaps Donald Trump’s, persisted in that belief. World War II—the Good War, even before that phrase came into common usage—remained a fixed point of reference, a lodestar. To preserve what the nation had won constituted a categorical imperative. Foster and Henry Weigh In Yet preservation was likely to require effort. Members of the policy elite were already insisting that the United States could ill afford to rest on its laurels. Just ahead lay new dangers that Americans dared not ignore. In the very week of Donald Trump’s birth, for example, Life magazine, then at the height of its influence, featured a lengthy essay by John Foster Dulles, offering his “Thoughts on Soviet Foreign Policy and What to Do About It.”4 Here was a sign that Boone City’s modest aspirations would not suffice.

Was planet Earth capable of tolerating the stress to which it was subjected by runaway capitalism? I saw little reason to think so. We may state with confidence that Donald Trump spent little time pondering such questions. During the Clinton era, he remained a celebrity of sorts and a symbol of excess, but also the butt of jokes. (In a 1993 Washington Post “Style Invitational,” the fifth runner-up prize went to the author of this witticism: “Donald Trump is so annoying that Amnesty International wants him beaten and locked up.”)10 Yet as the end of the decade (and of the Clinton presidency) approached, Trump toyed with making a run for the White House himself.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, when the unexpected trend—Trump might actually win—seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he called him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania, to whom Donald Trump had made his solemn guarantee, was in tears—and not of joy. There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a quite horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States. 2 TRUMP TOWER On the Saturday after the election, Donald Trump received a small group of well-wishers in his triplex apartment in Trump Tower.

Donald Trump became a symbol of the media’s own self-loathing: the interest in and promotion of Donald Trump was a morality tale about the media. Its ultimate end was Kaplan’s pronouncement that Trump should not be covered anymore because every story about Donald Trump had become a cliché. An important aspect of Kaplan’s New York Observer and its self-conscious inside media baseball was that the paper became the prime school for a new generation of media reporters flooding every other publication in New York as journalism itself became ever more self-conscious and self-referential. To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write about Donald Trump.

Bannon, hardly helping his cause, cast himself as a Cassandra to anyone who would listen. He insisted that only disaster would come from trying to mollify your mortal enemies. You need to keep taking the fight to them; you’re fooling yourself if you believe that compromise is possible. The virtue of Donald Trump—the virtue, anyway, of Donald Trump to Steve Bannon—was that the cosmopolitan elite was never going to accept him. He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up. 11 WIRETAP With three screens in his White House bedroom, the president was his own best cable curator. But for print he depended on Hope Hicks. Hicks, who had been his junior aide for most of the campaign and his spokesperson (although, as he would point out, he was really his own spokesperson), had been, many thought, pushed to the sidelines in the West Wing by the Bannonites, the Goldman wing, and the Priebus-RNC professionals.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Avi Asher-Schapiro, “Donald Trump Said Goldman Sachs Had ‘Total Control’ over Hillary Clinton—Then Stacked His Team with Goldman Insiders,” International Business Times, November 16, 2016, http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/donald-trump-said-goldman-sachs-had-total-control-over-hillary-clinton-then. 35. Sam Koppelman, “A Timeline of Donald Trump’s Birther Conspiracy Theory about President Obama,” Hillaryclinton.com, October 25, 2016, https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/a-timeline-of-donald-trumps-president-obama-birther-conspiracy-theory/. 36. Nick Corasaniti, “Donald Trump Calls Obama ‘Founder of ISIS’ and Says It Honors Him,” New York Times, August 10, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/us/politics/trump-rally.html; Del Quentin Wilber, “Call to ‘Lock Her Up’ Puts Trump in a Bind over His Threat to Prosecute Hillary Clinton,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2016. 37.

See Gregory Krieg, “14 of Donald Trump’s Most Outrageous ‘Birther’ Claims—Half from after 2011,” CNN, September 16, 2016, http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/09/politics/donald-trump-birther/index.html; Jana Heigl, “A Timeline of Donald Trump’s False Wiretapping Charge,” Politifact, March 21, 2017, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/mar/21/timeline-donald-trumps-false-wiretapping-charge/; and Michael D. Shear and Emmarie Huetteman, “Trump Repeats Lie about Popular Vote in Meeting with Lawmakers,” New York Times, January 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/donald-trump-congress-democrats.html. 14.

(Note that, though Trump repeatedly refused to distance himself from white supremacists in clear terms, he has disavowed them on other occasions.) 6. See Tim Marcin, “Donald Trump’s Popularity: His Approval Rating among His Base Voters Is Back Up,” Newsweek, July 12, 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-popularity-approval-rating-base-voters-635626. 7. See David Leonhardt, “G.O.P. Support for Trump Is Starting to Crack,” New York Times, July 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/opinion/republican-support-donald-trump.html. 8. The best aggregate of Donald Trump’s approval polls, including a useful comparison to past presidents, is run by FiveThirtyEight. See “How Popular Is Donald Trump?” FiveThirtyEight.com, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/. 9.


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

In American history there have been just four presidential impeachment trials in the U.S. Senate—of President Andrew Johnson, of President Bill Clinton, and of President Donald Trump in 2020 (for pressuring a foreign leader to interfere in our presidential election) and then again in 2021 (for inciting a violent insurrection against Congress to block and overthrow the counting of Electoral College votes). The bipartisan votes to impeach and convict Donald Trump in 2021 (a vote of 232–197 to impeach in the House and of 57–43 to convict in the Senate) marked the most sweeping bipartisan votes against a president for committing high crimes and misdemeanors in the history of the United States.

The House impeachment vote on January 13, 2021, and the Senate trial, which ended a month later, on February 13, 2021, together constituted an episode of passionate democratic lucidity and a sweeping rejection of violent authoritarianism. But, ultimately, this is not a book about Donald Trump. Quite the opposite. It is about the kind of people whose dreams and actions have allowed us to survive Donald Trump and his sinister incitement of racism and hatred among Americans who feel displaced and threatened by the uprooting of America’s racial caste system. Within these pages, you will find citizen activists, public servants, and seriously engaged political leaders, people who are democratic heroes and constitutional patriots of different political parties.

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.


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

Following lunch, they walked to the building and rode an elevator up to the twenty-fifth floor, where they entered through a set of double doors into a reception area. Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin were ushered into a set of suites where Donald Trump Jr. has his office. Along with Trump, Jared Kushner, his brother-in-law, and Paul Manafort, the former lobbyist who was now managing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, were waiting for them. After the meeting, Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Jr. seemed to agree that Rob Goldstone, to hype their interest and expectations, had sold them a bill of goods. Donald Trump Jr. expected dirt on Hillary Clinton. Instead he got a memo from Veselnitskaya that Simpson had prepared for use in the Prevezon case about some American investors who were connected to Browder’s business dealings in Russia and were Clinton donors.

But she also planned to use her visit to the United States to undermine the Magnitsky Act and she received an email soon after her arrival confirming a meeting for her on the following day, June 9, at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. The email was from Rob Goldstone, a publicist for a Russian rock musician, Emin Agalarov, whose father, Aras Agalarov, was the Russian developer who partnered with Donald Trump to bring the 2013 Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. Veselnitskaya told the Agalarovs, who were Putin allies, about her campaign against the Magnitsky Act and, at their behest, Goldstone reached out to Donald Trump Jr., thinking his father would be a natural ally. To stir his interest in meeting Veselnitskaya, Goldstone sent the candidate’s son emails, saying there were “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia,” and that Veselnitskaya was a “Russian government attorney.”

As for Winer, he had gotten himself tangled up in a mess. A month before the 2016 election, Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton family operative, gave two memos to Winer about Donald Trump’s supposed sexual antics in Russia. The memos were written by Cody Shearer, a self-styled private investigator who some journalists viewed as a loose cannon. Shearer stated in one memo that a supposed FSB source had told him that Donald Trump was secretly filmed twice by the spy agency having sex. “He said he believes a copy of the sex videos is in Bulgaria, Israel and FSB political unit vaults in Moscow,” Shearer wrote.


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

Won’t Rush to Defend NATO Countries If They Don’t Spend More on Military,” Washington Post, July 21, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-says-us-wont-rush-to-defend-nato-countries-if-they-dont-spend-more-on-military/2016/07/21/76c48430-4f51-11e6-a7d8-13d06b37f256_story.html. 37. “Transcript: Donald Trump on NATO, Turkey’s Coup Attempt and the World,” New York Times, July 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/donald-trump-foreign-policy-interview.html. 38. “February 4, 2020: State of the Union Address.” 39. Zeke Miller, Deb Riechmann, and Robert Burns, “Trump Says US Forces Cornered IS Leader in Dead-End Tunnel,” Associated Press, October 27, 2019, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-syria-ap-top-news-international-news-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-2c2c48e64f934d329c72a7af3dc284b1. 40.

Li-Meng Yan, a virologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong who said there was “solid scientific evidence” COVID-19 came from a lab. “I think a lot of people have egg on their face,” said ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in May 2021. “This was an idea that was first put forward by Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, Donald Trump. And look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.” Other journalists still couldn’t bring themselves to consider the possibility that Trump had been vindicated. Apoorva Mandavilli, one of the New York Times reporters on the COVID beat, was not happy the truth was coming out. “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe admit its racist roots.

If not, as RNC Chairman, I will have no choice but to advise future Republican candidates against participating in CPD-hosted debates.”87 The Republican Party was waking up to the fact that the system was rigged against it, and its members were finally willing to stand up against the media and Democrats who insisted on setting the terms of the debate. CHAPTER SEVEN “Zuckerberg Should Be in Jail” Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was a shock to much of the country, but Silicon Valley took it especially hard. The progressive bastion of San Francisco had turned tech companies from libertarian idealists into liberal crusaders. The industry as a whole felt complicit in Donald Trump’s rise and was intent on doing everything in its power to suppress his voice and those of his supporters. Not long after the 2016 election, Google held a company-wide meeting.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

“has to go to jail”: Lisa Hagen, “Trump: Clinton ‘Has to Go to Jail,’ ” The Hill, October 12, 2016. offered to pay the legal fees: “Donald Trump Says He May Pay Legal Fees of Accused Attacker from Rally,” New York Times, March 13, 2016. Here are a few examples: “Don’t Believe Donald Trump Has Incited Violence at Rallies? Watch This Video,” Vox, March 12, 2016, https://www.vox.com/​2016/​3/12/​11211846/​donald-trump-violence-rallies. “the Second Amendment people”: “Donald Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Act Against Hillary Clinton,” New York Times, August 9, 2016. special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton: “Trump: Clinton ‘Has to Go to Jail,’ ” CNN.com, October 13, 2016.

“achieved something remarkable”: David Leonhardt and Stuart Thompson, “Trump’s Lies,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2017/​06/​23/​opinion/​trumps-lies.html?mcubz=1. President Trump claimed: Rebecca Savransky, “Trump Falsely Claims He Got Biggest Electoral College Win Since Reagan,” The Hill, February 16, 2017; Tom Kertscher, “Donald Trump Not Close in Claiming He Has Signed More Bills in First Six Months Than Any President,” PolitiFact Wisconsin, July 20, 2017, http://www.politifact.com/​wisconsin/​statements/​2017/​jul/​20/​donald-trump/​donald-trump-not-close-claiming-he-has-signed-more/. “the greatest speech ever”: Ella Nilsen, “Trump: Boy Scouts Thought My Speech Was ‘Greatest Ever Made to Them.’ Boy Scouts: No,” Vox, August 2, 2017.

— America failed the first test in November 2016, when we elected a president with a dubious allegiance to democratic norms. Donald Trump’s surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the Republican Party’s failure to keep an extremist demagogue within its own ranks from gaining the nomination. How serious is the threat now? Many observers take comfort in our Constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain demagogues like Donald Trump. Our Madisonian system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries. It survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate.


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The Russian property developer Trump and Agalarov: Luke Harding, Collusion (New York: Vintage, 2017), 229–37; “Here’s What We Know about Donald Trump and His Ties to Russia,” WP, July 29, 2016; “How Vladimir Putin Is Using Donald Trump to Advance Russia’s Goals,” NW, Aug. 29, 2016; Cameron Sperance, “Meet Aras Agalarov,” Forbes, July 12, 2017; Shaun Walker, “The Trumps of Russia?” TG, July 15, 2017; Mandalit Del Barco, “Meet Emin Agalarov,” NPR, July 14, 2017. Agalarov sends Trump information about Clinton: Jo Becker, Adam Goldman, and Matt Apuzzo, “Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It,’ Donald Trump Jr. Said,” NYT, July 11, 2017. The love began that summer Order of Honor: “How Vladimir Putin Is Using Donald Trump to Advance Russia’s Goals,” NW, Aug. 29, 2016.

In July 2016 Trump quotation: Melissa Chan, “Donald Trump Says Vladimir Putin Won’t ‘Go Into Ukraine,’ ” Time, July 31, 2016. Manafort and Opposition Bloc: Kenneth P. Vogel, “Manafort’s Man in Kiev,” Politico, Aug. 18, 2016; Peter Stone and Greg Gordon, “Manafort flight records show deeper Kremlin ties,” McClatchy, Nov. 27, 2017. CHAPTER 6 The rise of Donald Trump Timothy Snyder, “Trump’s Putin Fantasy,” NYR, April 19, 2016, includes most of these citations and sources. See also: Dugin: “In Trump We Trust,” Katekhon Think Tank video, posted March 4, 2016; Kozyrev: “Donald Trump’s Weird World,” NYT, Oct. 12, 2016.

Kramer, Mike McIntire, and Barry Meier, “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief,” NYT, Aug. 14, 2016. The Turkey story: Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts, “How Russia Dominates Your Twitter Feed,” DB, Aug. 6, 2016; Linda Qiu, “Trump campaign chair misquotes Russian media in bogus claim about NATO base terrorist attack,” Politifact, Aug. 16, 2016. Manafort was replaced Mainstream: Sarah Posner, “How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists,” Mother Jones, Aug. 22, 2016. For numerous examples of white supremacist enthusiasm for Trump, see Richard Cohen, “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America,” SPLC Report, Summer 2017; Ryan Lenz et al., “100 Days in Trump’s America,” Southern Poverty Law Center, 2017.


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

Robinson, founder and editor-in chief of Current Affairs magazine. I actually think QAnon itself is not terribly threatening at the moment, because much of it is focused on figuring out what ‘Q’ and Donald Trump are doing, and what the Rothschilds are doing. Though QAnon predicts a day of reckoning in which Trump will round up the evil cabal, it’s dependent on Donald Trump to act, and Donald Trump will soon be out of office. The whole Q theory cannot really last beyond Trump’s last day in office. I think many of these people are soon going to discover that they need a new theory once the Great Awakening doesn’t happen.’

This means that there’s no fixed set of beliefs that make up QAnon. It has also been more than five years since the first Q post, and much has changed since then – not least Donald Trump being voted out of office in 2020. If QAnon was not capable of shifting its theology over time, it would have died long ago. With all of those caveats aside, here is my interpretation of what the core components of the QAnon conspiracy were in the closing months of 2017: Donald Trump, on becoming president – or possibly as part of a plan hatched before his run – was working with a small group of trusted generals to overthrow a corrupt Deep State that had been running the US and the world for many years prior.

Not only had Joe Biden just been inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States of America, but the 6 January Capitol Hill riot, just two weeks earlier, had – temporarily, as it turned out – shifted the mood even in the Republican Party against its far-right wing and their QAnon boosters. Donald Trump had lost the election two months before, but QAnon had found no shortage of reasons to hope, to keep trusting the plan. But by 20 January, all seemed lost. You could be forgiven for thinking the same of the morning of 4 November 2020. QAnons had spent three years trusting the plan, waiting for the storm to come, expecting mass arrests, rescues or even civil war at any moment. Then, over the course of the morning, it all seemed to be going wrong: Donald Trump’s election leads were evaporating, Joe Biden was going to win, and Q hadn’t posted since a few hours before the election.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Did the politician you voted for go back on his or her promises? Did your tax dollars pay for the bombing of women and children in foreign countries? Do you even know where we’re at war? There’s a widespread belief now that “bravery”1 in a reporter is someone like Jim Acosta asking tough questions of someone like Donald Trump. But Acosta’s viewers hate Donald Trump. Wake me up when he takes on his own Twitter followers, or gets in his boss Jeff Zucker’s face about the massive profits they’ve all been making off Trumpmania. We don’t challenge audiences. I know one TV reporter who did a story about a murder in a poor region of the South.

THE MEDIA’S GREAT FACTUAL LOOPHOLE On Friday, January 18, 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller took the unusual step of releasing a statement essentially shooting down the latest “bombshell” in the Russiagate story, which had been released by BuzzFeed earlier that day. The BuzzFeed story said Donald Trump directed his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to congress, which would potentially have been a felony. After the BuzzFeed piece broke, Democrats not only wasted no time calling for impeachment, but within hours began fundraising in response to the story. This is from a mass mailing issued that same day by DNC chief Tom Perez: “Huge news just broke that indicates Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen lied to congress under the specific direction of Donald Trump himself… If you’re committed to holding Trump accountable… today is an important day to show it.

Those same libruls want to open the borders and replace you at work with an immigrant, who incidentally will be encouraged to vote at least three times. Every show is some variation on these themes. He’ll have on a series of guests to provide context (read: to agree with him in their own words). A recent list of Hannity guests: Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Ted Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, Devin Nunes, Alan Dershowitz, Joe Lieberman, Glenn Beck, etc. Hannity will occasionally do “balance,” and what “balance” looks like on one of these channels is a member of the other party (because no other forms of thought exist).


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

It explains why many Hispanics reacted no differently during the election than most whites to Donald Trump’s promised border wall. Mexican-Americans felt viscerally targeted by Trump. But there is little evidence to show that legal immigrants from other Spanish-speaking countries were any more outraged than any other voter. Why would the Democratic establishment bank more on their loyalty than it does on whites’? Resistance to such ethnic shoehorning might explain why a higher share of Hispanics voted for Donald Trump than had for Mitt Romney in 2012.25 If we took Hispanics at their word and treated more than half of them as white, America would remain a majority white country until at least the 2050s – and possibly indefinitely.

As the historian Eric Hobsbawm was to write, the short and genocidal twentieth century, which began with the Russian revolution in 1917, came to an end in 1989.2 Though still alive, history was smiling. The human species had proved it could learn from its mistakes. It was a good year to turn twenty-one. Nearly three decades later, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, I found myself in Moscow. I had been invited to attend a conference on the ‘polycentric world order’, which is Russian for ‘post-American world’. The conference was hosted by the Primakov Institute, named after the man who had been Russia’s foreign minister and prime minister during the 1990s.

By eerie coincidence, it was twenty-seven years to the day since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The worm had turned. America had just elected a president who was a big fan of walls and a big admirer of Vladimir Putin. While Putin was surveying his wrecked world in 1989, and we were racing down the Autobahn, Donald Trump was launching a board game. It was called Trump: The Game. With its fake paper money and property-based rules, it bore an uncanny resemblance to Monopoly – except that the number six on the dice was replaced with the letter T. Unsurprisingly, it was a flop. There is no record that Trump said anything positive or negative about the fall of the Berlin Wall.


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

Donald Trump Wants to See President Obama’s Birth Certificate with His Own Eyes,” New York Daily News, March 24, 2011, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/show-donald-trump-presidentobama-birth-certificate-eyes-article-1.118369, accessed June 23, 2021; “Trump on Obama’s Birth Certificate: ‘Maybe It Says He’s a Muslim,’ ” Fox Nation, March 30, 2011, http://nation.foxnews.com/donald-trump/2011/03/30/trump-obama-maybe-hes-muslim, accessed June 23, 2021; Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Hawaii’s Governor Takes on ‘Birthers’ ”; “Obama Releases ‘Long Form’ Birth Certificate,” BBC News, April 27, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13212230/, accessed September 8, 2021; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” The Atlantic, September 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/, accessed September 8, 2021; Jeff Greenfield, “Donald Trump’s Birther Strategy,” Politico, July 22, 2015, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/donald-trumps-birther-strategy-120504, accessed June 23, 2021; Joshua Green, “What Donald Trump’s Birther Investigators Will Find in Hawaii,” The Atlantic, April 12, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/what-donald-trumps-birther-investigators-willfind-in-hawaii/237198/, accessed September 8, 2021. 44.“Donald Trump 2015 Presidential Candidacy Announcement Speech,” June 15, 2015, https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/, accessed May 26, 2021; Katie Reilly, “Here Are All the Times Donald Trump Insulted Mexico,” August 31, 2016, https://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/, accessed May 26, 2021. 45.Trump’s role in railroading the Central Park teenage “rapists” had been a lead tabloid story in 1989.

Trump’s Testing of America (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 37.Bill Carter, “‘The Apprentice’ Scores Ratings Near Top for the Season,” New York Times, April 17, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/us/the-apprentice-scores-ratings-near-top-for-the-season.html, accessed June 28, 2021; James Traub, “Trumpologies,” New York Times Magazine, September 12, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/magazine/trumpologies.html, accessed June 28, 2021; Patrick Radden Keefe, “How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success,” New Yorker, December 27, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success, accessed June 28, 2021; Emily Nussbaum, “The TV That Created Donald Trump,” New Yorker, July 31, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/the-tv-that-created-donald-trump, accessed June 28, 2021; Stuart Heritage, “You’re Hired: How the Apprentice Led to President Trump,” The Guardian, November 10, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/10/trump-the-apprentice-president-elect-reality-tv, accessed June 28, 2021. 38.One year he contemplated running with Oprah Winfrey on a Democratic Party ticket, the next with Ross Perot’s populist Reform Party.

Schlesinger, “Trump Forged His Ideas on Trade in the 1980s—and Never Deviated,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-forged-his-ideas-on-trade-in-the-1980sand-never-deviated-1542304508, accessed December 17, 2020; Beth Reinhard and Peter Grant, “How the 1990s Became Donald Trump’s Personal Crucible,” Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-1990s-became-donald-trumps-personal-crucible-1469035278, accessed December 17, 2020; Don Gonyea and Domenico Montanaro, “Donald Trump’s Been Saying the Same Thing for 30 Years,” NPR.org, January 20, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/01/20/510680463/donald-trumps-been-saying-the-same-thing-for-30-years?t=1608117553171, accessed December 17, 2020; Timothy Noah, “Trump vs. Clinton Is the 1980s vs. the 1990s,” Politico, July 31, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/2016-history-hillary-bill-clinton-donald-trump-1990s-1980s-214125, accessed December 17, 2020.


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Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

You start to think a little differently about universal health care and tuition-free college and Wall Street bailouts. But of course it is too late by then. Too late for all of us. (2016) PART 4 THE EXPLOSION Why Millions of Ordinary Americans Support Donald Trump Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? I call it a mystery because the working-class white people who make up the most noticeable part of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers.

If the unreconstructed Democratic Party is to be saved, I suspect, what will save it is what always saves it: the colossal incompetence of the Republicans. This, too, we can already see coming down the rails. Donald Trump is getting the wrecking crew back together, and before too long, I suspect, he will have the country pining for Hillary Clinton. (2016) Main Street USA Liberal Americans like to think we know the answer to a lot of things, including why those who live outside liberal bubbles chose Donald Trump for president. Small-town people, we like to think, are Republican people. At their best, they are pious, respectful, and conservative; at their worst they are smug and self-righteous, small-minded and yet capable of broad prejudice.

* * * I paint a gloomy picture here, I admit. If the economy zooms, I have conjectured, Donald Trump has a good chance of being reelected. If economic conditions don’t change and Democrats play out their strategy of indignant professional-class self-admiration, they have only a fair chance of chasing him out of office—after which they will undoubtedly be surprised by some new and even more abrasive iteration of right-wing populism. What I want to focus on now is how right-wing populism can be defeated more or less permanently. Donald Trump will never seem like a natural or inevitable president to me—not merely because he is a cad in a shockingly cantilevered ducktail, but because right-wing populism is itself a freakish historical anomaly.


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

THE PRICE OF POPULISM perverse machismo and personalization: See Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). increasingly appealed to: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “The Bitter Fruits of Trump’s White Power Presidency,” New Yorker, January 12, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-bitter-fruits-of-trumps-white-power-presidency. shoot someone: Colin Dwyer, “Donald Trump: ‘I Could . . . Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters,’ ” NPR, January 23, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/23/464129029/donald-trump-i-could-shoot-somebody-and-i-wouldnt-lose-any-voters.

Both parties were split in their support of the candidates: First Lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, and insurgent political newcomer, reality TV star, and real estate mogul Donald Trump for the Republicans. Clinton had engaged in a bitter primary competition with a self-declared socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who usually functioned as an independent in Congress and was something of a populist himself. Donald Trump had never been part of the Republican Party and had once been registered as a Democrat in New York. He was the last man standing from a huge field of seventeen candidates representing the Republican Party’s mainstream.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats imagined Donald Trump would ultimately be the candidate. The Kremlin anticipated that Hillary Clinton would win the election and seek to constrain Russia’s room for maneuver. As secretary of state under President Obama, Clinton was particularly outspoken about Russian foreign and domestic policy and critical of Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 after a four-year term as prime minister. Russia’s operation sought to weaken her. Russian propaganda efforts promoted both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as well as third-party candidates like Jill Stein of the Green Party.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.14 Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American. Traits which seem outlandish in a US president would not have seemed so if Trump had been elected mayor of New York. Donald Trump was not Der Führer. He was Da Mayor of America. * * * — THE WEAKNESS OF populism is that it is literally reactionary.

No longer restrained by working-class power, the metropolitan overclass within Western democracies has run amok, provoking a belated populist rebellion from below that has been exploited, often with disastrous results, by demagogues, many of them opportunists from elite backgrounds, like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Antisystem populism, the force behind the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote in Britain, and the rise of populist parties in continental Europe, has been triggered in different nations by different causes—deindustrialization here, immigration or tax policies there. But whatever the immediate stimulus, the underlying cause is the same—long-smoldering rage by non-college-educated workers against damage done to their economic bargaining power, political influence, and cultural dignity during the half-century revolution from above of technocratic neoliberalism.

Scott Shane, “These Are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2016,” New York Times, November 1, 2017; Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel, “Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media,” New York Times, December 17, 2018. 8. Jason Guerrasio, “We Asked Michael Moore About the Gun-Violence Epidemic, His New Movie, and Why Donald Trump Will Get the Republican Nomination,” Business Insider, December 23, 2015. 9. Michael Moore, “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win,” michaelmoore.com. 10. Alex Seitz-Wald and Benjy Sarlin, “Why Democrats Fear Donald Trump,” NBC News, February 26, 2016. 11. Amanda Sakuma, “Trump Did Better With Blacks, Hispanics Than Romney in ’12: Exit Polls,” NBC News, November 9, 2016. 12. “Populism Past and Present,” hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2016/05/populism-past-and-present. 13.


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

Through the summer and early fall, we stopped writing about the Facebook data because it didn’t say anything new. Americans were talking about only two people: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The conversation about Clinton tended to be negative. And nobody could get enough of Donald Trump. In September, a Facebook employee managing the program called Miller to tell her that Facebook were pausing it to upgrade its sentiment analysis, and promised to get back to delivering the data soon. By then, Donald Trump was running wild on the platform. I was a little surprised, but I assumed they’d stopped sending over the news because they found it a little embarrassing: Facebook, whose young employees in Palo Alto prided themselves on being the home of the liberal populism of Oscar Morales and Barack Obama, had been overrun by the angry baby boomers who loved Donald Trump.

If Facebook had kept sharing its data with us, we would have seen two things that only became public years later in a series of apologies, leaks, and government reports. First, that Donald Trump dominated the platform. His style of provocation, and his attacks on immigration in particular, were exactly the sort of thing that got people talking. His supporters loved it, of course, and shared enthusiastically. But if you hated Trump and everything that he stood for, and expressed as much in a Facebook comment—well, that was engagement, too, a signal to Facebook to spread his message further. Donald Trump was made for Facebook. So was another type of content: attacks on Hillary Clinton. Among the first to discover that fact were a handful of teenagers in Veles, Macedonia, a small city on the Vardar River, who wanted some spare cash.

He showed up at a café on Montague Street a couple of days before Christmas wearing a coat with a lavish fur collar, stashing full shopping bags beside the table. Brock was consumed with the mission of stopping Donald Trump, manic; he was headed, it turned out, for a massive heart attack. He wanted to get the word out about a secret that was circulating among media and political elites, a dossier of allegations about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. David didn’t have the document, he said. But he knew The Washington Post did, and so did The New York Times, as well as a handful of other chosen outlets. Politicians had it, too, he told me, and spies, and as far as I could figure out, so did everyone, it seemed, except the reading public.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

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

CNN tied the crime to the climate of hate purportedly fostered by Donald Trump. The noose upon FBI investigation was found to be a cord used as a garage door opener. CNN additionally claimed that Trump did nothing when apprised by intelligence sources that Russians were paying Taliban terrorists to kill Americans in Afghanistan. Yet CNN never substantiated the truth of that rumor or reported that Donald Trump had never been briefed on such intelligence. Much later it was disclosed that the story was a fabrication. CNN alleged that Donald Trump’s July 3, 2020, address at Mount Rushmore was a veritable homage to Confederate Civil War racists.

If, in the Watergate age, the media inherently distrusted the permanent Washington bureaucracy, during the Trump administration journalists inherently distrusted those who distrusted the permanent Washington bureaucracy. All of these establishment “professionals” could condemn the excesses of Donald Trump; almost none would fault the excesses of professionals, in circular fashion, supposedly justified by the excesses of Donald Trump. Given that progressivism self-identifies as a protector of civil liberties against government infringement on the rights of the individual, such modern overreach of the sort from 2015 to 2017 became a question of who will police the police.

Reporters Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb in December 2017, for example, falsely asserted that Donald Trump Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee in general and to the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisor John Podesta in particular. But Trump Jr. did not. Such a false charge may have spawned all sorts of subsidiary rumors that the younger Trump was on the verge of becoming indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller.64 Why did CNN’s own “unnamed source”—namely, lawyer Lanny Davis—later deny he had ever given CNN information that Donald Trump had advance warning of a meeting between Russian interests and Donald Trump Jr. concerning purported “collusion” during the 2016 campaign?


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Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

The first part of the title is filched from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), whose book also provided some general inspiration for this piece. 2. Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, The Executive Unbound (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3. See Thomas B. Edsall, “What Does Vladimir Putin See in Donald Trump?” New York Times, January 19, 2017 (quoting political scientist Brendan Nyhan), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/opinion/what-does-vladimir-putin-see-in-donald-trump.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region. 4. See Ozan O. Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism,” Iowa Law Review 100, 1673 (2015).

., “Michael Flynn Resigns as National Security Adviser,” New York Times, February 13, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/politics/donald-trump-national-security-adviser-michael-flynn.html. 39. Pamela Brown et al., “Sources: Russians Discussed Potentially ‘Derogatory’ Information About Trump and Associates During Campaign,” CNN, May 30, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/30/politics/russians-trump-campaign-information/index.html. 40. Gloria Borger et al., “Russian Officials Bragged They Could Use Flynn to Influence Trump,” CNN, May 19, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/politics/michael-flynn-donald-trump-russia-influence/index.html. 41. Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller, “Sessions Discussed Trump Campaign-Related Matters with Russian Ambassador, U.S.

., “Russian Officials Bragged They Could Use Flynn to Influence Trump, Sources Say,” (“Russian officials bragged in conversations during the presidential campaign that they had cultivated a strong relationship with former Trump adviser retired Gen. Michael Flynn and believed they could use him to influence Donald Trump”); Jim Sciutto et al., “British Intelligence Passed Trump Associates’ Communications with Russians on to US Counterparts,” CNN, April 14, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/13/politics/trump-russia-british-intelligence/index.html (“British and other European intelligence agencies intercepted communications between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials and other Russian individuals during the campaign and passed on those communications to their US counterparts, US congressional and law enforcement and US and European intelligence, sources tell CNN”); Shane Harris, “Russian Officials Overheard Discussing Trump Associates Before Campaign Began,” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/article_email/russian-officials-overheard-discussing-trump-associates-before-campaign-began-1499890354-lMyQjAxMTI3MjE5MjExMzI0Wj/ (“Investigators are re-examining conversations detected by U.S. intelligence agencies in spring 2015 that captured Russian government officials discussing associates of Donald Trump. . . .


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The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

But Le Pen is determined, as the 2017 presidential election nears, that the FN be seen as a “party like any other.” The Past and Future of Populism Donald Trump’s campaign in the United States, the rightwing populist parties in Europe, and even the left-center Five Star Movement have repeatedly been likened to the fascists of the 1920s. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich titles a column, “Donald Trump: American Fascist.” “Yes, Donald Trump is a fascist,” Jamil Smith declares in The New Republic. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble described the National Front as “not a right-wing party but . . . a fascist, extremist party.”

For political language, the lack of an “essence” is even more obvious if you think of terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” and their very different use from country to country. 14and Spain’s Podemos: My own analysis of populism has been heavily influenced by, but is still somewhat different from, that of Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso, 2005. 14former against the latter: Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, Basic Books, 1995, p. 1. CHAPTER ONE 18nomination in 2016: http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector 18downscale white Americans: See http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533#ixzz43pWmnAgK and http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/03/how_donald_trump_happened_racism_against_barack_obama.html 18weakness as a frontrunner: See http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-01/what-bernie-sanders-gets-about-millennials. 21the legend goes: McMath, p. 75. 22the gold standard: Robert C.

CHAPTER THREE 62“protest candidate”: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/07/03/bernie-sanders-seen-as-a-protest-candidate-says-democratic-rival-martin-omalley/. 62“Trump’s campaign is a sideshow”: http://www.huffing-tonpost.com/entry/a-note-about-our-coverage-of-donald-trumps-campaign_us_55a8fc9ce4b0896514d0fd66?-section=politics. 62back into their politics section: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/a-note-on-trump_b_8744476.html. 63“personality not substance”: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/us/politics/why-donald-trump-wont-fold-polls-and-people-speak.html. 63“Sanders’s authenticity”: Pablo Zevallos, Politico, February 12, 2016. 64recouped his losses: Michael D’Antonio, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, Thomas Dunne Books, 2015. 65“I’m very pro-choice”: “Inside Politics,” CNN, October 26, 1999. 65“liberal on health”: Trump and Dave Shiflett, The America We Deserve, Renaissance Books, 2000, p. 212. 66“rebuild our own country”: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/01/472633800/4-things-to-know-about-donald-trumps-foreign-policy-approach. 66criticized NATO: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/03/27/trump_europe_is_not_safe_lots_of_the_free_world_has_become_weak.html. 67“police that deal”: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/01/donald_trump_is_the_only_serious_gop_candidate_who_hasn_t_promised_to_rip.html. 67“a bunch of saps”: Associated Press, December 2, 1999. 68“political hacks”: Debate, June 28, 2015. 69“It’s rigged against you”: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Bagli, “How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions,” New York Times, June 11, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html. 2 banished him: Andrew Bary, “More Troubles in Trump Land,” Barron’s, April 30, 2011, https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB50001424052970203579804576285341283000706?mg=prod/accounts-barrons. 2 75th most watched: Steve Johnson, “Donald Trump a ‘Reality Star Genius’? TV Ratings Tell Different Story,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 2016, http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-donald-trump-not-a-reality-star-genius-20160201-column.html. 2 ratings were plummeting: “Final 2009–10 Broadcast Primetime Show Average Viewership,” TV by the Numbers, June 16, 2010, http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/broadcast/final-2009-10-broadcast-primetime-show-average-viewership/54336/. 2 beneath his shock-blond: Ashley Feinberg, “Is Donald Trump’s Hair a $60,000 Weave?

Trump Twitter Archive, http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com/archive. 2 soon reached into: David Robinson, “Text Analysis of Trump’s Tweets Confirms He Writes Only the (Angrier) Android Half,” Variance Explained (blog), August 9, 2016, http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/. 3 Trump issued screeds: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “What a convenient mistake: @BarackObama issued a statement for Kwanza but failed to issue one for Christmas,” Twitter, December 28, 2011, 8:02 A.M., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/152056935712169984. 3 whom he’d praised: Friga Garza, “Remember When Donald Trump Said ‘I Really Like’ President Obama in 2009?,” Complex, July 13, 2015, http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/07/donald-trump-i-really-like-obama. 3 directing his Twitter followers: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “Busy doing phoners this week with Neil Cavuto, Wolf Blitzer, Fox & Friends, and Larry Kudlow . . . check out http://shouldtrumprun.com/,” Twitter, January 21, 2011, 9:20 A.M., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/28502098983260160. 3 “Let’s take a closer look”: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “Let’s take a closer look at that birth certificate.

TV Ratings Tell Different Story,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 2016, http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-donald-trump-not-a-reality-star-genius-20160201-column.html. 2 ratings were plummeting: “Final 2009–10 Broadcast Primetime Show Average Viewership,” TV by the Numbers, June 16, 2010, http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/broadcast/final-2009-10-broadcast-primetime-show-average-viewership/54336/. 2 beneath his shock-blond: Ashley Feinberg, “Is Donald Trump’s Hair a $60,000 Weave? A Gawker Investigation [Updated],” Gawker, May 24, 2016, http://gawker.com/is-donald-trump-s-hair-a-60-000-weave-a-gawker-invest-1777581357. 2 “Don’t be afraid”: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “‘Don’t be afraid of being unique—it’s like being afraid of your best self.’—Donald J. Trump http://tinyurl.com/pqpfvm,” Twitter, May 17, 2009, 8:00 A.M., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1826225450. 2 Trump’s Twitter messages: In 2009, 59 messages; in 2010, 142; in 2011, 774; and in 2012, 3,531.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President (Scribner, 2016). 55. Donald Trump, Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life (HarperCollins, 2009). 56. Tony Schwartz, ‘I Wrote the Art of the Deal with Donald Trump’ in Bandy X. Lee (ed.), The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). 57. Paul B. Brown, ‘How to Deal with Copy Cat Competitors: A Six Point Plan’, Forbes (12 March 2014). 58. Interview with Jeffrey Lord, p. 40. 59. ‘The 1990 Playboy Interview With Donald Trump’, Playboy (1 March 1990). 60. ‘Full Text: Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid’, Washington Post (16 June 2015). 61.

Wertheim’s prediction that ‘if Trump continues to spurn exceptionalism, he will damage his government’s credibility domestically, opening up a legitimacy gap that each of the country’s political factions will scramble to fill’ has yet to be fulfilled. 31. See the interviews collected in Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms, Donald Trump: The Making of a World View (Endeavor Press, 2017). 32. ‘Transcript: Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Speech’, The New York Times (27 April 2016). 33. ‘Donald Trump: How I’d Run the Country (Better)’, Esquire (August 2004). 34. ‘Remarks by President Trump to the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly’, Foreign Policy (25 September 2018). 35. See Laderman and Simms, Donald Trump. 36. Analogously, the Central European rejection of the Imitation Imperative began in earnest once it became clear, after 2008, that the West was losing its dominant position in the world.

See also Griff Witte and Rick Noack, ‘Trump’s Tariff Threats Suddenly Look Very Real in the Heartland of Germany’s Car Industry’, Washington Post (22 June 2018). 62. Interview on The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News, 31 March 2011. 63. Eric Rauchway, ‘Donald Trump’s New Favorite Slogan Was Invented for Nazi Sympathizers’, Washington Post (14 June 2016). 64. Laderman and Simms, Donald Trump, p. 73. 65. ‘Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid’. 66. ‘Many Americans believe they have been duped of their birthright by unfair competition from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and now China and India.’ Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) p. 40. 67.


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

He answered from a book-filled room in his home in the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin—a state that had been key to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. We went through the blow-by-blow of election night, which he spent at ABC headquarters on the “decision desk”—a group of nerds who analyze vote returns and call states as results become clearer—and discussed the various sources of error for his final poll of Wisconsin, which had Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by six percentage points, 46% to 40%. (In the end, Trump won by less than a point, 47.2% to Clinton’s 46.5%.) Franklin believes that, more than anything, his error in Wisconsin was due to a late-breaking shift toward Donald Trump among key undecided voters.

Were they overrating support for universal health care by six percentage points as well? Were they underrating support for trade protectionism and Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the US-Mexico border? To answer this question, Pew took nine surveys that they conducted during the election year and re-weighted each of them so that the percentage of self-proclaimed supporters of Donald Trump and Joe Biden matched the actual results of the election. In effect, they created perfectly unbiased polls. Then, they created a separate set of “tilted “polls where Joe Biden’s margin over Donald Trump was 12 points—an intentionally large number that would serve as an example of an extremely biased pre-election survey.

The press and the public derided polls, and the pollsters, as inaccurate, misleading, and increasingly irrelevant. The 2020 election was supposed to be the year that polls came back. 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.


pages: 399 words: 114,787

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Lyft, Mikhail Gorbachev, NetJets, obamacare, offshore financial centre, post-materialism, proprietary trading, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, rolodex, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vision Fund, yield curve

Trump’s default on the junk bonds: Associated Press, “Trump Casinos File for Bankruptcy,” November 22, 2004; Emily Stewart, “The Backstory on Donald Trump’s Four Bankruptcies,” TheStreet.com, September 15, 2015. Trump Chicago tower plans: Donald J. Trump et al. v. Deutsche Bank et al., filed November 3, 2008. Flights on the 727: Anupreeta Das, “When Donald Trump Needs a Loan, He Chooses Deutsche Bank,” Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2016. Trump’s $788 million net worth: Deposition of Donald Trump in lawsuit against Timothy O’Brien, 37. Deutsche’s fee and additional exposure: Trump v. Deutsche Bank. Client parties at Mar-a-Lago: BondWeek, “Seen ’N Heard,” October 15, 2004.

Skepticism about Trump’s bid: Jonathan O’Connell, “You May Not Take Donald Trump’s Candidacy Seriously, but Take Another Look at His Real Estate Business,” Washington Post, June 21, 2015. “Every bank wants to do the deal”: Ibid. Deutsche claim to Trump assets: House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Democratic staff, “Breach of a Lease: The Tale of the Old Post Office in the Swamp,” July 12, 2017. “I’m borrowing money”: Cohan’s transcript of unpublished interview with Trump. Titan Atlas: Shawn Boburg and Robert O’Harrow Jr., “Donald Trump Jr. Stumbled While Trying to Make a Mark in the Business World,” Washington Post, February 4, 2017.

And then one day he walked through 60 Wall Street’s cavernous marble lobby, rode the elevator up to the executive suites, and realized that no, in fact, he had not seen everything. At a meeting with a few colleagues that morning, someone mentioned that a division of the bank in New York planned to make a large loan to Donald Trump. The proposed loan came from Deutsche’s “private banking” group, which was devoted to serving the richest of the rich. The loan was ostensibly to pay for upgrade work at a golf resort, Turnberry, that Trump owned in Scotland. At the time, though, Trump was running for president, and it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the loan he was requesting might have something to do with the fact that he was burning through gobs of his own cash on the campaign trail.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Trying to confuse the public about that is evil on a whole different level. Don’t some of these people have children? And let’s be clear: while Donald Trump is a prime example of the depravity of climate denial, this is an issue on which his whole party went over to the dark side years ago. Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people. CLIMATE DENIAL WAS THE CRUCIBLE FOR TRUMPISM December 3, 2018 Many observers seem baffled by Republican fealty to Donald Trump—the party’s willingness to back him on all fronts, even after severe defeats in the midterm elections. What kind of party would show such support for a leader who is not only evidently corrupt and seemingly in the pocket of foreign dictators, but also routinely denies facts and tries to criminalize anyone who points them out?

They were the worst of times in the sense that policymakers insistently refused to use the knowledge we had, choosing instead to obsess over budget deficits based on bad, often bad-faith arguments, and inflicting vast unnecessary suffering as a result. The rest of the book is mainly about what the title says: arguing with zombies, from the tax-cut zombie to climate-change denial, and also about the movement conservatism that keeps those zombies shambling along. Yes, there’s also quite a lot about Donald Trump, but I see Trump not as a departure from the past so much as the culmination of where movement conservatism has been taking us for decades. I finish the book with some lighter reading—well, not actually, but stuff that puts me in a better mood. The last section offers a selection of relatively economistic pieces that go back to my intellectual roots.

But it’s definitely a cause worth fighting for. 1 Saving Social Security AFTER THE KHAKI ELECTION ELECTION NIGHT 2004 WASN’T AS MUCH OF A SHOCK AS ELECTION NIGHT 2016, but it came as a bitter disappointment to American liberals. George W. Bush’s image has improved in retrospect; people see him, correctly, as better than Donald Trump, and forget about the enormities that took place on his watch. Above all, he took America to war on false pretenses, and hundreds of thousands died as a result. Seeing voters reward that vileness was not a happy thing. Furthermore, there were plenty of commentators who saw the election not just as a one-time event, but as a harbinger of permanent conservative rule.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

* Like his bitter rival, Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott, Banks often looked to the United States for inspiration. He found it in slightly different places and people. In August 2016, Banks and Farage travelled to Jackson, Mississippi, for a Donald Trump fundraiser at the invite of state governor Phil Bryant. The UKIP leader – introduced by Trump as “Mr Brexit” – put in a barn-storming performance. “He got a thunderous standing ovation,” recalled Trump advisor Steve Bannon. “He got more of a standing ovation than any politician besides Donald Trump.” A few months later, the ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ were back in the US, this time as the first foreign politicians to meet Trump after his unlikely election victory.

From Breitbart, the stories soon spread across the hyper-partisan right-wing media world and into the news feeds of tens of millions of American voters. 10 MAKING EUROPE GREAT AGAIN The EU is managed by lobbies and is ever more distant from the people, but things are changing… I want to be part of an international front that includes Donald Trump, who will be re-elected, Boris Johnson, [Brazil’s] Jair Bolsonaro and [Israel’s] Benjamin Netanyahu. MATTEO SALVINI, December 20191 In April 2016, Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s secessionist Northern League, attended a Donald Trump campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. At the time, Salvini, a charismatic 43-year-old with the physique of a rugby player, was already one of the leading figures on the Italian far right.

Arron Banks, an insurance broker with interests in gold mines and a sprawling business empire registered in tax havens around the world, had become the biggest campaign donor in British electoral history. Banks was eventually investigated – and exonerated – by the National Crime Agency, amid concerns about the sources of his record Brexit contributions. The trail continued, stretching far beyond Britain’s shores – from Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon and leading figures in Donald Trump’s America to Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Europe’s insurgent far right. There were corporate-funded think tanks and lobbyists with access to the highest levels of government and networks of keyboard warriors in suburban bedrooms churning out hyper-partisan news stories that spread like digital wildfire.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

#sendDonaldtospace,” Twitter, 3:30 pm, December 7, 2015, https://twitter.com/jeffbezos/status/674008204838199297?lang=en. In a Fox News interview: Reuters, “Amazon ‘Getting Away with Murder on Tax,’ Says Donald Trump,” Guardian, May 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/amazon-getting-away-with-on-tax-says-donald-trump. When Bezos was asked: Olivia Solon, “Jeff Bezos Says Donald Trump’s Behavior ‘Erodes Democracy,’ ” Guardian, October 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/20/jeff-bezos-donald-trump-criticism-amazon-blue-origin. Two days after the election: Deirdre Bosa, “Jeff Bezos Congratulates President-Elect Trump, after Offering to Shoot Him into Space,” CNBC.com, November 10, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/10/jeff-bezos-congratulates-president-elect-trump-after-offering-to-shoot-him-into-space.html.

The next day Coppins’s BuzzFeed story: McKay Coppins, “Donald Trump, America’s Troll, Gets Tricked into Running for President,” BuzzFeedNews, June 17, 2015, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mckaycoppins/donald-trump-americas-troll-gets-tricked-into-running-for-pr. When CNN chief Jeff Zucker: Hadas Gold and Gabriel Debenedetti, “Campaign Operatives Blast Jeff Zucker over CNN Coverage at Harvard Event,” Politico, December 1, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/jeff-zucker-harvard-heckled-cnn-trump-coverage-232090. In contrast, it was not until September 2016: Michael Barbaro, “Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years, and Still Isn’t Apologetic,” New York Times, September 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/politics/donald-trump-obama-birther.html.

“It’s never been acceptable: Margaret Sullivan, “How BuzzFeed Crossed the Line in Publishing Salacious ‘Dossier’ on Trump,” Washington Post, January 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-buzzfeed-crossed-the-line-in-publishing-salacious-dossier-on-trump/2017/01/11/957b59f6-d801-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html?utm_term=.ca47f551a840. “Even Donald Trump deserves: David Corn, “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump,” Mother Jones, October 31, 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/. “I think it was disgraceful: Ayesha Rascoe, “Trump Accuses U.S. Spy Agencies of Nazi Practices over ‘Phony’ Russia Dossier,” Reuters, January 11, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-idUSKBN14V18L.


pages: 211 words: 66,203

Life Will Be the Death of Me: ...And You Too! by Chelsea Handler

airport security, Burning Man, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, impulse control, microdosing, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, systems thinking, zero-sum game

I couldn’t believe how lucky my life had turned out, how many of my dreams had come true, and also my good fortune in being alive during this time in history—the year we were going to elect our first female president. I suppose I could blame my state of mind on the election of Donald Trump—so I will. I have the Trump family and their horrifying personalities and veneers to thank for my midlife crisis. Along with more than half the population—of the world—I couldn’t grasp how, in this day and age, we elected a man who insulted Mexicans and women and Muslims and veterans and disabled people and everyone else he has insulted since. The contrast in decency between Barack Obama and Donald Trump was too much for me to bear—like electing Snooki to the Senate. Now people were seriously talking about Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson running for president.

Daniel Day-Lewis playing Bob Mueller, maybe, but the jury is out until that movie is released and Daniel Day-Lewis gives up “shoe cobbling” for a year. I mean, my God. Just stop it with the cobbling. Just act. You’re great at it. People adore you. No one’s talking about your shoes. Maybe your wife, but I doubt it. Bob Mueller was the only hope I had that Donald Trump and that terrible vampire family he spawned would end up in prison. The investigation into Donald Trump and his conspiring with Russia and all the other crimes I’m sure he’ll be indicted for made me realize what real men look like. They look like Bob Mueller. A seventy-four-year-old with a six-pack (possibly an eight-pack) underneath that suit.

I knew that Bob Mueller knew better than I did, and if he wanted to use one ice cube, then he was trying to accomplish something different with his libation—something that only a scotch or whiskey drinker knew about. I would be willing to switch over to scotch or whiskey—and even use one ice cube for the rest of my life—if the reward meant seeing Donald Trump dragged out of the White House topless, handcuffed, in his tighty-whiteys, while his hairpiece detached from the tape on his head and flew around like a cyclone, landing in the Rose Garden. * * * • • • On the subject of ice—once we sort out this Donald Trump situation, I would like my social activism to focus solely on the integrity of ice. Temperature and ice are two of my most learned subject matters. I feel strongly that everybody needs to get on the same page with ice.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Our work on Trump TV could even help Cruz, by giving him a platform once elected. In other words, there was nothing to worry about, Alexander said. Every rally, every debate, every announcement, and every outrageous utterance that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth was entirely for the purpose of activating, identifying, and solidifying his hold on a rapt audience. The primary campaign was a trial balloon for the whole shebang. And Donald Trump’s growing “base” would comprise the consumers of his new product. “Running,” which he’d spent very little money on, was Donald J. Trump’s unique, brilliant, broad, and very cost-effective way of testing his messaging, and CA would make a fortune helping him, thus becoming afterward the key communications and data analytics team for the new enterprise.

“Ex-Daughter-in-Law of Vincente Fox Kidnapped,” Borderland Beat (blog), May 1, 2015, http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2015/05/ex-daughter-in-law-of-vincente-fox.html. 3.María Idalia Gómez, “Liberan a ex nuera de Fox: Mónica Jurado Maycotte Permaneció 8 Meses Secuestrada,” EJCentral, December 16, 2015, http://www.ejecentral.com.mx/liberan-a-ex-nuera-de-fox/. 4.Eugene Kiely, “Timeline of Russia Investigation,” FactCheck.org, April 22, 2019, https://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/timeline-russia-investigation/. 17: INQUIRY 1.Alexander Nix, “How Big Data Got the Better of Donald Trump,” Campaign, February 10, 2016, https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/big-data-better-donald-trump/1383025#bpBH5hbxRmLJyxh0.99. 18: RESTART 1.Paul Grewal, “Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook,” Newsroom, Facebook, March 16, 2018, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/. 2.Alfred Ng, “Facebook’s ‘Proof’ Cambridge Analytica Deleted That Data?

In the process, I had been exposed to the vast sweep of Cambridge’s efforts, both to acquire data on as many U.S. citizens as possible and to leverage that data to influence Americans’ voting behavior. I’d also come to see how Facebook’s negligent privacy policies and the federal government’s total lack of oversight about personal data had enabled all of Cambridge’s efforts. But, most of all, I understood how Cambridge had taken advantage of all these forces to help elect Donald Trump. As the car drove, my lawyers and I sat quietly, each of us preparing for what was to come. We all knew I would share any part of my story in full; the question now was what everyone else wanted to know. Mostly people seemed to want answers, both professional and personal, about how this could happen.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

One study of the presidential primaries found that Hillary Clinton was mentioned more often on Twitter by Republican sympathisers than by Democrats.7 Likewise, Democrats tweeted more about Donald Trump than Republicans did. We just can’t resist the temptation to focus on criticising the other side’s leader. Twitter’s ranking algorithm changes these underlying sentiments. Computer scientist Juhi Kulshrestha and her colleagues found that searches for Hillary Clinton on Twitter during the election, tended to reveal tweets that were more sympathetic to her than reflected in the overall sentiment of the tweets made. Searches for Donald Trump, on the other hand, reinforced the negative image of the candidate. As in the UK, Twitter users have a slight liberal bias in the US and the way Twitter filters this bias serves to (slightly) increase it.

During the US presidential election and in the year that followed, fake news really took off. BuzzFeed’s founding editor, Craig Silverman, has created a list of the big stories of the Trump vs Clinton race.1 Most of the stories were pro-Trump, with headlines like: ‘Pope endorses Donald Trump’; ‘Hillary’s ISIS email just leaked’; ‘FBI agent investigating Hillary found dead’. But there were also anti-Trump headlines: ‘Celebrity RuPaul said that Donald Trump groped him’. Some of the stories came from sites that were meant to be satirical, others were run by extreme right-wing sympathisers. A large number of stories originated from a small town in Macedonia, where a group of youngsters were being paid for the adverts shown on the sites.

To test whether the Stanford algorithm works in practice, I downloaded a 100-dimensional representation of words recently created by the Stanford researchers. I started with the question: ‘Donald Trump is to USA as Angela Merkel is to ?’ I calculated ‘USA – Trump + Merkel’ and got the answer … ‘Germany’! The algorithm got it right. The closest point in the 100-dimensional space was indeed the country she leads. So I decided to see if the algorithm understood how the two leaders differ in gender: ‘Donald Trump is to men as Angela Merkel is to ?’ I calculated ‘men – Trump + Merkel’ and got the correct answer again, ‘women’. This algorithm was smart.


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

sref=4ZgkJ7cZ. given to his campaign: Rebecca Ballhaus and Brody Mullins, “No Fortune 100 CEOs Back Republican Donald Trump,” The Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-fortune-100-ceos-back-republican-donald-trump-1474671842. news of the event leaked: Dawn Chmielewski and Ina Fried, “Intel’s CEO Planned, Then Scrapped, a Donald Trump Fundraiser,” Recode, June 1, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/01/intels-ceo-planned-then-scrapped-a-donald-trump-fundraiser.html. CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE THIEL THEORY OF GOVERNMENT conclusion of the convention: Dowd, “Trump’s Tech Pal.”

the seriously-not-literally line: Salena Zito, “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally,” The Atlantic, September 23, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh/501335/. was the CNBC headline: Jay Yarrow, “Peter Thiel Perfectly Summed Up Donald Trump in a Few Sentences,” CNBC, November 9, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/peter-thiel-perfectly-summed-up-donald-trump-in-one-paragraph.html; see also: Dara Lind, “Peter Thiel’s Monstrously Naïve Case for Donald Trump,” Vox, October 31, 2016, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/31/13477236/trump-seriously-literally-thiel. popular than anything else: This was a controversial statement in 2016, but it has since been well documented, especially by Kevin Roose at The New York Times.

“Our community’s success depends on everyone feeling comfortable sharing anything they want.” The message to employees, and the outside world, was clear: Facebook intended to allow supporters of Donald Trump, who was by then the de facto Republican nominee, to say more or less whatever they wanted on its platform. Over the next several months, misinformation on Facebook—much of it in Trump’s favor—outperformed real news. The most popular election headline on Facebook during that period, according to one study, was pope francis shocks the world, endorses donald trump for president, which, of course, never happened. Another claimed falsely that Wikileaks emails revealed that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to Islamic State terrorists.


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

“So, given all of that, it was interesting to see how people around Butler feel about Donald Trump,” Carlson continued. “Pictures of the rally site showed a sea of people obscuring the horizon, the kind of image you would see in a visit of the pope.” There were people wearing red MAGA hats waving PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT signs. “They must have known that Donald Trump is the most evil man who has ever lived,” Carlson said. “They’ve heard that every day for five years. They know that people who support Donald Trump are also evil, they’re bigots, they’re morons, they’re racist cult members….Only losers and freaks support Donald Trump. “People in Butler knew all that.

“Possibly I did”: “Donald Trump NBC Town Hall Transcript October 15,” Rev Transcripts, Oct. 15, 2020. “highest ratings”: John Koblin, “In TV Ratings, Trump vs. Biden Was No Match for Trump vs. Clinton,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 2020. Mexico was paying: “Speech: Donald Trump Holds a Campaign Rally in Duluth, Minnesota,” Factbase, Sept. 30, 2020. No one told: Sarah Ellison and Josh Dawsey, “Hope Hicks returned to the White House to pull Trump across the finish line. Then coronavirus hit,” Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2020. 1 in 25: James Gallagher, “Covid: What is the risk to Donald Trump’s health?”

Trump’s own chief of staff, Mark Meadows, conceded, “We are not going to control the pandemic.” The administration had yielded to a force far better adapted to its purpose. Covid didn’t kill Donald Trump, but it would defeat him. Five days before the election, Joe Biden spoke at a drive-in rally in Tampa. “So much pain, so much suffering, so much loss in America,” he said. “More than 225,000 people dead, 225,000. The estimates are, if we’d have acted responsibly, there’d be 160,000 fewer dead than there are today….Donald Trump has waved the white flag, abandoned our families, and surrendered to the virus.” Honking cars punctuated his remarks. That day new confirmed cases topped 90,000.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The Politics of Fear: What Right-­Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. 39. Massimiliano Demata. 2017. ‘“A great and beautiful wall” Donald Trump’s populist discourse on immigration.’ Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5 (2): 274–294; Natalia Knoblock. 2017. ‘Xenophobic Trumpeters.’ Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5 (2): 295–322. 40. Donald Trump. Speech on January 24, 2016. Des Moines, Iowa. www.c-span.org/video/?403832-1/ presidential-candidate-donald-trump-rally-des-moines-iowa. 41. Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld David. 2017. ‘Stoking fear, Trump defied bureaucracy to advance immigration agenda.’

Many observers seeking to explain developments offer narratives focused on particular high-­profile cases and leaders – such as the role of Jean-­ Marie Le Pen in founding the French National Front (FN),36 the rightwards shift and revival of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) during the 1980s under Jörg Haider,37 and the role of Hugo Chávez in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.38 Similarly, the 2016 US presidential elections can be seen to reflect a contingent series of idiosyncratic events catalyzing the unexpected rise of Donald Trump. Accounts emphasize the role of personalities and leadership styles: the dramatic appeal of Donald Trump, an out-­spoken and unpredictable television celebrity, with the public rejecting both ‘No drama’ Obama’s reserved control and cool grace and also Hillary Clinton’s policy wonk professionalism.39 A lot of ink has blamed James Comey’s controversial intervention during the final days of the campaign and false journalistic equivalence in negative media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails and Trump scandals.40 Others regard the outcome in terms of the evolution of political parties, with the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus pushing House Republicans to the right and deep partisan gridlock emerging in a broken Congress, with Trump inheriting the mantle of Sarah Palin.41 The FBI has pointed to Putin’s meddling through cyber-­ hacking, Facebook bots, and Twitter trolls.42 Theories of communications Part I Introduction 13 emphasize the growth of partisan polarization in the legacy news media and especially social media bubbles, which facilitate the spread of misinformation and conspiratorial thinking.43 The outcome of the 2016 election can also be attributed to a visceral white backlash against the election of Obama, the first African-­American President, toughening the deep scar of racism in the US.44 Studies emphasize that Trump capitalized upon threats to the declining social status of white working class Americans.45 Economic accounts seek explanations focused on the after effects of globalization, as trade shocks from cheap Chinese imports shut factories and squeezed paychecks for low-­skilled white American workers.46 Contingent events clearly do help to account for the outcome of the 2016 American presidential election – for example, it has been estimated that a switch of just 77,744 votes would have tipped Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania into the Clinton column, making her President.47 During the fall campaign, the standard political economy model, combining presidential approval with GNP growth, predicted a tight outcome where the popular vote could have flipped either way.48 Given the close race, and the decisive role of the Electoral College, mechanical over-­ determinism should be avoided.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 39. www.wsj.com/articles/president-obama-created-donald-trump-1457048679. 40. Deckle Edge. 2017. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. New York: Crown; Susan Bardo. 2017. The Destruction of Hillary Clinton. New York: Melville House; Thomas E. Patterson. 2017. ‘News coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the press failed the voters.’ Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. shorensteincenter.org/ news-coverage-2016-general-election/; Hillary Clinton. 2017. What Happened. New York: Simon & Schuster. 41. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/donald-trump-is-the-teaparty.html; Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson. 2012.The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster. In the week after the election, I was a mess. I had not seen my wife in two weeks. I was on deadline for this article. My son was struggling in school. The house was in disarray. I played Marvin Gaye endlessly—“When you left, you took all of me with you.” Friends began to darkly recall the ghosts of post-Reconstruction. The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history.

I think the old fear of Good Negro Government has much explanatory power for what might seem a shocking turn—the election of Donald Trump. It has been said that the first black presidency was mostly “symbolic,” a dismissal that deeply underestimates the power of symbols. Symbols don’t just represent reality but can become tools to change it. The symbolic power of Barack Obama’s presidency—that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons from taking up residence in the castle—assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries. And it was that fear that gave the symbols Donald Trump deployed—the symbols of racism—enough potency to make him president, and thus put him in position to injure the world.

That acceptance frustrates the aims of the left, which would much rather be talking about the class struggles that might entice the working white masses, instead of the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support of Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firemen and observant evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, could be dismissed.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

The transcript of Lorenzo’s interview with Guccifer 2.0 is viewable at motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yp3bbv/dnc-hacker-guccifer-20-full-interview-transcript. our second foreign-policy interview with Trump: “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views,” New York Times, March 26, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/us/politics/donald-trump-transcript.html. Nicole Perlroth and I wrote: David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, “As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue,” New York Times, July 25, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-emails.html. CHAPTER X: THE SLOW AWAKENING “hallmark of our democracy”: “Obama’s Last News Conference: Full Transcript and Video,” New York Times, January 18, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/politics/obama-final-press-conference.html.

After oil prices collapsed in late 2014, the sanctions began to cause real pain—chasing away foreign investors and undercutting Putin’s support by undercutting growth. And one of the potential investors who was trying yet again to build a hotel in Moscow was Donald Trump. During the first year of sanctions, one European diplomat who dealt often with Russia reported, “the Russians were telling the oligarchs, ‘Just wait it out. The sanctions cost Europe too much business. They will go away.’ ” But in fact, the sanctions held, and in the United States they received overwhelming bipartisan support. Overwhelming—but not unanimous, at least after Donald Trump came along. One of the most striking aspects of one of the interviews Maggie Haberman and I conducted with Trump during his presidential campaign—long before there were charges that Trump was somehow in Putin’s thrall—came when the new-to-foreign-affairs candidate told us he had doubts that the sanctions made sense at all.

Worse yet, Facebook (and Twitter) put far too little energy into understanding how their systems were being hijacked by young Russian trolls and bot makers who knew how to take advantage of the algorithms that made the systems work. It is impossible to know whether the Russian campaign succeeded in changing hearts and minds. Yet the truth remains that the tech firms who were so repelled by Donald Trump invented a system that may have helped elect him. Without question, the Russian decision to move from an espionage operation aimed at disrupting the election to an effort to put Donald Trump in office propelled the country into an entirely new place. We now think about the effects of cyberattacks entirely differently. Just five years before, our worry was China’s theft of intellectual property.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The Roads to the Heart of the World 1Jason Blevins, ‘Donald Trump, in Grand Junction, says he will “drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.”’, Denver Post, 18 October 2016. 2Time, ‘Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech’, 16 June 2015. 3Jonathan Swan, ‘Trump calls for “hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”’, The Hill, 6 February 2016. 4Rishi Iyengar, ‘Read Donald Trump’s Speech on Immigration’, Time, 1 September 2016. 5Univision, ‘Former Mexican President to Donald Trump “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall” ’, 25 February 2016. 6Cassandra Vinograd and Alexandra Jaffe, ‘Donald Trump in Indiana Says China is “Raping” America’, CNBC, 2 May 2016. 7Good Morning America, Interview, ABC, 3 November 2015. 8Donald Trump, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America (New York, 2015), p. 43. 9White House, ‘The Inaugural Address’, 20 January 2017. 10For the budget, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2018_blueprint.pdf.

Dance, ‘Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by US Intelligence’, New York Times, 5 June 2018. 6House of Representatives, Energy and Commerce Committee, Press Release, ‘Walden and Pallone on Facebook’s Data-Sharing Partnerships with Chinese Companies’, 6 June 2018. 7Ali Breland, ‘Facebook reveals data-sharing partnerships, ties to Chinese firms in 700-page document dump’, The Hill, 30 June 2018. 8Casey Newton, ‘Google’s ambitions for China could trigger a crisis inside the company’, The Verge, 18 August 2018. 9Kate Conger, ‘Google Removes “Don’t Be Evil” Clause from Its Code of Conduct’, Gizmodo, 18 May 2018. 10Good Morning America, Interview, ABC, 3 November 2015. 11Trump, Staten Island speech, ‘Trump: I’m So Happy China Is Upset; “They Have Waged Economic War Against Us” ’, Transcript on Real Clear Politics, 17 April 2016. 12The Economist, ‘The Economist interviews Donald Trump’, 3 September 2015. 13B. Milanović, Global Inequality: a new approach for the age of globalization (Cambridge, MA, 2016), p. 20. 14Woodward, Fear, pp. 272–3. 15Shawn Donnan, ‘Is there political method in Donald Trump’s trade madness’, Financial Times, 23 March 2018. 16Lingling Wei and Yoko Kubota, ‘Trump Weights Tariffs on $100 Billion More of Chinese Goods’, Wall Street Journal, 5 April 2018 17For the text of the letter to the president, see https://fonteva-customer-media.s3.amazonaws.com/00D61000000dOrPEAU/psDunXQF_RILA%20301%20Letter.pdf 18Scott Horsley, ‘Trump Orders Stiff Tariffs on China, In Hopes Of Cutting Trade Gap by $50 Billion’, NPR, 22 March 2018. 19BlackRock Investment Institute, Global Investment Outlook Q2 1018 (April 2018). 20For example, Ana Swanson, ‘Trump Proposes Re-joining Trans-Pacific Partnership’, New York Times, 12 April 2018. 21White House, ‘Peter Navarro: “Donald Trump Is Standing Up For American Interests” ’, 9 April 2018. 22Sarah Zheng, ‘How China hit Donald Trump’s supporters where it hurts as tariffs target Republican Party’s heartlands’, South China Morning Post, 5 April 2018. 23Nathaniel Meyersohn, ‘Walmart is where the trade war comes home’, CNN Money, 19 September 2018. 24Woodward, Fear, pp. 135–6. 25Eli Meixler, ‘President Trump Is “Very Thankful” for Xi Jinping’s Conciliatory Talk on Trade’, Time, 11 April 2018. 26White House, ‘Joint Statement of the United States and China Regarding Trade Consultations’, 19 May 2018. 27David Lawder, ‘US–China trade row threatens global confidence: IMF’s Lagarde’, Reuters, 19 April 2018. 28Ashley Parker, Seung Min Kim and Philip Rucker, ‘Trump chooses impulse over strategy as crises mount’, Washington Post, 12 April 2018. 29Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the white House (New York, 2018). 30Mark Lander and Ana Swanson, ‘Chances of China Trade Win Undercut by Trump Team Infighting’, New York Times, 21 May 2018. 31The National Interest, ‘The Interview: Henry Kissinger’, 19 August 2015. 32National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2017). 33Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United of America.

Milanović, Global Inequality: a new approach for the age of globalization (Cambridge, MA, 2016), p. 20. 14Woodward, Fear, pp. 272–3. 15Shawn Donnan, ‘Is there political method in Donald Trump’s trade madness’, Financial Times, 23 March 2018. 16Lingling Wei and Yoko Kubota, ‘Trump Weights Tariffs on $100 Billion More of Chinese Goods’, Wall Street Journal, 5 April 2018 17For the text of the letter to the president, see https://fonteva-customer-media.s3.amazonaws.com/00D61000000dOrPEAU/psDunXQF_RILA%20301%20Letter.pdf 18Scott Horsley, ‘Trump Orders Stiff Tariffs on China, In Hopes Of Cutting Trade Gap by $50 Billion’, NPR, 22 March 2018. 19BlackRock Investment Institute, Global Investment Outlook Q2 1018 (April 2018). 20For example, Ana Swanson, ‘Trump Proposes Re-joining Trans-Pacific Partnership’, New York Times, 12 April 2018. 21White House, ‘Peter Navarro: “Donald Trump Is Standing Up For American Interests” ’, 9 April 2018. 22Sarah Zheng, ‘How China hit Donald Trump’s supporters where it hurts as tariffs target Republican Party’s heartlands’, South China Morning Post, 5 April 2018. 23Nathaniel Meyersohn, ‘Walmart is where the trade war comes home’, CNN Money, 19 September 2018. 24Woodward, Fear, pp. 135–6. 25Eli Meixler, ‘President Trump Is “Very Thankful” for Xi Jinping’s Conciliatory Talk on Trade’, Time, 11 April 2018. 26White House, ‘Joint Statement of the United States and China Regarding Trade Consultations’, 19 May 2018. 27David Lawder, ‘US–China trade row threatens global confidence: IMF’s Lagarde’, Reuters, 19 April 2018. 28Ashley Parker, Seung Min Kim and Philip Rucker, ‘Trump chooses impulse over strategy as crises mount’, Washington Post, 12 April 2018. 29Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the white House (New York, 2018). 30Mark Lander and Ana Swanson, ‘Chances of China Trade Win Undercut by Trump Team Infighting’, New York Times, 21 May 2018. 31The National Interest, ‘The Interview: Henry Kissinger’, 19 August 2015. 32National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2017). 33Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United of America.


pages: 173 words: 52,725

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

I’m giggling. You’re the one who’s phoned me about a giant balloon. I don’t think you’ve phoned me before. I just want to know why. Jack: Because it’s pathetic, James. I really cannot understand why you just keep attacking Donald Trump. James: But we know why you can’t understand that, Jack. It’s because you describe all the facts that provide the basis for attacking Donald Trump as ‘fake news’. So you can understand why! Come on, Jack, no one’s that stupid. If you describe the evidence of your own eyes as ‘fake news’, then of course you can understand why people keep attacking him. It’s not difficult to grasp that, if you describe facts as lies, then you’ve chosen not to understand.

Their private beliefs about people from countries or cultures other than their own are demonstrably racist, they just don’t like being told so. I’m not sure why, and I suspect the next chapter in these ludicrous, social media-fuelled ‘culture wars’ will see more and more people take the advice that Donald Trump’s former consigliere, Steve Bannon, gave to French fascists to wear the accusation of racism with ‘pride’fn1. For now, the kindest thing you can do in the circumstances is invite them to say whatever they want with a promise that you won’t call them names. Three or four years after I first assumed the position behind the microphone, I was told by a caller from the London borough of Hounslow that he wasn’t allowed to say what he really thought about immigration because of political correctness.

Of course, some of the people who lack the courage or confidence to call in have persuaded themselves that the people who end up embarrassing themselves on air have been specially selected for the weakness of their position. In fact, the opposite is true. There’s no point me talking to someone who doesn’t sound completely convinced that they’re right and I’m wrong. It’s the strength of this conviction that I find enduringly fascinating. Long before Donald Trump deployed the phrase ‘fake news’ to punt his own barefaced lies while discrediting honest journalism that was critical of him, the British media was breath-takingly complicit in portraying immigration as an unalloyed bad. Pockets of resistance at the Guardian and elsewhere were preaching almost pointlessly to the choir, while the likes of Kelvin MacKenzie at the Sun and latterly Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail, inarguably the two most powerful and toxic propagandists of the last 30 years, were offering up generous portions of xenophobic fire and brimstone on a daily basis.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Representative for New York,” MyNBC5-WPTZ, YouTube video, youtube.com/watch?v=r_EHJgomQUk. white women had broken slightly for Trump: Molly Ball, “Donald Trump Didn’t Really Win 52% of White Women in 2016”: TIME, October 18, 2018, time.com/5422644/trump-white-women-2016/. of eligible voters over sixty-five: William H. Frey, “The Demographic Blowback That Elected Donald Trump,” Brookings, November 10, 2016, brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/10/the-demographic-blowback-that-elected-donald-trump/. overwhelmingly voted to remain: Simon Schuster, “The U.K. ’s Old Decided for the Young in the Brexit Vote,” TIME, June 24, 2016, time.com/4381878/brexit-generation-gap-older-younger-voters/.

It lurked behind clouds as school buses wound through their afternoon routes, bringing children to the end of their first day in Donald Trump’s America. The oldest members of Gen Z were nineteen on the day Trump was elected in 2016; the youngest were just learning to read. But over the next four years, as millennials began to grasp for political power, the generation behind them was just beginning to wake up. Many of the kids born since 1997 barely remembered George W. Bush, or were in elementary school during Obama’s 2008 campaign—Donald Trump’s election would be one of the first major political moments of their young lives. They would remember it forever.

mostly white and male: CIRCLE Staff, “Young Voters in the 2016 General Election,” Tufts University, Jonathan M. Tisch, College of Civic Life, civicyouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CIRCLE-Full-Exit-Poll-Analysis_Final.pdf. “emotions regarding the election.”: Neil Thomas, “Donald Trump Is President: Crisis at Harvard Kennedy School?,” Kennedy School Review, November 28, 2016, ksr.hkspublications.org/2016/11/28/donald-trump-is-president-crisis-at-harvard-kennedy-school/. CHAPTER 13: THE PILGRIMAGE OF ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ their new “prayer camp.”: Saul Elbein, “The Youth Group That Launched a Movement at Standing Rock,” The New York Times Magazine, January 31, 2017, nytimes.com/2017/01/31/magazine/the-youth-group-that-launched-a-movement-at-standing-rock.html.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

As David Uberti observed in Chapter 3, the impunity of Iraq War peddlers points essentially to a media oligarchy. Whether it was the Iraq War, Brexit or Donald Trump’s election, what has never really been reckoned with is the media’s role in reproducing the very myths that, when they finally took shape, bewildered its own members. The media wrote all the stories that have led to our age of discontent. How can you separate bellicose muscular liberalism from the war-underwritten exceptionalism of Anglo-America? How can you separate the promotion and acceptance of casual misogyny and sexism from the election of Donald Trump? How can you separate lazy rote thinking on freedom of speech from its instrumentalisation by bigots and hate preachers?

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that myths develop in order to ‘resolve collective problems of classification and hierarchy, marking lines between the inside and the outside, the Law and its exceptions, those who belong and those who do not’ and that they are based on a structure that recurs across cultures and eras. But that does not mean that we resign ourselves to the inevitability of their perversion. Legend has it that the moment it became clear that Donald Trump was winning, around 3 a.m. Eastern time, David Remnick of the New Yorker sat down and wrote his now famous piece, ‘An American Tragedy’, in one sitting. It started with the assertion: ‘The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.’

t=1562162061694 [accessed on 23 July 2019] 64 ‘… evidence suggests that Trump’s grandiose rhetorical style’: Lucian Gideon Conway III, Meredith A. Repkea, Shannon C. Houck, ‘Donald Trump as a Cultural Revolt Against Perceived Communication Restriction: Priming Political Correctness Norms Causes More Trump Support’ (Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol. 5 (1), 2017), 246 64 ‘… norms of restrictive communication’: ibid. 65 ‘Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status’: Moira Weigel, ‘Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy’ (Guardian, 30 November 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump [accessed on 23 July 2019] 70 ‘After Brexit, we can give Isil [ISIS] terrorists the justice they deserve’: Colonel Richard Kemp, ‘After Brexit, we can give Isil terrorists the justice they deserve – and that means the death penalty’ (Telegraph, 23 July 2018), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/07/23/laws-inadequate-prosecuting-isil-beatles-brexit-can-change/ [accessed on 23 July 2019] 70 ‘… a crushing 60 to 26 margin’: Tom Clark, ‘Free speech?


pages: 157 words: 53,125

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, chief data officer, cloud computing, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, low interest rates, machine readable, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Bannon, tail risk, the new new thing, uranium enrichment

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S DATA Acknowledgments THE FIFTH RISK PROLOGUE LOST IN TRANSITION CHRIS CHRISTIE NOTICED a piece in the New York Times—that’s how it all started. The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race—Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—and the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government.

The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job hadn’t been handed to someone who actually knew something about government. “We don’t have anyone,” said Lewandowski. Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie.

Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said. And so Christie set out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trump’s campaign was happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump adviser Paul Manafort. “The kid is paranoid about you,” Manafort said. The kid was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Back in 2005, when he was U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Christie had prosecuted and jailed Kushner’s father, Charles, for tax fraud.


pages: 382 words: 117,536

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

And so, I suspect, when all is said and done, is Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson. And why not? It worked for Donald Trump. Each morning in the small hours, Donald Trump’s bladder slowly fills with urine. The president wakes and looks at his phone in the bathroom, while fumbling in his silken sleeping pants for the flesh pyracantha of his genital. He sees something true online and instantly sends off a combative tweet. Sad! Bleary journalists panic and the fairy tinkling of Donald Trump’s cold night penis dominates the daily American news cycle once more. Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson obviously aims to surf the British news wave in a similar fashion to the orange goblin.

It was to be a journey I am sure they would have looked back on with some fondness, or at least tolerance, in later life at least. But I imagined a difficult American situation, where a delightful pea-soup restaurant waitress, who has been nothing other than charming this last hour, asks us in parting what we think of good ole Donald Trump, kickin’ Muslamic ass.3 My daughter, Six, would doubtless say, ‘Donald Trump is a smelly poo-poo head.’ It is her habit to regurgitate wholesale the adult discourse she overhears around our dinner table, without necessarily understanding it. In the ensuing conversational difficulties, we would then be gunned down by aggrieved onlookers and hung naked from poplar trees, as a warning to any other visiting snowflakes considering casting doubt on the composition and cleanliness of the forty-fifth US president’s head.

Full plans for the porn president’s visit to the UK revealed 14 May 2018 Desperate for American co-operation with post-Brexit trade, Britain is hamstrung in her reaction to Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. A man in Southend-on-Sea, who just wanted bendy bananas, eats takeaway butterfly wings, and a nuclear missile hits Tel Aviv.1 In July, Guardian and Observer readers, their furious tofusmeared faces red with righteous rage, will doubtless wish to greet visiting American president Donald Trump with well-punctuated placards, laced with Pythonesque whimsy.2 Realpolitik appeasers like Boris Piccaninny Johnson assure us, with one eye on transatlantic trade deals in the dystopian post-EU wasteland he has engineered, that we must respect the office of the president of the United States.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Adam Goldman, “Russian Spies Tried to Recruit Carter Page Before He Advised Trump,” The New York Times (April 4, 2017). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/us/politics/carter-page-trump-russia.html. 21. “Trump Tower Russia meeting: At least eight people in the room,” CNN (July 15, 2017). http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/14/politics/donald-trump-jr-meeting/index.html. 22. “Read the emails on Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia Meeting,” The New York Times (July 11, 2017). https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/11/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-email-text.html. 23. Euan McKirdy and Mary Ilyushina, “Putin: ‘Patriotic’ Russian Hackers May Have Targeted US Election,” CNN (June 2, 2017). http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/01/politics/russia-putin-hackers-election/index.html. 24.

The most egregious and foolish connection between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin occurred on June 9, 2016, in New York City.21 Rob Goldstone, an English music producer and friend of the Trump family, emailed Donald Trump Jr. about setting up a meeting at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, and Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian immigrant with ties to a range of Kremlin intelligence. “Russia—Clinton—private and confidential,” the email’s subject line read.22 Donald Trump Jr. took the meeting under the auspices of receiving damaging kompromat on Clinton, but the meeting devolved into a lobbying effort to repeal the Magnitsky Act, a congressional law passed to prevent those responsible for the 2009 death of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky from gaining access to the United States and utilizing the U.S. banking system.

Massimo Calabresi, “Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America,” Time (May 18, 2017). http://time.com/4783932/inside-russia-social-media-war-america. 11. “Is Donald Trump a Man to Mend US Relations with Russia?,” Sputnik (August 24, 2015). https://sputniknews.com/politics/201508241 026144021. 12. David Ignatius, “Russia’s Radical New Strategy for Information Warfare,” The Washington Post (January 18, 2017). https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/01/18/russias-radical-new-strategy-for-information-warfare/?utm_term=.1873e03e1c47. 13. Ashley Parker and David Sanger, “Donald Trump Calls on Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails,” The New York Times (July 27, 2016). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-clinton-emails.html. 14.


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

., April 1, 2008, p.132 ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia’: ‘Executive Talk: Donald Trump Jr bullish on Russia and few emerging markets’, eTurboNews, September 15, 2008, eturbonews.com/9788/executive-talk-donald-trump-jr-bullish-russia-and-few-emerging-ma ‘Senior Adviser to Donald Trump’: Felix Sater’s LinkedIn profile, later deleted, said: ‘Senior Advisor to Donald Trump, The Trump Organization, January 2010 – 2011 (1 year)’ to meet Donald: Trump’s deposition in his lawsuit against Timothy L. O’Brien and the publishers of TrumpNation, December 19, 2007 luxury apartment he kept for himself was in Trump Tower: Friedman, Red Mafiya, p.113 sold them to him personally: James S.

Bush’, New York Times, October 17, 2004, nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html make money mean something other: There are examples of this throughout Timothy O’Brien’s TrumpNation, Warner Business Books, 2005 ‘The philosophy of Survivor’: O’Brien, TrumpNation, p.16 ‘My name is Donald Trump’: O’Brien, TrumpNation, p.17 ‘laced with a number of howlers’: O’Brien, TrumpNation, p.18 ‘I’m going to be the biggest developer’: Confidential interview Trump’s mobster associates: David Cay Johnston, ‘Just what were Donald Trump’s ties to the mob?’, Politico, May 22, 2016, politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910; O’Brien, TrumpNation, pp.67–70 Tamir Sapir: Gary Silverman, ‘Trump’s Russian riddle’, Financial Times, August 14, 2016, ft.com/content/549ddfaa-5fa5-11e6-b38c-7b39cbb1138a ‘wilful obliviousness’: Confidential interview Trump Ocean Club down in Panama: Ned Parker, ‘Ivanka and the fugitive’ cost $370 million: Mike McIntire, ‘Donald Trump settled a real estate lawsuit, and a criminal case was closed’, New York Times, April 5, 2016, nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/politics/donald-trump-soho-settlement.html supposed to follow: Monica Alonzo-Dunsmoor, ‘City rejects high-rises on camelback’, Arizona Republic, December 22, 2005 tower in Florida: Ryan Yousefi, ‘Failed Fort Lauderdale Beach Trump project will finally open as Conrad hotel’, Broward Palm Beach New Times, October 3, 2014, https://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/failed-fort-lauderdale-beach-trump-project-will-finally-open-as-conrad-hotel-6455709 set off for Moscow with two of Trump’s children: Felix Sater deposition in Donald Trump v Timothy O’Brien et al., April 1, 2008, p.132 ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia’: ‘Executive Talk: Donald Trump Jr bullish on Russia and few emerging markets’, eTurboNews, September 15, 2008, eturbonews.com/9788/executive-talk-donald-trump-jr-bullish-russia-and-few-emerging-ma ‘Senior Adviser to Donald Trump’: Felix Sater’s LinkedIn profile, later deleted, said: ‘Senior Advisor to Donald Trump, The Trump Organization, January 2010 – 2011 (1 year)’ to meet Donald: Trump’s deposition in his lawsuit against Timothy L.

For all their wilful obliviousness, Trump and his people showed a pretty clear sense of the sources of the funds: ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,’ Don Jr said in an interview published the day Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. Felix Sater was a crucial conduit. For a while, he even enjoyed the title of ‘Senior Adviser to Donald Trump’. His partner Tevfik Arif brought ex-Soviet moneymen to meet Donald. But they were by no means the only one. Ex-Soviet money had multiple pipelines into Donald Trump. Vyacheslav Ivankov, the brutal vor who was extracted from jail by the Brainy Don and came to New York: the luxury apartment he kept for himself was in Trump Tower. The five condos that the brother of the Brainy Don’s US moneyman bought there: Trump sold them to him personally.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

To run, one needs to enter a CV and some formal documentation here: http://www.beppegrillo.it/movimento/regole_politiche_2013.php#candidati). 21. Beppe’s way of talking about these subjects seems to have been particularly important. In a similar way, Donald Trump’s word use when discussing subjects other politicians appeared reluctant to bring up was significant. See for example: Stacey Liberatore, ‘Donald Trump’s language could win him the presidency’, MailOnline, 21 March 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3502925/Donald-Trump-s-language-win-presidency-Candidates-use-emotional-words-votes-times-crisis.html#ixzz4Br9rMAYL (accessed 9 August 2016). 22. Gian Antonio Stella and Sergio Rizzo, La Casta: così i politici italiani sono diventati intoccabili (ebook, Rizzoli, 2010).

During his campaign, Trump said things that would not have been out of place at Pegida rallies, including a pledge to stop all immigration from Muslim-majority countries, until elected officials can ‘figure out what the hell is going on’. (In fact Pegida supporters often carried placards that read ‘Donald Trump is right.’) ‘Thank you America, thank you Donald Trump,’ Tommy said, the day after his election. ‘You’ve given us all a fighting chance.’ In August 2015, when this all started, the right-wing, Euro-sceptic German political party Alternative for Germany was polling around 5 per cent. By late 2016 it was 15 per cent. Pegida-UK had gone, but many of its ideas—the belief that Islam is in some ways a threat to Western democracies, that liberal politicians and journalists are too ignorant or scared to speak up and say so—had become mainstream.

A textual analysis of the relation between Beppe Grillo’s posts and his commenters’, University of Sydney paper, September 2015, https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/2683fd50-c329-43da-87b5-8578e32d794a.pdf (preliminary draft). 40. Jason le Mierre, ‘Did the media help Donald Trump win? $5 billion in free advertising given to president-elect’, International Business Times, 9 November, 2016, http://www.ibtimes.com/did-media-help-donald-trump-win-5-billion-free-advertising-given-president-elect-2444115. 41. See ‘MoVimento 5 stelle, ma quale democrazia? Le regionali mettono in crisi le liste di Grillo’, Yes, political!, 28 December 2009. The first media to report that was Wired, followed by Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica.


On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The episode reminded everyone how much the old racial wound still hurts. Sitting in New York, recollecting the day, Newsome said, ‘The hate is in your face, it’s outright. We have people who worship Trump as if he’s a god. He can do no wrong. You have Bible-belt Republicans who draw all their ideals from the Good Book. Donald Trump is violating God’s code, the commandments, and they choose Donald Trump over Jesus. Well, that’s amazing to me.’ These were the early signs of a presidency that by the beginning of the last year of his first term was the most chaotic America had known in the modern era. The tweets of Trump’s early days, which many people had taken as evidence of a fragile, tormented personality, and not much more, had turned into a conveyor belt of abuse, layered with fantasy and untruths that were so blatant that reporters spent their time not so much checking his messages for veracity – because the inventions were usually so obvious – as arguing among themselves whether he knew what he was saying, and just didn’t care, or whether he had passed into a state in which he had lost the ability to distinguish between fiction and truth, and had created a world so consumed by his boiling rage that it had none of the characteristics most people would associate with normality.

The intoxication is easy to describe, because no one with feeling can reasonably resist the excitement of the mingling of cultures, the country’s obsession with its own history and the romantic political tradition spawned as a result; nor the efforts of writers over two and a half centuries to describe the personality and the agonies of the New World, never mind the movies and the music, from jazz bar to Broadway, that gave the twentieth century across the world so much of its personality. Yet all of this is touched by the shadow that is cast, sooner or later, by every empire that has seen its power and assurance wax and wane. The heart of America, although it beats with precious self-confidence, is trembling. Donald Trump is the contemporary emblem of that pain, but the recent story stretches back to a time when he had nothing much in mind except another land deal, and a building taller than the next guy’s. Anyone who first came to America in the age of Vietnam, like me, and watched while Watergate drained politics of so many illusions, is bound to know that the struggle between America’s view of itself and the judgement of a world in which it tries to protect its role has produced a crisis of identity that cuts deep.

Thinking back to political campaigns and holidays, wanderings into the wild, dozens of small towns and happy valleys, cities that sketch out the twentieth century in their streets, these contrasts are sharp – a vigorous optimism set against urban despair and violence, and an unmistakable anxiety about the future. It explains many of the upheavals of our time, and Donald Trump, too. This book is not about him – emphatically not, because he would take it over – but about the urge that he has recognised and articulated (although that may not be the appropriate word), turning the anger and sense of loss that he’s identified into an electric current to shock politics. Anyone who has enjoyed America over the last few decades, in melodramatic moments, in crises and at times of hope, will recognise the feelings that are now on the loose.


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

Economic Supremacy Has Repeatedly Proved Declinists Wrong,” Foreign Affairs, April 31, 2020. 191 than the next ten countries combined: US military spending in 2019 = $732 billion, total military spending of next 10 nations (China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil) = $725.8 billion: “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2019,” Table 1, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2020–04/fs_2020_04_milex_0_0.pdf. 191 “soft power”: Term first coined by Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 191 Nye . . . has warned in recent years: “The evidence is clear. Donald Trump’s presidency has eroded America’s soft power”: Joseph S. Nye, “Donald Trump and the Decline of US Soft Power,” Project Syndicate, February 6, 2018. 192 64% for Obama: Richard Wike, Bruce Stokes, Jacob Poushter, and Janell Fetterolf, “U.S. Image Suffers as Publics Around World Question Trump’s Leadership,” Pew Research, June 26, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.orjg/global/2017/06/26/u-s-image-suffers-as-publics-around-world-question-trumps-leadership/. 192 29% for Trump: Richard Wike, Jacob Poushter, Janell Fetterolf, and Shannon Schumacher, “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe, While Views of U.S.

In 2017, he sounded the alarm louder, predicting in a speech at the Munich Security Conference that there was a reasonable chance that such a pandemic would erupt in the next ten to fifteen years. By then, it did not take much foresight to imagine a pandemic and to argue for investing more time, resources, and energy toward stopping it. In June 2017, when President Donald Trump proposed budget cuts in the key agencies that dealt with public health and diseases, I devoted a segment of my CNN show to the topic, saying: One of the biggest threats facing the United States isn’t big at all. Actually, it’s tiny, microscopic, thousands of times smaller than the head of a pin.

Or consider the origins of the global financial crisis—one obscure financial product, the “credit default swap,” a kind of insurance policy mostly on mortgages, was bundled and re-bundled, sliced and diced, sold and resold, until it became a $45 trillion market, three times larger than the US economy, and three-quarters the size of the entire global economy. And when that market crashed, it took the world economy with it and, in due course, triggered a wave of populism. Without credit default swaps, there might never have been a President Donald Trump. And in the case of this pandemic, we now all recognize how a tiny viral particle, circulating in a bat in China’s Hubei Province, has brought the world to its knees—a real-life example of the butterfly effect, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wing might influence weather patterns on the other side of the world.


pages: 395 words: 103,437

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

Trump bragged: The White House, “Remarks by President Trump on the Administration’s National Security Strategy,” December 18, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/​briefings-statements/​remarks-president-trump-administrations-national-security-strategy/. “We have 25,000 soldiers”: Louis Jacobson, “Donald Trump Mostly Wrong That ‘We Get Practically Nothing’ from South Korea for U.S. Troop Presence,” PolitiFact, January 10, 2016. “How long will we go on defending”: John Power, “Donald Trump’s Problem with the US-Korea Alliance,” The Diplomat, July 23, 2015. And as president in 2017: Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 264. “Fear,” candidate Trump: Ibid., front matter. Trump the businessman: Niraj Chokshi, “The 100-Plus Times Donald Trump Assured Us That America Is a Laughingstock,” WP, January 27, 2016.

They both had fathers who were larger than life, whom they revered and sought to emulate, but in their own way. Fred Trump, the patriarch, was less flamboyant and “stern, disciplined,” according to Timothy O’Brien, who wrote another meticulously researched biography of Donald Trump. His critical look into the dark crevices of Donald Trump’s life and his exposure of the truth hidden beneath layers of decades-old mythology provoked his subject into filing a $5 billion libel suit against him. Unlike his father, the younger Trump was flashy and drawn to celebrity, with an insatiable appetite for praise and attention.

And while she has supported his desire to re-create North Korea’s brand and supplemented the image he wants to project to the outside world, Kim’s ultimate validation would come from another man—Donald Trump. In June 2018, Kim would get what his grandfather and his father were never able to obtain—a meeting with a sitting U.S. president. Kim’s meetings with presidents Xi and Moon were mere opening acts for the main event: his summit with Donald Trump. When Trump, who had once dreamed of going into show business instead of real estate, having planned to study filmmaking, according to biographer Tim O’Brien, met Kim Jong Un, the son of a cinephile dictator and a former dancer, drama and entertainment were almost guaranteed.


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 promise to crack down on corruption and private lobbying is integral to the pitch made by figures such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or Viktor Orbán. One of the great political riddles of recent years is that declining trust in ‘elites’ is often encouraged and exploited by figures of far more dubious moral character – not to mention far greater wealth – than the technocrats and politicians being ousted. On the face of it, it would seem odd that a sense of ‘elite’ corruption would play into the hands of hucksters and blaggards such as Donald Trump or Arron Banks. But the authority of these figures owes nothing to their moral character, and everything to their perceived willingness to blow the whistle on corrupt ‘insiders’ dominating the state and media.

, openDemocracy (30 June 2016); ‘The Crisis of Statistical Fact’, see ‘How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next’, Guardian (19 January 2017); ‘Strong and Stable’ see ‘Theresa May’s vapid vision for a one-party state’, New York Times (11 May 2017). Chapter 2: ‘The Corbyn Shock’ see ‘Reasons for Corbyn’, London Review of Books (13 July 2017); ‘The Riddle of Tory Brexitism’ see ‘What are they after?’, London Review of Books (8 March 2018); ‘The Revenge of Sovereignty on Government’ see ‘Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Rise of Radical Incompetence’, New York Times (13 July 2018); ‘The Lure of Exit’ see ‘Leave, and leave again’, London Review of Books (7 February 2019); ‘The Demise of Liberal Elites’ see ‘Why we stopped trusting elites’, Guardian (29 November 2019); ‘Comedy or Demagoguery’ see ‘The funny side of politics’, openDemocracy (9 April 2019).

Thus, in September 2019, the Johnson administration made the spectacular gesture of purging twenty-one anti-Brexit Conservative MPs from the party, including the ‘father’ of the House of Commons, Kenneth Clarke, and Sir Nicholas Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson. Others resigned from the cabinet out of concern at the direction the government was taking, including Johnson’s own brother, Jo. What was revealed during these periods is something that remains true even when the turbulence has subsided; namely that, as occurred with the GOP and Donald Trump, most of the conservative establishment is willing to dump its principles for political advantage. Meanwhile ostensibly centrist cabinet ministers, such as Matt Hancock and Nicky Morgan, turned out to be entirely comfortable with a reckless, even lawless, administration. The sometime establishment ‘paper of record’, The Times, backed Johnson in the 2019 general election, on the basis that he should be free to act however he pleased and without warning.


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

They knew me well. I called out the fact that I was one of the only candidates in the field that 10 percent or more of Donald Trump voters said they would vote for in the general election. “They’re looking around the field and asking, ‘Who can beat Donald Trump?’ ‘Who can beat Donald Trump?’ ” The crowd started chanting, “YANG BEATS TRUMP! YANG BEATS TRUMP!” I laughed. “That’s right, Yang does beat Trump! It’s like a game of rock-paper-scissors. And if Donald Trump is the scissors, then I’m the fucking rock!” The crowd erupted. * * * — I WAS THE last person anyone expected to be on either of these stages.

I thought, “I have a TV camera on me,” so I said to Anderson Cooper, who was seated several people to my left, “Hey, Anderson, can you send it to me after the break? I’m going to endorse Joe.” I then gave my best pitch that Joe was going to be the nominee and we needed to come together to defeat Donald Trump in the fall. I felt a lot of responsibility in part because a survey back in January had indicated that 42 percent of my supporters weren’t sure they were going to support the Democratic nominee. I always felt that defeating Donald Trump was the number one goal. The Biden team reached out to me after the endorsement and said they were delighted and asked if I would be willing to be a campaign surrogate. I said emphatically “Yes!”

Some of us have stopped believing in science, while others have simply come to doubt the possibility that brighter days lie ahead. The unprecedented disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic laid our anxieties bare. Unity and consensus seem like fading dreams. Many of us were surprised and horrified at the ascent of Donald Trump, and yet we sense, on some level, that the aggrieved mistrust and political anger he tapped into were real and will continue to exist long after he’s gone. As I write this, there is a Democratic majority in D.C. with the slimmest conceivable margins, with Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate necessary to get anything done.


pages: 276 words: 71,950

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Weisman, (((Semitism))), p. 129; Donald Trump, “I Don’t Know David Duke,” Morning Joe, MSNBC, November 14, 2016 (television), www.youtube.com/​watch?v=YBOy8iTBA9g; Glenn Kessler, “Donald Trump and David Duke: For the Record,” Washington Post, March 1, 2016. 6. Weisman, (((Semitism))), p. 147. 7. Ibid., p. 29. 8. Trump did subsequently say that it was a mistake to change it because it was a sheriff’s star. Critics pointed out that sheriff’s stars, while six-pointed, have little circles at the point of each star. Louis Jacobson, “Donald Trump’s ‘Star of David’ Tweet: A Recap,” Politifact, July 5, 2016; Bryce Covert, “Trump Tries to Spin Anti-Semitic Symbol as ‘Sheriff’s Star,’ ” Think Progress, July 4, 2016. 9.

The echo symbol originated in 2014, on a podcast called The Daily Shoah that is hosted by The Right Stuff, a white nationalist blog. The echo began to be used in earnest to identify Jewish reporters who were critical of Donald Trump. Those who relied on it described the symbol as “closed captioning for the Jew-blind.” It ensured that the journalist’s Jewish identity was immediately evident.16 In May 2016, Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor for the New York Times, mentioned an article by the historian Robert Kagan that linked Donald Trump to fascism. He quickly received a response—“Hello (((Weisman)))”—from someone who utilized the screen name @CyberTrump. Sensing that the parentheses had some connection to his Jewish identity, Weisman asked for an explanation and received the following response: “What, ho, the vaunted Ashkenazi intelligence, hahaha!

Locating the white supremacists who were considered social media “influencers,” Fortune discovered that a significant number of Trump campaign workers followed the leading #WhiteGenocide influencers. The study concluded that “the data shows…that Donald Trump and his campaign have used social media to court support within the white supremacist community, whether intentionally or unintentionally.”15 Not only did Trump’s campaign workers regularly follow influential white supremacists on social media, they were also spreading their hate-filled messages to the millions of people who followed Donald Trump on social media. This is the normalization or mainstreaming of white supremacy and its panoply of attendant prejudices. Trump’s ambiguous relationship to antisemitism extended beyond his social media activities.


pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

In America one of the tricks of the St Petersburg troll farm was to take on the personas of American civil liberties campaigns – Black Lives Matter, for instance – and then use them to raise the vote for the more pro-Russian presidential candidate, Donald Trump, or depress it for his rivals. The troll farm even organised protests in US cities, both for and against Trump, each chanting against the other. One protest in particular reminded me of a really crap copy of Srdja’s political street theatre: when a troll posing as a Donald Trump supporter in a fake Facebook group called Being Patriotic convinced a woman in Florida to hire an actor to wear a rubber Hillary Clinton mask and then lock the actor in a makeshift jail cell and wheel them about as if in a carnival procession.19 And it’s when the Kremlin’s efforts are unveiled that they have perhaps their most significant effect.

Russia had seen so many worlds flick through in such rapid progression – from Communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich – that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable.’ Notes 1 PolitiFact, ‘Donald Trump’s File’, www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump (accessed 20 July 2016); PolitiFact, ‘Hillary Clinton’s File’, www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton (accessed 20 July 2016). 2 BBC Breadth of Opinion Review; http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/breadth_opinion/content_analysis.pdf. 3 BBC News, ‘Kremlin’s Chief Propagandist Accuses Western Media of Bias’, 23 June 2016; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36551391. 4 Yaffa, Joshua, ‘Dmitry Kiselev Is Redefining the Art of Russian Propaganda’, New Republic, 1 July 2014; https://newrepublic.com/article/118438/dmitry-kiselev-putins-favorite-tv-host-russias-top-propogandist. 5 Balmforth, Tom, ‘Gene Warfare?

smid=tw-share&_r=0&module=inline. 19 Atlantic Council, ‘Breaking Aleppo’, 2017; http://www.publications.atlanticcouncil.org/breakingaleppo/attacks-overview/. 20 For background on the use of barrel bombs and attacks on medical facilities, see: Boghani, Priyanka, ‘A Staggering New Death Toll for Syria’s War – 470,000’, PBS, 11 February 2016; https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/a-staggering-new-death-toll-for-syrias-war-470000/; Barnard, Anne, ‘Death Toll from War in Syria Now 470,000, Group Finds’, New York Times, 11 February 2016; https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/world/middleeast/death-toll-from-war-in-syria-now-470000-group-finds.html; Physicians for Human Rights, ‘2015 Marks Worst Year for Attacks on Hospitals in Syria’, 18 December 2015; https://phr.org/news/2015-marks-worst-year-for-attacks-on-hospitals-in-syria/; International Committee of the Red Cross, ‘Syria: Aid Stepped Up Amidst Heavy Fighting in Aleppo Province’, 10 February 2016; https://www.icrc.org/en/document/syria-fighting-conflict-aleppo. 21 Physicians for Human Rights, ‘UN Security Council Calls for End to Attacks on Doctors, Hospitals’, 3 May 2016; https://phr.org/news/un-security-council-calls-for-end-to-attacks-on-doctors-hospitals/. 22 Syrian American Medical Society, ‘The Failure of UN Security Council Resolution 2286’, January 2017; https://www.sams-usa.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/UN-fail-report-07-3.pdf. 23 McKernan, Bethan, ‘Aleppo Attack: Syrian Army to Invade City with Ground Troops’, Independent, 23 September 2016; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/aleppo-syria-war-assad-troops-to-invade-city-under-siege-rebels-a7326266.html. 24 Atlantic Council, ‘Breaking Aleppo’. 25 BBC News, ‘Syria Conflict: US Accuses Russia of Barbarsim in Aleppo’, 26 September 2016; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37468080. 26 Atlantic Council, ‘Breaking Aleppo’. 27 Osborne, Samuel, ‘Donald Trump Wins: All the Lies, Mistruths and Scare Stories He Told During the US Election Campaign’, Independent, 9 November 2016; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-president-lies-and-mistruths-during-us-election-campaign-a7406821.html. 28 Graham, David, ‘The Wrong Side of the Right Side of History’, The Atlantic, 21 December 2015; https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/obama-right-side-of-history/420462/. 29 Shaheen, Kareem, ‘“Hell Itself”: Aleppo Reels from Alleged Use of Bunker-Buster Bombs’, Guardian, 26 September 2016; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/26/hell-itself-aleppo-reels-from-alleged-use-of-bunker-buster-bombs. 30 Violations Documentation Centre: http://www.vdc-sy.info. http://www.vdc-sy.info/index.php/en/martyrs/1/c29yd GJ5PWEua2lsbGVkX2RhdGV8c29ydGRpcj1ERVNDfGFwcHJvdmVkP XZpc2libGV8ZXh0cmFkaXNwbGF5PTB8cHJvdmluY2U9NnxzdGFydE RhdGU9MjAxMi0wNy0xOXxlbmREYXRlPTIwMTYtMTItMjJ8.


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

San Francisco Chronicle, 30 June 2009. <http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/06/30/crap-detection-101/> ‘Robert Fisk Makes Things Up’. Harry’s Place blog, 23 March 2012. <http://hurryupharry.org/2012/03/23/robert-fisk-makes-things-up/> Roberts, David. ‘Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology’. Vox, 19 May 2017. <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology> Roberts, David. ‘America is facing an epistemic crisis’. Vox, 2 November 2017. <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/america-epistemic-crisis> Rodriguez, Ashley. ‘How a single deal with a decidedly unhip tech company built the Vice media behemoth’.

<https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2019/jul/20/politics-live-blog-andrew-sparrow> Stelter, Brian. ‘Debunkers of Fictions Sift the Net’. The New York Times, 4 April 2010. <https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/technology/05snopes.html> Stelter, Brian. ‘How the shocking hot mic tape of Donald Trump was exposed’. Money.CNN.com, 7 October 2016. <https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/07/media/access-hollywood-donald-trump-tape/index.html> Stoppard, Tom. Night and Day. Reprint edition. New York: Black Cat, 2018. Stray, Jonathan. ‘Why link out? Four journalistic purposes of the noble hyperlink’. NiemanLab, 8 June 2010. <https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/why-link-out-four-journalistic-purposes-of-the-noble-hyperlink/> Suciu, Peter.

‘Fearing coronavirus, Arizona man dies after taking a form of chloroquine used to treat aquariums’. CNN, 25 March 2020. <https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/health/arizona-coronavirus-chloroquine-death/index.html> Walker, Hunter. ‘Sarah Palin defends Donald Trump: “WTH, LAMESTREAM MEDIA!”’. Business Insider, 28 August 2015. <https://www.businessinsider.com/sarah-palin-defends-donald-trump-on-bible-question-2015-8> Walker, James. ‘Ministry of Justice staff called Buzzfeed UK reporter “bitch” and “crazy” in internal messages after leaked report story’. Press Gazette, 7 January 2019 <https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/ministry-of-justice-staff-called-buzzfeed-uk-reporter-bitch-and-crazy-in-internal-messages-after-leaked-report-story/> Ward, Bob.


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

He also retweeted a CNBC article that read, “Fed Chair Powell calls for more help from Congress, says there’s a low risk of ‘overdoing it.’” Trump appended his own commentary: “True!” Four weeks later, in an election that set turnout records, voters denied Donald Trump a second term. Chapter Sixteen PERIL AND POSSIBILITY Donald Trump’s election defeat deprived him of the chance to remake the Federal Reserve. Trump had appointed three Supreme Court Justices, but his attempts to install loyalists on the Fed’s board in 2019 had run into opposition from Senate Republicans, forcing his picks—Herman Cain and Stephen Moore—to withdraw.

FOMC transcript, March 17–18, 2015, 143. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/FOMC20150318meeting.pdf 26. FOMC Transcript, December 15–16, 2015, 100. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/FOMC20151216meeting.pdf Chapter 4 1. Kate Davidson, “Donald Trump’s Comments on the Fed, Interest Rate Policy and Janet Yellen,” The Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-comments-on-the-fed-interest-rate-policy-and-janet-yellen-1478724767 2. Nick Timiraos, Michael C. Bender, and Damian Paletta, “Gary Cohn Has Emerged as an Economic-Policy Powerhouse in Trump Administration,” The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2017; for a more detailed account, see Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 3.

Akane Otani, Riva Gold, and Michael Wursthorn, “U.S. Stocks End Worst Week in Years,” The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/stocks-slide-as-trump-kicks-off-trade-war-1521765378 14. “CNBC Transcript: President Donald Trump Sits Down with CNBC’s Joe Kernen,” July 20, 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/20/cnbc-transcript-president-donald-trump-sits-down-with-cnbcs-joe-kern.html Chapter 5 1. Jerome H. Powell, “Monetary Policy in a Changing Economy,” Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 24, 2018. 2. Nick Timiraos, “Fed Confronts a Dilemma Over the Hot Job Market,” The Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2018. 3.


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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

returning to Twitter to harangue the company: Bernie Sanders, Tweet, December 27, 2019, https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1210602974587822080 (January 25, 2021). “Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise”: “Amazon ‘Getting Away with Murder on tax’, says Donald Trump,” Reuters, May 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/amazon-getting-away-with-on-tax-says-donald-trump (January 25, 2021). “Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt—many jobs being lost!”: Donald Trump, Tweet, August 16, 2017, https://www.thetrumparchive.com/?searchbox=%22many+jobs+being+lost%21%22 (January 26, 2021). the agency had lost money for years: “Be Careful What You Assume,” United States Postal Service Office of the Inspector General, February 16, 2015, https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume (January 25, 2021).

Executives who worked on the project recalled that on several occasions when Bezos demoed the prototype, he spent the first few minutes asking Alexa to play videos that ridiculed a certain GOP presidential candidate. “Alexa, show me the video, ‘Donald Trump says “China,” ’ ” he asked, or “Alexa, play Stephen Colbert’s monologue from last night.” Then “he would laugh like there’s no tomorrow,” said a vice president who was in the demos. Bezos had no idea what was coming. CHAPTER 2 A Name Too Boring to Notice In November 2012, when Donald Trump was still the host of a reality TV show and Alexa prototypes were about to start moving into the homes of employees, Jeff Bezos was asked by the TV interviewer Charlie Rose a question that had become a recurring favorite of journalists: Will Amazon ever buy or open physical stores?

CHAPTER 5: DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS “I predicted Osama bin Laden… a good location in real estate”: Glenn Kessler, “Trump’s Claim That He ‘Predicted Osama bin Laden,’ ” Washington Post, December 7, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/12/07/trumps-claim-that-he-predicted-osama-bin-laden/ (January 20, 2021). “going to have such problems”: Tim Stenovic, “Donald Trump Just Said If He’s Elected President Amazon Will Have Problems,” Business Insider, Feruary 26, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-says-amazon-will-have-such-problems-2016-2 (January 20, 2021). The Post would expand and fortify Bezos’ reputation: See Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), for more on the challenges at the Washington Post before Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the newspaper and the changes he made afterward.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

Hopkins, “How Information Became Ideological,” Inside Higher Ed, October 11, 2016, insidehighered.com/views/2016/10/11/how-conservative-movement-has-undermined-trust-academe-essay. 14 David Roberts, “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology: Journalism Cannot Be Neutral Toward a Threat to the Conditions That Make It Possible,” Vox, May 19, 2017, vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology. 15 David Roberts, “Donald Trump Is the Sole Reliable Source of Truth, Says Chair of House Science Committee: ‘Better to Get Your News Directly from the President,’ said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,” Vox, January 27, 2017, vox.com/science-and-health/2017/1/27/14395978/donald-trump-lamar-smith. 16 David Hookstead, “This Sexy Model Is Blowing Up the Internet [SLIDESHOW],” Daily Caller, December 16, 2016, dailycaller.com/2016/12/16/this-sexy-model-is-blowing-up-the-internet-slideshow/; David Hookstead, “This UFC Octagon Girl’s Instagram Account Is Sizzling Hot [SLIDESHOW],” Daily Caller, December 24, 2016, dailycaller.com/2016/12/24/this-ufc-octagon-girls-instagram-account-is-sizzling-hot-slideshow/; Kaitlan Collins, “13 Syrian Refugees We’d Take Immediately [PHOTOS],” Dailey Caller, November 18, 2015, dailycaller.com/2015/11/18/13-syrian-refugees-wed-take-immediately-photos/. 17 Jonathan A.

Key’s ‘South in the House,’ ” Studies in American Political Development 29, no. 2 (Oct. 2015): 154–84, doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X1500005X. 3 Robert Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 4 Ezra Klein, “American Democracy Has Faced Worse Threats Than Donald Trump,” Vox, May 10, 2018, vox.com/2018/5/10/17147338/donald-trump-illiberal-undemocratic-elections-politics. 5 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 61. 6 Ibid., 63. 7 Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, 38. 8 Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 9 Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie. 10 Brenda Wineapple, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (New York: Random House, 2019). 11 Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie. 12 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. 13 Qtd. in ibid. 14 Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin. 15 Michael Oreskes, “Civil Rights Act Leaves Deep Mark on the American Political Landscape,” New York Times, July 2, 1989, nytimes.com/1989/07/02/us/civil-rights-act-leaves-deep-mark-on-the-american-political-landscape.html. 16 mischiefsoffaction.com/2014/06/polarization-is-about-more-than-just.html. 17 Ezra Klein, “No One’s Less Moderate Than Moderates,” Vox, February 26, 2015, vox.com/2014/7/8/5878293/lets-stop-using-the-word-moderate. 18 Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 19 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018). 20 “Religious ‘Nones’ Now Largest Single Religious Group among Democrats,” Pew Research Center, October 23, 2015, pewforum.org/2015/11/03/u-s-public-becoming-less-religious/pf_15-10-27_secondrls_overview_nonesdems640px. 21 Pew Research Center, “Partisan Divide.” 22 Alan Abramowitz, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 23 Author correspondence with Wilkinson, vice president of research at the Niskanen Institute. 24 Ronald Brownstein, “How the Election Revealed the Divide between City and Country,” Atlantic, November 17, 2016, theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/clinton-trump-city-country-divide/507902. 25 David Choi, “Hillary Clinton: “I Won the Places That Are ‘Dynamic, Moving Forward,’ while Trump’s Campaign ‘Was Looking Backwards,’ ” Business Insider, March 13, 2018, businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-says-trump-won-backwards-states-in-2016-2018-3. 26 Mark Muro and Sifan Liu, “Another Clinton-Trump Divide: High-Output America vs.

Lockhart, “How Russia Exploited Racial Tensions in America During the 2016 Elections: New Reports Detail How Russian Internet Trolls Manipulated Outrage over Racial Injustice in America,” Vox, December 17, 2018, vox.com/identities/2018/12/17/18145075/russia-facebook-twitter-internet-research-agency-race. 17 Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (New York: Penguin, 2018). 18 Alexandra Bruell, “P&G Challenges Men to Shave Their ‘Toxic Masculinity’ in Gillette Ad,” Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2019, wsj.com/articles/p-g-challenges-men-to-shave-their-toxic-masculinity-in-gillette-ad-11547467200. 19 Klein, “White Threat.” 20 Ronald Kessler, “Donald Trump: Mean-Spirited GOP Won’t Win Elections,” Newsmax, November 26, 2012, newsmax.com/Newsfront/Donald-Trump-Ronald-Kessler/2012/11/26/id/465363/. 21 Qtd. in Klein, “White Threat.” 22 Qtd. in ibid. 23 Betsy Cooper et al., “How Immigration and Concerns About Cultural Change Are Shaping the 2016 Election: PRRI/Brookings Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, June 2016, prri.org/research/prri-brookings-poll-immigration-economy-trade-terrorism-presidential-race. 24 Sean Trende, “The Case of the Missing White Voters,” RealClearPolitics, November 8, 2012, realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/11/08/the_case_of_the_missing_white_voters_116106-2.html. 25 Ashley Jardina, White Identity Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 26 “When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression,” Quote Investigator, October 24, 2016, quoteinvestigator.com/2016/10/24/privilege/. 27 John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 28 Zack Beauchamp, “White Riot,” Vox, January 20, 2017, vox.com/2016/9/19/12933072/far-right-white-riot-trump-brexit. 29 Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (New York: Abrams, 2019). 30 Klein, “White Threat.” 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Bret Stephens (@BretStephensNYT), “The right to offend is […],” Twitter, January 7, 2015, 1:16 p.m.


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Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

When it comes to taking responsibility for the text, warts and all, I remain of course in a minority of one. Mick Hume, London, February 2017 1 From Brexit to Trump: ‘… but some voters are more equal than others’ This is not a book about Brexit. Nor is it a book about the election of Donald Trump. It is about a much bigger issue – one the debate around those extraordinary events has highlighted. What’s at stake is the future of democracy itself, in the UK, the US and across the West. We live at a strange moment in the history of democratic politics. Today, perhaps for the first time, every serious politician and thinker in the Western world will declare their support for democracy in principle.

That sneering attitude was even reflected in the satirical magazine Private Eye; under the spoof headline ‘Turkeys Vote for Christmas in Referendum Cliffhanger’, it reported that some turkeys were already regretting their ‘Brexmas vote’ as ‘evidence is piling up that, come Christmas lunch, they will in fact have their heads cut off, their giblets put in a plastic bag and be well and truly stuffed’. If it was irony the Eye was after, how about ‘Satirists Side with Establishment’?6 Then came the second political earthquake of 2016 – the November election of Republican candidate and celebrity capitalist Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. The bitter responses to the voters’ failure to elect Democratic Party favourite Hillary Clinton were if anything even more starkly anti-democratic than the anti-Brexit backlash. ‘Your Vote is a Hate Crime!’ declared anti-Trump protesters, graffiti artists and bloggers, implying that Trump supporters should be denied not only their vote, but their liberty.7 One leading Democrat commentator issued the blanket declaration that ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter’.

But the fury of the political, economic and cultural elites in response to the 17.4 million UK voters who dared to back Brexit, and the 62 million-plus Americans who had the temerity to vote for Trump, brought these anti-democratic poisons bubbling to the surface of our civilised societies once more. The real Brexit–Trump connection There has been a concerted attempt to explain the link between the Brexit referendum result and the election of Donald Trump. For angry social media commentators, it seemed obvious that ‘both were clearly mired in racism, bigotry and hate’. Many mainstream media pundits took a similar line, concluding that ‘both votes were marked by emotional, divisive campaigns’ and were won on ‘a tide’ of racism and hate.9 Much of this misses the point.


pages: 339 words: 103,546

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

To survive, like his uncles and grandfather before him, he’d need support from the United States, where an upcoming election could be a huge boon to the kingdom. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton seemed like a natural ally. Saudi leaders had long found Clinton an irksome counterparty when she was secretary of state, with her insistence on pressing the king and his deputies on human rights issues and demanding more freedom for women in the kingdom when they met. Donald Trump seemed even more problematic, with his naked Islamophobia and criticism of President Barack Obama for attempting to block a law that would let people sue Saudi Arabia in US courts for the 9/11 attacks.

(Olivier Douliery/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) Mohammed bin Salman found an ally in Steve Bannon, chief strategist of President Donald Trump. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images) Mohammed bin Salman connected well with Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President Trump. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images) SoftBank’s Rajeev Misra and Masayoshi Son with the Public Investment Fund’s Yasir al-Rumayyan. (Bandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Council/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with King Salman and President Donald Trump at the launch of Saudi counter-extremism center in Riyadh. (Bandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Council/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) Qataris write comments on a wall bearing a portrait of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, in Doha.

Cast of Characters The Al Saud King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the kingdom’s founder and father of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, Mohammed’s younger brother and former ambassador to the United States Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, King Salman’s first wife Fahdah bint Falah al-Hithlain, King Salman’s third wife and mother of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and briefly heir apparent Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Al Saud, King Salman’s nephew and a longtime antiterrorism official close to the US government King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and predecessor Prince Miteb bin Abdullah Al Saud, King Abdullah’s son and former chief of the Saudi Arabia National Guard Prince Turki bin Abdullah Al Saud, the seventh son of King Abdullah Prince Badr bin Farhan Al Saud, a prince from a distant branch of the family, minister of culture, and a longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman Prince Abdullah bin Bandar Al Saud, another prince and longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman and head of the National Guard Prince Sultan bin Turki Al Saud, the son of one of King Salman’s brothers, and an outspoken prince whose criticisms got him into trouble with more powerful members of the family The Palace Khalid al-Tuwaijri, the head of King Abdullah’s Royal Court Mohammed al-Tobaishi, King Abdullah’s chief of protocol Rakan bin Mohammed al-Tobaishi, Mohammed bin Salman’s protocol chief and the son of Mohammed al-Tobaishi The MBS Entourage Bader al-Asaker, a longtime associate of Mohammed who runs his private foundation Saud al-Qahtani, an advisor to Mohammed who specializes in quashing dissent Turki Al Sheikh, a longtime companion of Mohammed who has brought foreign sports and entertainment events to Saudi Arabia The Region Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi Tahnoon bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi national security advisor Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, former emir of Qatar Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt Saad Hariri, prime minister of Lebanon Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey Residents of the Ritz Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, a cousin of Mohammed and Saudi Arabia’s most prominent international businessman Adel Fakeih, a Saudi businessman who became minister of economy and planning Hani Khoja, a Saudi management consultant Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, a Saudi businessman with holdings in Ethiopia Ali al-Qahtani, a general Bakr bin Laden, scion of the bin Laden construction family The Critics Jamal Khashoggi, newspaper columnist with a long history of working for and sometimes criticizing the Saudi government Omar Abdulaziz, Canada-based dissident who criticizes Saudi leadership in online videos Loujain al-Hathloul, women’s rights activist who violated Saudi law by trying to drive into the kingdom from the United Arab Emirates The US Government President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an advisor to the president Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, later US secretary of state The Businessmen Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com David Pecker, CEO of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer Ari Emanuel, Hollywood agent and cofounder of Endeavor talent agency Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese tech investor SoftBank Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s Vision Fund Nizar al-Bassam, Saudi deal maker and a former international banker Kacy Grine, independent banker and confidant of Alwaleed bin Talal A note on naming: In the Saudi convention, a man is identified through a patrilineal naming system.


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They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

The Costs of Democracy From Jefferson to Lincoln,” The Journal of the Historical Society 6, no. 4 (December 2006): 501–12; Thomas Ferguson and Jie Chen, “Investor Blocs and Party Realignments in American History,” The Journal of the Historical Society 5, no. 4 (December 2005): 503–46. 111.“Speech: Donald Trump in Waterloo, IA—October 7, 2015,” Factbase, October 7, 2015, transcript and video available at link #67. 112.“Speech: Donald Trump in Green Bay, WI—August 5, 2016,” Factbase, August 5, 2016, transcript and video available at link #68. 113.Donald Trump, “Third Republican Presidential Candidate Debate, October 28, 2015,” Factbase, October 28, 2015, transcript and video available at link #69. 114.“Speech: Donald Trump in Beaumont, TX—November 14, 2015,” Factbase, November 14, 2015, transcript and video available at link #70. 115.Austin v.

Initially a Clinton supporter, she was surprised when the state voted for Bernie Sanders. And then, she was surprised again when a state that had gone for Obama in 2012 (54 percent versus 45 percent) voted for Donald Trump. “What’s going on?” she asked herself. And then, as she described to me afterward, she tried to answer her own question. “Okay, what do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have in common that maybe Hillary Clinton didn’t have.” I really do think it was kind of like this: Bernie Sanders was all about the political revolution, and Donald Trump was about “drain the swamp.” I saw it on so many bumper stickers across Michigan. Those messages to me were actually pretty similar: . . .

Hopelessness is the one idea that now unites much of the Rust Belt with inner cities across America, as aging populations face a future without retirement savings or a system of social security that can support them. Remove the “-ness” from the first word in that sentence and you have a fair estimate of the chance that Congress will address that problem either anytime soon.1 None of these—or a million other—problems are caused by Donald Trump. None of them would be fixed if Donald Trump were not president. These problems are deeper than the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They signal a failure much more fundamental than the misfiring of an Electoral College crafted at the birth of the nineteenth century. It is difficult in this moment to recognize that truth.


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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

In South Korea and Japan the death rate was just seven and five respectively. Mainland China claims a figure of three. That final number comes with a lot of caveats, but even if the Chinese death toll was in fact ten times the official total, the regime would still be ten times better at protecting its people than Donald Trump was. Even relatively poor parts of Asia, such as Vietnam and Kerala state in India, outperformed both the United States and Britain by dramatic margins. Looking at individual cities, the comparison between the West and Asia is even starker. London and New York City are both a little smaller than Seoul.

But they were much more successful in changing the rhetoric than the reality, so the state has continued to grow; only now it is a much more loathed monster. Then along came the populists. Silvio Berlusconi was the trailblazer, promising to boost his fellow Italians’ fortunes but mysteriously only boosting his own (Italy’s economy under his rule grew more slowly than any other country, except Zimbabwe and Haiti). In 2016, Donald Trump appeared, vowing to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC, while Britain voted for Brexit. Four years later, the swamp is fuller than ever, and Britain is in danger of leaving the European Union chaotically. On one day in June more people died of Covid in Britain than in the whole of the EU.8 The two countries that have set the mood music for the West for the past half century, look divided and shambolic.

The populist revolution began on the periphery—in Eastern Europe (Viktor Orban in Hungary and the Law and Justice Party in Poland) and the euro-ravaged Mediterranean (Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and a cluster of parties in Italy).21 In 2016, the barbarians reached the gates of Rome. First Britain voted for Brexit. “Isle of madness” wrote Der Spiegel in despair, and the New Yorker displayed a group of bowler-hatted lemmings walking off a cliff. Then Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to secure the White House. Since then, the populist effect has been most striking on the global stage. The West is losing its collective ability to act as a voice for free trade and free minds. Not only has nationalism widened the divide between Europe and America; the West is now led by a man who loathes globalization, wants to quit pretty much every global institution, and disdains the language of Liberty.


pages: 435 words: 120,574

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Proceeds were to be used to promote “Pillows for the Troops, college scholarships, and assistance to military families.” A tense split had opened between those who would vote for Donald Trump gleefully and those who would do so reluctantly. (A few didn’t know what to do.) The lifelong red-blue friends, Sally Cappel and Shirley Slack, now live in different towns—Sally in Lake Charles, Shirley in Opelousas. They talk two or three times a week by phone, and avoid mention of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Sally is deeply upset about “the GMO monster Monsanto.” Shirley frets about skyrocketing national debt. They recently flew together to Cleveland to see Shirley’s daughter perform as a professional ballerina in the Ohio Ballet.

Gerald Seib, “How Trump’s Army Is Transforming the GOP,” Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2016. 225“I’ll press charges” CNN Politics, “Trump Ends Wild Day on Campaign Trail by Calling for Protesters’ Arrests,” March 13, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/12/politics/donald-trump-protests. Also see “Next Time We See Him, We Might Have to Kill Him: Trump Fan on Punching Black Protester,” RT.com, March 11, 2016, https://www.rt.com/usa/335188-trump-protester-punched-arrest. 225“I would have gone bum, bum, bum” Donald J. Trump, rally in Kansas City, Missouri, March 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owSn8IYQUks. 225“We’re going to get rid of it in almost every form” Coral Davenport, “E.P.A. Faces More Tasks, Louder Critics, and a Shrinking Budget,” New York Times, March 19, 2016. 225“We’re not silent anymore” “Donald Trump Forcefully Removes Protesters from Louisiana Rally,” Mic.com, March 5, 2016, http://mic.com/articles/137129/donald-trump-forcefully-removes-protesters-from-louisiana-rally. 225They gather to affirm their unity Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1965 [1915]), 432; also page 417 on rites as a form of dramatic art and page 446 on scapegoating.

Dlouhy, Jennifer A. “Dangers Face Immigrant Contract Workforce in Gulf.” Fuel-Fix (November 3, 2013). http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/11/03/dangers-face-immigrant-contractor-workforce-in-gulf. “Dome Issues Kept Quiet.” The Advocate (August 12, 2012). “Donald Trump Forcefully Removes Protesters from Louisiana Rally.” Mic.com (March 5, 2016). http://mic.com/articles/137129/donald-trump-forcefully-removes-protesters-from-louisiana-rally. Drozd, David J. Trends in Fertility Rates by Race and Ethnicity for the U.S. and Nebraska: 1989 to 2013. University of Nebraska at Omaha: Center for Public Affairs Research, 2015. http://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-public-affairs-and-community-service/center-for-public-affairs-research/news/fertility-rate-gap.php.


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The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

In the same year Marine Le Pen’s Front National made huge gains in local elections, coming first in six of France’s thirteen regions. In 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union, against the advice of the prime minister, all living former prime ministers, the leader of the Opposition and President Obama. A few months later Donald Trump was elected President of the US, as Obama’s successor. Trump was a supporter of Brexit – the proposition that the UK should leave the EU – and had accurately proclaimed during his campaign that Brexit was a sign that he would win, too. The voters were in revolt against their traditional rulers.

Some outsiders soar from the left as well as from the populist right. A few of them rise fleetingly, only to decline just as fast when fatal flaws are exposed. On occasions, mainstream parties or individual liberal progressives get their act together and win elections with a confident flourish. The US elects Donald Trump. Canada elects Justin Trudeau. Austria nearly elected a far-right president, but in the end chose a progressive member of the Green Party in the 2016 election. In March 2017 Holland’s centre-right prime minister, Mark Rutte, was re-elected, defeating the far right’s Geert Wilders by a relatively wide margin, and yet Wilders’ party made gains.

Her speeches tend to be dull, with ornate sentences and technocratic talking points. She is more comfortable citing economic studies than discussing the lives of ordinary people. Still she stands out as a figure who does not conform to the caricature of a far-right leader, if the stereotype is closer, say, to the undisciplined exuberance of Donald Trump. Trump’s candidacy was based largely on his own unpredictably wilful charisma. At the start of 2016 he declared, with a provocative flourish, that he ‘would gladly accept the mantle of anger’.2 Anger was the driving force of the candidate and of his followers. Voters were angry, and he was equally angry on their behalf.


pages: 307 words: 88,745

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

Bagley already had channels: John Catsimatidis, “Michael Bagley—A refugee solution?” Catsimatidis, September 24, 2017, http://www.catsimatidis.com/michael-bagley-refugee-solution/. platform for the alt-right: Sarah Posner, “How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists,” Mother Jones, August 22, 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-alt-right-breitbart-news/. Chapter 17: Alt-Right, Inc. compared the sensation: Jef Costello, “‘That’s It, We’re Through!’: The Psychology of Breaking Up with Trump,” Counter-Currents, April 10, 2017, https://www.counter-currents.com/2017/04/thats-it-were-through/.

Chapter 18: Bannon Against the World unavoidability of destruction: Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury (New York: Holt, 2018). none other than Aleksandr Dugin: Henry Meyer and Onur Ant, “Alexander Dugin—The one Russian linking Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan,” Independent, February 3, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/alexander-dugin-russian-academic-linking-us-president-donald-trump-vladimir-putin-turkey-president-a7560611.html. “special Russian truth”: “Aleksandr Dugin: ‘We have our special Russian truth,’” BBC Newsnight, YouTube, October 28, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Dugin was banned from traveling to the United States and Canada in 2015 after allegedly calling for a genocide in Ukraine. His international reputation, justified or not, as the mad mastermind of Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical agenda makes him particularly poisonous for someone like Bannon. Back in the States, Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign has been under criminal investigation for over a year and a half amid allegations it coordinated and colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 election. Bannon managed that campaign, and although those who worked under and around him are falling to the investigation as it churns on—three high-profile figures have pled guilty in the past weeks alone—he himself remained untouched.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The 4channers appropriated: Olivia Nuzzi, “How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol,” Daily Beast, May 26, 2016. In one instance, he retweeted: Taylor Wafford, “Donald Trump Retweets Racist Propaganda,” Newsweek, November 23, 2015. “If you see somebody getting ready”: Philip Bump, “Donald Trump Reverses Course on Paying Legal Fees for Man Who Attacked Protester. But Could He Do It?,” Washington Post, March 15, 2016. Positive sentiment about Trump: 4C Insights, “Election Night 2016 Impact Report,” November 10, 2016. www.4cinsights.com. This moment, with much of the country: Natalie Andrews, “How Some Social Media Data Pointed to a Donald Trump Win,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2016. Following Trump’s election, George Orwell’s: “George Orwell Classic ‘1984’ Gets Sales Boost After Trump Advisor Coins ‘Alternative Facts,’ ” Associated Press, January 24, 2017.

Unlike NERC, which dipped its toe into new power waters and retreated at the first sign of a wave, the organizations who get this right are those who dive deep. 9 LEADERSHIP “Thank you for everything. My last ask is the same as my first. I’m asking you to believe—not in my ability to create change, but in yours.” —Barack Obama, January 2017 “I alone can fix it.” —Donald Trump, Republican National Convention, July 2016 How do we make sense of leadership when the world’s leading democracy can elect Barack Obama—and then replace him with Donald Trump? How do we reconcile a world of ever-proliferating “leaderless” movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, but also ever-proliferating strongmen like Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdoǧan, and Egypt’s el-Sisi?

There’s so much more than a regular job in this and once you’ve had this, it’s hard to go back to a regular job.” But, as we shall see, after the election, this highly structured and directed approach to involving people became more straitjacket than supercharger. From rent-a-crowd to intensity machine: The campaign of Donald Trump “Wow. Whoa. That is some group of people. Thousands…This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no crowd like this.” Donald Trump began his presidential campaign by buying himself a crowd. He reportedly hired a casting agency and paid actors $50 each to show up with “homemade” signs and cheer him on as he descended the elevator at Trump Tower. He started that speech by noting with surprise just how many people were in attendance, and then offered a rambling tour d’horizon of the epic failings of America and his unique capacity to put things right.


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

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Jim Rutenberg, “In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, February 20, 2017, Business, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/business/media/alex-jones-conspiracy-theories-donald-trump.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Manuel Roig-Franzia, “How Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theorist Extraordinaire, Got Donald Trump’s Ear,” Washington Post, November 17, 2016, Style, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-alex-jones-conspiracy-theorist-extraordinaire-got-donald-trumps-ear/2016/11/17/583dc190-ab3e-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Tristan Hallman, “Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones, Others Rally for Trump Outside GOP Convention,” Dallas Morning News, July 18, 2016, https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2016/07/18/conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-others-rally-for-trump-outside-gop-convention/.

“We had crazy people on all the time,” she added, but to be effective, RT needed its guests to be at least somewhat credible. They cut Jones loose. That was a year before Jones began pushing the Sandy Hook conspiracy on his show. And it was three years before Donald Trump, Republican candidate for president, appeared as an honored guest on Infowars. * * * — “Donald Trump is our guest, ladies and gentlemen,” Jones said on December 2. “He is a maverick, he’s an original. He tells it like it is, doesn’t read off a teleprompter. Neither do I. He’s self-made. This whole media operation that reaches twenty million people a week worldwide, conservatively, self-made.

I get along great with everybody, because when I needed them, I didn’t want to have an argument.” Jones talked over him, coaching him again. “You’re not a loser. You don’t get in mindless fights. You move forward with your agenda. But now you see America in trouble and you’re, ‘Hey, that’s all sidelined now. Donald Trump’s not working for Donald Trump. He wants to work for America.’ ” Trump stuck around through a commercial break and gave Jones extra time. The interview lasted more than a half hour. “So I wrote a book called Crippled America,” Trump said, signing off. “I hope your audience goes out and buys it as Christmas gifts and everything else.


pages: 100 words: 31,338

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Viktor Orbán’s speech at Băile Tuşnad (Tusnádfürdő) of 26 July 2014, http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of-26-july-2014/10592. 10. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 3. 11. Philip Bump, “Donald Trump’s Spectacular, Unending, Utterly Baffling, Often-Wrong Campaign Launch,” The Washington Post, June 16, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/16/donald-trumps-spectacular-unending-utterly-baffling-often-wrong-campaign-announcement/?utm_term=.aac10285ae5b. 12. Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 6. 13.

A recent survey conducted by Gallup International shows that in a case of a major security crisis, the public in at least three of the EU member states (Bulgaria, Greece, and Slovenia) would look to Russia and not to the West for assistance. The nature of the transatlantic relationship has also changed dramatically. Donald Trump is the first American president who does not believe that the preservation of the European Union should be a strategic objective of US foreign policy. The welfare state, once the heart of the postwar political consensus, has also come under question. Europe is aging—the median age on the continent is expected to increase to 52.3 years in 2050 from 37.7 years in 2003—and the future of European prosperity can hardly be taken for granted.

Democracy as a regime-type that favors the emancipation of minorities (gay parades, women’s marches, affirmative action policies) is supplanted by a political regime that empowers the prejudices of majorities. And it is the political shock caused by the flow of refugees and migrants that is the driving force of the transformation. A study by London’s Demos think tank, long prior to Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential victory, showed that opposition to liberal migration policies is the defining characteristic of those supporters of right-wing populist parties8. It was liberalism’s failure to address the migration problem, rather than the economic crisis or rising social inequality, that explains the public’s turn against it.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Commentators speak of Armageddon approaching: the London-born foreign affairs observer Roger Cohen said in 2014 that people “have never previously felt so uneasy about the state of the world,” not even during the Nazi horror. The impression given by the leadership class is of destruction abounding: “ The world is in chaos,” Henry Kissinger said in 2016. Political candidates speak of murder at unprecedented levels. Running for president, Donald Trump referred often to a “crime wave” making American cities “living hell.” Whatever else he may be, Donald Trump is a media president: he watches TV obsessively—five hours a day in the White House, if writer Elaine Godfrey is right—and tailors himself to others who do, while obsessively trolling social media. In the artificial universe of television, crime just keeps getting worse: decent citizens aren’t safe in their homes with the doors bolted.

PART II The Arrow of History Eight: How Declinism Became Chic Nine: The “Impossible” Challenge of Climate Change Ten: The “Impossible” Challenge of Inequality Eleven: We’ll Never Run Out of Challenges… Twelve: … And It Will Never Be Too Late Acknowledgments About the Author Notes Index For William Whitworth from the Arkansas Gazette to The New Yorker to editor-in-chief of The Atlantic: the consummate editor The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization is forever upward. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, shortly before his 1945 death Preface: Optimism Goes Out of Style ON THE NOVEMBER 2016 DAY Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, unemployment was 4.6 percent, a number that would have caused economists of the 1970s to fall to their knees and kiss the ground. In real-dollar terms, gasoline prices were the same as when teenagers rushed to record stores to buy the latest 45-rpm monaural singles.

Nor do I suppose that history is teleological, guided toward some end. I do not suggest history is cyclical, or bound to do that which can be predicted from previous events. (Cycles-of-history contentions hinge on pretending there are “secrets” that “control” history; for this reason, it is disturbing that some top advisers to Donald Trump endorse cycles-of-history mumbo jumbo.) I do assert that as time passes, in the main the human condition improves and this can be expected to continue. THE MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH PHILOSOPHER FRÉDÉRIC Bastiat maintained that when assessing any situation, it is vital to consider what might have occurred instead.


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The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Gordon Gekko, It's morning again in America, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

And now we face far right populist websites mixing half-truths, lies, conspiracy theories, and fabrications into a toxic brew eagerly swallowed by the credulous, the angry, and the menacing. Liberals have become America’s ideological third party, lagging behind self-declared independents and conservatives, even among young voters and certain minority groups. We have been repudiated in no uncertain terms. Donald Trump the man is, frankly, not the greatest of our worries. And if we don’t look beyond him there is very little hope for us. American liberalism in the twenty-first century is in crisis: a crisis of imagination and ambition on our side, a crisis of attachment and trust on the side of the wider public.

Now we must stand together at home to make sure that none of us faces the risk of being left behind. We’re all Americans and we owe that to each other. That’s what liberalism means. American liberals have a reputation, as the saying goes, of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. May that prophecy not be fulfilled this time. The election of Donald Trump has released stores of energy among liberals and progressives that even they seem surprised to have discovered within themselves. A popular wave from the left has risen up to resist a populist one from the right; and it’s encouraging to observe. But “resistance” will not be enough. Our short-term strategy must be to direct every bit of that energy into electoral politics so we can actually bring about the change we profess to seek.

For all his bombast, Beck was among the first on the right to report the truth that the American middle class was being hollowed out and that its children faced drastically reduced prospects. That a small class of highly educated people was benefiting from the new global economy and becoming fantastically wealthy. And that vast sections of the country had become deserted, heartbroken . . . and angry. Mainstream Republicans never got the message. Donald Trump did. The Republican primaries of 2016 will no doubt prove as historically significant as the election that followed. We must never forget that Trump defeated both of America’s major political parties, starting with the one he nominally belonged to. It was an extraordinary spectacle. The Breaker of the Idols did not come from the left or from the right.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

We had, according to the lawsuit, solicited one of Cambridge Analytica’s clients: Donald Trump. The letters informing us of the lawsuit gave us two weeks to respond, so even though the case was clearly bogus, I decided to hire a lawyer to make it go away as quickly as possible. At our first meeting, the attorneys were baffled. Imagine how strange this conversation was, long before Cambridge Analytica or Steve Bannon became household names: “So there’s this psychological warfare firm,” I told them. “And it got acquired by this Republican billionaire in the United States. And after I quit, I got invited to talk with Donald Trump—the guy from The Apprentice?

On March 16, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, just a little more than twenty-four hours before he was to retire with a pension. People were desperate for information about what had happened between the Trump campaign and Russia, but no one had been able to connect the dots. I provided evidence tying Cambridge Analytica to Donald Trump, Facebook, Russian intelligence, international hackers, and Brexit. This evidence revealed how both an obscure foreign contractor engaged in illegal activity and the same foreign contractor had been used by the winning Trump and Brexit campaigns. The email chains, internal memos, invoices, bank transfer records, and project documentation I brought demonstrated that Trump and Brexit had deployed the same strategies, powered by the same technologies, directed by many of the same people—all under the specter of covert Russian involvement.

This file showed that leading British alt-right figures met with the Russian embassy before and after they flew to meet the Trump campaign, and that at least three of them were receiving offers of preferential investment opportunities in Russian mining companies potentially worth millions. What became clear in these communications was how early the Russian government had identified the Anglo-American alt-right network, and that it may have groomed figures within it to become access agents to Donald Trump. It showed the connections among the major events of 2016: the rise of the alt-right, the surprise passage of Brexit, and the election of Trump. Four hours went by. Five. I was deep into describing Facebook’s role in—and culpability for—what had happened. Did the data used by Cambridge Analytica ever get into the hands of potential Russian agents?


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

Michael Young, “Down with Meritocracy,” The Guardian , June 28, 2001, theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment . 19. John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? , p. 66. 20. Jeff Guo, “Death Predicts Whether People Vote for Donald Trump,” The Washington Post , March 4, 2016, washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump . 21. Richard Butsch, “Ralph, Fred, Archie and Homer: Why Television Keeps Re-creating the White Male Working Class Buffoon,” in Gail Dines and Jean Humez, eds., Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader , 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), pp. 575–85; Jessica Troilo, “Stay Tuned: Portrayals of Fatherhood to Come,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 6, no. 1 (2017), pp. 82–94; Erica Scharrer, “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s–1990s,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 45, no. 1 (2001), pp. 23–40. 22.

As the contagion spread, the wealthiest country in the world found itself unable to provide even the medical masks and other protective gear that doctors and nurses needed to treat the flood of infected patients. Hospitals and state governments found themselves bidding against one another to acquire testing kits and life-saving ventilators. This lack of preparedness had multiple sources. President Donald Trump, ignoring the warnings of public health advisors, downplayed the crisis for several crucial weeks, insisting in late February, “We have it very much under control … We have done an incredible job … It’s going to disappear.” 1 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at first distributed flawed test kits and was slow to find a fix.

Others see it mainly in economic terms, as a protest against job losses brought about by global trade and new technologies. But it is a mistake to see only the bigotry in populist protest, or to view it only as an economic complaint. Like the triumph of Brexit in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an angry verdict on decades of rising inequality and a version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary citizens feeling disempowered. It was also a rebuke for a technocratic approach to politics that is tone-deaf to the resentments of people who feel the economy and the culture have left them behind.


pages: 138 words: 43,748

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

Foreign policy experts across the ideological spectrum were aghast—the established kabuki theater of international diplomacy and stability had been violated, and flagrantly so. For anyone who pays attention to these matters, the breach was a big deal. For my part, I will say that overreaction seems to be the order of the day (and perhaps the desired effect) when it comes to all things to do with Donald Trump, and that the sky did not fall after the president-elect’s chat with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. At least it hasn’t yet. I will also say that it may even be past time to consider a change—in a nuanced way—in our relationship with China and Taiwan, if that change is pursued purposefully. But in the tweeting life of our president, strategy is difficult to detect.

Of course, this culture of vicious dehumanization is bipartisan. But in the election of 2016, our side outdid itself. It helps if you ascribe the absolute worst motives to your opponents, traffic in outlandish conspiracy theories, abandon reason and any old-fashioned notions of the common good, and have an unquenchable appetite for destruction. But Donald Trump is not the source code for our obsession with the politics of personal destruction. Our crisis has many fathers. Among them is Newt Gingrich, the modern progenitor of that school of politics. Any honest accounting of how we got to this new day has to reckon with Newt, whose talent for politics exceeded his interest in governing.

I’ve always believed that politics will take care of itself, but principle—principle requires fidelity. And the older I get, the more that partisan pressure fades against the tenets of conscience. — It is not easy to oppose the presidential nominee of one’s own party, and never in my life did I expect that circumstance to arise. My opposition to Donald Trump’s candidacy did not escape his notice during the campaign, and we have had one memorable run-in. Just after he became the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in the early summer of 2016, he came to a meeting of the Republican Caucus in the Senate. “You’ve been very critical of me,” Trump said, as I got up to introduce myself.


pages: 390 words: 115,303

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

Epstein, Case 1:16-cv-04642, United States District Court Southern District of New York, complaint filed on June 20, 2016. 8 close friends with Donald Trump: Landon Thomas Jr., “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,” New York, October 28, 2002. 9 widespread allegations that Epstein sexually abused minors: Julie K. Brown, “How a Future Trump Cabinet Member Gave a Serial Sex Abuser the Deal of a Lifetime,” Miami Herald, November 28, 2018. 10 plaintiff’s intermediary in the press: Jon Swaine, “Rape Lawsuits Against Donald Trump Linked to Former TV Producer,” Guardian, July 7, 2016. 11 emerged as doubtful as most journalists: Emily Shugerman, “I Talked to the Woman Accusing Donald Trump of Rape,” Revelist, July 13, 2016. 12 AMI ran several stories shooting down the claims in the lawsuit: “Trump Sued by Teen ‘Sex Slave’ for Alleged ‘Rape’—Donald Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Suit,” RadarOnline.com, April 28, 2016; and “Case Dismissed!

He recently completed a PhD in political science at Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He lives in New York. @RonanFarrow RonanFarrow @RonanFarrow NOTES CHAPTER 1 1 published an article: David A. Fahrenthold, “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation About Women in 2005,” Washington Post, October 8, 2016. 2 Donald Trump held forth about grabbing women “by the pussy”: Billy Bush’s Access Hollywood tape with Donald Trump, 2005. 3 “How do you feel about your butt?”: Billy Bush interview with Jennifer Lopez, Access Hollywood, 2002. 4 sat on it: Jack Shafer, “Why Did NBC News Sit on the Trump Tape for So Long?” Politico Magazine, October 10, 2016. 5 Leaked accounts presented differing timelines: “NBC Planned to Use Trump Audio to Influence Debate, Election,” TMZ, October 12, 2016. 6 “The executive was unaware”: Paul Farhi, “NBC Waited for Green Light from Lawyers Before Airing Trump Video,” Washington Post, October 8, 2016. 7 “Get to Know Billy” video: “Get to Know Billy Bush—from Billy Himself, As His Parents Send Special Wishes,” Today show, August 22, 2016. 8 “Pending further review of the matter”: “Here’s How the Today show Addressed Billy Bush’s Suspension On-Air,” Entertainment Tonight, October 10, 2016. 9 against the head of that network: Michael M.

The preceding Friday, the Washington Post had published an article demurely titled “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation About Women in 2005.” There was a video accompanying the article, the kind you used to call “not safe for work.” In a soliloquy captured by the celebrity news program Access Hollywood, Donald Trump held forth about grabbing women “by the pussy.” “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he had said. “She’s now got the big phony tits and everything.” Trump’s interlocutor had been Billy Bush, the host of Access Hollywood. Bush was a small man with good hair. You could place him near any celebrity and he would produce a steady stream of forgettable but occasionally weird red-carpet banter.


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Inquiry Projects Russian ‘Soft Power,’” New York Times, June 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/business/vnesheconombank-veb-bank-russia-trump-kushner.html 6 the developers battled cost overruns and delays on the condo-hotel development: “Trump’s Name May Not Stay on Toronto Tower as Push for Buyers Begins,” Financial Post, November 25, 2016, http://business.financialpost.com/personal-finance/mortgages-real-estate/trumps-name-may-not-stay-on-toronto-tower-as-push-for-buyers-begins/wcm/b7732a42-835e-462b-81ee-cca2c16c2f20. 7 who had at least three Mossfon companies and a trust: Wendy Dent, Ed Pilkington, and Shaun Walker, “Jared Kushner Sealed Real Estate Deal with Oligarch’s Firm Cited in Money-Laundering Case,” Guardian, July 24, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/24/jared-kushner-new-york-russia-money-laundering. 8 the Trump Department of Justice abruptly settled with Prevezon for $5.9 million: Jose Pagliery, “Russian Money-Laundering Details Remain in the Dark as US Settles Fraud Case,” CNN, May 13, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/13/world/prevezon-settlement/index.html. 9 gas billionaire Dmitry Firtash: Adam Weinstein and Laura Juncadella, “Trump Campaign Manager’s Ukrainian Clients Have Panama Papers Connections,” Fusion TV, July 22, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/328264/paul-manafort-trump-campaign-panama-papers-connection/. 10 metals magnate Oleg Deripaska: Adam Weinstein and Laura Juncadella, “Trump Campaign Manager’s Ukrainian Clients Have Panama Papers Connections,” Fusion, July 22, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/328264/paul-manafort-trump-campaign-panama-papers-connection/. 11 appears to have written to the law firm in 1992: Letter to Yolanda De Azcarraga from Sebastian Gorka, August 20, 1992. 12 According to an account of the conversation between Trump and Erdoğan: Amberin Zaman, “From Trump to Erdogan: My Daughter Ivanka Is Your Big Fan and Supporter,” Diken, November 10, 2016, http://www.diken.com.tr/trump-erdogan-gorusmesi-kizim-ivanka-sizin-buyuk-hayraniniz-ve-taraftariniz/. 13 regularly conducted business with people connected to the Mafia: Michael Rothfeld and Alexandra Berzon, “Donald Trump and the Mob,” Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-dealt-with-a-series-of-people-who-had-mob-ties-1472736922. 14 Building unions known to be controlled by the Mob: Ibid. 15 dried up funding from most U.S. banks: Anupreeta Das, “When Donald Trump Needs a Loan, He Chooses Deutsche Bank,” Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-donald-trump-needs-a-loan-he-chooses-deutsche-bank-1458379806. 16 their relationship with the president of the United States: Dan Alexander, “In Trump They Trust: Inside the Web of Partners Cashing In on the President,” Forbes, March 20, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/03/20/in-trump-they-trust-inside-the-global-web-of-partners-cashing-in-on-the-president/#2a7573987605. 17 a pilot project that forced real estate agents in Miami and New York: Louise Story, “U.S.

utm_term=.4ba08dce702d. 30 Their best-known joint project was Trump SoHo: Associated Press, “City Backs 46-Story Trump Condo-Hotel Project in SoHo,” Daily News (New York), September 23, 2007, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/city-backs-46-story-trump-condo-hotel-project-soho-article-1.242953. 31 Trump received a 15 percent cut of sales: Ruth Sherlock and Edward Malnick, “Donald Trump May Go Before Court over Tax Deal That Deprived US Treasury of Millions of Dollars,” Telegraph, August 7, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/07/trump-may-go-before-court-over-deal-that-deprived-us-treasury-of/. 32 in return for future profits: Gary Silverman, “Trump’s Russian Riddle, “Financial Times, August 14, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/549ddfaa-5fa5-11e6-b38c-7b39cbb1138a. 33 embezzlement of about $22 million: Vala Hafstad, “Panama Papers Expose Icelan-dic Executive,” Iceland Review, May 13, 2016, http://icelandreview.com/news/2016/05/13/panama-papers-expose-icelandic-executive; and Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir, “Former FL Group CEO Acquitted in District Court,” Iceland Review, February 18, 2015, http://icelandreview.com/news/2015/02/18/former-fl-group-ceo-acquitted-district-court. 34 “I don’t know who owns Bayrock”: Silverman, “Trump’s Russian Riddle.” 35 conglomerate with far-flung interests ranging from mining to construction: Mike McIntire, “Donald Trump Settled a Real Estate Lawsuit, and a Criminal Case Was Closed,” New York Times, April 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/politics/donald-trump-soho-settlement.html. 36 whose grandson and other relatives had their own Mossfon companies: Vlad Lavrov and Irene Velska, “Kazakhstan: President’s Grandson Hid Assets Offshore,” OCCRP, April 4, 2016, https://www.occrp.org/en/panamapapers/kazakh-presidents-grandson-offshores/. 37 an undisclosed sum without admitting wrongdoing: William MacNamara and Stanley Pignal, “Case Against Three ENRC Oligarchs Settled,” Financial Times, August 17, 2011, https://www.ft.com/content/95f8ecc4-c8dd-11e0-a2c8-00144feabdc0. 38 “Due to the adverse results”: Email from Mossack Fonseca & Co to St.

utm_term=.6d3f537e3bfd. 54 Aliyev’s daughters, Leyla and Arzu: Miranda Patrucic, Eleanor Rose, Irene Velska, and Khadija Ismayilova, “Azerbaijan First Family’s London Private Enclave,” OCCRP, May 10, 2016, https://www.occrp.org/en/panamapapers/azerbaijan-first-familys-london-private-enclave/. 55 “Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku represents the unwavering standard of excellence”: “Trump Hotel Collection Announces Trump International Hotel,” PR Newswire, November 4, 2014, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trump-hotel-collection-announces-trump-international-hotel—tower-baku-281425361.html. 56 every element from the wood paneling to the landscaping: Adam Davidson, “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” New Yorker, March 13, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal. 57 contractors were apparently paid in sacks of cash: Ibid. 58 The Alliance spent more than $12 million showering cash on politicians: Ilya Lozovsky, “How Azerbaijan and Its Lobbyists Spin Congress,” Foreign Policy, June 11, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/11/how-azerbaijan-and-its-lobbyists-spin-congress/. 59 with Senator John McCain and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi: Kevin Sullivan, “For A President Trump, Global Real Estate Deals Present Unprecedented Gray Areas,” Washington Post, May 30, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-a-president-trump-global-real-estate-deals-present-unprecedented-gray-areas/2016/05/30/beac0038-15fa-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html?


Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

But that was not the real threat. Because Donald Trump was the furthest thing from Far Left or libertarian Right, and as he came to power, two things became clear: he was a savant at undermining legitimacy, and he considered the intelligence community an enemy whose legitimacy needed to be undermined. Instead of objecting to their individual crimes, he drew attention to the whole structure—a secret, parallel government of officials running secret programs with secret money. Trump supporters could not know what went on at Langley or Fort Meade and so Donald Trump painted a picture for them: a bunch of men no one had elected, whose names no one knows, conspiring to destroy the man they had chosen to lead them.

“I spoke to a psychologist one time,” said Kiriakou, smiling, “and he told me whistleblowers have an unusually well-defined sense of right and wrong. Whistleblowers can’t help themselves. They have to report evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s just the way we’re wired.” “All right.” It was also 2020 when Donald Trump lost an election to Joseph Biden, an election that Alex Jones and Joseph Biggs and many other people assumed to be fraudulent because Donald Trump was a fixed point of realness around which the world turned. “It’s time for fucking war if they steal this shit,” Biggs posted. In December leaders of the Proud Boys began raising money for “upcoming Patriot events.” On Telegram, Biggs helped plan an event at the Capitol, where he and his gang would protest the certification of the 2020 election.

The story was massive, it was based on an infinitesimal fraction of what Snowden had to give, and it infuriated Julian Assange, who wanted to be at the center of it, but was not. Two thousand thirteen was also the year Moscow hosted the Miss Universe pageant. When the finalists were selected, the judges were surprised at the names; the set of contestants was different from the one they had chosen. The pageant’s owner, Donald Trump, had intervened. Some people said he chose women from countries in which he had business interests, and others say he tried to exclude women who seemed too “ethnic,” though you could convince him to include an ethnic woman if she were a princess, or married to a football player. “Is Putin coming?”


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

There is little doubt that the rioters of January 6 were right-wing authoritarians. They invaded the Capitol building in order to stop the workings of democracy, overthrow the constitutional process, and harm those seeking to do their legal duty. They participated in authoritarian submission—they believed they were doing the work of President Donald Trump against a corrupt and effete establishment. They participated in authoritarian aggression—they believed they were empowered to do harm in order to defend Trump and take on the legislative branch. And they were engaged in conventionalism—they felt they were defending established values (the flag, the vote, democracy itself) against a revolution from within.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) stated that Congress should put together a “media literacy” commission in order to “figure out how we rein in our media environment.”29 Representative Cori Bush (D-MO) called for every single member of Congress who “incited this domestic terror attack” to be removed from Congress.30 Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) averred at NBCNews.com that the only way to prevent another Capitol riot was the addition of Washington, D.C., as a state, a renewed Voting Rights Act (likely unconstitutional), and universal mail-in voting.31 As Joe Biden entered office on January 20, Representative James Clyburn (D-SC), who had compared Donald Trump to Hitler and Republicans to Nazis,32 said that Biden should simply act unilaterally via executive action to implement his agenda if Congress balked: “If they’re going to throw up roadblocks, go on without them. Use your executive authority if they refuse to cooperate . . . you can do big things and you can do great things.

Or does it come from the left-wing authoritarians in government, who broadly disdain the Constitution and believe in the implementation of their worldview from the top down? If there is a threat to our most basic liberties, whom should we most fear: the dumbasses in clown suits invading the Capitol on January 6? Donald Trump, a man who talked like an authoritarian but did not actually govern as one? Or the monolithic leftists who dominate the top echelons of nearly every powerful institution in American society, and who frequently use their power to silence their opposition? LIFE UNDER LEFT-WING SOCIAL AUTHORITARIANISM Deep down, Americans know the answer to this question.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Either they deny the facts and pretend the entire model is at fault (the Sanders approach) or they use the facts to suggest that the future of Americans is imperilled by the success of others (the Donald Trump approach). This latter version is inevitably tinged with nationalism: according to one narrative, Americans have suffered thanks to the Chinese, the Mexicans or others, some of whom have, apparently, conspired to damage American interests. Given the views of Republican grandees – and, for that matter, the mainstream media – Donald Trump was an unlikely candidate to win the Republican nomination, let alone the 2016 presidential election. As was argued in Chapter 6, his success was a function of his ability to subvert Republican party elites and to reach out to voters directly.

, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 20733, Cambridge, MA, December 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In a parallel universe, I might have been tempted to thank Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. The ideas for Grave New World originally crystallized in 2015, long before the extraordinary political upheavals of 2016. I jokingly suggested to a number of people that the book would seem a lot more relevant if UK citizens were to vote in favour of Brexit and US citizens were to elect Donald Trump. Whilst I certainly hadn’t ruled out either development, I was very much aware that the majority of pundits in 2015 and the early months of 2016 thought UK ‘Remainers’ would triumph and that the battle for the White House was most likely to be between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush (or, at a pinch, Mario Rubio).

Economic power is shifting eastwards and, as it does so, new alliances are being created, typically between countries that are not natural cheerleaders for Western political and economic values. There are signs that pre-Columbus versions of globalization – in which power was centred on Eurasia, not the West – are making a tentative reappearance. The US is no longer sure whether its priorities lie across the Atlantic, on the other side of the Pacific or, following the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, at home rather than abroad. Indeed, President Trump confirmed as much in his January 2017 inauguration speech, stating that ‘From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.’ Free markets have been found wanting, particularly following the global financial crisis.


pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

“When you’ve got a government, when you’ve got an economy that does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren at the same forum. “Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place,” said Donald Trump in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 2016. “If solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself,” said sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg. As New York magazine’s Frank Rich put it: “Everything in the country is broken.

It will become a government for, of, and by the oligarchy. The biggest political divide in America today is not between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between democracy and oligarchy. Hearing and using the same old labels prevents most people from noticing they’re being shafted. The propagandists and demagogues who protect the oligarchy (Donald Trump included) are pouring salt into the nation’s oldest wounds. They’re stoking racial resentments, describing human beings as illegal aliens, fueling hatred of immigrants, and spreading fears of communists and socialists. This strategy gives the oligarchy freer rein: It distracts Americans from how the oligarchy is looting the nation, buying off politicians, and silencing critics.

* * * — Jamie Dimon is one of the highest-paid banking and finance CEOs in the world. His 2018 compensation package was $31 million. His reported net worth is $1.6 billion. He believes he deserves every penny. “This wealthy New Yorker actually earned his money,” Dimon said, comparing himself to Donald Trump. “It wasn’t a gift from Daddy.” Not exactly. Dimon was born March 13, 1956, in New York, the grandson of a Greek immigrant who rose from bank clerk to stockbroker, and the son of an even more successful stockbroker. Dimon’s father worked for Sanford I. Weill when Weill was already becoming the legendary head of a brokerage empire.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

The New York Times has reported that even the White House’s own analysis from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers has found that tariffs will hurt growth, as officials continue to insist otherwise!4 You couldn’t make this up. Then Larry Kudlow, Donald Trump’s chief economic advisor, accused Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau of undermining the United States and its allies with comments he made at the G7 summit. Peter Navarro, a trade advisor to President Donald Trump, said, “There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.”

See also Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, “There’s a Worrying Disconnect between How Fed Officials Look at the Economy and the Way Workers Experience It,” Business Insider, May 23, 2018. Chapter 2. Unemployment and Its Consequences 1. Glenn Kessler, “Donald Trump Still Does Not Understand the Unemployment Rate,” Washington Post, December 12, 2016. 2. Louis Jacobson, “Donald Trump Says U.S. Has 93 Million People ‘Out of Work,’ but That’s Way Too High,” Politifact.com, August 31, 2015. 3. The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor is the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy. 4.

The most watched economic data release in the United States, and probably the world, given the importance of the U.S. economy, is the Employment Situation Report, which is published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on a Friday. Labor market data are important politically. The May 2018 unemployment rate was released at 8:30 a.m. on June 1, 2018, as 3.8 percent. In a breach of protocol President Donald Trump, who receives early sight of the BLS data releases, tweeted out at 7:21 a.m., “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning.” Trump wanted to celebrate the news of a solid jobs report, but there was a puzzle buried within it. Normally, when the unemployment rate is below 4 percent, wages grow.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

Trump’s strategy, all along, was to highlight the artificiality and contingencies of the political stage. It was during this press conference that Carson put the cat among the post-modern pigeons. ‘There are two different Donald Trumps,’ Carson said, ‘there’s the one you see on the stage and there’s the one who’s very cerebral, [who] sits there and considers things very carefully […] and that’s the Donald Trump that you’re going to start seeing more and more of right now.’ After a fumbling hug, Trump took over the podium to answer questions, and the journalists in attendance pursued Carson’s theory with great interest.

After a fumbling hug, Trump took over the podium to answer questions, and the journalists in attendance pursued Carson’s theory with great interest. They asked Trump to expand on this proposed duality. They used words such as ‘persona’, ‘character’ and ‘performance’. Trump initially agreed with the verdict: ‘I think there are two Donald Trumps. There’s the public version and people see that […] and it seems to have worked over my lifetime, but it’s probably different, I think, from the personal Donald Trump.’ While it doesn’t seem unreasonable for someone to suggest that they behave differently in public than in private, Trump is too keen to insist on the inherent falsity of the politician’s public life for the distinction to be useful to him.

Storey and Arlene Allan: A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); ‘plays on the …’, David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 14 ‘says what he …’, see The New York Times/CBS Poll, 4th–8th December 2015; ‘never turn around …’, see ‘Watch Ben Carson endorse Donald Trump full news conference’, PBS NewsHour YouTube Channel, 11th March 2016. 15 ‘Anyone who knows …’, see ‘Donald Trump apologises for controversial video remarks’, Fox News YouTube Channel, 7th October 2016; ‘everyone can draw …’, see ‘Watch Live: The 2nd Presidential Debate’, CBS News YouTube Channel, 9th October 2016. 16 ‘If, for example …’, Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1969). 17 ‘I had to …’, The Last Unicorn, dir.


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

All the decisions made by Stonecipher, McNerney, Muilenburg, McAllister, and Calhoun helped create a broken culture, which in turn produced a flawed airplane. Welchism had infected America’s great aerospace company, and killed 346 people. “A Donald Trump, a Jack Welch” Over the decades, in ways large and small, direct and indirect, Jack Welch abetted the rise of Donald Trump, partnering with him on real estate deals, lending him credibility, and ultimately supporting his campaign and his presidency. Welch and Trump orbited each other as colleagues and friends, two megalomaniacs taking advantage of each other’s wealth and credibility as it suited their own needs.

In 2004, when Trump’s latest book fetched a $5 million advance—$1 million more than the $4 million Welch and Wetlaufer got for Winning—the former CEO shrugged it off with a bit of self-deprecation. “Jack Welch is a peanut compared to Donald Trump,” Welch said. During the financial crisis, Trump suggested on Fox News that Welch be named the czar to oversee the recovery of the auto industry. Trump was a funhouse mirror reflection of Welch, and even Roger Stone, the cunning, corrupt political operative, saw the likeness. “It’s our private sector that has our greatest minds, a Donald Trump, a Jack Welch, a Warren Buffet,” Stone told Tucker Carlson in 2007. “These are the greatest negotiators—some of the greatest minds in our society.”

“Jack Welch is a peanut”: Keith Kelly, “Welch Book Deal Trumped,” New York Post, February 6, 2004, https://nypost.com/2004/02/06/welch-book-deal-trumped-the-donald-1m-ups-jacks-4m-harper-contract/. “It’s almost must-see TV”: Jack Welch, “Welch: ‘No’ to Serving as Trump Treasury Secretary,” CNN, October 3, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/10/03/exp-smr-welch.cnn. “I know I got a better shot”: Jack Welch, “Why I back Donald Trump: Jack Welch,” CNBC, September 20, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2016/09/20/why-i-back-donald-trump-jack-welch.html. “We had a hell of a meeting”: Jack Welch, “Jack Welch: We had a ‘hell of a meeting’ with Trump,” Fox Business, February 3, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYl1qphvE3E. “I give him an A”: Jack Welch, “Jack Welch: I Give Trump a D- on Management and Bureaucracy,” CNBC, May 17, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?


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

In 1986, Shamir became prime minister, in line with the rotation agreement he’d made with Peres (who became foreign minister). True to form, he quickly increased settlement building in the West Bank. The Reagan administration frowned on this; Reagan (like all other U.S. presidents, with the exception of Donald Trump) considered the settlements a bad idea: a violation of international law and an obstacle to peace. But the strong relationship between the two countries was not significantly weakened. The Cold Warrior president was more concerned with Israel’s role as a buffer against Soviet interests in the Middle East than he was with its policy in the West Bank.

He led the country through several short, sharp, indecisive wars with Hamas in Gaza, increased the rate of settlement building, clashed with U.S. president Barack Obama over Iran, and moved closer to evangelical Christians and the Republican Party in America while growing further away from the liberal American Jewish community and the Democrats. He celebrated the rise of his friend Donald Trump, and Trump showered him with political gifts: U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, recognition of Israeli sovereignty on the Golan, relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem (see “Jerusalem (East and West)” in the “Lexicon of the Conflict,” to see why that’s important), a U.S. peace plan that would allow Israel to annex 30 percent of the West Bank, and U.S.

During the first years of the Bibi Era, as Israel became more populist, more ethnonationalist, more illiberal, Netanyahu continued his strong support for the settlement enterprise, but he maintained his official (albeit tepid) support for a two-state solution with the Palestinians, despite the increasingly prevalent position of some of his coalition partners and, indeed, fellow Likudniks against the establishment of any Palestinian state, ever. But as right-wing, illiberal populism continued to rise around the world, the international atmosphere became conducive to a more hard-line Israeli position on the question of the settlements, the occupation, and the two-state solution. The election of Donald Trump in the United States and the almost total focus of the European Union, Israel’s largest trading partner and a critic of its settlement enterprise, on dealing with Brexit and a number of other internal crises removed two of the last powerful checks on Israel’s policies in the West Bank. Then, just days before Israel's April 9, 2019, elections—and with what appeared to be tacit support from the Trump administration—Netanyahu broke with fifty-one years of prime-ministerial precedent and told an interviewer that, should he win, he would move to extend Israeli sovereignty to all Jewish settlements in the West Bank.


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

useful for hostage negotiations: “Qatar: Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy,” Congressional Research Service, June 13, 2019. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria: Ibid. “pointed to Qatar—look!”: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump). “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology,” Twitter, June 6, 2017. https://twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​872062159789985792 “end to the horror of terrorism”: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump). “…extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar,” Twitter, June 6, 2017. https://twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/​status/​872086906804240384 entice them away from Iran: “King Salman of Saudi Arabia Meets With Hamas Leaders,” NYT, July 17, 2015.

“the public interest”: “Anti-graft committee will ‘create new era of financial transparency’ in KSA,” Arab News, Nov. 6, 2017. “ ‘milking’ their country for years”: Donald Trump (@realdonaldtrump), “I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” Twitter post, Nov. 7, 2017. https://twitter.com/​realdonaldtrump/​status/​927672843504177152 told him to withdraw: Alwaleed bin Talal (@Alwaleed_Talal). “@realDonaldTrump You are a disgrace not only to the GOP but to all America,” Twitter post, Dec. 11, 2015. https://twitter.com/​Alwaleed_Talal/​status/​675390247165915137 “U.S. politicians with daddy’s money”: Donald Trump (@realdonaldtrump), “Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our U.S. politicians with daddy’s money,” Twitter post, Dec. 12, 2015. https://twitter.com/​realdonaldtrump/​status/​675523728055410689 on his win: Alwaleed bin Talal (@Alwaleed_Talal), “President elect @realDonaldTrump, whatever the past differences, America has spoken,” Twitter post, Nov. 9, 2016. https://twitter.com/​Alwaleed_Talal/​status/​796341367106637828 in a room by himself: All quotes and details from author interview, former Ritz detainee, May 2019.

MBS would attack all these problems and more, plunging the kingdom into a war in Yemen; launching a plan to overhaul the economy; charming executives from Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley; kidnapping another country’s prime minister; and forging a strong and unlikely bond with President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Inside the kingdom, he would defang the clerics, open cinemas and concert venues, and shatter traditions, locking up other royals—including his own mother—and putting in place a technological authoritarianism that would put his spies in people’s phones, manipulate social media, and lead to a gruesome murder that would shock the world.


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

Perhaps the most influential articulation of this panic came in the run-up to the 2016 elections. Writing under a pseudonym, Michael Anton, who later took a senior position in the White House, acknowledged that Donald Trump was an untested candidate who might prove incapable of governing. But that didn’t matter. Democrats, Anton warned, are “on the cusp of a permanent victory” because of “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners.” In Anton’s mind, Donald Trump was the last chance for Republicans to rescue the country from the imminent demise brought on by its demographic transformation. In the lead-up to the election, Trump himself echoed strikingly similar language.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Demography alone appears to give Clinton”: Sama Khalid, “The 270 Project: Try To Predict Who Will Win the Election,” NPR, June 30, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/06/30/483687093/the-270-project-try-to-predict-who-will-win-the-election. Vox put it in even starker terms: “There are simply not enough struggling, resentful, xenophobic white people in the US to constitute a national majority sufficient to win a presidential election.” David Roberts, “Why I Still Believe Donald Trump Will Never Be President,” Vox, January 30, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/1/30/10873476/donald-trump-never-president. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT When the ballots were counted on the evening: The demographic forces that had made Obama such an electoral powerhouse, Teixeira predicted in a triumphant post-election report published in March 2009, were only going to accelerate in the following years.

Immigration and demographic change present an existential threat to both. They are bound to impoverish countries and cultures, and to incite chaos or civil war. Over the past decades, these voices have migrated from the fringes of public and political life to its very center. There are a lot of important differences between far-right leaders like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. They hail from different religious traditions, have an allegiance to different ideological tribes, and direct their ire at different enemies. But one thing they share is a strong strain of ethnic majoritarianism: all of them cast the most visible minority group in their country as a central threat to its well-being—and promise to stand up for the majority.


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

Hall, ‘The politics of social status: economic and cultural roots of the populist right’. 44 The appeal to community is particularly enticing; see Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism’, American Sociological Review 24, no. 4 (1959), 482–501, https://doi.org/10.2307/2089536. 45 ‘List of post-election Donald Trump rallies’, Wikipedia, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_post-election_Donald_Trump_rallies. 46 Compared to Obama’s midterm rallies, which were (anecdotally) much less outfit-coordinated, far more people were in street clothes rather than Democratic gear. See Katy Tur, ‘Why Barack Obama’s Rallies Feel so Different from Donald Trump’s’, NBC News, 5 November 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/what-i-learned-last-weekend-s-rallies-donald-trump-barack-n931576. 47 Claude Brodesser-Akner, ‘I Went to a Trump Rally Last Night and Mingled with the Crowd.

See also Thomas Ferguson et al., ‘The Economic and Social Roots of Populist Rebellion: Support for Donald Trump in 2016’, Working Paper No. 83, Institute for New Economic Thinking, October 2018, https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_83-Ferguson-et-al.pdf; Lee Fang, ‘Donald Trump Exploited Long-Term Economic Distress to Fuel His Election Victory, Study Finds’, Intercept, 31 October 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/10/31/donald-trump-2016-election-economic-distress/. 32 Declan Walsh, ‘Alienated and Angry, Coal Miners See Donald Trump as Their Only Choice’, New York Times, 19 August 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/world/americas/alienated-and-angry-coal-miners-see-donald-trump-as-their-only-choice.html; Sarah Sanders and Christina Mullins, ‘2016 West Virginia Overdose Fatality Analysis’, West Virginia Bureau for Public Health, 20 December 2017, https://dhhr.wv.gov/bph/Documents/ODCP%20Reports%202017/2016%20West%20Virginia%20Overdose%20Fatality%20Analysis_004302018.pdf; Ed Pilkington, ‘What happened when Walmart left,’ Guardian, 9 July 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happened-when-walmart-left; Calvin A.

The results were revealing. Donald Trump voters were significantly more likely than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders to have replied not with reference to neighbours, community organisations or friends, but simply with ‘I just rely on myself’.25 They were also more likely to report having fewer close friends, fewer acquaintances and to spend fewer hours a week with both. Other researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute investigating the traits of Republican supporters in the final stages of the Republican primaries in 2016 found that supporters of Donald Trump were twice as likely as those of his main opponent, Ted Cruz, to have seldom or never participated in community activities like sports’ teams, book clubs or parent–teacher organisations.26 The corollary also holds true.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

Fahrenthold, “Owners of Former Trump Hotel in Panama Say President’s Company Evaded Taxes,” Washington Post, 3 June 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/owners-of-former-trump-hotel-in-panama-say-presidents-firm-evaded-taxes/2019/06/03/fe70d344-866b-11e9-a870-b9c411dc4312_story.html. 43. Adam Davidson, “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” New Yorker, 5 March 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal. 44. Robbie Gramer, “Trump Hotel in Baku Partnered with ‘Notoriously Corrupt’ Oligarch Family with Ties to Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps,” Foreign Policy, 6 March 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/06/trump-hotel-in-baku-partnered-with-notoriously-corrupt-oligarch-with-ties-to-iranian-revolutionary-guard-corps-new-yorker-report-azerbaijan-iran-corruption-conflict-of-interest-mammadov/. 45. Davidson, “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal.” 46. Michel, “Ivanka Trump’s Starring Role in Her Father’s Financial Troubles.” 47. 

It has enjoyed something of a renaissance over the past few years, thanks in no small part to the rise of Donald Trump and the kinds of practices and proclivities he perfected, which will be explored in the fourth section of this book. Emerging first in the early nineteenth century—and initially used to describe Spanish organized crime—kleptocracy means, quite literally, “rule of thieves,” describing a regime dedicated entirely to predation and pillaging of the population. During Trump’s presidency, it was fashionable to refer to his administration as a “kleptocracy.” A quick scan through some headlines of the Trump era highlights that fusion: “How Donald Trump’s Kleptocracy Is Undermining American Democracy”21 (Vox); “No to the Trump Kleptocracy”22 (Washington Post); “Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating America”23 (The Atlantic).

“Revealed: Global Super-Rich Has at Least $21 Trillion Hidden in Secret Tax Havens,” Tax Justice Network, 22 July 2012, https://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/The_Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_Presser_120722.pdf. 20. Libby Nelson, “A Top Expert on Tax Havens Explains Why the Panama Papers Barely Scratch the Surface,” Vox, 8 April 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11371712/panama-papers-tax-haven-zucman. 21. Zack Beauchamp, “How Donald Trump’s Kleptocracy Is Undermining American Democracy,” Vox, 31 July 2017, https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/31/15959970/donald-trump-authoritarian-children-corruption. 22. Ann Telnaes, “No to the Trump Kleptocracy,” Washington Post, 3 July 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/03/no-trump-kleptocracy/. 23. Franklin Foer, “Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating America,” Atlantic, March 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-kleptocracy-came-to-america/580471/. 24. 


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

Accessed on 7 July 2020 at https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-most-job-growth.htm 11 UK Commission for Employment and Skills, ‘Working Futures 2014-2024’, May 2016, Annexes, Table C.2. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/523332/Working_Futures_Annexes_1424.pdf 12 Cedefop, ‘Skills forecast: trends and challenges to 2030’, 2018, Table A7. https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/files/3077_en.pdf 13 According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 38.8 percent of immigrants in the US work in the two lowest-wage categories – service occupations and production, transport and material- moving occupations – compared with just 27.3 percent of locals. 14 More than two-fifths of farm labourers and supervisors in the US are migrants. 15 Australian Government Department of Immigration and Border Protection, ‘The place of migrants in contemporary Australia: A summary report’, July 2014. 16 Sally Kohn, ‘Nothing Donald Trump Says on Immigration Holds Up’, Time, 29 June 2016. https://time.com/4386240/donald-trump-immigration-arguments/ 17 Deborah Summers, ‘Brown stands by British jobs for British workers remark’, Guardian, 30 January 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jan/30/brown-british-jobs-workers 18 ‘Theresa May’s conference speech in full’, Telegraph, 5 October 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/theresa-mays-conference-speech-in-full/ 19 Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti, ‘With a little help from abroad: The effect of low-skilled immigration on the female labour supply’, Labour Economics, 18:5, 2011, pp. 664–75. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0927537111000273; Delia Furtado and Heinrich Hock, ‘Low Skilled Immigration & Work-Fertility Tradeoffs among High Skilled Us Natives’, American Economic Review, 100(2), 2010, pp. 224–28 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4160832/ 20 Philippe Legrain, ‘Free to Move’, Institute of Economic Affairs, 17 November 2016. https://iea.org.uk/publications/free-to-move/ 21 See, for example, George J.

journalCode=mnsc 70 William Kerr, ‘Ethnic Scientific Communities and International Technology Diffusion’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 90:3, 2008, pp. 518–37. https://ssrn.com/abstract=983573 71 Gabriel Felbermayr and Farid Toubal, ‘Revisiting the trade-migration nexus: Evidence from new OECD data’, World Development, 40:5, 2012, pp. 928–37. https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/wdevel/v40y2012i5p928-937.html 72 Mariya Aleksynska and Giovanni Peri, ‘Isolating the network effect of immigrants on trade’, The World Economy, 37:3, 2014, pp. 434–55. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/twec.12079 73 Paul Collier, Exodus, 2013, p. 200. 15 Cultural Cornucopia 1 Alison Caporimo, ‘15 Iconic American Things That Wouldn’t Exist Without Immigrants’, BuzzFeed, 2 February 2017. https://www.buzzfeed.com/alisoncaporimo/inventions-made-by-famous-immigrants-america 2 Michael Oliver, ‘”You’re not welcome”: rap’s racial divide in France’, Guardian, 22 April 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/22/rap-music-racial-divide-france 3 Philip Kasinitz and Marco Martiniello, ‘Music, migration and the city’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42:6, 2019, pp. 857–64. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2019.1567930 4 Emma Bleznak, ‘Inside Melania and Donald Trump’s Extravagant Wedding (Plus, the Real Reason Melania Had 2 Wedding Dresses)’, Showbiz Cheatsheet, 27 April 2018. https://www.cheatsheet.com/health-fitness/inside-melania-and-donald-trumps-extravagant-wedding-plus-the-real-reason-melania-had-2-wedding-dresses.html/ 5 ‘The Afrobeats nightclub uniting Naples ­– Ternanga’, Guardian, 7 February 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2020/feb/07/teranga-the-migrant-run-afrobeat-nightclub-uniting-naples-video 6 ‘Attitudes towards Immigration and their Antecedents: Topline Results from Round 7 of the European Social Survey’, ESS Topline Results Series 7, November 2016. http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/docs/findings/ESS7_toplines_issue_7_immigration.pdf 16 Irregularity 1 IOM, ‘Flow Monitoring Europe’.

‘This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,’ stated a message posted just beforehand on 8chan, an online message board favoured by far-right immigrant-haters. Put aside the fact that El Paso was actually founded by the Spanish and that Texas was part of Mexico until 1836. The mass murder in El Paso was an act of terrorism – an act of unlawful violence and intimidation against civilians in the pursuit of political aims. Although President Donald Trump subsequently sought to distance himself from the racist hate that motivated it, the terrorist’s manifesto echoes Trump’s repeated mischaracterisation of the peaceful attempts of people to cross the US-Mexican border, often to seek asylum, as an ‘invasion’.1 Words matter. When Trump visited El Paso after the attack, purportedly to console its grieving residents, he was met with protests.


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The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N b.John Coder and Gordon Green, ‘Comparing Earnings of White Males by Education for Selected Age Cohorts’, Sentier Research, October 2016, www.sentierresearch.com/StatBriefs/Sentier_Income_Trends_WorkingClassWages_1996to2014_Brief_10_05_16.pdf 23.Frank Newport, ‘Fewer Americans Identify as Middle Class in Recent Years’, Gallup, 28 April 2015, www.gallup.com/poll/182918/fewer-americans-identify-middle-class-recent-years-aspx 24.John Harris, ‘Donald Trump supporters are not the bigots the left likes to demonise’, The Guardian, 13 May 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/13/donald-trump-supporters-bigots-left-demonise 25.Almost all counties with the highest proportion of highly educated people saw a sharp increase in support for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and vice versa for counties with the least well educated people, see http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/ 26.See New York Times, 9 November 2016, for a report on how one county in Ohio, won by Obama with a 22 per cent margin in 2012, voted Trump with a six-point margin in 2016. 27.YouGov/Policy Exchange/Birkbeck survey August 2016. 28.See Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins, ‘Public Attitudes Toward Immigration’, Annual Review of Political Science, 2014. 29.http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/trump-and-brexit-why-its-again-not-the-economy-stupid/ 30.Ariel Edwards-Levy, ‘Nearly half of Trump voters think Whites face a lot of discrimination’, Huffington Post, 21 November 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/discrimination-race-religion_us_583_3761ee4b099512f845bba 31.Anne Case and Angus Deaton, ‘Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the twenty-first century’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, September 2015, http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078.abstract 32.The experimental research consistently suggests that whites prefer more culturally similar immigrants (Western Europeans and Australians for the British).

I would also like to thank: Michelle Bannister, Jamie Bartlett, Hannah Beard, Phillip Blond, Sam Bright, Alex Brummer, Andrew Cahn, Samantha Callan, Daisy Christodoulou, Jon Cruddas, René Cuperus, William Davies, Swati Dhingra, Stephen Driver, Bobby Duffy, Daniel Finkelstein, Janan Ganesh, Maurice Glasman, Dean Godson, Maud Goodhart, Matthew Goodwin, Charles Grant, Andrew Green, Francis Green, Kathy Gyngell, Jonathan Haidt, Ernst Hillebrand, Sunder Katwala, Inara Khan, Shiria Khatun, Ivan Krastev, David Landsman, Tim Leunig, Warwick Lightfoot, Alexander Linklater, John Lloyd, Rebecca Lowe Coulson, Pam Meadows, Anand Menon, David Metcalf, Jasper McMahon, Richard Norrie, Liav Orgad, Geoff Owen, Marie Peacock, Trevor Phillips, John Philpott, Rachel Reeves, Christopher Roberts, Shamit Saggar, Paul Scheffer, Tom Schuller, Jonathan Simons, Jon Simmons, David Soskice, Nick Timothy, David Willetts, Max Wind-Cowie, Alison Wolf, Philip Wood, Michela Wrong. 1 THE GREAT DIVIDE Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—the two biggest protest votes in modern democratic history—marked not so much the arrival of the populist era in western politics but its coming of age. Looking back from the future, the first few years of the twenty-first century, culminating in those two votes, will come to be seen as the moment when the politics of culture and identity rose to challenge the politics of left and right.

For Somewheres, meanwhile, post-industrialism has largely abolished manual labour, reduced the status of lower income males and weakened the national social contract—neither the affluent nor employers feel the same obligation towards ‘their’ working class that they once did. In a democracy the Somewheres cannot, however, be ignored. And in recent years in Britain and Europe, and in the US through Donald Trump, they have begun to speak through new and established parties and outside party structures altogether. In Britain they helped to win the Brexit referendum and then the vote itself, and by constantly telling pollsters how worried they are about immigration they have kept that issue at the centre of British politics.


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

., "The Follower Factory," New York Times, January 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html. 195.Rand Fishkin, "We Analyzed Every Twitter Account Following Donald Trump: 61% Are Bots, Spam, Inactive, or Propaganda," SparkToro, October 9, 2018, https://sparktoro.com/blog/we-analyzed-every-twitter-account-following-donald-trump-61-are-bots-spam-inactive-or-propaganda/. 196.Beatrice Dupuy, "Are Donald Trump’s Followers Real? Almost Half Could Be Fake, a Report Found," Newsweek, October 26, 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-twitter-following-could-be-fake-694231. 197.SparkToro, "The Problem with Follower Count," sparktoro.com, accessed December 3, 2020, https://sparktoro.com/tools/fake-followers-audit. 198.Maria Tenor, "Ariana Renee, Influencer with More than 2mill.

“The most amazingly, entertainingly fake video of a fake Barack Obama being born—featuring a baby that is all cleaned up and looks about three months old—to a fake Ann Dunham in a fake Kenyan hospital has been leaked to VICE because, wait for it, the leaker couldn’t get in touch with Donald Trump,” The Atlantic reported at the time. “It is so fake it makes you wonder if it was made not by birthers, but by liberals mocking birthers.”95 But we see what we want to see, and apparently Donald Trump saw impeachment on the horizon. The day before Kamer was set to reveal how he had arranged the prank in the New York Observer, he got a call from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, whose time in federal prison would later briefly overlap with Billy McFarland’s.

It did, however, technically make the New York Times bestseller list—albeit with the tell-tale dagger signifying a bulk order typically made to game the author onto the list in the first place. Whatever happened there to justify the literary asterisk, it’s a dubious honor she now shares with other luminaries like Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Bernstein gets—and often deserves—credit for being among the more “real” influencers on Instagram today. But that’s all a relative designation. As it turned out, a year after we first sat down, Bernstein got in trouble for running a similar bait and switch on a secondhand clothing seller who hit the jackpot after Bernstein’s assistant accidentally dropped off samples from her own upcoming swim line to a Goodwill store.


pages: 357 words: 88,412

Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight From Fashion Designers by Teri Agins

Donald Trump, East Village, haute couture, new economy, planned obsolescence, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, women in the workforce

Carter Show World Tour Limited Edition 2013 Beyoncé Rise 2014 Billy Dee Williams Avon Undeniable 1990 Bret Michaels Roses & Thorns 2014 Britney Spears Curious 2004 Britney Spears Fantasy 2005 Britney Spears In Control Curious 2006 Britney Spears Midnight Fantasy 2007 Britney Spears Believe 2007 Britney Spears Curious Heart 2008 Britney Spears Hidden Fantasy 2009 Britney Spears Circus Fantasy 2009 Britney Spears Radiance 2010 Britney Spears Cosmic Radiance 2011 Britney Spears Fantasy Twist 2012 Britney Spears Island Fantasy 2013 Britney Spears Fantasy Anniversary Edition 2013 Britney Spears Fantasy The Naughty Remix 2014 Britney Spears Fantasy The Nice Remix 2014 Bruce Willis Bruce Willis Eau de Parfum 2010 Bruce Willis Bruce Willis Personal Edition 2014 Carmen Electra Carmen Electra 2007 Carlos Santana Carlos Santana for Men 2005 Carlos Santana Carlos Santana for Women 2005 Catherine Deneuve Deneuve 1986 Céline Dion Céline Dion 2003 Céline Dion Notes 2004 Céline Dion Belong 2005 Céline Dion Always Belong 2006 Céline Dion Enchanting 2006 Céline Dion Paris Nights 2007 Céline Dion Spring in Paris 2007 Céline Dion Sensational 2008 Céline Dion Sensational Moment 2008 Céline Dion Spring in Provence 2009 Céline Dion Chic 2009 Céline Dion Simply Chic 2010 Céline Dion Pure Brilliance 2010 Céline Dion Signature 2011 Céline Dion Sensational Luxe Blossom 2013 Cher Uninhibited 1987 Cher Lloyd Pink Diamond 2012 Christina Aguilera Christina Aguilera 2007 Christina Aguilera Inspire 2008 Christina Aguilera By Night 2009 Christina Aguilera Royal Desire 2010 Christina Aguilera Secret Potion 2011 Christina Aguilera Red Sin 2012 Christina Aguilera Unforgettable 2013 Cindy Crawford Cindy Crawford 2002 Cindy Crawford Waterfalls 2005 Cindy Crawford Summer Day 2006 Daddy Yankee Daddy Yankee for Men 2008 Daddy Yankee Dyamante 2010 Daisy Fuentes Dianoche 2006 Daisy Fuentes So Luxurious 2007 Daisy Fuentes Dianoche Ocean 2008 Daisy Fuentes Dianoche Love 2009 Daisy Fuentes Dianoche Passion 2010 Daisy Fuentes Mysterio 2011 Danielle Steel Danielle 2006 David Beckham Instinct 2005 David Beckham Intimately Beckham Women 2006 David Beckham Intimately Beckham Men 2006 David Beckham Intimately Beckham Night Women 2007 David Beckham Intimately Beckham Night Men 2007 David Beckham Intense Instinct 2007 David Beckham Instinct After Dark 2008 David Beckham Signature Women 2008 David Beckham Signature Men 2008 David Beckham Signature Women 2009 David Beckham Signature Men 2009 David Beckham Pure Instinct 2009 David Beckham Instinct Ice 2010 David Beckham Homme 2011 David Beckham The Essence 2012 David Beckham Instinct Sport 2012 David Beckham Urban Homme 2013 David Beckham Classic 2013 David Beckham Classic Summer 2014 Denise Richards Denise Richards 2012 Derek Jeter Avon Driven 2006 Dionne Warwick Dionne 1986 Dita Von Teese Dita Von Teese 2011 Dita Von Teese Rouge 2012 Dita Von Teese Erotique 2013 Dita Von Teese FleurTeese 2013 Donald Trump Donald Trump The Fragrance 2004 Donald Trump Success 2012 Elizabeth Taylor Passion 1987 Elizabeth Taylor Passion for Men 1989 Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds 1991 Elizabeth Taylor Diamonds and Emeralds 1993 Elizabeth Taylor Diamonds and Rubies 1993 Elizabeth Taylor Diamonds and Sapphires 1993 Elizabeth Taylor Black Pearls 1996 Elizabeth Taylor Forever Elizabeth 2002 Elizabeth Taylor Gardenia 2003 Elizabeth Taylor Violet Eyes 2010 Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds Lustre 2014 Elvis Presley Teddy Bear 1957 Eva Longoria Eva 2010 Eva Longoria EVAmour 2012 Faith Hill Faith Hill 2009 Faith Hill True 2010 Faith Hill Soul2Soul 2012 Faith Hill Soul2Soul Vintage 2013 Fergie Avon Outspoken 2010 Fergie Avon Outspoken Intense 2011 Fergie Viva by Fergie for Avon 2012 Gabriela Sabatini Gabriela Sabatini 1989 Gabriela Sabatini Magnetic 1992 Gabriela Sabatini Bolero 1997 Giorgio Giorgio Beverly Hills 1981 Gloria Vanderbilt Vanderbilt 1982 Gwen Stefani L.A.M.B. 2007 Gwen Stefani (Harajuku Lovers) Harajuku Lovers Baby 2008 Gwen Stefani (Harajuku Lovers) Harajuku Lovers G 2008 Gwen Stefani (Harajuku Lovers) Harajuku Lovers Lil’ Angel 2008 Gwen Stefani (Harajuku Lovers) Harajuku Lovers Love 2008 Gwen Stefani (Harajuku Lovers) Harajuku Lovers Music 2008 Halle Berry Halle 2009 Halle Berry Pure Orchid 2010 Halle Berry Reveal 2010 Halle Berry Reveal The Passion 2011 Halle Berry Closer 2012 Halle Berry Exotic Jasmine 2013 Heidi Klum Shine 2011 Heidi Klum Shine Rose 2012 Heidi Klum Surprise 2013 Herb Alpert Listen 1989 Hilary Duff With Love . . .

Riding the Wave of Blurred Lines “Brands matter more than ever—the consumer perceives greater value, higher quality, and greater status—but the definition of brands has broadened immensely,” said Richard Jaffe, an analyst who follows retail stocks for Stifel, Nicolaus & Company. He told me in 2012, “A brand can be a fashion designer who has been making high-quality merchandise for a long time, or it can also be Alex Rodriguez or Donald Trump.” A celebrity’s name on a label effectively fast-tracks a new fashion brand—shaving off as much as ten years to develop widespread recognition. It’s not just Jessica Simpson. Brands like The Row by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Victoria Beckham, Tory Burch, Donald Trump, Air Jordan by Michael Jordan, Sean John by Sean Combs, Selena Gomez, Carlos Santana, and Daisy Fuentes are increasingly outstripping those of traditional fashion designers.

After mergers and acquisitions across the department-store sector in the early 2000s, Macy’s emerged as Goliath in 2007, a $26 billion chain with 850 stores and a burgeoning online division, Macys.com. Macy’s would continue to gallop ahead of the pack as the strongest better department-store chain in America, getting celebrity buzz starting with its fragrances that extends to fashion collections from Jessica Simpson and Madonna, to menswear from Donald Trump, to bed linens and towels from Martha Stewart, and to pots and kitchenware from Food Network celebrity chef Rachael Ray. Macy’s formidable lineups of celebrity brands have served it well, especially as the bridge to shoppers under thirty, who had eluded Macy’s for years. The gateway drug at Macy’s, right on the ground floor, has been around twenty celebrity fragrances introduced with great fanfare at the Herald Square flagship store in Manhattan from 2002 to 2013.


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

An internal Facebook memo, “Political Influences on Content Policy,” stated that Kaplan’s group “regularly protects powerful constituencies,” starting with then candidate Donald Trump in 2015.46 This is partly why the company has consistently allowed politicians to lie, why it hid the truth, then blunted its announcement, about Russian disinformation and information operations, and why it allowed extremist groups to grow and seed metanarratives that led to its wake-up call: the violence on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump exhorted thousands of Americans to attack the US Capitol building in protest against his election loss. That was when Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost.47 Recent surveys show that up to 40 percent of Americans still believe that Trump won, including 10 percent of Democrats.48 There are three assumptions implicit in everything Facebook says and does: first, that more information is better; second, that faster information is better; third, that the bad—lies, hate speech, conspiracy theories, disinformation, targeted attacks, information operations—should be tolerated in service of Facebook’s larger goals.

c_id=3&objectid=11551882. 13.Doug Bock Clark, “The Bot Bubble: How Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency,” New Republic, April 21, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/121551/bot-bubble-click-farms-have-inflated-social-media-currency. 14.Chris Francescani, “The Men Behind QAnon,” ABC News, September 22, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/men-qanon/story?id=73046374. 15.Clark, “The Bot Bubble.” 16.Ibid. 17.Jennings Brown, “There’s Something Odd About Donald Trump’s Facebook Page,” Insider, June 18, 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-facebook-followers-2015-6. 18.Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J. X. Dance, Richard Harris, and Mark Hansen, “The Follower Factory,” New York Times, January 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html. 19.Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jason Vincent A.

Every development that happens in my country eventually happens in the rest of the world—if not tomorrow, then a year or two later. As early as 2015, there were reports of account farms creating social media phone-verified accounts, or PVAs, from the Philippines. That same year, a report showed that most of Donald Trump’s Facebook likes came from outside the United States and that one in every twenty-seven Trump followers was from the Philippines. Some days, I feel like Sisyphus and Cassandra combined, trying to repeatedly warn the world about how social media has destroyed our shared reality, the place where democracy happens.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

But it’s important context for thinking about whether online politics is likely to really unleash the furies in the real world. Lies and propaganda are normal features of revolutionary movements, but there is usually true belief woven in as well; Joseph Goebbels propagandized like Satan, but he believed absolutely in his Führer and his cause. But Alex Jones just believes in selling supplements, Donald Trump just believes in selling Donald Trump, and a remarkable amount of online extremism is a mix of irony memes and pranks and playacting, with anonymous trolls competing with very public grifters to exploit an aging society’s anxieties and a drifting youthful population’s appetite for stimulation. The reason that Steve Bannon achieved—for a brief spell—so much celebrity was that almost alone among Trumpian figures, he seemed to have a coherent philosophy beyond grifting, and I emphasize that “seemed” because there’s a possibility that all his name-checks of fascist intellectuals were part of the grift as well.

First, emphasizing the economic element limits the scope of decadence to societies that are actually stagnating in a measurable way and frees us from the habit of just associating decadence with anything we dislike in rich societies or with any age (Gilded, Jazz) of luxury, corruption, and excess. Emphasizing the decay of institutions, likewise, frees us from the trap of regarding an individual case—whether a Nero, or a Bill Clinton, or a Donald Trump—as a synecdoche for a civilization as a whole. Focusing on repetition in the cultural and intellectual realm frees us—well, a bit—from the problems of individual intellectual and aesthetic taste and lightens the obligation of deciding exactly which literary style or intellectual shift constitutes the tipping point into decadence.

And then it also looks ahead and tries to assess the stability and sustainability of our decadence, what it will mean for our society if it should continue, and how it might ultimately end. * * * This means that the writing of the book has inevitably been shadowed by the strange phenomenon of Donald Trump, and the larger populist irruptions in Europe and the United States. As a leader for a decadent age, Trump contains multitudes. He is both an embodiment of our society’s distinctive vices and a would-be rebel against our torpor and repetition and disappointment; a figure who rose to power by attacking the system for its sclerosis while exploiting that same decadence to the very hilt.


pages: 245 words: 72,893

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

Very few would have thought it might be taking place before their eyes. Yet here we are, barely two decades into the twenty-first century, and almost from nowhere the question is upon us: is this how democracy ends? Like many people, I first found myself confronting this question after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. To borrow a phrase from philosophy, it looked like the reductio ad absurdum of democratic politics: any process that produces such a ridiculous conclusion must have gone seriously wrong somewhere along the way. If Trump is the answer, we are no longer asking the right question.

But it is nothing like as dangerous as when a seventeen-year-old buys a motorbike. More often, it is simply embarrassing. The mid-life motorbike gets ridden a few times and ends up parked in the street. Maybe it gets sold. The crisis will need to be resolved in some other way, if it can be resolved at all. American democracy is in miserable middle age. Donald Trump is its motorbike. It could still end in a fireball. More likely, the crisis will continue and it will need to be resolved in some other way, if it can be resolved at all. I am conscious that talking about the crisis of democracy in these terms might sound self-indulgent, especially coming from a privileged, middle-aged white man.

Nevertheless, the immediate American past is where I begin, with the inauguration of President Trump. That was not the moment at which democracy came to an end. But it was a good moment to start thinking about what the end of democracy might mean. INTRODUCTION 20 January 2017 I WATCHED THE INAUGURATION of Donald Trump as president of the United States on a large screen in a lecture hall in Cambridge, England. The room was full of international students, wrapped up against the cold – public rooms in Cambridge are not always well heated and there were as many people in coats and scarves inside the hall as there were on the podium in Washington, DC.


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

When a gay-pride-themed “Make America Great Again” hat appeared in Donald Trump’s official shop in June 2019—with the caption “Show your support for the LGBT community and the 45th President with this exclusive Make America Great Again Pride Hat”—it enraged numerous users in the chat rooms I monitored. A post originating in “Alt-right Shitlords Inc.” with a picture of the hat and the slogan “Be sure to get your globohomo MAGA hat before 2020” circulated through four different channels. A similarly vitriolic response greeted Donald Trump’s May 31, 2019, tweets in support of LGBT Pride Month. “Hey, maybe him going full globohomo will wake his religious followers up . . .” wrote one user under a screenshot of the tweets.

The general theme is that Jews encourage race mixing within predominantly white countries to create “standard citizens” of mixed race—who would be stupid, docile, and savage because nonwhite people are inherently stupid, docile, and savage, and thus more malleable—the perfect subjects for Jewish world domination. It tells you about the nature of far-right anti-Semitism that its targets tend to be random Jews—not powerful ones or ones even close to power. That’s why recent high-profile white supremacist attacks on Jews have targeted essentially random synagogues. Those who celebrated Donald Trump’s election by toppling graves in Jewish cemeteries in Brooklyn and Philadelphia and St. Louis have never been caught—but their targets were dead, beyond the ability to manipulate anything at all. The notion of a nefarious plot by Jews is not limited merely to Jews who are proximal to power and wealth; the key to far-right anti-Semitism, and the reason it endures as a fatal threat, is the belief that every Jew is engaged in the machinations of evil.

Another graphic mapped out a network meant to guide Telegram users through an ideological journey of radicalization, starting from “entry-level redpills” and advancing to channels about the “gay trans agenda” and “based screencaps and good reads” (based being a frequently used far-right term for “ideologically far-right”). I also encountered a channel run by Paul Nehlen, once a congressional primary challenger to Paul Ryan endorsed by Donald Trump, whose virulent anti-Semitism saw him banned from Twitter and the Wisconsin Republican Party. I joined Gen Z Y K L O N; K i K e S C e N T R a L; Jewish Ritual Murder Abortion Satanism Pizzagate; Judenpresse Monitor/Archive; Holohoax Memes & Info; Jews Own USA (Wars Media Banks). A chat called “MakeAmerica110” was named after a frequently floated white-supremacist statistic—that Jews had been expelled from 109 countries.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

But how can we hold anyone to account if there is no clear, single set of promises that everyone can see and understand? And how do we even know if we’re getting the real Trump anyway? When I was at Alamo, Theresa told me that she wrote many of Donald Trump’s Facebook posts. That was odd. I’d always assumed Trump wrote his own posts. I’d read many of them, and they certainly sounded like him. Nope, it was Theresa, sitting in her San Antonio office. ‘I channelled Mr Trump,’ she told me, smiling. ‘How do you channel someone like Donald Trump?’ I asked. ‘A lot of believe mes, a lot of alsos, a lot of verys . . . he was really wonderful to write for. It was so refreshing. It was so authentic.’

But the internet has taken this to a whole new level. And just wait. Within a couple of years, video manipulation will be extremely believable and widely available. Anyone will be able to make any public figure ‘say’ anything they want, making it indistinguishable from the real thing. Fake videos could circulate of Donald Trump saying he’s secretly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, or that George Soros is funding an anti-democratic coup. The problem with tribes Tribalism and ‘system one’ thinking are the direct products of information overload. These are ideal conditions for division and disagreement to turn into existential opposition.

‘They affect our well-being and happiness . . . we try to fill our minds with information that makes us feel strong and right, and to avoid information that makes us confused or insecure.’ This is why, when exposed to contradictory facts, most of us become more strongly set in our beliefs. Note, for example, how much Donald Trump was negatively fact-checked, and how little difference it made to the result of the election.14 Several inconvenient studies have found that if two groups of people debate with each other they often consequently hold more extreme views than when they started.15 No one knows why exactly (some studies say that it is an evolved trait that helps us cooperate, a kind of ‘my-side bias’).


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

* * * — With the arrival of the Trump administration, LNG became a tool in conflict over trade. This administration—and Donald Trump himself—was obsessed with deficits in the trade balance with individual countries, and no deficit loomed larger than that with China. The administration seized on U.S. energy exports, specifically LNG, as a way to help reduce trade deficits. Previous administrations had also promoted U.S. exports ranging from Boeing jets to corn and pork. What was different, however, was that Donald Trump personally turned himself into America’s top LNG salesman. When India’s prime minister Narendra Modi visited Washington, Trump told him that he was looking forward to “exporting more American energy to your country,” including “major long-term contracts to purchase American natural gas, which are being negotiated right now.”

Members of the militia and their supporters then entered with ease into the protected Green Zone in Baghdad and counter-attacked the U.S. embassy, a spectacle that unfolded on television worldwide. Among those watching was Donald Trump. On the night of January 2, 2020, the leader of the Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, boarded a civilian airliner in Damascus bound for Baghdad. He had met the day before in Beirut with the head of Hezbollah, demonstrating how he seemed to be everywhere in the region. He had also been in something of a Twitter and Instagram war with Donald Trump. Dismissing Trump as a “gambler” in 2018, he had messaged the president, “You know how powerful we are in asymmetrical warfare.

U.S. senators who had praised MBS as a reformer and modernizer now criticized him and Saudi Arabia. The same for international media. The U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution to end U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war. Donald Trump pushed back against these critics and reaffirmed his administration’s support for MBS and Saudi Arabia. * * * — Relations with the United States had already become complicated on another front. In May 2017, for his first foreign trip as president, Donald Trump flew to Saudi Arabia, where he and King Salman cohosted a summit with the leaders of Arab and Muslim countries. The two also jointly inaugurated an anti-terrorism center, to which the other Arab Gulf states signed on.


pages: 385 words: 121,550

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

Neither before nor after the referendum of June 2016 did its leading proponents come up with any serious plan for what Brexit would really mean in practice for Britain’s economy, for its place in the world, for its very existence as a unitary state. An aspect of this paradox is that Brexit is, on the one hand, unquestionably historic – but it is not, in the imaginations of its proponents, history. It is not an event that is unfolding in the 2020s, amid all the other realities of the time: climate change, Donald Trump, runaway technological transformations and so on. It is, rather, a flight from history. It is both literally and metaphorically escapist – the great leap out of the EU is also a giant bound out of the real, compromised, messy truths of the world in which Britain, alongside everyone else, finds itself.

At the end of the ‘scepter’d isle’ speech Gaunt says something that may in fact be more pertinent to England’s current situation that his earlier hyperbole: ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others, / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’ 2 July 2016 Boris Johnson’s campaign to succeed David Cameron collapses in farce. Donald Trump is looming as the most likely next president of the United States. We are living with the politics of the fake orgasm. The leaders of the Brexit campaign are obliged to join in with the ecstasies of their followers. They must let out a few polite yelps of satisfaction. But a week on, it is increasingly clear that theirs is a phoney consummation.

As shown by Boris Johnson’s retreat from the prospect of having to actually govern the new kingdom he did so much to create, it was all a performance. It will not be long before those they embraced – the alienated, the dispossessed – realise that they have been had in more ways than one. Like the followers of Donald Trump in the US, white working-class Brexit voters are experiencing a new kind of political relationship. These movements may look like the reactionary populism we have seen many times before, but they are profoundly different in one crucial respect. The old reactionary politics is utterly serious: its leaders really intend to do what they say they will do, and they really mean to reshape systems of government to allow them to do it.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

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

Indeed, natural language processing is only getting more sophisticated, in ways that could be quite frightening. Better language abilities could make it easier for trolls to spread propaganda—and harder for us to identify them. In 2019, OpenAI fed an algorithm the words “Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally…” The algorithm proceeded to generate the following realistic—and perilous—sentences: Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally fired a missile in the air. Russia said it had “identified the missile’s trajectory and will take necessary measures to ensure the security of the Russian population and the country’s strategic nuclear forces.”

c4616537/user-clip-hillary-clinton-breaks-glass-ceiling. 25 Tom Hamburger and Karen Tumulty, “WikiLeaks releases thousands of documents about Clinton and internal deliberations,” Washington Post, July 22, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/22/on-eve-of-democratic-convention-wikileaks-releases-thousands-of-documents-about-clinton-the-campaign-and-internal-deliberations/. 26 Rebecca Shabad, “Donald Trump: I hope Russia finds Hillary Clinton’s emails,” CBS News, July 27, 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-i-hope-russia-finds-hillary-clintons-emails/. 27 David A. Fahrenthold, “Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005,” Washington Post, October 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html. 28 Aaron Sharockman, “On Oct. 7, the Access Hollywood tape comes out.

Chapter 1: THE ORIGINS OF THE GRAY WAR 1 Dan Frommer, “Google’s parent company Alphabet added almost 5,000 employees last quarter, and now has more than 85,000,” Vox, April 23, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/4/23/17272502/googl-alphabet-google-q1-earnings-2018-headcount. 2 Seth Fiegerman, “Google posts its first $100 billion year,” CNN Money, February 1, 2018, https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/technology/google-earnings/index.html. 3 Madeline Farber, “Google Tops Apple as the World’s Most Valuable Brand,” Fortune, February 2, 2017, https://fortune.com/2017/02/02/google-tops-apple-brand-value/. 4 Dana Bash, “Hillary Clinton calls Donald Trump to concede election,” CNN Politics, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/11/09/hillary-clinton-calls-donald-trump-to-concede-election-bash-sot.cnn. 5 Charles II, “By the King, a proclamation. To restrain the spreading of false news,” 1688, https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.12024/A87488/A87488.html?sequence=5&isAllowed=y. 6 Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo#.fu2okXaeKo. 7 Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg says it’s ‘crazy’ to think fake news stories got Donald Trump elected,” Recode, November 11, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/11/13596792/facebook-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 8 Amit Singhal, “ ‘Revenge porn’ and Search,” Google Public Policy Blog, June 19, 2015, https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/06/revenge-porn-and-search.html. 9 P.


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

why the state had shifted: Mike Kelly, “A Town in Opioids’ Grip Still Looks to President Trump with Hope,” North Jersey Media Group, October 19, 2018, https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/columnists/mike-kelly/2018/10/17/town-opioids-grip-looks-donald-trump-hope/1381268002/. voting for Democrats in the twentieth century: Philip Bump, “How West Virginia Explains Donald Trump’s Political Success,” Washington Post, February 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/09/how-west-virginia-explains-donald-trumps-political-success/. the University of Alabama: Megan Davis, interview with the author, 2018. Ruth Christ Sullivan: Carter Taylor Seaton, “The Pioneer,” Huntington Quarterly, September 27, 2018, https://huntingtonquarterly.com/2018/09/27/issue-79-the-pioneer/.

I was decked out in my best grizzled-campaign-reporter outfit of jeans, flannel, and sneakers with my reporter’s notepad in hand. Bustos was in jeans, high-heeled boots, and a red jacket as if to emphasize her rural Midwestern bona fides and show that despite being a Democrat, she could capably represent a district that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Moments like these are why I became a reporter. I spent my teenage years wanting to play guitar in rock-and-roll bands, traveling the world and finding adventure. But when my parents told me I needed to find a legitimate job, journalism seemed like the next best thing. I could still travel the country, meet new people, and have that kind of anti-authority attitude that I got from my thrash-metal albums.

Years later, I was living in Washington, DC, and working as a reporter for National Journal. It was 2015; the Republican presidential primary was heating up, and I had been assigned to cover a debate-watching party at a bar on Capitol Hill. At one point, I turned my eyes to CNN as moderator Jake Tapper asked Donald Trump about his previous tweets speculating a link between vaccines and autism. Trump, being Trump, doubled down. “Autism has become an epidemic,” he said, and he talked about the spike in autism diagnoses in the past thirty years. He told a story about a friend whose child received a vaccine “and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

That is because the buildup of social and economic pressures can be fairly invisible until a crisis situation comes along, in this case the appearance on the scene of a candidate—Donald Trump—with some pretty special talents for appealing to the disgruntled. Very commonly it is suggested that income inequality is behind these growing dysfunctions in our politics, and that is one of the most common memes you read in the press today or hear on television. But for all the popularity of this view, it doesn’t have enough evidence behind it. For instance, if we look at those who voted for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries, they had an average income of about $70,000 and also education levels higher than the American average.

They fit the standard description of cosmopolitan and usually take an interest in the cultures of other countries, though, ironically, many of them have become sufficiently insulated from hardship and painful change that they are provincial in their own way and have become somewhat of a political target (from both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the recent campaigns). Because they are intelligent, articulate, and often socially graceful, they usually seem like very nice people, and often they are. Think of a financier or lawyer who vacations in France or Italy, has wonderful kids, and donates generously to his or her alma mater.

They have been committing much less crime, engaging in much less social unrest, and embracing extreme ideologies such as communism to a smaller degree; if anything, they have been more disillusioned than politically engaged. I’ll consider later in the book whether the Ferguson riots and the election of Donald Trump and other unusual current events might be signaling an end to this trend, but the point is that we have been building toward stasis for about the last forty years. Whether or not you think the break point has come just now, to understand why the stasis eventually must fall apart, first we must see how and why it has evolved.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

A NEW PRO-BUSINESS MANIFESTO We live in an age when the reputation of business is under siege. Among Democrats, for instance, the word “socialism” now polls better than does “capitalism.” But Republicans, while they pay greater lip service to some business ideals, are not in practice much better. Many of them have quite readily followed President Donald Trump into his attacks on free trade, immigration, outsourcing, and the American media (which is labeled “the enemy of the people”)—all fundamentally anti-business stances.1 Business, quite simply, has become underrated, and thus I am writing a contrarian book that ought not to be contrarian at all.

In other words, arguably the biggest problem with American business is the politically incorrect truth that too often it simply isn’t big enough and successful enough. It isn’t ambitious enough or doing a good enough job boosting profits and growing toward gargantuan size.11 Trump Supporters and the Conservative Right Donald Trump often presents himself as a fan of big business and a representative of America’s productive class. But big business also serves as his whipping boy. He is very happy to taunt businesses and business executives in his tweets (such as Carrier and Amazon). When push comes to shove, on the issues where Trump is in the wrong, do Trump supporters side with the man or with the better parts of American business?

We’ve already taken a look at nonprofits, so let’s turn to government, also a large and focal institution and a potential regulator of business, and ask whether government has become more honest in recent times. I think there is a fair amount of evidence that it has not, at least not from the point of view of voters. Approval ratings for Congress have been at all-time lows, often below 10 percent. The election of Donald Trump as president and the choice of Brexit in the United Kingdom are often interpreted as protests against the corruption, lies, and smug, complacent, business-as-usual attitudes of our political elites. Or at least that is how things are viewed by numerous critics of the status quo. Does that sound like a world where trust in government and its honesty is increasing?


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Figure 8.1 A typical Karel the Robot problem. Figure 11.1 Bailiwick splash screen customized to show three 2016 US presidential candidates. Figure 11.2 Independent expenditures in support of Donald Trump. Figure 11.3 Operating expenditures for Donald Trump campaign committee as of December 2017, organized by category. Note the rectangle at the bottom labeled “Collateral: Hats.” Figure 11.4 Payments from Donald Trump’s campaign committee to Cali-Fame marked “Hats,” organized by date and amount. Figure 11.5 Story idea page. I How Computers Work 1 Hello, Reader I love technology.

Figure 11.2 Independent expenditures in support of Donald Trump. Data visualizations often trigger story ideas. For example, the first time I saw the tree map of Trump’s campaign committee spending pattern, I saw there was a fairly large rectangle devoted to hats (see figure 11.3). As of December 2016, the campaign had spent $2.2 million on hats from a company called Cali-Fame (see figure 11.4). Figure 11.3 Operating expenditures for Donald Trump campaign committee as of December 2017, organized by category. Note the rectangle at the bottom labeled “Collateral: Hats.” Figure 11.4 Payments from Donald Trump’s campaign committee to Cali-Fame marked “Hats,” organized by date and amount.

Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017. Brown, Mike. “Nearly a Third of Millennials Have Used Venmo to Pay for Drugs.” LendEDU.com (blog), July 10, 2017. https://lendedu.com/blog/nearly-third-millennials-used-venmo-pay-drugs/. Bump, Philip. “Donald Trump’s Campaign Has Spent More on Hats than on Polling.” The Washington Post, October 25, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/25/donald-trumps-campaign-has-spent-more-on-hats-than-on-polling. Busch, Lawrence. “A Dozen Ways to Get Lost in Translation: Inherent Challenges in Large-Scale Data Sets.” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 1727–1744.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

And not just any country, but the two powers that had done the most to set up the postwar order in the first place. The British referendum to leave the European Union showed a major European nation turning its back on the European project, which had gone further than any other part of the world in realising the West’s borderless, rules-based ideal. Then Americans elected Donald Trump as their president—an authoritarian who hides neither his racist-tinged nationalism nor his contempt for democratic principles and the rule of law—and thereby repudiated a world order the United States had shaped and led in its own image. Through these choices, voters at the core of the Western system showed that they no longer feel they belong to it.

For now, let me just make a simple appeal to intellectual pragmatism to convince sceptics why they should treat economics as both a root cause of antiliberalism and the key to disarming it. Even if voters opposed to the open Western liberal order—the millions of Americans, French, or Germans who support Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, or the Alternative for Germany—are motivated by cultural identity or authoritarian and illiberal attitudes, the question remains why identity and attitudes of this sort have become so much more politically powerful in the last decade. Have voters become more nativist and illiberal—and if so, why did this happen?

Or is it that such attitudes have always been present to the same extent but their influence on how people vote has increased—and if so, why did that happen? Answering these questions convincingly is impossible without the economic story this book tells. The United States offers a stark illustration. A decisive number of American voters swung from supporting Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 to voting for Donald Trump in 2016. Those two leaders could not be more different. However strongly identity and values matter, it is hard to see how they explain how anyone could switch their allegiance from one to the other. Yet enough former Obama voters in the key battleground states did precisely this—in particular white, working-class voters—to make it fair to say that it was they who brought Trump over the threshold to the White House.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The sprayers ensured that voters were treated to tens of thousands of raw Clinton emails: the irrigators decided the voters should not be trusted with much more explosive – and raw – information about Donald Trump . . . until it was too late to make any difference. Many in the old world vented their fury at Buzzfeed for playing by the new rules, rather than the old ones: their behaviour, they said, stank. Corn, who had allowed his readers only a peek in late October, was dismayed at the publication: ‘Even Donald Trump deserves journalistic fairness.’ Brad Heath, an investigative journalist for USA Today, protested: ‘“not how journalism works . . .” decide for yourself if it’s legit’.

On this most people could agree: we were now up to our necks in a seething, ever churning ocean of information; some of it true, much of it wrong. There was too much false news, not enough reliable news. There might soon be entire communities without news. Or without news they could trust. There was a swamp of stuff we were learning to call ‘fake news’. The recently elected 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, used the term so indiscriminately it rapidly lost any meaning. The best that traditional journalism could offer was – or so he repeatedly told us – fake. We should believe him, not lying journalists. Truth was fake; fake was true. And that’s when the problem suddenly snapped into focus. Throughout recent centuries anyone growing up in a western democracy had believed that it was necessary to have facts.

Nearly 70 years later many of us may be surprised to be asking the most basic question imaginable: how do you know if something is true or not? * Here is just one small example of this new world of information chaos, playing out as I was writing this chapter. I could have chosen a thousand such illustrations, but this had most of the components of the unfolding problem. In February 2017 Donald Trump used a rally in Melbourne, Florida, to draw attention to disturbing events he said were happening in Sweden.2 ‘You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden.’ The President of the United States paused for the name to sink in and then repeated it. ‘Sweden.’


pages: 98 words: 27,201

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

Why have wages stagnated in developed countries, while stock payments, bonuses and dividends for those at the top have exploded? Company bosses in most Western societies are cashing in untold riches for just a few years’ labour in stark contrast to those who work for them, who have not had a real-terms pay rise for years. The Brexit vote in Britain, the election of Donald Trump in the US, as well as the rise of populism in Europe, are commonly seen as an expression of frustration by those ‘left behind’ by the current economic structure and moves towards greater globalization. It is worth asking how late-stage capitalism in the West has created the conditions that hand so many benefits to the ‘few’: those at the top of the income scale and the wealthy.

It also means the mantra of the market has reached into the heart of government around the world. Politicians have looked to business people to overcome the sclerotic workings of their own civil servants and departments. Top executives have been drafted in to run working groups, examine operational practices and even into government itself. Donald Trump’s former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was the boss of oil major, ExxonMobil; his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is a former Goldman Sachs banker. In fact, Charles Schumer, the senate minority leader, says between them, Trump’s cabinet had a net worth of $9.5 billion (before Rex Tillerson left).

‘We must accept that Big Finance and runaway inequality are incompatible with either a functioning democracy or a sustainable economy.’1 Nevertheless, successive UK and US governments have shied away from raising tax rates. David Cameron, Conservative prime minister of the UK coalition government in 2010, was quick to scrap the 50p top rate of tax that was briefly imposed in April 2010 by Gordon Brown’s Labour administration to help pay for the banking crisis. Donald Trump has passed an extensive tax bill in the US that marks the biggest changes to the tax base since Ronald Reagan’s reforms in 1986, slashing top rates in a direct benefit to the wealthy. The bill includes a deep cut to corporate taxes from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. Unions and campaigners have strongly argued for some of those tax breaks to be passed on to the workforce and a handful of companies have increased wages, but this has not been widespread.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

The result is what President Obama calls “a Wild West” world without privacy or security that leaves every citizen vulnerable to criminal, corporate, and government intrusion. As Obama wrote in The Economist, “a capitalism shaped by the few and unaccountable to the many is a threat to all.” The Internet is changing our democracy, too: in Twitter, Donald Trump found the perfect vehicle for his narcissistic personality, allowing him to strike out at all his perceived tormentors. And Facebook (the primary news source for 44 percent of Americans) was equally responsible for the Trump victory, according to Ed Wasserman, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism: “Trump was able to get his message out [on Facebook] in a way that was vastly influential without undergoing the usual kinds of quality checks that we associate with reaching the mass public.”

And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up. But this sense of shared social responsibility is not part of the libertarian creed, which in many respects is antidemocratic. As Ben Tarnoff, writing in the Guardian noted, one of the reasons Peter Thiel was drawn to Donald Trump’s authoritarian candidacy was that “he would discipline what Thiel calls ‘the unthinking demos’: the democratic public that constrains capitalism.” But for now there are few constraints on Tech capitalism. The monopoly profits of this new era have been very, very good to a few men. The Forbes 400 list, which ranks American wealth, places Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg in the top ten.

As a result of an ever-expanding list of non-discrimination—“affirmative action”—laws and non-discriminatory, multicultural, egalitarian immigration policies, every nook and cranny of American society is affected by government management and forced integration; accordingly, social strife and racial ethnic and moral-cultural tension and hostility have increased dramatically. That a country in such peril would need a more authoritarian government that could counter the forces of “egalitarian immigration” and “forced integration” feels at once like a throwback to the Jim Crow 1950s and a contemporary statement from someone like Donald Trump. This is in essence the truly elitist theory behind Peter Thiel’s thinking. Though his undergraduate degree was in philosophy, Thiel gravitated toward technology and politics. What he believed was that politics was impeding progress and that he needed to find a way to make money without its interference.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Ditto his successor, Mike Pompeo. Indeed, the billionaire Ray Dalio, one of those confidants Donald Trump calls late at night when he can’t sleep, said, “Her books pretty well capture the mind-set” of the president and his men. “This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies and it admires strong, can-do profit-makers.”10 Andrew Puzder, Trump’s first nominee for secretary of labor, named his private equity fund after Howard Roark, one of Rand’s fictional heroes. And what of the great man himself? Donald Trump has called The Fountainhead his favorite book. “It relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions,” he told USA Today.

I think I’m not alone when I say I find America increasingly perplexing: three hundred million may be past the population size at which any of us can feel fully at home or completely responsible. I try to imagine Donald Trump coming to a town meeting in my small community, the first-Tuesday-in-March gathering where we vote on the budget for the year and discuss community business. His foul mouth and obvious disdain for detail would mean that no one would pay him much mind; if he kept up his ranting, he’d be asked to sit down so that the rest of us could do the necessary work of making sure there was money to buy sand for the road crew and of figuring out if the roof on the town office had another year of life in it. Donald Trump, I think, would have had a hard time being elected a mayor or a governor, because the damage he’d have done would have hit too close to home.

Even compared to the twentieth century, violence is now far less likely to kill us—of the more than 55 million people who died around the world in 2012, war killed just 120,000 of them.2 Eighty-five percent of adults can read now, a staggering increase inside two generations.3 Women, with more education and at least a modicum of equality, have gone from having more than five kids apiece on average in 1970 to having fewer than two and a half today, probably the most rapid and remarkable demographic change the planet has ever witnessed. In the year 1500, humans managed to produce goods and services worth $250 billion in today’s dollars—five hundred years later, that number is $60 trillion, a 240-fold increase.4 The chorus of affirmation swells, from Steven Pinker insisting we’re in an age of unprecedented enlightenment to Donald Trump tweeting, “There is an incredible spirit of optimism sweeping the country right now—we’re bringing back the JOBS!” We’re quite accustomed to this idea of progress, so accustomed that some can’t imagine anything else: the former chief economist of the World Bank, Kaushik Basu, recently predicted that, in fifty years, global GDP will be growing 20 percent a year, meaning that income and consumption will be doubling every four years or so.5 There are, each day, more ideas hatched, more songs sung, more pictures taken, more goals scored, more schoolbooks read, more money invested


pages: 197 words: 49,240

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

As president, he called for curbing family-based admissions on the grounds that it meant admitting millions of immigrants lacking in “merit.” Immigration advocates pushed back. Some argued that it was obscene to suggest that a man like Ullah was representative of immigrants at large. Others said that it was racist to question our current approach to family-based admissions. And where was I? In an uncomfortable place. Donald Trump had built his political career on demonizing immigrants, and I sympathized with immigration advocates who resented him for it. I am not just the son of immigrants. I am the brother, neighbor, and friend of immigrants, many of whom found Trump’s rhetoric frightening. To the extent I harbor stereotypes about immigrants, they are positive.

However, our current immigration system is increasing both the number and the share of children being raised in low-income households. If the children of immigrants were immune to the ill effects of growing up poor, this wouldn’t be cause for concern. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Today’s poor immigrants are raising tomorrow’s poor natives, and we aren’t doing nearly enough to break the cycle. Just as Donald Trump’s election spoke to the rage and disaffection of older whites in the heartland, the years to come may see a new populist revolt, driven by the resentments of working-class Americans of color. Imagine an America in which wealthy whites and Asians wall themselves off from the rest of society, and low-wage immigrants and their offspring constitute a new underclass.

My mother might find the prospect of an America overrun by little Salams delightful, and I rather like the idea myself, but not everyone welcomes the prospect. I thought of her when, in 2017, Steve King, an Iowa congressman known for his strident opposition to immigration, tweeted, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” King’s remark was widely denounced.1 It came not long after Donald Trump’s inauguration, at a moment when the immigration debate felt even more combustible than usual, and it raised disturbing questions. What did King mean by “somebody else’s babies”? Was the congressman implying that the children of immigrants, or the children of Muslims or nonwhites, are not our babies?


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

Wichita Eagle, December 8, 2018, https://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article48524730.html (April 11, 2021). 31 Ibid. 32 Merritt, Public Journalism and Public Life, 7. 33 Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 20. 34 Ibid., 19–20. 35 Jay Rosen, “Donald Trump Is Crashing the System. Journalism Needs to Build a New One,” Washington Post, July 13, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/07/13/donald-trump-is-crashing-the-system-journalists-need-to-build-a-new-one/ (April 11, 2021). 36 Ibid. 37 Martin Linsky, “What Are Journalists For?” American Prospect, November 14, 2001, https://prospect.org/features/journalists-for/ (April 11, 2021). 38 “Marx the Journalist, an Interview with James Ledbetter,” Jacobin, May 5, 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/karl-marx-journalism-writings-newspaper (April 11, 2021). 39 Saul D.

., 94. 18 Lily Zheng, “We’re Entering the Age of Corporate Social Justice,” Harvard Business Review, June 15, 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/06/were-entering-the-age-of-corporate-social-justice (April 22, 2021). 19 Dan McLaughlin, “The Party in Power Is Directing a Corporate Conspiracy against Its Political Opposition,” National Review, April 13, 2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-party-in-power-is-directing-a-corporate-conspiracy-against-its-political-opposition/ (April 22, 2021). 20 Zachary Evans, “Amazon, Google Join Hundreds of American Corporations in Signing Letter Opposing Voting Limits,” National Review, April 14, 2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/amazon-google-join-hundreds-of-american-corporations-in-signing-letter-opposing-voting-limits/ (April 22, 2021). 21 Phill Kline, “How Mark Zuckerberg’s $350 million threatens democracy,” Washington Examiner, October 21, 2020, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-mark-zuckerbergs-dollar350-million-threatens-democracy/ar-BB1afARG (April 22, 2021); J. Christian Adams, “The Real Kraken: What Really Happened to Donald Trump in the 2020 Election,” PJ Media, December 2, 2020, https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2020/12/02/the-real-kraken-what-really-happened-to-donald-trump-in-the-2020-election-n1185494 (April 22, 2021). 22 Mark R. Levin, Liberty and Tyranny (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), 195. 23 Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, ed. Steve Straub, The Federalist Papers Project, https://thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-American-Crisis-by-Thomas-Paine-.pdf (April 22, 2021) 5. 24 Ibid., 8. 25 Saul D.

They use the tactics of propaganda and indoctrination, and demand conformity and compliance, silencing contrary voices through repressive tactics, such as “the cancel culture,” which destroys reputations and careers, censoring and banning mostly patriotic and contrary viewpoints on social media, even including former president Donald Trump, and attacking academic freedom and intellectual interchange in higher education. Indeed, they take aim at all aspects of the culture—historical monuments (including memorials to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and the 54th Massachusetts black Union regiment), Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Mr.


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

Edgecliffe-Johnson, “US Business Lobby Groups for Patience over Election Result,” Financial Times, October 27, 2020. 52. C. Cutter, “Expensify CEO Urges Customers to Vote Against Trump,” Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2020. 53. A. Edgecliffe-Johnson and M. Vandevelve, “Stephen Schwarzman Defended Donald Trump at CEO Meeting on Election Results,” Financial Times, November 14, 2020. 54. A. Edgecliffe-Johnson, “US Business Leaders Press Donald Trump to Start Transition to Joe Biden,” Financial Times, November 23, 2020. 55. M. Wayland and L. Kolodny, “Tesla’s Market Cap Tops the 9 Largest Automakers Combined—Experts Disagree About if That Can Last,” CNBC, December 14, 2020. 56.

The IMF worried about the destabilizing effect that geopolitical tension might have on a world economy piled high with debt.3 Economists cooked up new statistical indicators to track the uncertainty that was dogging investment.4 The data strongly suggested that the source of the trouble was in the White House.5 America’s 45th president, Donald Trump, had succeeded in turning himself into an unhealthy global obsession. He was up for reelection in November and seemed bent on discrediting the electoral process even if it yielded a win. Not for nothing, the slogan of the 2020 edition of the Munich Security Conference—the Davos for national security types—was “Westlessness.”6 Apart from the worries about Washington, the clock on the interminable Brexit negotiations was running out.

As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amid the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial. For them climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand. In Mexico, the notionally left-wing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

America’s War for the Great Middle East: A Military History. New York: Random House. Bagli, Charles V. 2016. “How Donald Trump Built an Empire on $885 Million in Tax Breaks.” New York Times, September 17. Baily, Martha J., and Susan M. Dynarski. 2011. “Inequality in Postsecondary Education.” In Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, ed. Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, 117–132. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Barbaro, Michael. 2016. “Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years, and Still Isn’t Apologetic.” New York Times, September 16. Barnett, W. Steven, Kwanghee Jung, Min-Jong Youn, and Ellen C.

Rajan, Radhuram. 2010. Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rankine, Claudia. 2015. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf Press. Rappeport, Alan. 2016. “Donald Trump Says His Remarks on Judge Were ‘Misconstrued.’” New York Times, June 7. Rattner, Steven. 2016a. “Donald Trump and Art of the Tax Loophole.” New York Times, May 1. Rattner, Steven. 2016b. “Long Lines at Airports? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.” New York Times, July 8. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reardon, Sean F. 2012.

As Bob Dylan said in a song at Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, “The poor white remains / On the caboose of the train / But it ain’t him to blame / He’s only a pawn in their game.”3 Race and class are distinct, but they have interacted in complex ways from the U.S. slavery era that ended in 1865; to Ronald Reagan announcing his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia in Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964; to Donald Trump’s equally indirect claim to “Make America Great Again” in his 2016 presidential campaign—where “great” is a euphemism for “white.” The Civil Rights Movement changed the language of racism without reducing its scope. As incomes become more and more unequal, racism becomes a tool for the rich to arouse poor whites to feel superior to blacks and distract them from their economic plight.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

.: Pew Research Center, 19 November 2015). http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s 270 Keith Ellison for Congress, “Keith on ABC’s ‘This Week’ 7/26/15,” YouTube, 24 May 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHkPadFK34o 271 “Full Text: Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid,” Washington Post, 16 June 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06/16/full-text-donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/?utm_term=.ea78b474e6a9 272 Yankee Patriot News, “Trump: ‘Compete Shutdown on Muslims Entering the United States—Speech,” YouTube, 8 December 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWlQ3buH9FI 273 Jeffrey Sparshott, “Immigration Does More Good Than Harm to Economy, Study Finds,” Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2016. http://www.wsj.com/articles/immigration-does-more-good-than-harm-to-economy-study-finds-1474568991 274 Ibid. 275  International Migration Report 2015. 276 “Worldwide Displacement Hits All-Time High as War and Persecution Increase” (Geneva: UNHCR, 18 June 2015). https://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2015/6/558193896/worldwide-displacement-hits-all-time-high-war-persecution-increase.html 277 “Fecund Foreigners?”

Immigration made the twentieth century the American century, and continued immigration will define the twenty-first as American as well. Unless. The suspicious, nativist, America First groundswell of recent years threatens to choke off the immigration tap that made America great by walling up the border between the United States and everywhere else. Under President Donald Trump, the federal government not only cracked down on illegal immigrants, it reduced legal admissions for skilled workers, a suicidal policy for the U.S. economy. If this change is permanent, if Americans out of senseless fear reject their immigrant tradition, turning their backs on the world, then the United States too will decline, in numbers and power and influence and wealth.

Yes, it doesn’t help that the Middle Eastern refugee crisis has generated local acts of terrorism from extremists posing as refugees. But long before the Syrian civil war or the rise of ISIS, national populations chafed at what they saw as the infiltration of their societies by foreigners. ISIS didn’t create Donald Trump in the United States, or Marine Le Pen in France or Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The seeds had already been sown. But the blame for this sorry state lies not only with the populist, nativist nationalists on the right. Defenders of immigration on the left contribute too, by characterizing immigration as a test of personal compassion and tolerance.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Rather than have this public conversation about what is happening with our degraded information ecologies, however, states are increasingly bringing the social industry giants to book over ‘fake news’. III. Donald Trump’s gleeful appropriation of the term ‘fake news’ ought to have been a red flag. It ought to have alerted us to the intrinsically authoritarian cadences of this language, and to the fact that it isn’t saying exactly what we’d like to think it is. In the United States, the term gained currency as part of an attempt to explain why the paragon of the Washington governing class, Hillary Clinton, lost to the far-right rank outsider Donald Trump. After all, Trump’s candidacy was supposed to assure a Clinton win; leaked Democratic Party strategy documents showed that they sought to encourage the Republicans to veer as far right as possible, in the hope of building a broad centre to rival them.15 The New York Times, a paper very much of the Democratic Party establishment, conducted an in-depth investigation into these ‘fake news’ stories that it said had warped the outcome.

There is no evidence that this toxicity is chemical. To locate it, we may have to go, as Freud put it, ‘beyond the pleasure principle’.94 The name for our compulsion to pursue that which we know will give us unpleasure is ‘death drive’. CHAPTER THREE WE ARE ALL CELEBRITIES Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser. Donald Trump, Twitter.com The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear – like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is. . . it could be you!’ Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle I. No one kneads us again out of earth and clay/no one incants our dust.

Alex Jones’s far-right conspiracy website, Infowars, builds on talk radio’s tradition of right-wing rage, conspiracy-as-infotainment and ‘home shopping’. Much of what is classified as ‘fake news’ is just satire taken literally. For example, the satirical claim that the US would house a quarter of a million Syrian refugees at the Standing Rock Reservation was repeated in earnest by Sean Hannity of Fox News, and Donald Trump.25 In other cases, the old media concocts a false news story out of random detritus found on the internet. The Toronto Sun’s false story claiming that asylum seekers being temporarily housed at the Radisson Hotel Toronto East had ‘slaughtered goats’ in the bathrooms, was based entirely on unverified reviews left on the TripAdvisor website.26 Nonetheless, ‘fake news’ has galvanized governments to act against Facebook, as part of the general attempt to invigilate liberal states against the populist menace.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Some blame Wall Street and what they call the “neoliberalism” of free market monetary capitalism, with its rapacious appetite for financial profit. Then there are those who see the problem in our new, unstable international system—for instance, the cult-of-personality authoritarianism in Russia, which they say is destabilizing Europe and America with a constant barrage of fake news. There’s the xenophobic reality television populism of Donald Trump and the success of the Brexit plebiscite in the United Kingdom—although sometimes it’s hard to tell if these are causes or effects of our predicament. What is clear, however, is that our twentieth-century elites have lost touch with twenty-first-century popular sentiment. This crisis of our elites explains not only the scarcity of trust bedeviling most advanced democracies but also the populist ressentiment on both left and right, against the traditional ruling class.

The Russian state is making a massive investment in the machinery of digital untruth as the main vehicle—a kind of digital Ministry of Truth—of its domestic and foreign policy. More than that, it has set up a four-story office complex in St. Petersburg as the headquarters of Russia’s “troll army,” the hundreds, maybe even thousands of bloggers paid by Putin to lie on the internet about everything from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to the war in Ukraine.21 The Kremlin sponsors the online harassment of anyone who tries to expose these trolls and has, according to the New York Times, hired “elite hackers” and made cyberwarfare a “central tenet” of expanding its interests overseas.22 Russia spends $300 million annually on a “cyber army” of a thousand hackers, which, according to the Financial Times, is known as APT 28 and also goes under the name of Fancy Bears’ Hack Team.

But given Peter Thiel’s influential role in the Trump administration, especially as an advisor of the new regime’s tech policy, this seems extremely unlikely. Thiel, the libertarian multibillionaire investor who made one of his most successful counterintuitive bets when, alone in Silicon Valley, he backed Donald Trump for the presidency, is an outspoken supporter of monopolies. In his bestselling libertarian manifesto Zero to One, Thiel even seems to suggest that it’s the government’s role to let monopolies alone because of their supposed efficiencies and wealth-creating benefits. Reback, of course, would strongly disagree with Thiel about the collective benefits of monopolies.


pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

From the United States to France to Germany, the left is losing. This is an era of authoritarian Big Men: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India. Corbyn has a simple answer to the question of the struggles of the establishment left. He believes that for too long progressive parties have pursued the wrong policies and have been too-willing servants of ‘neoliberalism’. In America, Donald Trump won the presidency because he ‘was a well-funded opportunist who doesn’t appear to put forward an entirely coherent message other than one of blaming women and minorities’, and because he ‘somehow managed to present himself as a “saviour” to people who were suffering the trauma of industrial decline’.

ANTONIO GRAMSCI ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.’ OSCAR WILDE ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ THERESA MAY Introduction: Getting the Balance Right There’s no denying that we are living through an era of extraordinary politics. Old certainties are crumbling, social trust has declined, and shocks keep happening, from the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, to the vote for Brexit, to the no less astonishing triumph in France of Emmanuel Macron, a former Rothschild banker who founded his own movement and party and swept to power in 2017. The New Statesman – where I have worked as editor since autumn 2008 – began in 1913 as a weekly review of politics and literature.

So, for example, the deal that was done with Nissan’ – to persuade the Japanese carmaker to expand its production in Sunderland after Brexit – ‘I don’t know what the terms of that deal are, but we should know. Because that will tell us a lot about what they’re prepared to concede in order to keep access to the single market.’ * * * Blair says that he has never met Donald Trump, although he knows his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the real estate multimillionaire. Trump’s venality, belligerence, isolationist rhetoric and narrow definition of the national interest has alarmed the Anglo-American foreign policy establishment, which considers Trump to be a clear and present danger to the rules-based liberal world order.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Buettner, Russ, and Charles V. Bagli. “How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Billions.” New York Times, 11 June 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html?_r=0; Carroll, Lauren, and Clayton Youngman. “Fact-Checking Claims About Donald Trump’s Four Bankruptcies.” Politifact, 21 Sept. 2015, www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/21/carly-fiorina/trumps-four-bankruptcies/; Isidore, Chris. “Everything You Want to Know about Donald Trump’s Bankruptcies.” CNN, 31 Aug. 2015, money.cnn.com/2015/08/31/news/companies/donald-trump-bankruptcy/; Harwell, Drew, and Jacob Bogage.

“Treasury Presentation to TBAC,” www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/quarterly-refunding/Documents/November%202014%20QRCombined%20Charges%20for%20Archives.pdf. 40. See supra notes 38–40; author’s calculations (based on Treasury data and ten-year yields). 41. Appelbaum, Binyamin. “Donald Trump’s Idea to Cut National Debt: Get Creditors to Accept Less.” New York Times, 6 May 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/us/politics/donald-trumps-idea-to-cut-national-debt-get-creditors-to-accept-less.html?_r=0. 42. US Federal Reserve System, Board of Governors “Financial Accounts of the United States,” 10 Mar. 2016, table D3; Federal Reserve Statistical Release, G.19, Consumer Credit, released 6 May 2016. 43.

“Marco Rubio’s Career Bedeviled by Financial Struggles.” New York Times, 9 June 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/us/politics/marco-rubio-finances-debt-loans-credit.html. 47. Rubin, Richard, and John McCormick. “Even 40,000 Scott Walkers Aren’t as Wealthy as Donald Trump.” Bloomberg, 3 Aug. 2015, www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-08-03/even-40-000-scott-walkers-aren-t-as-wealthy-as-donald-trump; Jacobs, Harrison. “Scott Walker has tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of credit-card debt.” Business Insider, 3 Aug. 2015, www.businessinsider.com/scott-walker-has-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-worth-of-credit-card-debt-2015-8. 48.


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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

As long as someone is white, male, and telling us to pay attention to him, we’ll follow even “the most obviously bumbling con artist dumbass ever birthed by the universe,” West says. Even rude, mediocre, murderous Ted Bundy. Even buffoonish Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland. Even racist fascist misogynist Donald Trump. Even diabolical despotic Jim Jones. Admittedly, it isn’t always productive to make blanket statements equating Donald Trump (or any problematic leader) to Jim Jones. That’s chiefly because it’s not the most useful way to evaluate their specific danger. Jonestown, cult scholars agree, was a singularly extraordinary tragedy, which had never happened before and remains unreplicated to this day.

There, Peale preached the “prosperity gospel” to a congregation of mostly wealthy, influential Manhattanites—including, and especially, a young Donald Trump. (By no coincidence, Trump grew up to become a hard-core MLM enthusiast.) Known for his inspiring self-help oratory, Peale evangelized sentiments like “Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that,” and “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” You can hear Peale’s influence in Donald Trump’s speeches and social media posts half a century later. “Success tip: See yourself as victorious.

That second name should sound familiar: The DeVoses are a Michigan-based family of politically influential billionaires; Rich was the father-in-law of Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy. With a personal net worth of over $5 billion, Rich DeVos served as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, was BFFs with Gerald Ford, secured special Amway tax breaks for hundreds of millions of dollars, and funneled prodigious sums into Republican presidential candidates’ coffers. Amway funded the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and, naturally, the most direct-sales-friendly president of all time, Donald Trump. Throughout the 2010s, Trump made a killing from his endorsements of several MLMs.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

The resulting company: Stephane Fitch, “The Real Apprentices,” Forbes, Oct. 16, 2006. Also Stephane Fitch, “What Is Trump Worth?” Forbes.com, Sept. 21, 2006. 40. “I took a big risk”: E-mail interview with Donald Trump. The Apprentice dominated ratings during its first three seasons (2004 and early 2005), then trailed off. 41. “Pressure can bring out the best”: E-mail interview with Donald Trump. 42. Born in 1897: “Daniel Ludwig, Billionaire Businessman Dies at 95,” obituary, New York Times, Aug. 29, 1992. Much of the material in the subsequent section comes from this obituary. 43. When Ludwig ran into difficulties: Warren Hoge, “Ludwig May Cut Brazil Project,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 1980. 44.

Soros was the largest single donor: Center for Responsive Politics, “Top Individual Contributors to 527 Committees, 2004 Election Cycle.” 18. President Bush felt so threatened: AP Wire Service, “Republicans File Complaint over Kerry, Group Ads,” Apr. 1, 2004. 19. Indeed, being wealthy: Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, Eileen P. Gunn, and Michelle McGowan, “The Money Chase,” Fortune, Sept. 7, 1998. 20. Even Donald Trump considered: Jerry Useem and Theodore Spencer, “What Does Donald Trump Really Want?” Fortune, Apr. 3, 2000. 21. Rockefeller says that in 1967: David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 194. 22. And in 1992 Ross Perot spent: Connie Cass, “For His Second Presidential Bid, Ross Perot Has Turned from a Free-Spending Billionaire into Something of a Penny-Pincher,” Associated Press, Oct. 22, 1996. 23.

Power and Politics Afterword: Money and Happiness Endnotes Appendix: The Forbes 400, 1982–2006 Notes Contributors Copyright Page Acknowledgments For the past twenty-five years, Forbes magazine has compiled its now legendary list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans and considered the state of the nation’s vast fortunes. Its issues on the subject have been rich in facts and figures, on who’s up and who’s down, on whether Bill Gates (or Donald Trump) has a billion more or less. But the list is perforce numbers-driven; the issues focus less on the character of the people and the peculiar world they inhabit. What makes the Forbes 400 members tick? Who gets to the top—and why? How different are they from more average Americans? Are they happy?


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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

The policed may go mute in public, but resentment builds up in their hearts and homes, then bursts forth in the voting booth when activated by a demagogue. As one study found in 2017, “Temporarily priming PC [politically correct] norms significantly increased support for Donald Trump” (and not just among right-wingers: the study’s participants were “largely politically moderate Americans”).9 Donald Trump certainly agreed. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he said during his 2016 campaign. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”

Bill Schneider, Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable (Simon & Schuster, 2018), p. 261. 9. Lucian Gideon Conway, Meredith A. Repke, and Shannon C. Houck, “Donald Trump as a Cultural Revolt against Perceived Communication Restriction: Priming Political Correctness Norms Causes More Trump Support,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 5, No. 1 (2017). Chapter 2 1. Ben Bradlee Jr., The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America (Little, Brown, 2018), p. 247. 2. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), pp. 89, 91, 74, 76. 3.

Foer’s passion is the spirit of the Constitution of Knowledge—the spirit this book seeks to defend and empower. 2 The State of Nature: Tribal Truth Bias, groupthink, and the epistemic war of all against all In 2018 Americans waited anxiously for answers. A special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, was digging into the activities of a president, Donald Trump. The president’s future seemed to hang in the balance. Well, some people waited anxiously. Others already knew the result. As a Trump supporter named Donna Kowalczyk told the journalist Ben Bradlee Jr., “I don’t think there’s anything to it. If they find something, they will have made it up.”1 To say that she and I approached the question differently would be an understatement.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

Canepa, “From Court to Forest: The Literary Itineraries of Giambattista Basile,” Italica 71, 291–310 (1994). 90. C. Johnson, “Donald Trump Says the US Military Will Commit War Crimes for Him,” Fox News Debate, published online March 4, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/​watch?time_continue=9&v=u3LszO-YLa8. 91. B. Kentish, “Donald Trump Blames ‘Animals’ Supporting Hillary Clinton for Office Firebomb Attack,” The Independent (2016), published online October 17, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/​news/​world/​americas/​us-elections/​us-election-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-animals-firebomb-attack-north-carolina-republican-party-a7365206.html. 92. M. Miller, “Donald Trump On a Protester: ‘I’d Like to Punch Him in the Face,’ ” Washington Post (2016).

As the Italian poet Giambattista Basile wrote, “though the tongue has no bones, it can break a spine.”89 “Can you imagine—can you imagine these people, these animals over in the Middle East, that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we’re having a problem with waterboarding?” Donald Trump said on his campaign trail. “We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding.”90 The presidential campaign of Donald Trump was unique for many reasons, but one of the most disturbing was the dehumanizing rhetoric he used throughout the campaign. Trump had an uncanny intuition for groups his constituents would consider outsiders and was adept at framing these outsiders as threatening.

Miller, “Donald Trump On a Protester: ‘I’d Like to Punch Him in the Face,’ ” Washington Post (2016). Published online February 23, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​morning-mix/​wp/​2016/​02/​23/​donald-trump-on-protester-id-like-to-punch-him-in-the-face/. 93. J. Diamond, “Trump: I Could Shoot Somebody and Not Lose Voters” CNN Politics (2016). Published online January 24, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/​2016/​01/​23/​politics/​donald-trump-shoot-somebody-support/. 94. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 2016). 95. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class, and What We Can Do About It (UK: Hachette, 2017). 96.


Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

Krieger, “‘Bernie or Bust’: Over 50,000 Sanders Supporters Pledge to Never Vote for Hillary,” Liberty Blitzkrieg, March 3, 2016, https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/03/03/bernie-or-bust-over-50000-sanders-supporters-pledge-to-never-vote-for-hillary/. 31. L. Gambino, “Trump: Hillary Clinton May Be ‘Most Corrupt Person Ever’ to Run for President,” The Guardian, June 22, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/22/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-corrupt-person-president. 32. See E. F. Bloomfield and G. Tscholl, “Analyzing Warrants and Worldviews in the Rhetoric of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton: Burke and Argumentation in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society 13, no. 2 (2018), https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=comm_fac_articles. 33.

Writing at the time of the 2004 presidential campaign, in which George W. Bush faced off against John Kerry, Ames had a prescription for how the left could neutralize the spite-voter. All they had to do was “not stir up the wrong bile.” Twelve years later, Hillary Clinton would famously refer to half of Donald Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables.” Not only did she stir up bile, but she did so using a blender with no lid. Spite not only impacts whom we elect. It also affects the policies our elected officials pursue and how we feel about them. Consider policies relating to income distribution. We might expect that as economic times get tougher people would be more in favor of their government reducing the difference between the rich and the poor.

In the darkness of anonymity, spite slips its chains. What we have learned about spite can contribute to a fuller understanding of the major political events of our time and potentially those yet to come. HILLARY CLINTON WAS GREAT AT getting people to vote for her. In fact, she was better at it than Donald Trump by nearly three million votes. Unfortunately, the Trump campaign, the media, the Democratic Party establishment, the Russian government, and even Clinton herself proved to have a knack for getting people to not vote for her. There is no single reason why Clinton failed to win the US presidency in 2016.


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

Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress. New York, Touchstone, 1999, p. xiv. 27 D. Montgomery, ‘AOC’s Chief of Change’, Washington Post, 10 July 2019. 28 Matthew Choi, ‘Fox News host says Warren “sounds like Donald Trump at his best”’, Politico.com, 5 June 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/tuckercarlson-elizabeth-warren-donald-trump-1355871 (accessed 9 March 2020). 29 R. A. Stapleton and S. E. Goodman, ‘The Soviet Union and the personal computer “revolution”’, Report to National Council for Soviet and East European Research, June 1988. 30 ‘If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute’, as the ad had it. 31 S.

History does not repeat itself, but human nature does. I OPEN 1 OPEN EXCHANGE ‘We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny […] before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world.’ Martin Luther King, 1967 In July 2017, US president Donald Trump was editing an upcoming speech with his staff secretary. In the margin he scribbled three words indicating what he wanted to emphasize in the speech, and which also summed up his America First worldview: ‘TRADE IS BAD’.1 In the view of Trump, and many of the new populists of the Right and the Left in ascendance around the world, free trade is the worst foreign import of them all.

An increase in a country’s foreign trade by ten percentage points is associated with an increase in productivity between 1.4 and 9.6 per cent.58 This creative destruction is, of course, also what condemns free trade in the eyes of many people. Competition from imports hurts particular sectors, and results in the dislocation of workers. In his inaugural address in 2017, US president Donald Trump echoed the protectionists of the 1920s in saying that free trade had resulted in ‘the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs’.59 The election of Trump has been widely interpreted as a reaction to the loss of US manufacturing jobs and the collapse of the American Rust Belt, just as similar dislocation in other parts of the world has resulted in protectionist reactions there.


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Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

Trump regularly reposted QAnon content: David Klepper and Ali Swenson, “Trump Openly Embraces, Amplifies Qanon Conspiracy Theories,” Associated Press, Sept. 16, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/technology-donald-trump-conspiracy-theories-government-and-politics-db50c6f709b1706886a876ae6ac298e2. In another speech, Trump said: Peter Wade, “Crowd Jeers and Laughs When Trump Threatens Journalists with Prison Rape,” Rolling Stone, Oct. 22, 2022, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-threatens-journalists-prison-rape-1234616603/. “I don’t think the people of this country”: https://hughhewitt.com/donald-trump-returns-to-talks-election-2022-indictments/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top.

You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. To Rory PROLOGUE 1776 The spirit of rebellion was in the air on January 6, 2021. Vice President Mike Pence was due to certify Joseph Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election in a ceremony at the Capitol. But supporters of President Donald Trump, and Trump himself, were mobilizing for a confrontation that they hoped would change the outcome. The Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, had crafted a nine-page plan for storming the Capitol and other buildings in Washington; it was called “1776 Returns.” Two days earlier, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, another extremist outfit, said, “We’re walking down the same exact path as the Founding Fathers.”

McVeigh failed to find his army because he had no efficient way to locate and mobilize potential allies; in other words, McVeigh didn’t have the internet, in particular social media. As it turned out, there was an army of McVeigh’s heirs out there, but it took the invention of cyberspace for the soldiers to find one another. * * * Donald Trump broke the pattern of right-wing terror rising under Democratic administrations and falling during Republican ones for a simple reason. He encouraged it. Trump won election as president, served in office, and sought to remain there after he lost in 2020 by embracing political violence. From his earliest campaigning to the final moments of his presidency, Trump employed the language of not-so-veiled physical threat.


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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

Bill Gates advises schoolchildren to be nice to nerds on the grounds that one day they will be working for them. Sports stars and managers routinely boast that their sports are ‘meritocracies’ in which all that matters is skill. Politicians are alternately boastful and defensive about their IQs. As well as declaring himself a ‘very stable genius’, Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted that he has ‘a very good brain’ and a ‘high IQ’. During his first run for the presidency back in 1987, Joe Biden ticked off a voter who asked him about his educational qualifications by retorting, ‘I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do … I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours.’8 Boris Johnson has been known to rag David Cameron because he was a King’s Scholar at Eton, a sure sign of mental ability, while Cameron was an Oppidan, or regular fee payer.

In Britain, one of the strongest predictors of how you would vote in the Brexit referendum was educational level.52 In America, the proportion of people who voted Republican in presidential elections in the hundred best-educated counties, judged by the proportion of degree holders, shrank from 76 per cent in 1980 to 16 per cent in 2020.53 Donald Trump, who was particularly successful at appealing to blue-collar workers, even declared, ‘I love the poorly educated.’54 Chapter Seventeen returns to one of the themes of the earlier part of the book: the Far East. Singapore is the closest thing the world has seen to Plato’s Republic or Confucius’s mandarin state.

Augustus solidified his initially precarious position by offering jobs to almost all his relatives, however distant, and by forming marriage alliances with other powerful families.4 Nepotism was also the hallmark of the earliest family businesses, not just the numerous small companies that advertised themselves under the ampersand ‘& son’ but also multinational behemoths such as the Fugger and Rothschild banks.5 Patronage (and indeed nepotism) survives to this day: presidents and prime ministers habitually surround themselves with people they can trust and reward them with coveted positions when they leave office. David Cameron brought a clique of Eton- and Oxford-educated chums with him to Downing Street and gave them baubles when he resigned despite the fact that they lost an unlosable referendum. Donald Trump surrounded himself with members of the Trump organization as well as relatives such as daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. John F. Kennedy made his brother, Bobby, attorney general, and Bill Clinton gave his wife the job of overhauling America’s health-care system. Yet today’s examples of patronage are small compared with the ones we encounter in the pre-modern world.


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Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Inclusive Growth in the Developed World The developed world needs new ideas—perhaps even more so than developing nations, which can always emulate yesterday’s successes—to embark on a path of inclusive economic growth. We are getting a fresh policy take for sure with Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the US presidency. But all indications as I write these lines are that he will lead us astray and make our problems worse. Donald Trump’s brand of flawed economic strategy was on full display even before he took office as president. Within weeks of the election, Trump had already claimed a victory. Through a mix of carrots and sticks, he was able to prevail on the heating and cooling firm Carrier to keep some of its operations alive in Indiana, “saving” around 1,000 American jobs.

Even two decades ago, it was easy to see that mainstream politicians’ unwillingness to offer remedies for the insecurities and inequalities of our globalized age would create political space for demagogues with easy solutions. Back then, it was Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan; today it is Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and sundry others. The Abdication of the Left The bigger surprise is the decidedly right-wing tilt the political reaction has taken. In Europe, it is predominantly nationalists and nativist populists that have risen to prominence, with the left advancing only in a few places such as Greece and Spain. In the United States, the right-wing demagogue Donald Trump has managed to displace the Republican establishment, while the leftist Bernie Sanders was unable to overtake the centrist Hillary Clinton.

. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 To my children Deniz, Odile, and Delphine, who replenish my faith daily that the world will become a better place CONTENTS Preface ix CHAPTER 1 A Better Balance 1 CHAPTER 2 How Nations Work 15 CHAPTER 3 Europe’s Struggles 48 CHAPTER 4 Work, Industrialization, and Democracy 79 CHAPTER 5 Economists and Their Models 114 CHAPTER 6 The Perils of Economic Consensus 139 CHAPTER 7 Economists, Politics, and Ideas 159 CHAPTER 8 Economics as Policy Innovation 181 CHAPTER 9 What Will Not Work 202 CHAPTER 10 New Rules for the Global Economy 222 CHAPTER 11 Growth Policies for the Future 239 CHAPTER 12 It’s the Politics, Stupid! 267 Acknowledgments 275 Notes 281 Index 301 PREFACE Are economists responsible for Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the US presidential election? Economists might only wish they have the kind of power it takes to determine elections. But even if they may not have caused (or stopped) Trump, one thing is certain: economists would have had a greater—and much more positive—impact on the public debate had they stuck closer to their discipline’s teaching, instead of siding with globalization’s cheerleaders.


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Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, Apple II, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, break the buck, buttonwood tree, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, financial repression, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Potemkin village, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tontine, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

And to do this, the Democrats advocated “breaking up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that pose a systemic risk to the stability of our economy” and an “updated and modernized” version of the so-called Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which forced the separation of investment banking from commercial banking for the next sixty-six years, until its repeal in 1999. Plugging his new book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, after the election of Donald Trump, Senator Sanders continues to lambast Wall Street. Hell, Wall Street has grown so unpopular that even the 2016 Republican Party platform called for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. Just think about that for a moment. Rest assured, Trump’s victory does not necessarily mean that the populist anger directed toward Wall Street dissolves overnight.

Take, for instance, the word “securities,” which is nothing more than Wall Street argot for an ownership position in a stock—the equity value of a corporation—or a bond, which is a creditor’s right to receive fixed payments (plus the return of the principal) from a corporation, or a government entity, over time in exchange for lending money to it. If you’re like most people, though, once you hear the term “leveraged buyout” or “credit default swap,” your eyes glaze over and you mentally check out. Or maybe you are just utterly confused by the fact that after attacking Wall Street mercilessly during his campaign, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with Wall Street veterans. But here’s the thing: If you like your iPhone (which you clearly do, because more than one billion iPhones have been sold worldwide since its inception in June 2007), or your wide-screen TV, or your car, or your morning bacon, or your pension, or your 401(k), then you are a fan of Wall Street, whether you know it or not.

Wall Street today is more akin to a Disney theme park, or what a Disney park might be if it mythologized moneymaking. There is a Tiffany, a Hermès store, a BMW showroom, a Tumi luggage store, and an outlet for True Religion brand jeans. Fifty-Five Wall Street, which at one time was the headquarters of what is now Citigroup, is a branch of the Cipriani restaurant empire and is used for benefit dinners. Donald Trump claims to own 40 Wall Street, but, of course, that’s not entirely true: He leases the building from the Italian businessmen who actually own the land underneath it. There are apartments for rent or sale at 37 Wall Street, at 63 Wall Street, at 75 Wall Street, at 95 Wall Street, and at 101 Wall Street.


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

The global range of his contacts in business and politics helped him to keep expanding Deutsche Bank’s businesses. For example, one set of contacts led the bank into a host of deals with the Trump Organization. By 2012, after endless legal battles had caused other banks to cease working with the organization, Deutsche Bank was the only global bank still doing business with Donald Trump. Ackermann’s Russian connections were probably closer than that of any other chairman of a major Western bank, and Deutsche gained a unique foothold in Moscow. And while those relationships generated a good deal of legitimate business, they also produced some questionable deals. It was one of the largest Western banks to be caught up in the Danske Bank scandal.

We regret their unwillingness to engage with our inquiry and must leave others to judge whether their work at ‘the forefront of financial, corporate and commercial developments in Russia’ has left them so entwined in the corruption of the Kremlin and its supporters that they are no longer able to meet the standards expected of a UK-regulated law firm.”12 Oleg Deripaska is featured prominently in the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller13 into Russian interference in the US 2016 election. The Russian had extensive dealings, for example, with Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign in 2016, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on multiple charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, and lying to the FBI. Nevertheless, despite the public concerns about Deripaska raised by both Mueller and the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee, the US Treasury lifted sanctions on En+ and Rusal in January 2019.

Those warehouses contain the collections of many art investors, and as Rybolovlev drew attention to Bouvier’s dealings, the Monaco authorities started to look at his claims and at the warehouses. They also started to investigate the financial dealings of the Russian, who has sprawling interests, from the ownership of the Monaco FC soccer club to ownership of a mansion in Palm Beach that he bought in 2008 for $5 million from Donald Trump. His largest investment, however, is in a Russian company called Uralkali, which is a producer and exporter of potash fertilizer. Eventually, in a surprising twist, they announced that they would be bringing criminal charges against the Russian tycoon.18 Wealthy people across the globe also invest heavily in jewelry.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The results were also comparable: increased deportations, the pushing of migrants into more remote and dangerous routes, greater risk of abuse and violence, yet little slowing of migrant flows.6 As journalist Manuel Bojórquez reported, “The Obama administration wants to stem the flow of children entering the United States illegally by highlighting the perils of the journey. But many young immigrants say they know the dangers. They believe the risk at home is greater.”7 DONALD TRUMP, IMMIGRATION, AND THE WORKING CLASS It wasn’t that big a jump from President Bill Clinton’s criminalization of immigrants with the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) to Obama’s recriminalization with humanitarian exceptions, to candidate and then president Donald Trump’s repeated references to immigrants as “rapists,” “criminals,” “bad hombres,” and “bad dudes.” Nativism had become one arm of a multifaceted project of the criminalization of people of color, with mass incarceration, expansion and militarization of the police, and the creation of a climate of fear so as to justify the growth and institutionalization of a repressive apparatus at home and abroad.

On analyzing the white working-class vote, see Emma Green, “It Was Cultural Anxiety That Drove White Working Class Voters to Trump,” Atlantic, May 9, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771; Stephen Rose, “Trump and the Revolt of the White Middle Class,” Washington Monthly, January 18, 2017, http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/01/18/trump-and-the-revolt-of-the-white-middle-class; Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr, “The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt,” Slate, December 1, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/the_myth_of_the_rust_belt_revolt.html; John Henley, “White and Wealthy Voters Gave the Victory to Donald Trump,” Guardian, November 9, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/white-voters-victory-donald-trump-exit-polls; Ted Mellnik, John Muyskens, Kim Soffen and Scott Clement, “That Big Wave of Less-Educated White Voters? It Never Happened,” Washington Post, May 10, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/census-election-turnout.

., “a schizophrenic”), the stylebook recommended specifying an action, rather than labeling a person. Thus “a person living in the country illegally” would be preferred. But many newspapers, and even AP itself, continued to use the proscribed terms.1 The concept of “illegality,” as discussed in Part II of this book, received new impetus from Donald Trump, who, in addition to using the term, frequently invoked words such as “rapist,” “gangs,” and “criminals” when talking about immigrants. Most immigrant rights organizations continued to support the use of the term “undocumented” and promoted slogans like “undocumented and unafraid.” Young people who obtained temporary status through President Obama’s DACA program sometimes referred to themselves as “DACA-mented.”


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

You’ll also know that straight white men aren’t evil (it’s actually racist and sexist to believe so) and that Western values rooted in individual rights are the cornerstones of free societies. Defend them proudly! Learn how to spot fake news: So much of this hatred comes from our deeply corrupt mainstream media. Activists pretending to be journalists have helped spread fake news more than Donald Trump ever could do on his own, so we’ll look at how to spot the lies. You’ll learn that the blue-check Twitterati at Vox, BuzzFeed, and HuffPo release ideologically driven articles presented as legitimate journalism. You’ll no longer believe that just because the staff at The New York Times and CNN once did their jobs they also do it now.

He even once told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “Our direct message to families is ‘do not send your children to the border.’ If they do make it, they’ll be sent back. But they may not make it [at all].” Yes, that’s progressive hero, Mr. Hope and Change himself, Barack Obama, sounding an awful lot like evil, racist Republican Donald Trump, wouldn’t you say? Meanwhile, Democrat senator Chuck Schumer of New York once said during a 2009 speech at Georgetown University: “The American people are fundamentally pro-legal immigration and anti-illegal immigration. We will only pass comprehensive reform when we recognize this fundamental concept.

I felt that after the disaster of Iraq it was time for some of the other regional actors to step up and do something to stabilize Syria, most notably Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Once we’d committed to doing something, however, we had to back it up with action. Preventive threats in other situations have been successful for years, which is why we cannot operate on a no-war policy. Interestingly, Donald Trump has been resetting our policy of credible deterrence quite well. When he killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike in January of 2020, many media elites and Twitter warriors proclaimed this was the beginning of World War III. As of this writing, the war has yet to break out. Bad news for MSNBC, good news for the rest of the world.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Though rooted in and motivated by local politics and history, the activists I spoke with were all engaged in fighting the same things: poverty wages, the disappearance of public services (education, healthcare, water), the transformation of workers into independent contractors (and with that a loss of seniority, benefits, pensions), disrespect, sexual harassment and violence, mass evictions and disregard of people’s land rights. What follows are some stories of their resistance—their struggles, their losses, their victories, their visions for the future. When I began this book Donald Trump had not yet been elected president of the United States. As the book goes to press, the US and many parts of the world are just coming out of a period of shock and mourning that followed the election. Listening to the activists whose words animate this book has been healing for me, inspiring. US activists, especially African American and Latinx workers, reminded me that their battles had begun long before Trump, and that they planned to keep on struggling as they had for centuries.

In a twenty-first-century update of Andrew Carnegie’s nineteenth-century “Gospel of Wealth,” corporate titans espoused a gospel of global profit-taking. Politicians—many with ties to global corporations—signed on, passing tax cuts for the wealthy, slashing labor and environmental protections, Social Security, education and healthcare programs. Like Carnegie, they have argued that philanthropy obviates the need for rights. But from Donald Trump to the Walton family, the 1 percent has given selectively and stingily.3 In many ways, Trump’s election as president of the United States in 2016 was a culminating moment in the rise of the twenty-first-century Gospel of Wealth. The oil-magnate Koch brothers had long worked to dismantle welfare-state provisions and worker protections.

Since most American workers no longer earn a living wage, activists see unlimited possibilities for growth. Many cities have passed the $15 minimum wage. New York and California enacted $15 state minimums. And new living-wage bills are considered every term by cities and towns across the US.3 Will these victories survive the presidency of Donald Trump, and the rise of authoritarian regimes in the Philippines, Brazil, and other parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia? Activists believe they will, because rising inequality and falling real wages are so widespread, and are sparking anger across political divides. Some movement gains will likely not survive.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

mostly by accident in 2010: Nik DeCosta-Klipa, “How Paul LePage Got Elected, and How Mainers Think They Can Fix a Broken Voting System,” Boston Globe, Sept. 1, 2016. less and less of the state’s federal grant: Eric Russell, “Maine Sits on Millions in Federal Welfare Dollars, yet Poverty Rises,” Portland Press Herald, Oct. 23, 2016. “Donald Trump before Donald Trump”: Associated Press, “I Was Donald Trump Before Donald Trump Became Popular,” New York Post, Mar. 5, 2016. “The Maine food stamp work requirement”: Robert Rector, Rachel Sheffield, and Kevin Dayaratna, “Maine Food Stamp Work Requirement Cuts Non-Parent Caseload by 80 percent” (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, Feb. 8, 2016).

He rolled back MaineCare for nondisabled but very low-income adults. He slashed the TANF case rolls, spending less and less of the state’s federal grant on cash assistance. In his bluster and bluntness and his occasional outbursts of racism, LePage sounded a lot like Trump, and he had described himself as “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular.” (He hates Trump, for the record.) But his policies have won plaudits from conservatives intent on shrinking the size of the welfare state and concerned with welfare dependency. “The Maine food stamp work requirement is sound public policy,” scholars at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that tends to feed policy thinkers into Republican administrations, wrote in 2016.

The American faith in hard work and the American cult of self-reliance exist and persist, seen in our veneration of everyone from Franklin to Frederick Douglass to Oprah Winfrey, or in our obsession with antiheroes like Jay Gatsby, Stringer Bell, Al Swearengen, and Tony Soprano. (I would gently note that Donald Trump has persistently promoted the idea that he is mostly a self-made success, turning a $1 million loan into a $10 billion fortune; fact-checkers have disputed this claim.) We believe in hard work, that it will get you ahead and that it is the pathway to righteous prosperity. We believe that we are all responsible for our own success.


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

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Engineers ran tests for Dallas: YouTube, like most internet companies, ran these tests on subsets of its users without their knowledge. For years, YouTube showed a small percentage of viewers no ads at all, an unaware control group. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT search engine boilerplate: Ben Collins, “Meet the ‘Cult’ Leader Stumping for Donald Trump,” The Daily Beast, February 5, 2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-cult-leader-stumping-for-donald-trump. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he told viewers: Kevin Roose, “One: Wonderland,” April 16, 2020, in Rabbit Hole, produced by The New York Times, podcast, 26:48, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/podcasts/rabbit-hole-internet-youtube-virus.html.

How, seven months later, he had dropped the n-word casually in a video game stream (and apologized) but then went on to direct his viewers to a YouTuber who spouted anti-Semitic bile. How critics called PewDiePie “dangerous” and “flirting with the alt-right.” How one headline about him read, when did fascism become so cool? How people compared him to Donald Trump. But the marketing team also knew that all this only strengthened the resolve of PewDiePie’s fans—his “Bro Army,” he called them. That past autumn, when a YouTube channel featuring Bollywood songs looked set to surpass PewDiePie’s subscriber total, his army had formed a rallying cry to defend their king against critics and the threat to his crown.

They turned to C-list celebrities (ABC had Dancing with the Stars) or promised real, lasting fame: Fox’s new show American Idol topped TV ratings, drawing twenty-six million viewers an episode. A year earlier NBC brass, fretting about the end of its megahit Friends, lucked out with the surprise success of The Apprentice, a reality contest starring a washed-up real estate heir, Donald Trump. TV moguls had seen what the internet did to music. Punk pirates at a site called Napster gave it away for free, obliterating the industry. Thankfully, boomers still soaked up reality TV. But younger audiences, that slippery cultural bellwether, were already drifting away from broadcast again.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Fallows, “The Daily Trump: Filling a Time Capsule,” The Atlantic, Nov. 20, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/11/on-the-future-of-the-time-capsules/508268/. History of Trump in his first half-year as president: E. Levitz, “All the Terrifying Things That Donald Trump Did Lately,” New York, June 9, 2017. 27. “Donald Trump’s File,” PolitiFact, http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/. See also D. Dale, “Donald Trump: The Unauthorized Database of False Things,” The Star, Nov. 14, 2016, which lists 560 false claims he made in a span of two months, about twenty per day; M. Yglesias, “The Bullshitter-in-Chief,” Vox, May 30, 2017; and D.

In 2016 populist parties (mostly on the right) attracted 13.2 percent of the vote in the preceding European parliamentary elections (up from 5.1 percent in the 1960s) and entered the governing coalitions of eleven countries, including the leadership of Hungary and Poland.25 Even when they are not in power, populist parties can press their agendas, notably by catalyzing the 2016 Brexit referendum in which 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the European Union. And in that year Donald Trump was elected to the American presidency with an Electoral College victory, though with a minority of the popular vote (46 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 48 percent). Nothing captures the tribalistic and backward-looking spirit of populism better than Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America Great Again. In writing the chapters on progress, I resisted pressure from readers of earlier drafts to end each one by warning, “But all this progress is threatened if Donald Trump gets his way.” Threatened it certainly is. Whether or not 2017 really represents a turning point in history, it’s worth reviewing the threats, if only to understand the nature of the progress they threaten.26 Life and Health have been expanded in large part by vaccination and other well-vetted interventions, and among the conspiracy theories that Trump has endorsed is the long-debunked claim that preservatives in vaccines cause autism.

For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance. NOTES PREFACE 1. “Mothers and children” from Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address. “Outright war” and “spiritual and moral foundations” from Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s remarks to a Vatican conference in the summer of 2014, transcribed in J. L. Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” BuzzFeed, Nov. 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world. “Global power structure” from “Donald Trump’s Argument for America,” final television campaign ad, Nov. 2016, http://blog.4president.org/2016/2016-tv-ad/.


pages: 224 words: 71,060

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin

affirmative action, Airbnb, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, conceptual framework, David Brooks, demand response, Donald Trump, fake news, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, WeWork

But it has come to lack a properly constitutional ambition in a way that is highly relevant to the broader problem we are tracing here. Our presidents, like many members of Congress, now too often see themselves as outsiders yelling about the government more than insiders wielding its power. This has become especially clear under President Donald Trump, though it began well before him. The Trump presidency has made the problem clearer because Trump, in an unusually explicit way, approaches politics in performative, theatrical terms. He exhibits an ambition to put himself at the center of our national consciousness and attention even more than to use the institutional power of the presidency to pursue policy goals.

This is in part because Trump has not been subject, as his predecessors were, to the formative power of our political institutions. Every one of our past presidents was formed by a set of institutions—as either a senior military officer or (much more frequently) a government official serving in other offices—that shaped his understanding of how to act effectively as the head of the executive branch. Donald Trump is the first American president who has not been shaped by any experience in such institutions. His life experience involved running a family business in real estate and then becoming a professional celebrity, essentially playing the part of a successful real-estate developer in American popular culture.

But it does get harder all the time, and we live with a vague sense of unease about drawing distinctions between what people say and do and what they mean and intend. The moral logic of reality television increasingly defines the political arena: what we’re seeing is real, but it’s also being put on for show. And of course, reality television is how Donald Trump became a truly household name. He has long been at home in the genre, while the rest of us are only getting used to it. Rather than being shaped by the contours of the presidency and using it to advance an agenda, he has tended to embrace it as a platform for a kind of reality-television act. His ambition has been directed at making himself the most visible player in the drama of our culture war, filling a great deal of space in our national consciousness but leaving a void in our constitutional system.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

For all these reasons, the energy transition promises to be positive — although implementing it will be no easy feat so long as we have not seen the last of oil and coal.13 The world that is taking shape before our eyes nevertheless gives us reason to hope. More modest energy consumption will naturally stave off global tensions around the ownership of fossil-fuel sources, create green jobs in leading industrial sectors, and make Western countries serious energy contenders once again.14 Irrespective of what Donald Trump thinks, this transition is unstoppable: it involves big money that is pulling in players from all across the economy — including the oil giants. This energy transition traces its beginnings to Germany in the 1980s,15 and culminated in Paris in 2015, when 195 nations jointly agreed to accelerate this formidable journey.

Millions of jobs were siphoned,’ Australian academic Dudley Kingsnorth explained.39 By betting on renewables, Beijing precipitated the downfall of a fossil-fuel-based industrial order in which the West excelled in favour of a new energy system in which the West is already lagging behind. In a way, one can understand Donald Trump’s refusal to commit the US to the energy transition: he would rather preserve an oil-energy model that allowed the US to dominate the twentieth century40 than commit to going fully electric — a move he knows could be detrimental to American industry.41 France was not spared either. Arnaud Montebourg, the then minister of industry, reported as much in his op-ed piece published in a major French newspaper: ‘In 2001, a small village in Haute-Garonne, Marignac [in south-western France], painfully witnessed the loss of France’s only magnesium factory to Chinese competition.

Over the same period, the secondary sector’s contribution to France’s GDP slid four points.45 The figures are not much better in Europe and the US, where the industry made up 22 per cent and 18 per cent of GDP respectively in 2018, down 11 per cent and 12 per cent since the turn of the century.46 De-industrialisation in the United States and Europe hammered the post-war social contract, stirring up deep social turmoil and creating a hotbed for a franchise of populist parties. Donald Trump succeeded in reaching the White House because he could count on the voters in the de-industrialised states of the Rust Belt. In these swing states, where votes can tip the result of a national election, the Republican candidate vigorously denounced the anti-competitive practices of the Chinese and offshoring, and emphasised the need to protect the US from the industrial war spearheaded by Beijing.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Vitter, whose title will be co-chairman, gives the firm a veteran lawmaker with deep relationships with top members of the Trump administration, including Attorney General–designate Jeff Sessions….Vin Weber, a Mercury partner and a former congressman himself, called Vitter the firm’s “top choice among retiring members of Congress….” Mercury had been working to recruit Vitter since he announced he’d retire from Congress, Weber said. That may have given the firm an advantage over other lobbying shops that reached out to Vitter only after Donald Trump’s victory. “When Donald Trump won the presidency, David Vitter became an even hotter commodity,” Weber said. Vitter is forbidden from lobbying his former colleagues for two years under the “cooling-off period” mandated by legislation that Vitter himself worked to pass….But the ban doesn’t apply to the executive branch.

See also this December 2016 Congressional Research Service report on Department of Defense contracts: https://fas.org/​sgp/​crs/​natsec/​R44010.pdf. D-FARS is a tribute: Brill, “Donald Trump, Palantir, and the Crazy Battle to Clean Up a Multibillion-Dollar Military Procurement Swamp.” A study by a Defense Department: “Transforming DoD’s Core Business Processes for Revolutionary Change,” January 2015, http://www.dtic.mil/​dtic/​tr/​fulltext/​u2/​a618526.pdf. Defense Acquisition University: See the university’s website: https://www.dau.mil/. See also Brill, “Donald Trump, Palantir, and the Crazy Battle to Clean Up a Multibillion-Dollar Military Procurement Swamp.” formal protests of bid awards: Annual reports of bid protests are available on the GAO website: https://www.gao.gov/​legal/​bid-protest-annual-reports/​about.

Yet measures of public engagement, satisfaction, and confidence—voter turnout, knowledge of public policy issues, faith that the next generation will have it better than the current one, and respect for basic institutions, especially the government—are far below the levels of a half century ago, and in many cases have reached historic lows. So deep is the estrangement that 46.1 percent of American voters were so disgusted with the status quo that in 2016 they chose to put Donald Trump in the White House. It is difficult to argue that the cynicism is misplaced. From the relatively small things—that Americans are now navigating through an average of 657 water main breaks a day, for example—to the core strengths that once propelled America, it is clear that the country has gone into a tailspin since the post-war era, when John F.


pages: 93 words: 30,572

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again) by Nick Clegg

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, sceptred isle, Snapchat, Steve Bannon

Kaufman, ‘Breitbart News Network Plans Global Expansion’, www.nytimes.com, 16th February 2014 65. J. Lester Feder, ‘This is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World’, www.buzzfeed.com, 15th November 2016 66. For the full transcript of the interview with Donald Trump, see www.thetimes.co.uk, 16th January 2017 67. J. Pickard and J. Garrahan, ‘Rupert Murdoch Secretly Sat in on Interview with Donald Trump’, Financial Times, 9th February 2017 68. International Monetary Fund (IMF) figures 69. Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, letter to the Financial Times, 5th July 2017 70. Ed Vaizey and Rachel Reeves, ‘Why We Must Save Vital Nuclear Treaty with our Allies in the EU’, Sunday Telegraph, 8th July 2017 71.

Through ingenuity and generosity, we could find, if we chose to, a place for Britain within this new EU. If the triple-whammy of the eurozone economic crisis, the refugee crisis and Brexit were the immediate catalysts prompting the European Union to focus on the need for reform, the sucker punch of Donald Trump’s presidential victory stunned it into even more urgent action. Brexit, followed by Trump’s self-proclaimed ‘Brexit plus plus plus’ victory, had excitable pundits predicting that an unstoppable right-wing populist surge was poised to sweep across the whole of Europe. There had been a dramatic shift in the political weather; could Europe survive the coming storm?

The truth is that voting for Brexit felt so good to so many people because it felt like a victory of ordinary voters against the arrogance of an out-of-touch political elite. It was a triumph of the many against the elitist few. But what if this is also turning out to be untrue as well? In a speech in Mississippi in support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Nigel Farage hailed the vote for Brexit as a victory for the ‘little people, the real people … the ordinary, decent people’. A few months later Mr Farage, a privately educated ex-City trader with a taste for a post-prandial glass of port, flew across the Atlantic to join President Trump at the billionaire’s victory party.


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

Her own journey—from democracy icon to tacit collaborator in brutality fueled by Buddhist nationalism and rampant anti-Rohingya disinformation on Facebook—didn’t cut against the currents of history, it drifted in the wake of events in the wider world. In April 2017, I went to Milan with Barack Obama. He was there to speak about climate change a few weeks after Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The rhythm of the trip felt familiar: a private plane, a block of hotel rooms, Secret Service agents. But the plane was a fraction the size of Air Force One, there were only a handful of hotel rooms and agents, and unlike the crush of responsibilities that used to follow me, I had very little to do.

Hispanic immigrants. The mainstream media. Socialism. China. Antifa. The Deep State. George Soros. The conduct of elections. The real Them, of course, is where America seems to be going: a country where white people are in the minority, a world that we cannot control. None of this happened because of Donald Trump. 4 Identity Politics In May 2018, I learned that I had been spied on by a private intelligence firm of former Mossad operatives, Black Cube, which had recently gained notoriety for spying on Harvey Weinstein’s accusers. The Guardian published a story reporting that Trump associates had hired Black Cube to dig up dirt on me and another Obama administration official, Colin Kahl, in order to discredit the Iran Nuclear Deal.

Trump had dismissed her, saying that the only Ukrainians he knew were corrupt. On a mild May day, I walked cobblestoned pathways along Baden-Baden’s central canal, passed meticulously groomed red clay tennis courts with bright white umpires’ chairs, and wandered sprawling formal gardens. Statues of royals long forgotten peered over the hedges. It was four months after Donald Trump’s inauguration and I was just beginning to recover some sense of equilibrium—sleeping more, working less, reading books again, spending leisurely mornings with my daughters with no fear of being late for anything. Still, I lived in a state of permanent unease. I was a thirty-nine-year-old with as little idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life as I’d had as a twenty-three-year-old in Kaliningrad.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

They can take part in unobtrusive experiments which vary the stimuli and tabulate the responses in real time. And they happily supply these data in gargantuan numbers. Everybody Lies is more than a proof of concept. Time and again my preconceptions about my country and my species were turned upside-down by Stephens-Davidowitz’s discoveries. Where did Donald Trump’s unexpected support come from? When Ann Landers asked her readers in 1976 whether they regretted having children and was shocked to find that a majority did, was she misled by an unrepresentative, self-selected sample? Is the internet to blame for that redundantly named crisis of the late 2010s, the “filter bubble”?

With unflagging curiosity and an endearing wit, Stephens-Davidowitz points to a new path for social science in the twenty-first century. With this endlessly fascinating window into human obsessions, who needs a cerebroscope? —Steven Pinker, 2017 INTRODUCTION THE OUTLINES OF A REVOLUTION Surely he would lose, they said. In the 2016 Republican primaries, polling experts concluded that Donald Trump didn’t stand a chance. After all, Trump had insulted a variety of minority groups. The polls and their interpreters told us few Americans approved of such outrages. Most polling experts at the time thought that Trump would lose in the general election. Too many likely voters said they were put off by his manner and views.

Trump, a man who retweeted a false claim that black people are responsible for the majority of murders of white Americans, defended his supporters for roughing up a Black Lives Matters protester at one of his rallies, and hesitated in repudiating support from a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The same hidden racism that hurt Barack Obama helped Donald Trump. Early in the primaries, Nate Silver famously claimed that there was virtually no chance that Trump would win. As the primaries progressed and it became increasingly clear that Trump had widespread support, Silver decided to look at the data to see if he could understand what was going on. How could Trump possibly be doing so well?


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

The erosion of their confidence in the future of their social safety net is happening just as their need for it has increased. Anxiety, anger and despair have shredded people’s political allegiances, their trust in government and even their trust in each other. The less educated were at the core of the mutinies that saw Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the USA; Brexit defeat Remain in the UK; the insurgent parties of Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon gain over 40 per cent of the vote in France (shrivelling the incumbent Socialists to under 10 per cent); and in Germany so shrinking the Christian Democrat–Social Democrat coalition to turn the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany) into the official opposition in the Bundestag.

Political parties of the centre-left and centre-right alternated in power, but the policies remained in place. Yet, social democracy as a political force is now in existential crisis. The last decade has been a roll-call of disasters. On the centre-left, mauled by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton lost against Donald Trump; the Blair–Brown British Labour Party has been taken over by the Marxists. In France, President Hollande decided not even to seek a second term, and his replacement as the Socialist Party candidate, Benoît Hamon, crashed out with merely 8 per cent of the vote. The Social Democrat parties of Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain have all seen their vote collapse.

Not only do the new nationalists quite explicitly intend to divide society into an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, they trigger a further division within their self-defined ‘us’ due to the many people who are offended by them. Their rise bitterly divides the society. Marine Le Pen did not unite France: she divided it two-to-one against her; Donald Trump has polarized American society down the middle. Hence, such nationalism is not even a feasible means of restoring the loss of shared identity which is giving it momentum; on the contrary, it would destroy any prospect of it. In turn, this would undermine trust and the co-operation that it facilitates, and mutual regard and the generosity that it facilitates.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

online harassment and cyber hate: “Gender Distinctions in Cyber Bullying,” soc101group2, Wikispaces, Providence College, accessed Nov. 20, 2017, http://soc101group2.providence.wikispaces.net/Gender+Distinctions+in+Cyber+Bullying; Maeve Duggan, “Part 1: Experiencing Online Harassment,” Pew Research Center, Oct. 22, 2014, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302393. “by the pussy”: “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women,” New York Times, Oct. 8, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html. “I know that so many women”: Sheryl Sandberg, “#metoo. These two simple words . . .” Facebook post, Oct. 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10159365581865177. “Travis can spend eight”: Chris Sacca, “Lowercase Capital Founder Chris Sacca: Studio 1.0,” interview by author, Bloomberg, June 12, 2015, video, 27:43, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-06-13/lowercase-capital-founder-chris-sacca-studio-1-0-06-12-.

“emotional outbursts” in “electronic mail”: Erik Eckholm, “Emotional Outbursts Punctuate Conversations by Computer,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/02/science/emotional-outbursts-punctuate-conversations-by-computer.html. “low I.Q. Crazy Mika”: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came,” Twitter post, June 29, 2017, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/880408582310776832. “bleeding badly from a face-lift”: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “. . . to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift.

., television anchors Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Bill O’Reilly, and media mogul Roger Ailes. Politicians were dogged by allegations as well, including Congressman John Conyers, Senator Al Franken, and Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was accused of molesting teenage girls. During the 2016 presidential election, an Access Hollywood tape revealed Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Although Trump won the election, many women, it seems, became furious and emboldened, and 2017 turned into a watershed year, with more women coming forward daily, shining a spotlight on men who had grossly overstepped. In Silicon Valley, the scandals were just as serious.


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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

Much as many smokers would like to keep smoking, many of us are fondly attached to our gut instincts on political questions. All politicians need to do is persuade us to doubt evidence that would challenge those instincts. As Donald Trump’s former right-hand man Steve Bannon infamously told the writer Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”15 The history of another term associated with Donald Trump—“fake news”—is instructive here. Originally, it described a very specific phenomenon: websites publishing false articles in the hope of getting clicks from social media and thus advertising dollars.

Shane Frederick points out that noticing your initial error is usually all that’s necessary to solve the problem.24 The cognitive reflection questions invite us to leap to the wrong conclusion without thinking. But so, too, do inflammatory memes or tub-thumping speeches. That’s why we need to be calm. And that is also why so much persuasion is designed to arouse us—our lust, our desire, our sympathy, or our anger. When was the last time Donald Trump, or for that matter Greenpeace, tweeted something designed to make you pause in calm reflection? Today’s persuaders don’t want you to stop and think. They want you to hurry up and feel. Don’t be rushed. * * * — Han van Meegeren had been arrested almost immediately after German occupation ended.

* * * — Another way to step back and enjoy the view is to give yourself a sense of scale. Faced with a statistic, simply ask yourself, “Is that a big number?” The creators of More or Less, Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, made a habit of asking this unassuming but powerful question.10 Take, for example, the claim that Donald Trump’s border wall between the United States and Mexico would cost $25 billion to build. Is that a big number? It certainly sounds biggish, but to really understand the number you need something to compare it with. For example, the US defense budget is a little under $700 billion, or $2 billion a day.


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

It doesn’t take a Nobel Prize winner to appreciate how social media’s continuous surfacing of sensational content feeds into and reinforces these biases. It might also help explain why Donald Trump’s firehose of obvious Twitter lies about “witch hunts” and “fake news” reinforces (rather than drives away) his diehard supporters. While we are on the topic of the self-proclaimed “stable genius,” it is worth pausing and reflecting on just what an epitome of social media’s syndromes Donald Trump’s Twitter account represents. His online bullying, petty name-calling, and patent falsehoods rain down daily on his nearly one hundred million followers from one of the most popular accounts in the world.

Your daily news feeds fill with stories about data breaches, privacy infringements, disinformation, spying, and manipulation of political events. Social media executives have been dragged before congressional and parliamentary hearings to face the glare of the cameras and the scrutiny of lawmakers. The 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. election of president Donald Trump were both major precipitating factors behind the re-examination of social media’s impact on society and politics. In both cases, malicious actors, domestic and foreign, used social media to spread malfeasance and ignite real-life protests with the intent to foster chaos and further strain already acute social divisions.

Cybercrime and data breaches also skyrocketed as bad actors capitalized on millions of people working from home, their kitchen routers and jerry-rigged network setups never designed to handle sensitive communications. In spite of efforts by social media platforms to remove misleading information and point their users to credible health sources, disinformation was everywhere, sometimes consumed with terrible effects. People perished drinking poisonous cocktails shared over social media (and endorsed by Donald Trump himself) in a desperate attempt to stave off the virus. The entire situation presented a striking contrast both to the ways in which social media advertise themselves and to how they were widely perceived in the past. Once, it was conventional wisdom to assume that digital technologies would enable greater access to information, facilitate collective organizing, and empower civil society.


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

The Internet Research Agency created fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Tumblr, SoundCloud, Meetup, and other social media sites months, sometimes years, in advance. They amassed a following, coordinated with other accounts, rooted themselves in real online communities, and gained the trust of their followers. Then they created fake news intended to suppress voting and to change our vote choices, in large part toward Republican candidate Donald Trump and away from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The fake news included memes about Black Lives Matter, the mistreatment of American veterans, the Second Amendment and gun control, the supposed rise of sharia law in the United States, and well-known falsehoods like the accusation that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C.

Menczer and his colleagues point to an example in their data in which a single bot mentioned @realDonaldTrump nineteen times, linking to the false news claim that millions of votes were cast by illegal immigrants in the 2016 presidential election. The strategy works when influential people are fooled into sharing the content. Donald Trump, for example, has on a number of occasions shared content from known bots, legitimizing their content and spreading their misinformation widely in the Twitter network. It was Trump who adopted the false claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election as an official talking point.

Deepfake technology uses deep learning, a form of machine learning based on multilayered neural networks, to create hyperrealistic fake video and audio. If seeing is believing, then the next generation of falsity threatens to convince us more than any fake media we have seen so far. In 2018 movie director (and expert impersonator) Jordan Peele teamed up with BuzzFeed to create a deepfake video of Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a “complete and total dipshit.” It was convincing but obviously fake. Peele added a tongue-in-cheek nod to the obvious falsity of his deepfake when he made Obama say, “Now, I would never say these things…at least not in a public address.” But what happens when the videos are not made to be obviously fake, but instead made to convincingly deceive?


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

And though America had yet to explode into violence, the similarities to what was happening back home were undeniable. Every week there was another story of a Twitter conspiracy overtaking national politics, a Reddit subculture drifting into neo-Nazism, a YouTube addict turning to mass murder. And Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 had been attributed, in part, to social media. Though the role of the platforms remained poorly understood, it was already clear that Trump’s rise had been abetted by strange new grassroots movements and hyperpartisan outlets that thrived online, as well as Russian agents who’d exploited social media’s reality-distorting, identity-indulging tendencies.

It spurred them to share ever more links and comments tightening their in-group identity and rallying against the common enemy. It kept them clicking and posting, whipping other users into the same shared frenzy, an endless feedback loop of fear and rage that proved enormously beneficial for Silicon Valley and Donald Trump, but disastrous for everybody else. Facebook’s reach and algorithm gave it an unusually large role in creating this information ecosystem. But much the same process played out on the other platforms, suggesting that the problem was not particular to some quirk of Facebook or its founders, but endemic to modern social networks.

The platforms had learned to indulge the outrage that brought their users “a rush—of purpose, of moral clarity, of social solidarity.” The growing pace of these all-consuming meltdowns, perhaps one a week, indicated that social media was not just influencing the broader culture, but, to some extent, supplanting it, to the ultimate benefit of—and this was an outlandish argument at the time—Donald Trump. Was it so crazy to think, Williams suggested, that the new dominant media of our time might launch standard-bearers like Trump to the heights of power? Wasn’t it already happening? “The truth is,” he wrote, “these political effects are already upon us.” 2. Moral Outrage BILLY BRADY WAS a freshman at the University of North Carolina when he realized that he enjoyed getting outraged on Facebook.


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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

Bob David, Kate O’Keefe, and Lingling Wei, “U.S.’s China Hawks Drive Hard Line Policies After Trump Turns on Beijing,” Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-s-china-hawks-drive-hard-line-policies-after-trump-turns-on-beijing-11602867030?mod=e2twe.   59.  Olivia Nuzzi, “My Private Oval Office Press Conference with Donald Trump, Mike Pence, John Kelly, and Mike Pompeo,” New York, Intelligencer, October 10, 2018, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/my-private-oval-office-press-conference-with-donald-trump.html. For a list of Pompeo’s major speeches in 2020, none of which were on the pandemic, see https://2017–2021.state.gov/speeches-secretary-pompeo//index.html.   60.  This section is based on an interview on background with a French official and on Giles Whittell, “Trump First,” Tortoise Media, June 8, 2020, https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/06/08/trump-first-goodbye-america/content.html.   61.  

In each case where we use information from one of these interviews, the official had direct knowledge of the events being discussed. In most instances, we do not provide endnotes referencing interviews conducted for the book; we only do so when the source of the information is not otherwise clear from the text. Introduction Donald Trump was a natural unilateralist. He was elected on an “America First” platform that rejected seventy years of U.S. global leadership and viewed alliances, treaties, and trade deals as attempts by the rest of the world to trick the United States out of its money and power. Nevertheless, his core team understood early—in fact, earlier than European governments—that the novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 could be a game-changer, a national security challenge that would define his presidency.

Harding insisted on the imperative to “safeguard America first, to stabilize America first, to prosper America first, to think of America first, to exalt America first, to live for and revere America first.”12 (“America First” would also be embraced by the isolationist movement in 1940, as we will see, and much later by the Republican U.S. presidential candidate Pat Buchanan in the 1990s and Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign.) At the same time, the opportunity for a possible compromise arose. A growing number of Democrats contemplated breaking ranks with Wilson, increasing the prospect for bipartisan agreement on softening the reservations somewhat, and potentially paving the way for ratification.


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The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

* * * — AT OUR FIRST STOP, in Athens, we had planned to give a speech celebrating the resilience of democracy in its birthplace, with the Acropolis as the backdrop. As we’d sketched it out, we’d foreseen a defiant challenge to Russia and its revanchist leader, Vladimir Putin. Somehow, that setting no longer felt equal to America’s moment. It was two weeks after the election of Donald Trump. We moved the speech indoors to an auditorium that could have been anyplace. We ended up touring the Acropolis instead, on a pristine, warm morning. From its perch up on a hill, the world was lovely and calm—in the clear blue sky and sweeping view of Athens, there was no hint of the financial crisis gripping Greece, the flow of refugees crossing its borders, or the uncertainty that those forces had unleashed in the world beyond.

At the end of our time in Germany, when Obama bade her farewell at the door of the Beast, a single tear appeared in her eye—something that none of us had ever seen before. “Angela,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s all alone.” At this third and final stop, a summit of Pacific nations in Lima, Obama was pulled aside by leader after leader and asked what to expect from Donald Trump. Ever conscious of the norms of his office, Obama dutifully urged his counterparts to give the new administration a chance. “Wait and see,” he told them. The leaders of eleven other countries who had painstakingly negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement met with Obama on the first day.

I’d spent eight years pursuing it in a windowless West Wing office where I could hear rats scurrying in the ceiling above me and could walk into meetings where the fate of nations was discussed. I’d experienced highs I could never have anticipated, such as walking into the Vatican to tell a cardinal we were normalizing relations with Cuba. I’d suffered lows I couldn’t yet understand, being demonized by the same forces that led to the rise of Donald Trump. Most of all, I’d subsumed my own story into the story of Barack Obama—his campaign, his presidency, the place where he was leading us. Standing there, I struggled to find some feeling within myself that would sum up what it felt like to watch our country represented abroad for the last time by this man—decent and determined, at times reticent, at others bolder than any politician I’d seen.


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The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES INDEX For Myrna Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more. Tap here to learn more. ONE THE LEVELLING Brexit, Trump, Noise, and Disruption THAT OUR WORLD IS CHANGING AT A TECTONIC LEVEL IS CLOSE TO UNDENIABLE, yet we often do not seem able to see beyond headline-grabbing events of recent years—the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and new governments in Mexico and Italy, to name a few. These events simply represent the smashing of the old order; they are the detonators, the wrecking balls of the system that has grown up since the fall of communism. The Levelling is about how the center of gravity in our world, societies, and economies is changing, the confusion those changes create, and the ideas that will help bring new structure to what is a disordered world.

Additionally, central banks, now more powerful than governments, own enormous pools of assets, which they bought in an effort to keep the side effects of the global financial crisis at bay. As they unwind these holdings, this will make financial markets more jumpy and fragile economies more vulnerable. In politics, there is Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the emergence in Europe of new, mostly right-wing political parties that are starting to disrupt traditional parties and politics. The rise of radical politics is spreading to emerging nations, notably Brazil. Voter volatility, apathy toward established political parties, and distrust in politics have risen to levels not seen since the Second World War.

I find myself recommending his book to anyone interested in American politics today. It is honest and charming, though I am somewhat suspicious of the way it was received and lauded by Washington, DC, elites for apparently showing that large segments of the American population were “falling behind” and that traditional Democratic voters turned toward Donald Trump. Accounts of the demise of the white lower-middle-class and lower-class population are plentiful in social science, literature, and music in the United States, but few policy makers and corporate leaders appear to have paid attention to this demise. In his book, Vance tells how he turned his life around through enlisting in the Marines, seeking an education (Ohio State and then Yale Law School), and playing golf (his grandmother had advised him that playing golf would help him understand how wealthier people socialize and do business).


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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

A 320 per cent increase in far-right terror attacks since 2014, with many recent attacks perpetrated by those with no clear connection to organised offline hate groups, forces us to consider the role of the internet in the radicalisation process.39 If left unchecked, the tactics of these internet-enabled hatemongers can act like a super-accelerant, transforming those vulnerable to extreme rhetoric into terrorists. Notes 1. Factbase, ‘Donald Trump Speaks to the Press before Marine One Departure’, 26 April 2019, factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-press-gaggle-marine-one-departure-april-26-2019. 2. J. Heim, ‘Recounting a Day of Rage, Hate, Violence and Death’, Washington Post, 14 August 2017. 3. M. Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2017. 4.

It is no coincidence that soaring hate crime figures are found in countries where the extreme right is rising. This trend is fuelled by the internet revolution and its corruption by masked individuals, the far right and state actors. Societal divisions are being prised wide open with the use of the internet in an attempt to garner support for populist leaders and ideologies. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign hired Cambridge Analytica and the Leave.EU Brexit campaign hired Aggregate IQ to use artificial intelligence to ‘micro-target’ those who would be most vulnerable to messages designed to stir up fears of the ‘other’.3 During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was flooded with far-right conspiracy theories and hate targeting Jewish, Muslim, Chinese and LGBTQ+ people for supposedly creating and/or spreading the disease (more on this in Chapter 10).4 Beyond organised campaigns, the everyday internet user also took to social media to post hateful messages, triggered by disinformation and careless phrases, like ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘kung flu’, coming out of the White House.5 What is most worrying about this trend is that the research shows divisive messages from public figures are directly linked to tipping some people into hateful violence on the streets.

We’re all humans.’2 Days later Sunayana said in a press conference, ‘I was always concerned. Were we doing the right thing by staying in the United States of America? … What will the government do to stop this hate crime? My husband would want justice to be done. We need an answer.’ She had read about other hate crimes all over the country since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. She said to a reporter shortly after the attack, ‘When the recent elections happened, we were watching it so closely. I was so worried; I just couldn’t sleep.’3 She recalled asking her husband, ‘Srinivas, will we be safe in this country? I’m so worried.’4 After fleeing the scene Purinton drove 112 km to Clinton, Missouri, where he confessed to an employee at an Applebee’s restaurant.


The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

‘California’s Redistricting Shake-Up Shakes Out Politicians’, 23 March 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/articles/2013–03–21/californias-redistricting-shake-up-shakesout-politicians, last accessed 27 March 2016. 22.╇Chasmar, Jessica (2016). ‘Donald Trump: I Consult Myself on Foreign Policy, “Because I have a Very Good Brain’”, The Washington Times, 17 March 2016, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/ mar/17/donald-trump-i-consult-myself-on-foreign-policy-be/, last accessed 29 July 2016. 23.╇Carothers, Thomas (2016). ‘Look Homeward, Democracy Promoter’, 27 January 2016, Foreign Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/ 01/27/look-homeward-democracy-promoter/, last accessed 18 March 2016. 24.╇Ibid. 25.╇See The Electoral Integrity Project, http://www.electoralintegrityproject.com, last accessed 29 July 2016. 26.╇Van de Walle, Nicolas (2002).

She managed to always offer encouragement even as she (rightfully) told me when I was wrong. Ellie, I love you. Sorry in advance for the shock when you finally realize, as I’ve known all along, that you’re clearly out of my league. viii INTRODUCTION ACCESSORY TO AUTHORITARIANISM For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the world is losing faith in democracy. Between Donald Trump’s rise in American politics and the predictable but self-inflicted “Brexit” economic shockwave, many are now openly asking what was previously an unthinkable question in the West: can people really be trusted with self-government? Is it time to ditch democracy and try something else? â•… After the Soviet Union fell, democracy expanded at an unprecedented rate.

There’s the birth of democracy in Athens that can be traced to a fateful incident involving gay lovers; or the failed Cold War CIA plot to assassinate a Congolese politician with poisoned toothpaste; or the backfiring “democracy war” quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; or Rwandan hitmen plotting to assassinate pro-democracy critics in London; or the results of an election in Azerbaijan being released on an iPhone app the day before voting took place; or the tragicomic blowhard Donald Trump blustering about how he has himself as his primary foreign policy adviser because he “has a very good brain” and he’s “said a lot things”; or even the story of how a Turkish court was forced to enlist “Gollum experts” to determine if a pro-democracy activist comparing the authoritarian President Erdoggan to the Lord of the Rings character was, in fact, insulting him. â•… Curious and occasionally amusing tales aside, the crisis of democracy is real and it is dangerous.


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Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

,” Economist, April 11, 2017. 88. P. Anderson, “The Center Can Hold,” New Left Review 105 (May/June 2017). 89. A. Parker, “Donald Trump, in Scotland, Calls ‘Brexit’ Result ‘a Great Thing,’” New York Times, June 24, 2016. CHAPTER 24: TRUMP 1. “Full Text: Donald Trump 2016 RNC Draft Speech Transcript,” Politico, July 21, 2016. 2. D. Diaz, “Ivanka Trump Markets Her Look After RNC Speech,” CNN, July 22, 2016. 3. K. Reilly, “Read President Obama’s Remarks on Donald Trump’s Convention Speech,” Time, July 22, 2016. 4. D. W. Drezner, “My One Contribution to the Autopsies of the 2016 Presidential Election,” Washington Post, May 2, 2017. 5.

Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Macmillan, 2016). 51. Among many, two particularly thoughtful pieces are W. Davies, “The Age of Post-Truth Politics,” New York Times, August 24, 2016; and A. M. Rondón, “Donald Trump’s Fictional America,” Politico, April 2, 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/donald-trumps-fictional-america-post-fact-venezuela-214973. 52. C. Forelle, “Luxembourg Lies on Secret Meeting,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2011. CHAPTER 1: THE “WRONG CRISIS” 1. Conference moderated by P. Orszag, “Restoring America’s Promise of Opportunity, Prosperity and Growth,” Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 2006, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/legacy/files/downloads_and_links/Restoring_Americas_Promise_of_Opportunity_Prosperity_and_Growth_Transcript.pdf. 2.

Economic and Social Populism in the 2016 Presidential Election, a Preliminary Exploration,” prepared for delivery at the INET Conference, Edinburgh, UK, October 20–23, 2017, https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Ferguson-and-Page-Scotland-Paper-revised-for-Conference.pdf. 18. C. Laderman and B. Simms, Donald Trump: The Making of a Worldview (London: Endeavour Pess, 2017). 19. K. W. Capehart, “Hyman Minsky’s Interpretation of Donald Trump,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 38.3 (2015): 477–492 20. F. Norris, “Trump Sees Act of God in Recession,” New York Times, December 4, 2008. 21. Soopermexican, “Trump on TARP and Stimulus Sounds More Like a Crony Capitalist Than a Conservative,” The Right Scoop (blog), August 15, 2015, http://therightscoop.com/trump-on-tarp-and-stimulus-sounds-more-like-a-crony-capitalist-than-a-conservative/. 22.


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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

After a good night’s sleep, Abdramane and Isaac gathered with other ranch employees for the first of many morning briefings in the workshop run by Aaron, the ranch mechanic. As they walked in, they were greeted by the sound of American Family Radio, Aaron’s broadcaster of choice for news and opinion. This would be the routine every day for the length of Abdi’s stay in Montana. Donald Trump’s presidency was about to begin. The anchors of American Family Radio were ecstatic. So was Aaron. Aaron is a dedicated conservative and churchgoing family man. He and his wife home-schooled their three children until they could find places for them in a school specifically approved by their Lutheran congregation.

The impact of his presence was not merely economic, it was also cultural. He enriched the lives of those he met, and his own life was enriched in turn. Migration has become a hot topic across the Western world, and well beyond. Fear and denigration of migrants have fuelled Britain’s Brexit crisis, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of populists and nationalists across the world. The term ‘migrant’ tends to conjure up images of ‘hordes’ of refugees fleeing their countries of birth to escape gangs, war, famine or poverty and coming to invade ‘ours’. We think of Syrians and Afghanis on the island of Lesbos, of Africans on sinking vessels on the Mediterranean.

Up until the moment I started writing, this book was going to be a rather predictable globalist ode to mobility. The rise of nativism, nationalism and populism was already a trend. As I saw it, nomadism was the perfect cure: personal and economic growth as the answer to nationalism and xenophobia. But something started shifting in my mind following the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. I came to Davos in January 2017 expecting those ‘Committed to improving the state of the world’5 to engage in intense soul-searching and to try to figure out what had gone wrong. After all, it was the Thatcherism-lite of Tony Blair and the centrism of Barack Obama, both celebrated in Davos as the pinnacle of political, economic and social development, which had led to these two earthquakes.


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Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Pew Research Center, “Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers,” June 11, 2015, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/multiracial-in-america. 8. Jamelle Bouie, “What Pundits Keep Getting Wrong about Donald Trump and the Working Class,” Slate, May 5, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/what_pundits_keep_getting_wrong_about_donald_trump_and_the_working_class.html. 9. Renee Stepler and Anna Brown, “Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States,” Pew Research Center, April 19, 2016, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/04/19/statistical-portrait-of-hispanics-in-the-united-states. 10.

Hudson Hongo, “Facebook Finally Rolls Out ‘Disputed News’ Tag Everyone Will Dispute,” Gizmodo, March 3, 2017, http://gizmodo.com/facebook-finally-rolls-out-disputed-news-tag-everyone-w-1792959827. 7. Spencer Woodman, “Palantir Provides the Engine for Donald Trump’s Deportation Machine,” Intercept, March 2, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/palantir-provides-the-engine-for-donald-trumps-deportation-machine. Index Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. Note: Italic page numbers refer to illustrations.

“We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.” 2 Costolo was right: in a 2014 Pew Research Center study, 13 percent of people who’d been harassed online said they had deleted a profile or changed their username because of harassment, and 10 percent said they had left an online forum because of it.3 After two more years of sustained harassment, that’s precisely what West did. In January 2017—as then-president-elect Donald Trump was taunting South Korea and strangers were harassing her for her views on the death of Carrie Fisher—West realized she was done: She was tired of neo-Nazis digging into her personal life. She was tired of men telling her they’d like to rape her, “if [she] weren’t so fat.” More than anything, she was tired of feeling like all Twitter’s talk about taking harassment seriously hadn’t gotten her anywhere: I talk back and I am “feeding the trolls.”


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like humans today; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of “natural” cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have recently visited (or now reside on) Earth. A quarter believe vaccines cause autism and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 general election. A quarter believe that our previous president was (or is?) the Antichrist. A quarter believe in witches. Remarkably, no more than one in five Americans believe the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables—around the same number who believe that “the media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals” and that U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.*2 When I say that a third believe X or a quarter believe Y, it’s important to understand that those are different thirds and quarters of the U.S. population.

A white woman felt black, pretended to be, and under those fantasy auspices became an NAACP official—and then, busted, said, “It’s not a costume…not something that I can put on and take off anymore. I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black.” Bill Gates’s foundation has funded an institute devoted to creationist pseudoscience. Despite his nonstop lies and obvious fantasies—rather, because of them—Donald Trump was elected president. The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable. As particular fantasies get traction and become contagious, other fantasists are encouraged by a cascade of out-of-control tolerance. It’s a kind of twisted Golden Rule unconsciously followed: If those people believe that, then certainly we can believe this.

America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump. In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

“under[stood] the depth”: See “Why the White Working Class Voted for Trump,” interview with Joan C. Williams. “believe that the modern”: See J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (New York: Harper, 2016), 191. thought the same of them: See Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump’s Appeal Was Just Perfectly Summed Up by Chris Matthews,” Washington Post, September 30, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/30/chris-matthews-just-nailed-donald-trumps-appeal/?utm_term=.24ba2184ad30. agreed with both statements: The survey was conducted by the Huffington Post in conjunction with YouGov. See Michael Tesler, “Trump Voters Think African Americans Are Much Less Deserving Than ‘Average Americans,’” Huffington Post, December 19, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-tesler/trump-voters-think-africa_b_13732500.html.

Clair Shores City, accessed July 24, 2018, http://miboecfr.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/cfr/precinct_srch_res.cgi. St. Clair Shores voted 53 percent Trump-Pence and 42 percent Clinton-Kaine. “Donald Trump’s speeches”: See Kevin Williamson, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction,” National Review, March 17, 2016, accessed July 23, 2018, www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump. See also Edward Luce, “The New Class Warfare in America,” Financial Times, March 20, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.ft.com/content/63b061be-ecfc-11e5-bb79-2303682345c8.

Ironically (although following a profound inner logic), these resentments, borne of exclusion, often focus on the forms of inclusion that meritocracy exalts, including in particular—as in complaints about political correctness—the meritocratic embrace of a multicultural elite. The resentments, moreover, have direct and powerful—even world-changing—consequences. They enabled Donald Trump to become president of a wealthy, powerful, and famously optimistic nation by relentlessly attacking the status quo, repudiating what he calls “the Establishment,” and blaming the state of the country on a corrupt alliance of meritocratic elites and cultural outsiders. Trump’s dark vision replaces the American dream with what his apocalyptic inaugural address—painting a nation in deep decline, overrun by poverty, crime, and economic decay—called “this American carnage.”


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

If we go back to those fundamental principles, the United States could achieve serious tax reform, even in our current state of political gridlock. Another benefit of looking at other countries is that comparative analysis can tell us where Americans stand relative to the rest of the world when it comes to how much tax we have to pay. During his campaign for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump repeatedly said, “The United States is the highest-taxed country in the world.” Was he right? 2. “LOW EFFORT, LOW COLLECTION” The Gallup poll surveys Americans every year about the taxes they pay, and every year a hefty majority says that taxes are too high.1 Whenever I mentioned this to economists in other countries, they laughed.

Generally, the advocates of the flat tax focus so tightly on “fairness” and “simplicity” that they fail to mention the most important impact of a flat-rate income tax: it would amount to a major tax break for the richest people in the country and a corresponding tax hike for many average workers. While a progressive income tax tends to reduce the gap between rich and poor, a flat-tax regime would serve to increase economic inequality. Even the self-proclaimed multibillionaire Donald Trump acknowledged this in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve. “Only the wealthy,” Trump conceded, “would reap a windfall, because a flat-rate tax would shift the tax burden from the richest taxpayers to those in the lower brackets.” To see how this shift would work, consider the case of a corporate CEO and her spouse with a taxable income, after exemptions, of $500,000 (a fairly conservative figure for corporate chieftains these days).

Of all the advocates, the most visible and exuberant has been Steve Forbes, an extremely high-income taxpayer who inherited a family business (Forbes magazine) and a family fortune from his father, Malcolm Forbes. Steve Forbes ran twice, on a flat-tax platform, for the Republican nomination for president. He made the covers of Time and Newsweek—in the same week!—promoting the idea. He wrote a book about his plan, titled Flat Tax Revolution; it came with a blurb on the cover from (who else?) Donald Trump and a gushing preface written by (who else?) Newt Gingrich. I know and admire Steve Forbes; he is a kind, friendly guy, a good father, and a successful corporate leader. But I was surprised when he ran for president. Unlike his flamboyant father—Malcolm Forbes flew his own blimps and dated Elizabeth Taylor—Steve is a rather shy and understated gentleman, much happier in an arcane policy debate than in the turmoil of a hand-shaking, baby-kissing political campaign.


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Lee, “Being a Housewife Where Neither House nor Husband Is Needed,” New York Times, March 5, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/arts/television/05real.html. about $2 billion in free media exposure: Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, “$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump,” New York Times, March 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html. Will Wilkinson wrote: Will Wilkinson, “The Majesty of Trump,” New York Times, November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/the-majesty-of-trump. the writer Michael Lerner: Michael Lerner, “Stop Shaming Trump Supporters,” New York Times, November 9, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/stop-shaming-trump-supporters.

A carpenter’s apprentice was told that her job performance had been suffering since she got pregnant. A legal worker, Ivy League educated, was initially much praised by her supervisors, but her story also ended in “job elimination” once pregnant. It would seem that women’s livelihoods are jeopardized by motherhood, starting at conception. Why? As President Donald Trump once commented, pregnancy is “certainly an inconvenience for a business. And whether people want to say that or not, the fact is it is an inconvenience for a person that is running a business.” However loathsome, he was articulating the cruel common sense of capitalism: why should employees take any kind of leave for any reason at all, least of all for reproduction?

Whole sectors of employment are dwindling away, and many people who are untrained for the new economic reality find themselves stranded, not only jockeying to stay where they are socially but also at odds, personally, socially, and politically, with what they invidiously call “the elite.” The spectacular rise of Donald Trump can be understood as an expression of the gulf between middle-class citizens and America’s ruling classes. It should not have been news to anyone, since these changes have been under way since at least the Reagan era. Yet colleges and universities have been slow to adapt to these changes, which are already more than a generation old.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

His advocacy of post-truth politics did not die following WWII; traces of his theories can be seen in propaganda efforts from both camps, from both Soviet and western stakeholders during the Cold War. Today, Sorel’s ideas about myth-making and explicit disdain for empirical fact are reminiscent of Donald Trump’s approach to the truth, but they also recall the manipulation and distortion of evidence that characterized the build up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The proclaimed newness of post-truth politics is a myth in itself. The greats is my shorthand for various national and international democratic social movements across the world that are challenging political and corporate authoritarianism.

But the more that social and cognitive scientists neglect the problem of elite ignorance, the more we shy from the type of ‘suspicious attention’ towards business practices that Adam Smith called for, the more unrealistic a picture of reality the social sciences become. ∗ ∗ ∗ The middle of the book looks at strategic and elite ignorance from different angles, including Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win and the Brexit vote, where I explore the way that low-income voters are seen as more ‘ignorant’ than wealthy voters, even though evidence since has shown that wealthier voters propelled both outcomes. Next, I examine phone hacking at News International, a scandal that rocked the United Kingdom ever since news first broke that staff at the tabloid newspaper News of the World had illegally hacked into the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl named Milly Dowler.

The smarts camp is my term for anti-democrat thinkers who advance the authoritarian idea of ‘rule by knowers,’ pointing to political surveys of ‘voter ignorance’ as a justification for stripping voting rights from men and women living in western democracies today.24 The strongs, on the other hand, often leverage ignorance in a more general way, exploiting the fact that the future is genuinely unknown (Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’) as a rationale for obtaining information in intrusive and violent ways, such as through torture, as Donald Trump has done. But both camps also sometimes switch oracles. This happens, for example, when the smarts camp points to the ‘mystery’ of natural laws of the universe to defend extreme wealth concentration and growing wealth inequality. It also happens when representatives of the strongs camp point to the seeming reasonableness of social scientific evidence to defend a practice like torture.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Newspaper profiles discussed Hill’s experience: Steve Robson, “Revealed: Coal Miner’s Daughter from County Durham Set to Be Donald Trump’s Top Adviser on Russia,” Daily Mirror, March 4, 2017, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/revealed-coal-miners-daughter-county-9961725; Kyle Scott Clauss, “Fiona Hill, Trump’s New Russia Expert, Went to Harvard,” Boston Magazine, March 2, 2017, http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2017/03/02/fiona-hill-russia-trump/. A blogger in Moscow: John Helmer, “Vladimir Putin Is Safe If Donald Trump’s Expert on Russia Is Fiona Hill, But Is Trump?,” Dances with Bears, May 15, 2017, http://johnhelmer.net/vladimir-putin-is-safe-if-donald-trumps-expert-on-russia-is-fiona-hill-but-is-trump/.

423339-1/sean-spicer-briefs-reporters-white-house&start=1644. The “Senior Fellow” became a “Former Expert”: “Clifford G. Gaddy,” Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/experts/clifford-g-gaddy/. Donald Trump’s chief adviser on Russia: John Hudson, “Trump Taps Putin Critic for Senior White House Position,” Foreign Policy, March 2, 2017; Nicholas Schmidle, “General Chaos,” New Yorker, February 18, 2017. “the Manchurian Candidate”: David Remnick and Evan Osnos, “What to Make of Donald Trump’s Early-Morning Wiretap Tweets,” New Yorker, March 4, 2017. The official announcement might have come sooner: Karen de Young, “Trump Adds Russia Scholar as a National Security Council Director,” Washington Post, March 28, 2017.

When we left the house, either to go for burgers at a nearby strip mall or to walk Ninja by the river, we passed a small encampment of homeless men. Faces deformed by poverty and alcohol. It was a picture out of Steinbeck. They sat in folding chairs beneath the trees, waiting for America to be somewhere else. And each time we passed, Chuck gave them a respectful nod. The 2016 U.S. election was only a few months away. Chuck was voting for Donald Trump. Chuck wanted that wall on the Mexican border, and he scorned those who said it couldn’t be built. Chuck believed that a Muslim invasion of America was taking place and that rape was the enemy’s weapon of choice. He’d been thrown off Facebook for saying so, but that only increased his sense of being in the right.


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

Swallows explained that he and [Sara] are always playing around, and that he did place his hands around her neck, although his hands were never locked,” the police report stated. “Ofc. Isaacs spoke with Ms. Landers who stated that she and Mr. Swallows were only playing around and that he would never hurt her.” Todd was placed under arrest; Sara was provided a domestic violence information sheet. * * * Donald Trump came to Dayton—or, more precisely, to the airport north of town in Vandalia, where one of the shuttered Delphi plants was located—on March 12, 2016, the Saturday before the state’s primary election. It was the day after his rally in Chicago had been canceled amid massive protests, and the friction from that standoff seemed to carry east to the flat, empty terrain around the airport.

“We punish people for violence by putting them in places where they are likely to witness or experience violence, and then send them back into their communities and relationships.” The job was gone, but Todd was out in time for something else: the 2016 election. He had voted twice for Barack Obama. But he was receptive to what he was hearing from Donald Trump. Spending a decade at a string of jobs that paid no more than $11 per hour made one susceptible to a promise of prosperity delivered by a man with a private jet. “He is a businessman,” Todd said later. “This man can run his businesses and he’s worth billions of dollars and runs hundreds of businesses, he runs them and owns them and I thought to myself, ‘This man will change the country.’”

Todd voted for Trump, who won Ohio by eight percentage points four years after Barack Obama had won it by two. “I couldn’t wait to vote for Trump,” Todd said. He quoted his own thinking at the time as if it was that of another person: “He’s gonna bring in jobs. He’s gonna raise the economy back to the way it was when my parents were working.” * * * Donald Trump became president, and Todd Swallows got his job in cardboard. Lewisburg Container was in the small town of that name, half an hour west of Dayton, a dozen miles from Eaton. The company was a subsidiary of Pratt Industries, a global paper and packaging company owned by an Australian billionaire, with 4,000 workers in the United States.


pages: 297 words: 69,467

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, elephant in my pajamas, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Jane Jacobs, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, W. E. B. Du Bois

If you are a younger or more forward-thinking person, you may already render the names of photocopied offspring commalessly, thus: Donald Trump Jr. In which case you’ve got it easy: Donald Trump Jr. is a perfidious wretch. and thus: Donald Trump Jr.’s perfidy Old-school construction, though, sets off a “Jr.”*23 with commas, as in: Donald Trump, Jr., is a perfidious wretch. When possessivizing such a person, your options are that horror noted above, which I’ll refrain from repeating Donald Trump, Jr.’s perfidy (which is admittedly a little unbalanced) Donald Trump, Jr.’s, perfidy (better balanced, and at least not eye-stabbingly ugly) You choose.*24 28.

A warning: Hasty typing fingers are apt to render the likes of Jane Jacobs’s activism as Jane Jacob’s activism As typos go, that sort of thing is perilously easy to commit and to overlook. Be careful. 27. THE POSSESSIVIZATION OF DONALD TRUMP, JR. A GRAND GUIGNOL IN ONE ACT In July 2017 one of our nation’s preëminent if perhaps somewhat self-delightedly parochial magazines foisted upon the world this headline: DONALD TRUMP, JR.,’S LOVE FOR RUSSIAN DIRT The writer Michael Colton, in an aghast tweet, identified this particular method of rendering a possessive “period-comma-apostrophe bullshit,” which may not be the precise technical term for it but which does just fine anyway.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

An initial advertising prediction was offered by Arpita Chowdhuri, a digital marketing vice president at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, who said: 2017 and beyond “is going to be the year for data. . . . Data is going to be the new oil.” With the surprising election of Donald Trump in mind, Kassan wondered whether there were some lessons to be learned from the contest, especially about data. “People are going to question data more,” he said, “because the projections said there was a ninety-one percent chance on the morning of the election that Hillary Clinton would be president.” Data from the polls and the predictions of prognosticators were dead wrong. Donald Trump’s success in winning the Republican nomination, and his election as president, challenged not just conventional political wisdom but some cherished precepts of advertising and marketing, starting with the assumption that there is a meaningful relationship between vast expenditures on advertising and the electoral outcome.

Bank profits rose from $4 billion in 2014 to $16 billion; the bank’s liquidity was four times as large as in 2008. But this good news was drowned out by the background noise of an angry presidential campaign where expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her challenger, Bernie Sanders, and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, vied to criticize big banks. Surveys reveal that support for banks dropped five points, Finucane said. “My concern is Bank of America should not be a focus of the conversation when the talk is about Dodd-Frank.” Pollster Joel Benenson said Sanders enjoyed broad support when he declared, “We have a rigged economic system.”

Today he owns 2 percent of WPP and chooses not to diversify his investments but to tie his wealth to how his company performs. “My dad said, ‘Invest with companies you know best,’” he says. Despite his rich pay, Sorrell rarely chooses to fly privately, insisting that it would cheat shareholders. He feels liberated to opine on most any subject, from Brexit to Donald Trump’s immigration policies (he was opposed to both), not to mention the unabashed joy he takes in belittling Maurice Levy, his Publicis rival. Members of his WPP team bristle when he publicly disparages “the snooty” attitude of creatives, who play a diminished role in the advertising business. Interviewed by Michael Kassan before an Advertising Week audience in September 2015, he proclaimed, “Seventy-five percent of our revenues comes from things—$15 billion of nearly $20 billion—Don Draper wouldn’t recognize.”


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

This language was a key part of their defiance of the mainstream: “If you’re using the left’s buzzwords like ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ then you’re gonna find yourself following leftist thought patterns,” one moderator wrote. “However, it’s very hard to accidentally align with SJWs by using words like ‘cuckold’ or ‘faggot.’ Our culture exists for a reason and we’re gonna cherish it, and enjoy the power it gives us.” The massive effort, in all its extremism, wasn’t lost on Donald Trump’s campaign. In the lead-up to the election, Donald Trump on his Twitter account reposted memes and videos that bubbled up on T_D, including, as far back as 2015, an image of Pepe that had been altered to resemble Trump. Former campaign staffers have admitted that from the war room that had been set up in Trump Tower in New York, they relentlessly monitored the huge forum for content to push out to Trump’s followers online.

I watched the site’s community heave and grow to hundreds of millions of people, who at turns participated in extraordinarily uplifting moments, and at others engaged in hateful, harmful behavior, and even mutinied against the very system that had nurtured them. I was rapt by the hyperpoliticized lead-up to the 2016 election on Reddit, which had already kindled some of the roots of the modern alt-right’s digital strategy, and was, we’d later learn, providing a fertile ground for Russian propagandists. Reddit was also where Donald Trump’s most vociferous online community had taken root. When I began working on this book, Reddit had a couple dozen employees spread across several cities; it was a ramshackle operation. In part because Huffman and Ohanian had already let me into their lives, I wound up with a view into the inner workings of the company once they returned in 2015, something extraordinarily rare for a company of its size.

By May 2009, a subreddit dedicated purely to the form r/IAmA, named after the first words a user volunteering to answer questions would write—as in, “I am a slumlord. Ask me anything!”—was created. Today, they’re mostly known as “AMAs,” as in “Ask Me Anything,” and they are easily Reddit’s most known feature. (Early and longtime Reddit employees still call them “IAmAs,” pronounced eye-am-uhs.) Celebrities, Nobel laureates, and politicians—up to President Donald Trump—have participated in them. Some of the most popular of all time, though, are still those by intriguing everymen possessing useful information. One by a vacuum repair specialist was for years one of the most widely viewed Reddit threads. By the end of the year, fifty thousand individual accounts followed r/IAmA.


pages: 721 words: 238,678

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

Unless … Tim Shipman Westminster, Preggio, Camerata, San Nicolo,Church Knowle, Studland and Blackheath July–October 2017 Timeline 2016 23 Jun – Britain votes to leave the European Union by a margin of 52 per cent to 48 per cent 29 Jun – Other 27 member states agree a ‘no negotiations without notification’ stance on Brexit talks and Article 50 13 Jul – Theresa May becomes prime minister and pledges to create ‘a country that works for everyone’ 7 Sep – May insists she will not give a ‘running commentary’ on Brexit negotiations 24 Sep – Jeremy Corbyn re-elected as Labour Party leader 30 Sep – Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s CEO, says he could scrap potential new investment in its Sunderland plant 2 Oct – In Brexit speech to party conference, May says she will trigger Article 50 before the end of March and create a Great Repeal Bill to replace the 1972 European Communities Act 5 Oct – In main speech to party conference, May criticises ‘citizens of nowhere’ 6 Oct – Keir Starmer appointed shadow Brexit secretary 27 Oct – Nissan says it will build its Qashqai and X-Trail models at its Sunderland plant, protecting 7,000 jobs 2 Nov – At Spectator awards dinner May compares Boris Johnson to a dog that was put down 3 Nov – High Court rules that only Parliament not the government has the power to trigger Article 50 4 Nov – Daily Mail calls the judges ‘enemies of the people’ 8 Nov – Donald Trump elected the 45th president of the United States 14 Nov – FT reveals the EU wants a €60 billion exit bill from Britain 15 Nov – Boris Johnson tells a Czech paper the UK will ‘probably’ leave the customs union and is reprimanded by May 19 Nov – Johnson accused of turning up to a cabinet Brexit meeting with the wrong papers 20 Nov – Sixty pro-Brexit Tory MPs demand Britain leaves the single market 21 Nov – Trump calls for Nigel Farage to be made British ambassador to Washington 7 Dec – MPs back government amendment to opposition day debate saying the government must set out its Brexit plans but also that Article 50 should be triggered by the end of March 8 Dec – Johnson calls Saudi Arabia a ‘puppeteer’ in the Middle East, sparking a rebuke from Downing Street and fears he will resign 11 Dec – Fiona Hill’s ‘Trousergate’ texts to Nicky Morgan, banning her from Downing Street, are published 15 Dec – BBC reveals that Sir Ivan Rogers has privately warned ministers a post-Brexit trade deal might take ten years 2017 4 Jan – Ivan Rogers resigns 10 Jan – Corbyn announces a wage cap in his ‘Trump relaunch’ 17 Jan – In speech at Lancaster House May announces Britain will seek a hard Brexit leaving the single market, the customs union and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

To make matters worse, the European Commission was now playing hardball too, over the most contentious issue of all. Money. 3 The Enemy Gets a Vote It is lost to history whether Martin Selmayr was an admirer of General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, the American general who was to become Donald Trump’s defence secretary, but he certainly understood one of Mattis’s favourite aphorisms about war – ‘the enemy gets a vote’. While the debate in cabinet and the British media was almost entirely consumed with what Britain wanted from a new deal with Brussels, senior Eurocrats had their own ideas and were beginning to flex their muscles.

Cabinet colleagues continued to be frustrated by Johnson’s controversialism – and his seeming ability to get away with things they could not. On a cabinet away day in early 2017, Johnson was walking with Andrea Leadsom and Ben Gummer while press photographers stalked them. Gummer referred to the controversy over the size of the crowds at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Johnson, who had misheard said, ‘The Krauts? What do you mean the Krauts?’ ‘No, no, no. Crowds, Boris.’ ‘What about the Krauts?’ ‘I said the crowds, the people there.’ Johnson bellowed, ‘I thought you said Krauts! It wasn’t Krauts at all! I thought you were talking about Krauts.’


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

These groups often find trivial factors to blame for their disappointments, like a preacher for misinterpreting a prophecy, or themselves for possessing insufficient piety. They seldom find fault with their underlying belief system, proclaiming that something else, not the prophecy, has failed. Fanatical political movements, I suspect, can function much in the same way. In November 2020, then president Donald Trump lost reelection but claimed, via an increasingly ludicrous series of conspiracy theories, that he was the rightful winner and that his opponent had cheated. As Trump’s election loss became evident to everyone outside his thrall, I spent my day job as a journalist interviewing Trump supporters who believed him.

By the event’s second day, my draft consisted of a single unpunctuated observation: “probably going to go insane at the flat earth conference.” For nearly all of the seventeen years after Charles Johnson’s death, the Flat Earth movement had been quiet—at times close to extinction. Then in 2015, the year Donald Trump launched a conspiracy-laden presidential campaign that many dismissed as a joke, Flat Earth began a much-mocked comeback. The joke was on the doubters. By November 2018, Trump had spent two years in the presidency shaping US policy 78 OFF THE EDGE after his paranoid impulses, and the Flat Earth movement was bigger than ever.

When in 2012 he falsely accused Sandy Hook parents of faking their first graders’ deaths as part of a shadowy plot to ban guns, legions of Infowars fans harassed the grieving parents until some went into hiding. Jones’s expansive Sandy Hook–era audience included not just up-and-coming Flat Earthers like Eric Dubay, but also Donald Trump. Months after launching his presidential campaign on a platform of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant paranoia in 2015, Trump appeared on Jones’s Infowars show. “Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told the Sandy Hook truther. “I will not let you down.” As large social media platforms came to dominate the internet, Mike Adams hitched his news empire to Facebook.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

In a Harris poll a few months before he was assassinated, nearly 75% of Americans expressed disapproval of him, although he had been substantially more popular at the time of his 1963 I Have a Dream speech, and he is wildly popular now, with approval levels above 90%. It took time, but the ideas in his 1963 speech changed the country. See Cobb, J. C. (2018, April 4). When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he was less popular than Donald Trump is today. USA Today. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/04/martin-luther-king-jr-50-years-as sassination-donald-trump-disapproval-column/482242002 42. Pauli Murray College. (n.d.). About Pauli Murray. Retrieved from https://paulimurray.yalecollege.yale.edu/subpage-2 43. Murray (1945), p. 24. 44. MainersUnited (Producer). (2012, November 2).

#miloatcal. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ucpd_cal/status/826978649341440000?lang=en 25. Riot forces cancellation (2017); see n. 8. 26. Zoppo, A., Proença Santos, A., & Hudgins, J. (2017, February 14). Here’s the full list of Donald Trump’s executive orders. NBC News. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/here-s-full-list-donald-trump-s-executive-orders-n720796 27. Helsel, P. (2017, February 2). Protests, violence prompt UC Berkeley to cancel Milo Yiannopoulos event. NBC News. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/protests-violence-prompts-uc-berkeley-cancel-milo-yiannopoulos-event-n715711 28.

Terrorists carried out large-scale attacks across Europe and the Middle East.16 In the United States, fourteen people were killed and more than twenty others injured in an ISIS-inspired shooting in San Bernardino, California;17 another ISIS-inspired attack, on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, became the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, with forty-nine people killed,18 and that number was surpassed just sixteen months later in Las Vegas when a man with what was essentially a machine gun shot and killed fifty-eight people and wounded 851 others at an outdoor concert.19 And 2016 became one of the strangest years ever in U.S. presidential politics when Donald Trump—a candidate with no prior political experience who had been widely regarded as unelectable because of the many groups of people he had offended—not only won the Republican primary but won the election. Millions turned out across the country to protest his inauguration, cross-partisan hatred surged, and the news cycle came to revolve around the president’s latest tweet or latest comment about nuclear war.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

That the government’s legislative and judicial branches have not given the Trump White House their obeisance (with some exceptions) does not erase the fact of Trump’s anticonstitutional aspirations, which are gradually permeating American foreign policy, minimizing alliances, elevating deals above values and alienating the countries of Western Europe that have been the historic backbone of the transatlantic alliance: a Fort Trump in Poland will not compensate for a ruptured US-German relationship. Trump’s admiration for autocrats like Vladimir Putin is not an anomaly of his worldview. It is an expression of his worldview. In his indifference to liberty and contempt for self-government at home and abroad, Donald Trump is the first non-Western president of the United States. THE CURRENT CRISIS in transatlantic relations cannot be pinned entirely on the person of Donald Trump and on the accidental nature of his election in 2016. The abandonment of the West has been long in the making, and on both sides of the Atlantic the rationales for codependence are gone. Europe is not destitute. Its military situation is not dire.

The political rhythms in the United States were similar. Year by year, the culture wars had been sharpening. After September 11, intractable battlefield wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made Americans wary of intervening abroad, while the entire era was one of gaudy prosperity and Dickensian inequalities. The 2016 election was won by Donald Trump, an advocate of an ethnonationalist West, a skeptic about Europe and the transatlantic relationship, a nonbeliever in international order and international institutions. Trump was a man at odds with both the American foreign-policy elite and the entire Wilsonian heritage in American foreign policy.

If he was recoiling from the Iraq War, Obama did not at all reject the American foreign-policy heritage. A presidency that foregrounded the transatlantic relationship and the Wilsonian tradition, Obama’s was the last twenty-first-century presidency framed by liberty as a foreign-policy ideal. After eight years of acting on these commitments, Obama had to watch them disintegrate into Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.26 Well versed in the West and its discontents, Obama was as educated a man as has ever made it to the White House. He is in the company of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, all presidents who were seriously moved by ideas. The idea of the West had been present but diminishing in the intellectual world the young Obama entered.


pages: 359 words: 97,415

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

Hazleton, almost 2,000 miles from the border with Mexico, became a bellwether for many of the tensions Americans feel in their relationship to the country next door. Today the debate about Mexican immigrants that tore at the seams of Hazleton has become a national one that increasingly touches on the larger issue of America’s relationship with Mexico. Donald Trump won the presidency in part by promising to deport unauthorized immigrants, renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that ties the Mexican, American, and Canadian economies together, and build a “big, beautiful wall” on the border between Mexico and the United States. Polls show that these positions are not actually popular with most Americans—majorities register positive opinions of Mexico and even more so of immigrants—but they do appeal to a quarter to a third of citizens.

Hazleton is in many ways a microcosm of the relationship between Mexico and the United States, both the one that exists between the two countries across our shared border and the one that exists within our own society. After all, Mexico has become both an intricate and intimate part of American life and a proxy for our own hopes, expectations, and frustrations. Donald Trump’s campaign prescriptions for the relationship—a border wall, more deportations, and withdrawal from NAFTA—may be at odds with reality, but they struck a note with an important segment of the American population because they captured the fears of change—and some of its painful realities—that Americans project onto Mexico and Mexicans.

Much like those who dislike Mexico, those who appreciate it are also often projecting domestic concerns onto the neighbor next door. Sometimes it seems that Mexico has become more an emblem of Americans’ hopes and fears for our own future than a real country that we deal with on its own terms. Today, with Donald Trump as president, political discussions of Mexico have become focused, above all, on his promise to build “a big, beautiful wall” to keep Mexicans from jumping across the border into the United States. It’s sold as a way of stopping illegal immigration and the flow of drugs into American communities, but it’s also a powerful symbol of how he wants to deal with the larger forces shaping American society.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Malcolm Debevoise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 24. 25 “The far right’s new fascination with the Middle Ages,” Economist, January 2, 2017, https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/01/medieval-memes. 26 Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites, 43. 27 Neil Munro, “Billionaire Steve Case says immigrants will offset middle class job losses,” Daily Caller, December 5, 2013, https://dailycaller.com/2013/12/05/billionaire-steve-case-says-immigrants-will-offset-middle-class-job-losses/. 28 Alex Pfeiffer, “Bill Kristol Says ‘Lazy’ White Working Class Should Be Replaced by ‘New Americans,’” Daily Caller, February 8, 2017, https://dailycaller.com/2017/02/08/bill-kristol-says-lazy-white-working-class-should-be-replaced-by-new-americans/. 29 Geoff Colvin, “Donald Trump’s Immigration Ban Ushers In a New Era of CEO Activism,” Fortune, February 7, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/02/07/donald-trumps-immigration-ban-ushers-in-a-new-era-of-ceo-activism/. 30 Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 99, 226. 31 Giles Kepel, remarks at the Tocqueville Conversations, Château de Tocqueville, Normandy, France, June 7–8, 2018. 32 Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere, 3–4, 100; “The Brexit Index: a who’s who of Remain and Leave supporters,” Populus, https://www.populus.co.uk/insights/2016/05/the-brexit-index-a-whos-who-of-remain-and-leave-supporters/; House of Commons Library, “General Election 2019: Results and Analysis,” Number CBP 8749, 28 January 2020. 33 Peter Foster, “Denmark’s EU referendum is a blow to David Cameron,” Telegraph, December 4, 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/denmark/12032958/Denmarks-EU-referendum-is-a-blow-to-David-Cameron.html; “Dutch referendum voters overwhelmingly reject closer EU links to Ukraine,” Guardian, April 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/06/dutch-voters-reject-closer-eu-links-to-ukraine-in-referendum; Nick Gutteridge, “European Superstate to be unveiled: EU nations ‘to be morphed into one’ post-Brexit,” Express, June 29, 2016, https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/683739/EU-referendum-German-French-European-superstate-Brexit; Project 28, “Handling the Immigration Crisis,” Századvég Foundation, http://project28.eu/. 34 Matthew Karnitschnig, “Cologne puts Germany’s ‘lying press’ on defensive,” Politico, January 25, 2016, https://www.politico.eu/article/cologne-puts-germany-lying-media-press-on-defensive-migration-refugees-attacks-sex-assault-nye/; Robert Spencer, “Google manipulates Search Results to Conceal Criticism of Islam and Jihad,” PJ Media, August 2, 2017, https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/08/02/google-manipulates-search-results-to-conceal-criticism-of-islam-and-jihad/; “Rome opens its gates to the modern barbarians,” Financial Times, May 15, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/6348cc64-5764-11e8-b8b2-d6ceb45fa9d0. 35 Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere, 14. 36 Robert Samuelson, “The Middle Class Rocks—Again,” Real Clear Politics, September 18, 2017, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/09/18/the_middle_class_rocks-again_135014.html; Nate Silver, “Silver Bulletpoints: The Union Vote Could Swing the Election,” FiveThirtyEight, May 2, 2019, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/silver-bulletpoints-the-union-vote-could-swing-the-election/. 37 Richard Florida, “Why Is Your State Red or Blue?

Authoritarian leaders are consolidating power in countries that previously appeared to be on a liberalizing path—Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. In more democratic countries, we can see a new longing for a strongman—such as the bombastic and often crude Donald Trump, as well as equivalents in Europe, some of them more functionally authoritarian. Many people who are losing faith in the prospects of liberty look for a paternalistic protector instead. Authoritarian leaders often rise by evoking the imagined glories of the past and stoking resentments both old and new.

Populist and nationalist parties in Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Poland, and Slovakia have done particularly well among younger votes. In fact, many of the right-wing nationalist parties are led by millennials.40 American millennials too are surprisingly attracted to right-wing populism. In November 2016, more white American millennials voted for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton. Their much-ballyhooed shift toward the Democratic Party has reversed, and now less than a majority identify as Democrats.41 More broadly, a sense of betrayal among those being left behind by progress is leading to defections from mainstream parties of both right and left.


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

The group agreed that political speech could be protected under a “newsworthiness” standard. The idea was that political speech deserved extra protection because the public deserved to form their own opinions on candidates based on those candidates’ unedited views. The Facebook executives were creating the basis for a new speech policy as a knee-jerk reaction to Donald Trump. “It was bullshit,” one employee recalled. “They were making it up on the fly.” This was a critical moment for Joel Kaplan in terms of proving his value. Though unpopular to some on the call, he was providing crucial advice on a growing threat coming from Washington. When Sandberg arrived at Facebook in 2008, the company had been neglecting conservatives.

That refrain, which all social media companies fell back upon, protected it from defamation suits and other legal liabilities and kept the company out of the fray of partisan politics. That afternoon, Zuckerberg redirected his answer, again, to his belief in free expression. The story got out anyway. On April 15, 2016, Gizmodo published an article by Nuñez headlined “Facebook Employees Asked Mark Zuckerberg If They Should Try to Stop a Donald Trump Presidency.” The story included a screenshot of the question and focused on Facebook’s power as a gatekeeper of information. “With Facebook, we don’t know what we’re not seeing. We don’t know what the bias is or how that might be affecting how we see the world,” Nuñez wrote. The story was widely shared by conservatives and became fodder on Fox News and right-wing blogs that had been accusing Facebook of censoring Trump and his supporters.

“So, rather than denying their bad faith accusations and producing hard data that refuted them, Facebook engaged their critics and validated them. Going forward, this became the modus operandi for all bias accusations from the right.” As the 2016 presidential campaigns kicked into high gear, Facebook’s News Feed showed that Americans were more divided than ever. The race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a feeding frenzy for highly partisan news, with each side eager to demonize the other. But an even more troubling trend was a number of obviously false news sites that were pumping out increasingly outlandish stories about the two candidates. Throughout the United States, and in countries as far flung as Macedonia, enterprising young people realized they could make money feeding Americans exactly the type of content they were craving.


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

It made me want to scream in anger—and to make a wager of my own. In 2016, the United States of America elected a con man as president. Millions of Americans from all walks of life cast their votes for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Although Clinton won the popular vote by millions, it didn’t matter. Thanks to the peculiar framework of the Electoral College, the world’s largest economy elected a man who will lie about anything. Donald Trump wasn’t the first liar to occupy the White House, but he may have been the first to exist in a world beyond reason. He helped form a political culture in which truth—factual consensus reality—didn’t matter.

I saw a bunch of average Joes making money in the stock markets, so I dusted off my long-neglected degree in economics and started paying attention to them for the first time in my life. It was clear to me from very early on that we were in a bubble hastened by the extraordinary measures taken in response to the pandemic, and that eventually that bubble would burst. While Donald Trump and members of his administration refused to acknowledge the depth of COVID crisis in early 2020, other branches of the federal government panicked. Fearing economic immolation, Congress and the Federal Reserve unleashed a fire hose of money meant to keep the economy from burning to the ground.

To my THC-inspired brain, it all made perfect sense. I had stumbled on something profoundly original! The next day, I woke up a bit groggy and realized the obvious: I don’t know how to write a book. Maybe there was someone who could help? A journalist named Jacob Silverman wrote an article for the New Republic that I thoroughly enjoyed: “Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam.” I looked him up and realized he, too, lived in Brooklyn. I started following him on Twitter. He followed me back. It took me days, and I felt a little silly being nervous, but I finally worked up the courage to DM him, inviting him to drinks at a local Brooklyn bar. For some reason, he agreed.


pages: 364 words: 119,398

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

And They Want You To Know They’ve Evolved’, BuzzFeed, 22 September 2018 5 BuzzFeed (5 October 2017), op. cit. 6 ‘How Men’s Rights Leader Paul Elam Turned Being A Deadbeat Dad Into A Moneymaking Movement’, BuzzFeed, 6 February 2015 7 ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, New York Review of Books, 19 March 2018 8 ‘The Making of an American Nazi’, The Atlantic, December 2017 9 BuzzFeed (6 February 2015), op. cit. 10 ‘Trump’s rationalization for calling women “dogs” helped define his campaign’, Washington Post, 14 August 2018 11 ‘Controversial pick-up artist Roosh V celebrates Donald Trump’s victory: “If the President can say it then you can say it” ’, The Independent, 16 November 2016 12 ‘Donald Trump’s False Comments Connecting Mexican Immigrants and Crime’, Washington Post, 8 July 2015 13 ‘Trump ramps up rhetoric on undocumented immigrants: “These aren’t people. These are animals.” ’, USA Today, 16 May 2018 14 ‘Trump mocks Christine Blasey Ford at Mississippi rally as supporters cheer’, The Guardian, 2 October 2018 15 ‘Trump Jr Accuses Facebook Silencing Conservatives Day After It Bans Some Far Right Users’, Washington Post, 3 May 2019 16 Brian F.

And, just like the manosphere, the alt-right takes a privileged group (white people) and sells them the comforting idea that they are really the ones facing discrimination at the hands of the group actually facing prejudice (people of colour and immigrants), who are portrayed as the true oppressors. Much has been written about the alt-right, and particularly its links to the rise of Donald Trump. But the deeply misogynistic beliefs that run through the movement, and their role in many of its foundational tenets, often go overlooked and unreported. In the same way, the racist elements of the incel movement are often omitted from commentary, suggesting that it is an exclusively misogynistic, sex-obsessed community.

Then other pundits weigh in and, far from a contested fringe idea, the ‘rule’ becomes accepted as a mainstay of the public conversation, treated by some as simply good common sense. It becomes part of the dialogue and, as such, is quickly used by men to further pursue a sexist agenda. ‘THINK,’ tweets Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to Donald Trump: ‘If Weinstein had obeyed @VP Pence’s rules for meeting with the opposite sex, none of those poor women would ever have been abused.’ Of course, if Weinstein hadn’t been an abusive predator, the same outcome could have been achieved, too. Just a thought. Indeed, far from isolated examples, the mainstream discussion of the Pence rule as a reasonable precaution for men to take in an age of harassment allegations is reflected in the workplace behaviour of a startlingly high percentage of men.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

Homeless people are banned from town centres, routinely fined hundreds of pounds and sent to prison if caught repeatedly asking for money… Local authorities in England and Wales have issued hundreds of fixed-penalty notices and pursued criminal convictions for ‘begging’, ‘persistent and aggressive begging’ and ‘loitering’ since they were given strengthened powers to combat antisocial behaviour in 2014 by then home secretary, Theresa May.18 In the US, the unemployed already face strict constraints on the support they can receive, and President Donald Trump has declared his intention to let states tie eligibility for Medicaid to work: Benefits under welfare programmes – including temporary cash assistance to needy families and food stamps – can [already] be linked to work. But to date conservative hopes of tying Medicaid benefits to employment have failed to bear fruit.

Distinguished followers of these writers include some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet:20 Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple; the Koch brothers, one the chairman and the other the EVP of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the US21; Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp; Politicians Donald Trump,22 Rex Tillerson, Ron and Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan in the US, and Daniel Hannan and Sajid Javid in the UK; Pay-Pal co-founder, Peter Thiel and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. These are serious people. And they wield untold influence. Politicians respond to this influence. It is easy for a politician to attack people on benefits; it is very risky for them to attack wealthy tax-avoiders.

This is, of course, a relatively short view. Unfortunately, the longer term will pose additional challenges because of the automation, described in Chapter 5, of most jobs and the inability (under current policies) of society to cope with this phenomenon. In the US, of course, the election of Donald Trump represents a more significant change in the direction of travel. His most significant legislation has been his Tax Bill which, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), will result in a total reduction in tax of US$205 billion in 2027.5 Of this US$205 billion, over US$98 billion (or 48 per cent) will go to the top 1 per cent, and only US$3.9 billion (or 2 per cent) to the bottom 20 per cent of the population.


pages: 241 words: 75,417

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

The irony is that within two years of rising to power by sweeping aside the traditional political parties, Macron found his presidency imperiled by the same kind of anti-establishment hostility. The Yellow Vest protest is often compared to other populist rebellions in Western democracies, such as those that led to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the 2016 American presidential election of Donald Trump, and the rise to prominence of right-wing governments in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. French geographer Christophe Guilluy, who has studied the demographics of “left behinds” in Britain, Italy, the United States, and France, concludes that the sociology of these populist uprisings is remarkably similar.

It can have pernicious political effects, pushing depressed rural and post-industrial areas to embrace extremist causes. As a result, British voters outside the wealth centers of London and Manchester became the principal foundation of support for Brexit. The economically depressed areas of the Midwest and the South turned to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. And in France, the Yellow Vest movement took root in the working-class exurbs and deserted rural areas of France. “Geography is the common point of the gilets jaunes, Brexit and Trump, and the populist wave,” Guilluy says, whose book La France péripherique (Peripheral France) is often cited as one of the rare works that foreshadowed the rise of the Yellow Vest protesters.

Since Merkel and her government were doubtful, however, that Macron would be able to deliver everything within the first year of his presidency, they felt confident that his inevitable difficulties at home would diminish the pressure on Germany to adopt painful measures that might irritate its taxpayers, particularly ahead of September national elections. On the eve of the Bastille Day ceremonies in 2017, which included Donald Trump as the guest of honor, Macron and Merkel convened a special conclave of their cabinet ministers at the Élysée Palace to review a clutch of initiatives to deepen European integration in defense, security, immigration, and the economy. They gave approval for their two countries to collaborate in developing a new generation of European fighter jets, ending decades of rivalry.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

President Trump,” New York Times, July 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/technology/political-ads-facebook-trump.html. 200 “Facebook enabled a Trump victory”: Max Read, “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook,” Intelligencer, November 9, 2016, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/11/donald-trump-won-because-of-facebook.html. 200 Even inside of Facebook: Mike Isaac, “Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence,” New York Times, November 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/technology/facebook-is-said-to-question-its-influence-in-election.html. 200 Trump had banked more: Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, “$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump,” New York Times, March 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html. 201 “a huge step backward”: Biz Carson, “ ‘I Do Not Accept Him As My Leader’—Uber CTO’s Explosive Anti-Trump Email Reveals Growing Internal Tensions,” Business Insider, January 24, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-cto-internal-email-donald-trump-deplorable-2017-1. 202 Uber’s $3.5-billion funding round: Isaac and de la Merced, “Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5 Billion Cash Infusion.” 202 Some of Uber’s institutional shareholders: Alex Barinka, Eric Newcomer, and Lulu Yilun Chen, “Uber Backers Said to Push for Didi Truce in Costly China War,” Bloomberg, July 20, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-20/uber-investors-said-to-push-for-didi-truce-in-costly-china-fight. 202 Uber conceded the fight: Paul Mozur and Mike Isaac, “Uber to Sell to Rival Didi Chuxing and Create New Business in China,” New York Times, August 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/dealbook/china-uber-didi-chuxing.html. 202 For investors, it was a win: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-20/uber-investors-said-to-push-for-didi-truce-in-costly-china-fight. 203 top tech CEOs were called: David Streitfeld, “ ‘I’m Here to Help,’ Trump Tells Tech Executives at Meeting,” New York Times, December 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/technology/trump-tech-summit.html?

President Trump,” New York Times, July 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/technology/political-ads-facebook-trump.html. 200 “Facebook enabled a Trump victory”: Max Read, “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook,” Intelligencer, November 9, 2016, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/11/donald-trump-won-because-of-facebook.html. 200 Even inside of Facebook: Mike Isaac, “Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence,” New York Times, November 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/technology/facebook-is-said-to-question-its-influence-in-election.html. 200 Trump had banked more: Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, “$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump,” New York Times, March 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html. 201 “a huge step backward”: Biz Carson, “ ‘I Do Not Accept Him As My Leader’—Uber CTO’s Explosive Anti-Trump Email Reveals Growing Internal Tensions,” Business Insider, January 24, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-cto-internal-email-donald-trump-deplorable-2017-1. 202 Uber’s $3.5-billion funding round: Isaac and de la Merced, “Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5 Billion Cash Infusion.” 202 Some of Uber’s institutional shareholders: Alex Barinka, Eric Newcomer, and Lulu Yilun Chen, “Uber Backers Said to Push for Didi Truce in Costly China War,” Bloomberg, July 20, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-20/uber-investors-said-to-push-for-didi-truce-in-costly-china-fight. 202 Uber conceded the fight: Paul Mozur and Mike Isaac, “Uber to Sell to Rival Didi Chuxing and Create New Business in China,” New York Times, August 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/dealbook/china-uber-didi-chuxing.html. 202 For investors, it was a win: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-20/uber-investors-said-to-push-for-didi-truce-in-costly-china-fight. 203 top tech CEOs were called: David Streitfeld, “ ‘I’m Here to Help,’ Trump Tells Tech Executives at Meeting,” New York Times, December 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/technology/trump-tech-summit.html?

Shear and Helene Cooper, “Trump Bars Refugees and Citizens of 7 Muslim Countries,” New York Times, January 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/trump-syrian-refugees.html. 206 he called for a complete restriction: Patrick Healy and Michael Barbaro, “Donald Trump Calls for Barring Muslims From Entering U.S.,” New York Times, December 7, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/07/donald-trump-calls-for-banning-muslims-from-entering-u-s/. 206 Thousands of lawyers arrived: Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Lawyers Mobilize at Nation’s Airports After Trump’s Order,” New York Times, January 29, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/us/lawyers-trump-muslim-ban-immigration.html. 206 “NO PICKUPS @ JFK Airport”: NY Taxi Workers (@NYTWA), “NO PICKUPS @ JFK Airport 6 PM to 7 PM today.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

In Conclusion The two and a half centuries since the Industrial Revolution were, in the long eye of world history, an anomalous interlude. They represented a fleeting era of American political-economic dominance, combined with Eastern fragmentation, that could now be entering its twilight years. A clear erosion of economic liberalism, manifest in Brexit and the trade policies of Donald Trump, is one central development. Also important are the dramatic growth and transformation of the Chinese political economy, the rise of a new Eurasian continentalism, and explosively growing “South–South” trade. These historic changes take place against a backdrop of enduring, embedded geo-economic realities that are all too often ignored.

Domestically, Alibaba is already one of the firms trialing a government-initiated “social credit” system for assessing the behavior of individuals, while its work on big data and cloud computing has major potential for boosting government surveillance and data collection capabilities. Internationally, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, although not involved in any formal Chinese political activity, has been a prominent international spokesman for President Xi’s global economic initiatives, including the BRI. Ma met with president-elect Donald Trump just before Trump’s inauguration, for example, to discuss ways of promoting US small-business exports through e-commerce.58 And he spoke again in support of President Xi’s initiatives at the 2018 Davos World Economic Forum meetings.59 Through its e-commerce activities, Alibaba is continually promoting a next-generation version of the BRI.60 Taken together, the three types of Chinese national champions—SOEs, government-supported private firms, and employee-owned collectives—all play central, if varied, roles in deepening Eurasian connectivity.

He returned to Beijing once again in May 2017, as a principal foreign guest among twenty-eight international leaders at Xi Jinping’s elaborate Belt and Road Forum, before attending the 2017 BRICS summit in Xiamen and the 2018 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Qingdao as well. As Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran JCPOA agreement and escalated his economic confrontation with China in the summer and fall of 2018, Putin and Xi continued their close collaboration. The Profile of Deepening Sino-Russian Political-Military Interdependence Deepening coincidence of economic interest and leadership interaction between Russia and China, in the context of rising Chinese leverage, has had consequences in the political-military sphere also.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, “Unleashing Metro Growth: Final Recommendations of the City Growth Commission,” London, October 2015, www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/unleashing-metro-growth-final-recommendations. 32. See Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Cites, Rising Nations, Yale University Press, 2013; Barber, “Can Cities Counter the Power of President-Elect Donald Trump?” The Nation, November 14, 2013, www.thenation.com/article/can-cities-counter-the-power-of-president-elect-donald-trump/. APPENDIX 1. Paul D. Allison, “Measures of Inequality,” American Sociological Review 43, no. 6 (December 1978): 865–880. 2. On the Dissimilarity Index, see Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation,” Social Forces 67, no. 2 (1988): 281–315. 3.

Vehemently opposed by affluent, cosmopolitan London, it was backed by the struggling residents of working-class cities, suburbs, and rural areas who were being left behind by the twin forces of globalization and re-urbanization. But what came next was even more unanticipated—and even more frightening: the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the most powerful country on the planet. Trump rose to power by mobilizing anxious, angry voters in the left-behind places of America. Hillary Clinton took the dense, affluent, knowledge-based cities and close-in suburbs that are the epicenters of the new economy, winning the popular vote by a substantial margin.

The stagnation and decline of older suburbs is one of the biggest forces shaping America today. Besides the effect that they are having on individuals and families, on America’s neighborhoods and cities, and on the economy of the nation, they are creating an earthquake in our politics.21 Suburban distress played a key role in the rise of Donald Trump, who harnessed the simmering anger and resentment of voters in economically distressed working-class suburbs. Trump won the 2016 GOP primary based on his support from whiter, more blue-collar, less educated, and older counties, according to my own analysis. Trump’s primary support was concentrated in counties with larger white populations, more blue-collar “old-economy” jobs, larger shares of people who did not graduate from high school, and also the portion of the population living in mobile homes, according to a New York Times analysis.22 Trump’s unpredicted and shocking victory in the general election was a product of the same overlapping class and geographic divides.


pages: 287 words: 92,194

Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, fake news, Firefox, gender pay gap, invention of movable type, Louis Daguerre, meta-analysis, Neil Kinnock, Ocado, phenotype, Russell Brand, TED Talk, telemarketer, twin studies, zero-sum game

‘Even in a fight, gentlemen don’t go for the goolies,’ Jools instructed, and I apologised. I learned something important that day, the word ‘goolies’. Three decades later, and Donald Trump had moved into politics. Amongst the debates and speeches there was schoolyardy name-calling. Critics of Trump disagreed with his opinions, what he said and (when imitating a journalist with cerebral palsy) how he said it. But while attempting to undermine him, some dissenters aimed for his penis. Here’s an example: in 2016 Marco Rubio entertains at a rally, first by saying Donald Trump has the hands of a much shorter man, then asking suggestively, ‘You know what they say about men with small hands?’

If you’re too young to remember this, you can watch it on YouTube. Kinnock was walking hand in hand with his wife when the sea surprised him and he tripped up trying to keep his shoes dry. ‘That’s it,’ said the nation. ‘You can’t be leader, you can’t even stay upright on pebbles.’ When some American voters continued to respect Donald Trump, I realised I did not understand people very well. Or at all. The discussions about what Trump had said were fascinating. Lots of people claimed it was ‘banter’, ‘men’s talk’, ‘locker-room’. What I’m expected to understand is that men in groups sometimes talk in a special way about women. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously, which is why they keep it secret.

There are studies that show heterosexual women prefer men with expensive cars and designer clothes; that they find the same men more attractive when adorned with symbols of wealth. This relationship between power and attraction appears gendered; the studies did NOT find that heterosexual men prefer powerful women. Beautiful porn star Stormy Daniels had an affair with unattractive tycoon Donald Trump. No porn star has been wooed by Angela Merkel.‡ To my surprise I found many straight women do believe it’s ‘fair’ and ‘right’ that a man provide for them, that gestures of generosity are expected. I battled with this because I find it such a repulsive attribute, though as we’ll discover, it reflects evolutionary logic.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

Despite the majority of the mainstream media, and just about every high-profile political pundit and establishment figure going, being vehemently against Trump, something was happening on the ground. The Stone Roses and Donald Trump employed the same strategy as the high-growth social businesses like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Instead of using traditional top-down methods of marketing and engagement, they worked from the bottom up. They focused their attention on their fans. The successful businesses and enterprises in the emerging new paradigm don’t have customers, they have fans. And fans have an entirely different relationship with the things they care about and love. On 8 November 2016, Donald Trump won the American presidential election, defying every mainstream poll.

In early 2017, it had to admit its second forecast had also turned out to be incorrect and tried again. This was set against a backdrop of all sorts of other confusion. Inflation was supposed to go up, but it didn’t. The rapid decline in oil prices was meant to be good news, but the drop seemed anything but. In the meantime, the biggest shock of all had happened. On Tuesday 8 November 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, defying every major poll, metric, tracker, expert opinion, and analysis. No one called it – not even the outliers who make their reputations on calling such things. People started to panic. What on earth was going on? That thing we seek “I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship” Dr.

When the band had played together 15 years earlier, it was as part of massive tour to promote an album. This time, though, there was no album, no “product” – just gigs. Instead of employing a big-bang top-down marketing campaign, the band focused their attention on their fans. On 27 September 2016, Donald Trump stepped onstage in front of a massive crowd of 15,000 people in Melbourne, Florida. Outside, another 10,000 Trump fans were clamouring to get in. About 650 miles north in Raleigh, North Carolina, his rival Hillary Clinton was addressing 1,400 supporters at Wake Tech Community College. There was a little over a month to go in the American presidential election, and Trump was well behind in the polls.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

Luckey presumed that it was because their attorneys had quickly brushed up on the California Labor Code, although that seemed unlikely given what he’d be forced to do instead. MEANWHILE, THE BAD PRESS CONTINUED TO MOUNT. AT 6:32 A.M.—WITH THE headline “How your Oculus Rift is secretly funding Donald Trump’s racist meme wars”—Ars Technica informed its readers that “the stream of racist, sexist, and economically illiterate memes appearing in support of Donald Trump . . . is being bankrolled in part by the 24-year-old inventor of Oculus Rift.” At 6:47 AM, Motherboard boldly asked “What Does Alt-Right Patron Palmer Luckey Believe?” And at 6:59 a.m., Mashable reported that Luckey had funded an organization that “aims to circulate anti-Hillary memes across the internet”; the piece also noted that “many people in the tech world were not amused”; and then linked back to a series of angry tweets (including that initial one from Anil Dash—the one about Luckey “funding” “racist trolls”).

“First,” Luckey said, picking up his phone, “I want to show you something.” Luckey opened up the Facebook app, but then remembered he had already deleted the post he wanted to show Chen. So instead he searched through his phone and was able to find what he was looking for, a Facebook post from March 16, 2011: “So, Donald Trump says he is seriously considering running for president in 2012, since he does not think anyone else can save America. He says he will make his final decision by June. I am thinking this might be pretty awesome.” “That’s from 2011?” Chen asked in disbelief. “As in a year before Oculus? That’s wild!

With the two biggest states (California and New York) going Democrat no matter what, it was just too hard to energize a country full of lethargic voters; people like his neighbors who felt “forgotten” by our country’s politicians, who felt like “Republican” and “Democrat” were just two words for the same thing: “Globalist.” And so a year before the election, Malinowski, like many Americans on both sides of the aisle, couldn’t help but come to this conclusion: if these were the best candidates our country could come up with, then we, as a nation, really were screwed. “Our country is in serious trouble,” Donald Trump said in June 2015, announcing his plans to run for president. That statement alone—that brutal honesty—was music to Malinowski’s ears. Finally, it seemed, there was a candidate willing to slice through the platitudes of politics. Not just when it came to talking about the economy, but politicians themselves: “We have losers.


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

Vox, 11 June 2020, www.vox.com/culture/21285396/jk-rowling-transphobic-backlash-harry-potter. 37. Ramaswamy, Vivek. “Vivek Ramaswamy: Election 2020—Are We Witnessing the Beginning of the End of Wokeism?” Fox News, 14 Nov. 2020, www.foxnews.com/opinion/affirmative-action-race-income-vivek-ramaswamy. 38. Jarvis, Jacob. “Donald Trump Made Gains in Every Demographic except for White Men.” Newsweek, 5 Nov. 2020, www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-support-demographics-white-men-exit-poll-1545144. CHAPTER 11 1. Bostock v. Clayton County, 140 S. Ct. 1731, 207 L. Ed. 2d 218 (2020). casetext.com/case/bostock-v-clayton-county?. 2. “Questions and Answers: Religious Discrimination in the Workplace.”

Professor Thomas Jones of the University of Washington in Seattle explains that “the corporation which acts in a responsible manner may simply be paying society back.”8 Stakeholderist-in-chief Larry Fink borrows this logic when he frequently proclaims that “companies need to earn their social license to operate every day.”9 The shield of limited liability is what allows entrepreneurs to raise capital from outside investors who can bet on risky new ventures while limiting their losses to the amount of their investment. But it’s also what allows the Sackler family to remain multibillionaires even as their wholly owned company, Purdue Pharma, goes bankrupt for having illegally marketed a painkiller that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths globally. It’s what allows President Donald Trump to remain a billionaire even though many of his properties have defaulted on their debts over the years, including payments to contractors who were struggling to make ends meet. It was the dark side of the grand bargain that society struck to incentivize entrepreneurial innovation. Classical capitalists have all but ignored this fundamental argument that corporations owe society concern for its welfare in return for its gift of limited liability.

Tomorrow I’ll lay out a plan to take it on,”17 in response to a New York Times article detailing Martin Shkreli’s exorbitant price increase of Daraprim by over 5,000 percent.18 Clinton was the Democratic presidential fron-trunner, so her comments sent biotech markets into a tailspin.19 Clinton’s concerns were echoed by then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The writing was on the wall for pharma companies—drug pricing would be a policy focus of any new administration, and the industry was losing in the court of public opinion. So what did it do in response? In 2016, the pharma industry created an unofficial social contract to limit drug price increases to 10 percent per year.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

As problems go, Elon Musk’s exploding satellite and concerns about Internet.org weren’t so insurmountable. In short, Facebook had taken its place as one of the great American success stories. Mark Zuckerberg’s world seemed perfect. What could go wrong? * * * • • • BARELY TWO MONTHS after Mark Zuckerberg returned from Nigeria, Donald Trump was elected the president of the United States. It was a shock to many, many people who supported the other candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. For Facebook, the shock was compounded by something else: a huge collective finger pointed toward Menlo Park, California, where the company had its sprawling headquarters.

Two days after the election, Mark Zuckerberg appeared at a conference at Half Moon Bay, about thirty miles north of the Facebook campus. He would be interviewed, fireside chat–style, by David Kirkpatrick, an author turned conference organizer who had himself published a book about Facebook six years earlier. Naturally, he asked Zuckerberg about the charges that Donald Trump might have benefited from misinformation circulated on Facebook via the personalized news feeds of its users. Zuckerberg brushed off the thought. “I’ve seen some of the stories they’re talking about around this election,” Zuckerberg said. “Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea.”

The status change garnered more than a million Likes. By exchanging vows, Zuckerberg was ignoring a warning from a fellow billionaire on CNBC, made on the eve of the IPO. “They get married, and then for some reason over the next couple of years they get divorced and then she sues him for $10 billion and she hits the jackpot,” said Donald Trump, who had at that point met neither party. The second thing Zuckerberg did was address the reason Facebook’s stock had crashed. The belated move to native apps assured Facebook that its service would run well on the technology that was on a path to ubiquity. The native apps were well received.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Americans are raised to believe in the sanctity of work: whether in school, at home, or from the pulpit, there is no higher praise than “a job well done.” Political hopefuls can’t seem to say enough about work—in stump speeches the word or its equivalent is more common than liberty and justice combined. In most matters rhetorical, even freedom takes a backseat to work. Little wonder, then, that Donald Trump’s campaign was built on a vow to return “real work” to America’s shores, to wrench twenty-five million jobs back from the grip of “not fair” trade treaties and “bad deal” immigration policies and lay them at our feet like the spoils of war. “I will be the greatest job producer that God ever created,” our future president bellowed.

On its face, this assumption might seem justified. For many of us the job “hunt” has become a sort of Hunger Game, a cutthroat competition to survive in a world where jobs have been automated away, or shifted from higher-wage nations like the United States to lower-wage nations like China and India. Donald Trump acknowledged—and exploited—this trend when pledging to bring jobs “back home.” The problem with this claim is that in a global economy not all jobs have any particular “home”—many can happily land almost anywhere, and when they land in low-wage nations the benefits sometimes return to American consumers in the form of lower-priced goods.

The authors had a name for these stalwart men and women. They called them “the Unbroken.” And as we’ll see in the following chapters, their story of survival in the throes of tumultuous change has much to inform our own time. Part I Our National Jobs Disorder We are going to fight for every last American job. —PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP 1 SUFFERING LESS How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less. —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE If the American dream came packaged in human form, Abe Gorelick would be a perfect match.


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

International Coordination Conclusion NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX Introduction THERE IS A CERTAIN tension between reducing socioeconomic inequalities and protecting the environment. For the most part these two objectives are compatible and often mutually reinforcing; but they may also be at odds with each other, as our political leaders do not tire of reminding us. Donald Trump, after all, justified his decision to leave the Paris Agreement on climate change on the ground that the jobs of American miners should be protected. Whatever his real motivation may have been (and one may reasonably suspect that it was neither the protection of American workers nor the health of Americans), the argument that environmental policy can improve the lot of a nation’s poorest people deserves to be given a fair hearing.

But the inability of states to guarantee social justice and to narrow, if not actually eliminate, economic inequality undermines their very legitimacy. Authoritarian regimes can allow themselves, through repressive measures or by falsifying public information, the luxury of disregarding their solemn undertakings, but democracies cannot do this for very long. SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND ELECTORAL EXTREMISM Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 American presidential election and the vote in Great Britain earlier that year to leave the European Union have caused much ink to be spilled, and surely there is much more yet to be said. What was the determining factor of these results? Some authors maintain that they are explained on objective socioeconomic grounds (notably, increases in inequality); others hold that the principal cause is a subjective feeling among certain ethnic groups of a loss of power in the face of rising levels of immigration.8 Recent studies go some ways to reconciling the two interpretations.9 Studying the sources of the Brexit vote, the German economist Thiemo Fetzer found that support for the pro-Brexit, far-right UKIP party was stronger where austerity cuts had been more severe, everything else being equal.

In the United States, the growing inequality that marked the Reagan years inaugurated a dark period for environmental policy.43 The preceding decade, by contrast, when partisan disagreements over economic justice were less pronounced, had begun with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970. The radicalization of political debate accompanying the election of Donald Trump is the most recent and the most extreme illustration of this dynamic. In June 2017, fulfilling a campaign promise, Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Under the terms of the treaty, this executive order cannot take effect before November 4, 2020, one day after the next presidential election—which leaves a faint glimmer of hope, if the Democrats manage to regain the White House.


pages: 234 words: 63,844

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein by James Patterson, John Connolly, Tim Malloy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, corporate raider, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Murray Gell-Mann, Ponzi scheme, Stephen Hawking, WikiLeaks

In a 2003 profile of him, New York magazine quotes Harvard professors (“He is amazing”), Princeton professors (“He changed my life”), MIT professors (“If I had acted upon the investment advice he has given me over the years, I’d be calling you from my Gulfstream right now”), and other luminaries, up to and including Bill Clinton. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years,” says Donald Trump. “Terrific guy; he’s a lot of fun to be with.” No one knew then that someday Trump would run for president. (When he does, he’ll attack Hillary Clinton for Bill Clinton’s own entanglements with Epstein.) But Trump’s already ahead of the curve in that he ends up severing his ties to Epstein well before the police or the media get wind of Epstein’s penchant for underage girls.

CHAPTER 33 Virginia Roberts: 1999 Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago, had once belonged to the fabulously wealthy heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. It sits on twenty perfectly manicured acres less than two miles away from Jeffrey Epstein’s home on El Brillo Way. It’s home to the exclusive Mar-a-Lago Club, which has a spa, tennis courts, and a very posh restaurant. Donald Trump had fought the town council for decades as they blocked all his efforts to turn the place into a private resort. Other clubs on the island—those with a history of excluding blacks and Jews—had never faced such restrictions, Trump had argued. At one point he sent copies of two movies to every member of the town council: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier confronts his girlfriend’s racist parents, and Gentleman’s Agreement, in which a journalist confronts anti-Semitism in Connecticut and New York City.

Through a representative, Ghislaine Maxwell called the allegations against her “obvious lies,” after which Roberts filed a defamation suit against Maxwell. In an answer filed in the suit, Maxwell elaborated that Roberts’s “story of abuse at the hands of Ms. Maxwell” was “fabricated” for financial gain. CHAPTER 35 Alicia: May 20, 1997 Donald Trump’s instincts regarding Jeffrey Epstein were solid. But if the reporters who were beginning to look into Epstein’s mysterious background had dug a bit further, there’s a chance they would have hit pay dirt as well—and not just in Palm Beach. In California, for instance, a paper trail already stretched from the Santa Monica Police Department to Epstein’s front door.


pages: 337 words: 87,236

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

A statue of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, was knocked clean off its base: it was unclear if the perpetrators were confused anti-fascists or fascists, retaliating for the removal of Confederates and slaveholders. The statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, Denmark, was daubed with the words ‘Racist Fish’. That one was probably just a prank.1 The backlash was led by President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order declaring: ‘Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies – such as Marxism – that call for the destruction of the United States system of government.’ The order reiterated that those who damage federal property could face ten years in jail.

Will we blow up the Colosseum in Rome because of slavery? Will we take down the White House because it was built by slaves? Where does it stop? ‘I watch them [protesters] on television and I see what’s happening and they’re ripping down things they have no idea what they’re ripping down’, said Donald Trump on Fox News in 2020. ‘They started off with the Confederate [sic] and then they go to Ulyssius [sic] S. Grant. Well, what’s that all about? And they would knock down Lincoln, there’s a group that wants to take down Lincoln, they haven’t figured exactly out why yet. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson.

How is memory constructed, how is it challenged, and what can we learn from this? What is the future for statues? Have they had their day? And, if they have: what comes next? 1.A Revolutionary Beginning King George III Location: Province of New York Put up: 1770 Pulled down: 1776 On 4 July 2020, during the great wave of iconoclasm, President Donald Trump vowed: ‘We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children, or trample on our freedoms.’1 Yet there is little more fundamentally American than an angry mob tearing down a statue. The statue in question was of George III, king of Great Britain and Ireland.


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

In the years leading up to Reagan’s presidency and during those of his tenure, as the economic historian Pamela Walker Laird and others understand it, to be a self-made success meant you were morally good, and if you had failed to succeed, you were morally corrupt. This ideology of bootstrapping, filtering through American politicians ranging from former president Donald Trump, with his faux self-made mindset, to ultraright Senator Josh Hawley and Tim Boyd, the now-former mayor of Colorado City, Texas. (During a period in 2021 when unusually frigid temperatures ravaged his state, Boyd boomed his bootstrapping views in response to a population that was in some cases freezing to death: “Sink or swim, it’s your choice!”)

This data made it even harder to accept the romanticization of the rugged individualism of the past. In addition to its continued effect on television shows and public health, the drumbeat of individualist pioneer propaganda was also a centerpiece of some key political speeches. These speeches might be broadcast on television, like one delivered by then-President Donald Trump at the 2020 Republican National Convention. “We are a nation of pilgrims, pioneers, adventurers, explorers, and trailblazers who refused to be tied down, held back, or reined in,” said Trump. “Americans built their beautiful homesteads on the open range.” “Those homesteads were a gift from the government!”

And he was “thrilled” in particular to be seated so close to Trump himself. Roecker was then a fifty-seven-year-old dairy farmer living in rural Wisconsin outside the village of Loganville, population 300, where the closest place to shop is the 9,500-person town of Reedsburg. Roecker first found common cause with Donald Trump in 2016 when Trump was running for president; foremost among his reasons: that Trump defined himself as a self-made man, even though the candidate, contradictorily, was born rich. Another rationale for his interest was that Roecker had grown irritated by the mandate to wear masks and the lockdown.


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

New York Times, February 12, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/us/politics/snapchat-bets-big-on-quick-fire-approach-to-campaign-coverage.html Flynn, Kerry. “President Trump Takes to Snapchat on Inauguration Day.” Mashable, January 20, 2017. http://mashable.com/2017/01/20/donald-trump-snapchat/#COriFAOfl5qR Levine, Sam. “Hillary Clinton Trolls Donald Trump with Custom Snapchat Filter at His Own Rally.” Huffington Post, May 25, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-snapchat_us_5745f017e4b0dacf7ad3be36 Mahler, Jonathan. “Campaign Coverage via Snapchat Could Shake Up the 2016 Elections.” New York Times, May 3, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/business/media/campaign-coverage-via-snapchat-could-shake-up-the-2016-elections.html Perlberg, Steven.

“Bernie Sanders Is Running a 9-Day Snapchat Ad Campaign in Iowa.” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-sanders-is-running-a-9-day-snapchat-ad-campaign-in-iowa-1453806001 Vincent, James. “Ted Cruz Trolled Donald Trump with a Snapchat Filter at Last Night’s Debate.” Verge, January 29, 2016. https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/29/10867830/ted-cruz-donald-trump-snapchat-filter Wagner, Kurt. “Hillary Clinton Gets a Snapchat Interview, but Donald Trump Doesn’t Want One.” Recode, October 17, 2016. https://www.recode.net/2016/10/17/13310114/snapchat-hillary-clinton-interview Chapter Thirty: Discover Falters Adair, Bill. “What Happens when a 50-Something Journalist Gets a Week’s Worth of News from Snapchat Discover?”

While they had initially been used solely to denote where a user was, geofilters now could include quotes from a candidate’s speech, an explanation of what had happened, and live-updating results from primary races. Soon the candidates started using Snapchat’s geofilters as well, paying to have custom filters at debate halls and rallies. In January 2016, Ted Cruz mocked Donald Trump’s absence at the final Republican debate with a filter asking, “Where is Ducking Donald?” accompanied by a yellow duck sporting a Trump haircut. Bernie Sanders’s campaign ran a different geofilter every day for nine straight days leading up to the Iowa caucus. Most urged voters to “Feel the Bern” and get out to vote on caucus night.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Such feelings often hold greatest sway among communities that also benefit economically from those governments’ policies. Some feelings have greater political potency than others. Feelings of nostalgia, resentment, anger, and fear have disrupted the status quo. Populist uprisings, as manifest in the victories of Donald Trump, the Brexit campaign, and a wave of nationalist surges across Europe, are cases of this, and have been widely criticized for their denigration of expertise and harnessing of emotional discontents. But these are symptoms of a problem, and not a cause. Individual leaders and campaigns will come and go, but the conditions that enabled them will endure.

For large swaths of Western societies, statistics are viewed as serving the interests of elites, offering a version of reality that only privileged cultural groups recognize and benefit from. In the United States, trust in the veracity of statistics maps heavily onto political divisions: 86% of those who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 expressed trust in the economic data produced by the federal government, compared to just 13% of those who voted for Donald Trump.1 In Britain, the emotive issue of immigration provokes widespread suspicion of official data, with 55% of people believing the government is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants in the country, a percentage that rises as people get older.2 The wounds suffered by technocracy are partly self-inflicted.

The global financial crisis began deep within the financial system itself, well beyond the purview of most members of the public, but soon revealed itself as an epic failure of numerical calculation on the part of credit-rating agencies and investment analysts. Opinion polling is another area of mathematical modeling that appears to have gone wrong in recent years, as it failed to adequately detect unexpected surges of support for Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. Do numbers still tell the truth? Do they still adequately represent how things are? The answer depends heavily on how they are produced and by whom. The credibility of statistics and economics has profound political implications for how we achieve consensus on the government of society.


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

He was like the surgeon, famously described by a writer, who had inside himself a small cemetery where he buried his failures and, from time to time, went to pray. And so he went to pray. * The relationships that Robert Redfield and Tony Fauci enjoyed with Donald Trump give you an idea of the difference between a career civil servant and a presidential appointee. If Donald Trump had gotten up and said, “Fauci, you’re fired,” nothing would have happened, which is likely why he never did it. The person with the authority to fire Tony Fauci was Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health. To do it, however, he would have needed to show cause—which is why Fauci was always less likely to be fired than to be reassigned to, say, the Indian Health Service.

Bush, Bossert had watched Carter and Richard reinvent pandemic planning, reinterpret the greatest pandemic in human history, resurrect the idea that a society could control a new disease by using social distancing in its various forms, and then somehow lead the CDC to the conclusion that the whole thing had been their idea. Donald Trump had shunned most anyone associated with any former president but had made an exception of Bossert, whom he’d named his first homeland security adviser. “The job I had was chief risk officer for the country,” said Bossert. “And it should have been named that.” After his appointment, Bossert built a team of people to deal with biological risks, and instantly called Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher.

He said I would be ‘doing research on imprisoned persons.’ ” Never mind that every single one of the fifty-seven Americans in quarantine wanted to be tested: the CDC forbade it. And Lawler never understood the real reason for the CDC’s objections. Did they want to avoid finding cases to avoid displeasing Donald Trump? Were they concerned that, if they tested people without symptoms and they found the virus, they’d make a mockery of their current requirement that only people with symptoms be tested? Were they embarrassed or concerned that someone other than the CDC was doing the testing? If so, then why didn’t they just perform the tests themselves?


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

Robert Glover, a Metropolitan Police officer who specialized in crowd control, cried out in panic on a radio transmission as insurrectionists stormed the west wing of the U.S. Capitol. It was 2:13 p.m. on January 6, 2021. A mob of Donald Trump supporters had breached the building, smashing windows and pouring into the seat of American democracy to reverse the election of Joe Biden. Rioters marched through the halls of the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” looking to vent their wrath against the vice president. Soon after, at 2:24, Donald Trump posted a tweet that said Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.” In the days and weeks that followed, right-wing media shifted the narrative of a violent mob attacking Congress on live TV to one of peaceful protestors rallying to protect democracy.

He’d learned of a disturbing feature of the novel coronavirus that was sweeping through Wuhan, China. At the time, Covid-19 had killed a few hundred people. Thousands more had become severely ill. Beijing had implemented a sweeping lockdown on the region. It all seemed so very far away. Few believed serious measures were required outside China. U.S. President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissed the virus as another seasonal flu that would fade away with the spring. Stock markets hit records in America, Europe, Asia. Good times lay ahead. Taleb, whose once coal-black beard had lately turned snow-white, learned that some epidemiologists estimated Covid-19 had an R0—called an “R naught” or “R zero”—of three or four, maybe higher.

In 2020, the infection of a single person in Wuhan by a microscopic virus killed millions and pushed the global economy into free fall. The murder of an African-American man by a police officer in Minneapolis, recorded on a cellphone, ignited waves of protests not only across the United States, but around the world. The intransigence of a single man—Donald Trump—radicalized tens of millions of Americans, pushing U.S. democracy to the brink. And in 2022 the intransigence of another man, Vladimir Putin, would bring the world to the edge of World War III. As globalization expands, connectivity accelerates. Complexity breeds complexity, and speed breeds speed.


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

“the poorest state in the nation”: “West Virginia Ranked Poorest State in Country,” WVNS TV, October 12, 2018, https://www.wvnstv.com/news/west-virginia-ranked-poorest-state-in-country/. had peaked decades prior: “Donald Trump and Coal Mining Jobs: How Far Back Does He Want to Take West Virginia?” Center for Economic and Policy Research, August 20, 2016, https://cepr.net/donald-trump-and-coal-mining-jobs-how-far-back-does-he-want-to-take-west-virginia/. their governor’s veto: Kurt G. Larkin, “West Virginia Becomes the 26th Right-to-Work State,” Hunton Andrews Kurth, March 7, 2016, https://www.huntonlaborblog.com/2016/03/articles/employment-policies/west-virginia-becomes-the-26th-right-to-work-state/.

This is a natural by-product of a capitalist system in which the flip side of exploitation is reliance, meaning that the fates of everyone in the system are deeply intertwined—something thrown into stark relief by the sudden rebranding of workers earning minimum wage as “essential.” In such a highly connected world, even the patriarch at the top of the ruling class is vulnerable and can become infected—as President Donald Trump showed in real life when he was hospitalized with COVID-19. This is why this virus has unnerved the ruling class around the world more than others; as the casually transmitted SARS-CoV-2 dropped a match into decades of social kindling, those rulers became aware that the blast might reach even them.

From the 1980s until 2010, for example, people living with HIV were formally barred from entering the United States, which triggered international boycotts of scientific AIDS conferences happening inside the States and ignored the rapid spread of the disease within the country’s borders. Early in his presidency, Donald Trump was reported to have said that Africans and Haitians “all have AIDS” as an excuse for his xenophobic immigration policies. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Trump and various politicians tried to blame the novel coronavirus on China, Mexico, and Hispanic and Asian people in the United States, even as the policies of those politicians—not to mention Trump himself running around the country holding huge rallies—were responsible for transmitting the virus within the country.


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

Shear, “Trump Signs Executive Order Protecting Free Speech on College Campuses,” New York Times, May 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/politics/trump-free-speech-executive-order.html. 147. Donald Trump Jr., “Free Speech Suppression Online Builds Case to Break Up Big Tech,” Hill, September 30, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/463631-free-speech-suppression-online-builds-case-to-break-up-big-tech. 148. Donald Trump, Twitter, May 16, 2020, 4:56 a.m., https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1261626674686447621, accessed May 27, 2020. 149. Nick Rigillo, “Convicted Racist Hits Danish Campaign Trail After Easter Riots,” Bloomberg, updated May 4, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-03/a-convicted-racist-joins-list-of-candidates-in-danish-election 150.

But for authoritarians, history is a matter of urgent necessity: to make their presence appear inevitable and welcome, to legitimate their actions, and to undermine their adversaries. “Warring authorities,” explains the historian J. H. Plumb, “mean warring pasts.”10 This is why totalitarian regimes give historians no freedom, why Donald Trump vehemently denied irregularities in his election and advanced a false, contrary narrative, and why the sixteenth-century Spanish invaders in Mesoamerica destroyed the Maya civilization’s most sacred and ancient texts. It also explains why the Guatemalan government targeted the Maya for renewed cultural extermination during that country’s 1960–96 civil war.

The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. found it difficult to imagine such an agenda being pushed by these leftists’ “activist counterparts in the sixties, who defined themselves through their adversarial relations to authority and its institutions.” Now, writes Gates, “the aim is not to resist power, but to enlist power.”16 It is not just governments that are being asked to censor. As of early June 2020, many Facebook employees were in revolt against their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for not removing Donald Trump’s inflammatory postings.17 This misplaced trust in institutions to censor in the public interest has received an assist from a “What’s the big deal?” outlook emerging from some of the more rarified confines of the ivory tower. Starting with the work of Michel Foucault and followed up by a stream of academics, the idea is that censorship is not merely something enforced by authorities; it’s also hardwired into the oppressive power dynamics of everyday life, communication, and thought formation—including what Frederick Schauer calls “the ways some discourses marginalize others by displacing them” and what Ruth Gavison identifies as “self-restraint by speakers themselves, a variety of market devices [and] social implementation of norms of unacceptability.”18 That does not leave much out.


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

If he could have provoked a military coup on his own behalf, he wouldn’t have hesitated. If he’d then abolished future elections, millions of Americans would have cheered him. The last day of 2020 came on January 6, 2021, the day that the president sent 20,000 maddened Americans to overthrow self-government. Up to the very end, what kept Donald Trump from reaching the exalted status of dictator—feared by his bitterest critics, desired by his most fanatic supporters—was his own ineptitude, along with our creaky institutions and the remaining democratic faith of the American people. There was always a perverse comfort in imagining Trump as a fascist, a Mussolini.

At one point Clinton informed the participants that Congress was about to pass a bill for permanent trade relations with China, which would make both countries more prosperous and China more free. “I believe the computer and the Internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all of human history,” he exulted. You can almost date the election of Donald Trump to that moment. * * * The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from the national life of their fellow Americans. Christopher Lasch, writing in the early 1990s when this withdrawal was young, called it “the revolt of the elites.” Between meritocracy and democracy, it’s the first that dominates their waking hours, commands their unthinking devotion, and drives them, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion.

The percentage of white college graduates answering yes to questions like these suddenly shot upward. It’s worth noting that the views of Black Democrats didn’t change nearly as much. It’s also worth noting that Republicans were becoming slightly more progressive on these issues, until the election of Donald Trump two years later. Then a polarizing dialectic set in, as his supporters and opponents drove each other to extremes, identity politics against identity politics, replicating endlessly. It’s hard to say why Just America emerged as a national narrative in 2014. That summer, in Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer shot and killed an eighteen-year-old Black man, whose body was left to lie on the street for hours.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

Matthew Gilbert, “Snarky Rich Kids Make for Fun ‘Gossip,’” Boston Globe, September 19, 2007, http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2007/09/19/snarky_rich_ kids_make_for_fun_gossip (accessed July 4, 2010). 23. Mantsios, “Media Magic,” 105. 24. “McDonald’s Features Donald Trump in New Ad Campaign Launching DollarPriced Big N’ Tasty and McChicken Sandwich,” McDonalds.com, October 3, 2002, http://www.mcdonalds.com/countries/usa/whatsnew/pressrelease/2002/10032002_a (accessed December 16, 2003). 25. Frank Urquhart, “Donald Trump Jets In and Fires Off ‘Slum and Pigsty’ Slur,” Scotsman.com, May 27, 2010, http://www.scotsman.com/donaldtrump/Donald -Trump-jets-in-and.6322621.jp (accessed July 5, 2010). 26. Urquhart, “Donald Trump Jets In and Fires Off ‘Slum and Pigsty’ Slur.” 27. Katie Evans, “Most Overexposed Billionaires,” Forbes.com, January 21, 2010, http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/21/most-overexposed-billionaires-branson-buffett -business-billionaires-trump.html (accessed July 5, 2010). 28.

According to sociologist Gregory Mantsios, the media send several messages about the wealthy as bad apples: On rare occasions, the media will mock selected individuals for their personality flaws. Real estate investor Donald Trump and New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, for example, are admonished by the media for deliberately seeking publicity (a very un–upper class thing to do); hotel owner Leona Helmsley was caricatured for her personal cruelties; and junk bond broker Michael Milken was condemned because he had the audacity to rob the rich.23 As Mantsios suggests, some of the wealthy can be viewed as bad apples because they seek the media spotlight to further their own causes and financial interests. New York real estate developer Donald Trump is an example. Over the years, Trump has been available to the media for profiles about his empire, including his numerous high-rise buildings and development projects in New York City and his hotels and casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey. 9781442202238.print.indb 61 2/10/11 10:46 AM 62 Chapter 3 Despite his billions, Trump at one time appeared in McDonald’s ads selling dollar-priced sandwiches,24 and he hosts reality shows like The Celebrity Apprentice, on which candidates vie to win money for their favorite charity, and The Apprentice, which pits noncelebrities against each other as they seek to win an at least six-figure prize—a job with the Trump organization.

“Bottom’s Up: The Middle Class—Winning in Politics, Losing in Life.” New York Times, July 19, 1998, WR1. ———. “We Pledge Allegiance to the Mall.” New York Times, December 6, 2004, C12. “Unable to Endure Poverty.” New York Times, June 2, 1884, 2. Urquhart, Frank. “Donald Trump Jets In and Fires Off ‘Slum and Pigsty’ Slur.” Scotsman.com. May 27, 2010. www.scotsman.com/donaldtrump/Donald-Trump-jets-in -and.6322621.jp (accessed July 5, 2010). Vane, Sharyn Wizda. “Martha’s Dirty Laundry.” Austin American-Statesman, April 20, 2002, D1, D13. 9781442202238.print.indb 286 2/10/11 10:47 AM Bibliography 287 Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class.


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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

one who had never served: “In the office’s storied 227-year existence—from George Washington to Barack Obama—there has never been a president who has entirely lacked both political and military service. Donald Trump has broken this barrier.” Zachary Crockett, “Donald Trump Is the Only US President Ever with No Political or Military Experience,” Vox, January 23, 2017, https://www.vox.com/​policy-and-politics/​2016/​11/​11/​13587532/​donald-trump-no-experience. “unholy mess”: Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York: Crown, 2017), p. 13. The two Washington journalists use the phrase “unholy mess” to sum up the views of campaign insiders Lissa Muscatine, Clinton’s longtime speechwriter, and Jon Favreau, former wunderkind speech writer for President Barack Obama.

Only weeks before, the billionaire: During a campaign rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, on January 23, 2016, Trump said, “They say I have the most loyal people—did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters….It’s like incredible.” Katie Reilly, “Donald Trump Says He ‘Could Shoot Somebody’ and Not Lose Voters,” Time, January 23, 2016, https://time.com/​4191598/​donald-trump-says-he-could-shoot-somebody-and-not-lose-voters/. by 2042, for the first time: Conor Dougherty, “Whites to Lose Majority Status in U.S. by 2042,” Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2008, https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​SB121867492705539109; Ed Pilkington, “US Set for Dramatic Change as White America Becomes Minority by 2042,” Guardian, August 14, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/​world/​2008/​aug/​15/​population.race.

They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most—the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America. Trump channeled insecurities and disaffection that went deeper than economics, researchers have found. “White voters’ preference for Donald Trump,” wrote the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, “…was weakly related to their own job security but strongly related to concerns that minorities were taking jobs away from whites.” The tremors within the dominant caste had been building long before Trump announced his candidacy.


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

“I hope you will put more”: David McCabe, “Tim Cook to Trump: Put ‘More Heart’ in Immigration Debate,” Axios, June 20, 2017, https://www.axios.com/tim-cook-to-trump-put-more-heart-in-immigration-debate-1513303104-f5799556-4f78-4c80-aca3-d7b48864a917.html. During a later interview: “Excerpts: Donald Trump’s Interview with the Wall Street Journal,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-interview-with-the-wall-street-journal-edited-transcript-1501023617?tesla=y; Tripp Mickle and Peter Nicholas, “Trump Says Apple CEO Has Promised to Build Three Manufacturing Plants in U.S.,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-says-apple-ceo-has-promised-to-build-three-manufacturing-plants-in-u-s-1501012372.

When the Trump administration issued: Tripp Mickle and Jay Greene, “Apple Says China Tariffs Would Hit Watch, AirPods,” Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-says-china-tariffs-would-hit-watch-airpods-1536353245; Tripp Mickle, “How Tim Cook Won Donald Trump’s Ear,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-tim-cook-won-donald-trumps-ear-11570248040. Chapter 21: Not Working “There’s lots of ways”: Apple, “Apple Special Event, September 2017” (video) Apple Events, September 14, 2017, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/apple-special-event-september-2017/id275834665?

The group had worked through the night without any sleep and were keenly aware that they were taking an unpopular position that could hurt Apple. It was a bet-the-company gamble. IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Apple’s showdown with the FBI dominated the news, accounting for about five hundred articles a day and constant discussion on TV. It became a presidential campaign talking point, as Republican candidate Donald Trump blasted Apple and called for a boycott of its products. Public opinion was split, with half the country demanding that Apple cooperate with the FBI and half supporting its resistance. The battle between the world’s largest company and the world’s most powerful government was enthralling. On February 25, a week after the letter, a crew from ABC News arrived at Infinite Loop with World News Tonight anchor David Muir.


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

In a behind-the-scenes outtake filmed in 2005, Donald Trump is on camera with the show’s host Billy Bush openly admitting to sexual assault: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them … Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” When Bush said, “Whatever you want,” Trump replied, “Grab ’em by the pussy.” The Clinton campaign was so excited about the Russia attribution that it initially ignored the Access Hollywood tape. What could be better than the U.S. government connecting Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin? Answer: Donald Trump admitting on tape to grabbing women’s genitals.

Besides, once information is on the internet, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Donald Trump followed up the next day with a tweet: “Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders, Mock his heritage and much more. On-line from WikiLeakes, really vicious. RIGGED.” The Sock Puppet Julian Assange vowed not to reveal his source for the emails, but denied that the leaked documents came from Russia. He speculated that it was an inside job, the work of a DNC consultant or programmer. Donald Trump also cast doubt on the Russia attribution: “I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China.

We’ll see how a sixteen-year-old from South Boston hacked the cell phone of the celebrity socialite Paris Hilton, then leaked nude photos he found on it, only to have Paris Hilton be accused of deploying a similar hack on her rival celebrity Lindsay Lohan. From there, I’ll describe how Fancy Bear, a hacking unit within Russian military intelligence, broke into the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and arguably helped elect Donald Trump president of the United States. Finally, I’ll explain how the “Mirai botnet,” a vast, distributed, hacking supercomputer a Rutgers undergraduate designed to get out of his calculus exam and disrupt the online game Minecraft, almost destroyed the internet in the process. As I delve into these five epic hacks, I will also lay bare the technology that made them possible.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

It includes this question: Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people? Researchers ran the first round of the survey in 1972. At the time, nearly half of the people who responded said they trusted others. By the latest round in 2018 — two years after Donald Trump was elected president — the figure had dropped to less than a third. That’s scary news. Trust is the basis of all cooperative action in a free society. It’s the feeling of fellowship that allows people to take risks and grow. It’s also the underpinning of democracy. And it’s fragile, easy to undermine.

We’re describing them now because we want to preserve these small moments for the sake of posterity. Above all, we hope that this story will help empower others — anyone who cares about an open society — to speak and act during a precarious moment in American history. Meanwhile, the presidency of Donald Trump has brought new threats to democracy and transparency in government. Chelsea Manning, whose role in leaking US diplomatic cables made her an inspirational figure to Snowden, has been thrown back in jail, despite having received a pardon by President Barack Obama. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged under the Espionage Act and now faces up to 175 years in jail.

“When I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately,” he told Meet the Press, “I type or write a letter myself, put it in the post office, and mail it.” Three years later, New York Times reporter Susanne Craig would find a surprise in her third-floor mailbox: then–presidential candidate Donald Trump’s tax returns. This prompted her to remind the newspaper’s readers that “especially nowadays, when people are worried that anything sent by email will leave forensic fingerprints, ‘snail mail’ is a great way to communicate with us anonymously.” At some point after Snowden’s box arrived, I began to wonder about its backstory.


pages: 199 words: 57,599

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Donald Trump, fear of failure, high net worth, Maui Hawaii, Parkinson's law, passive income, retail therapy

Notice that when self-made millionaires lose their money, they usually have it back within a relatively short time. Donald Trump is a good example. Trump was worth billions, lost everything, and then a couple of years later, got it all back again and more. Why does this phenomenon occur? Because even though some self-made millionaires may lose their money, they never lose the most important ingredient to their success: their millionaire mind. Of course in “The Donald”’s case, it’s his “billionaire” mind. Do you realize Donald Trump could never be just a millionaire? If Donald Trump had a net worth of only 1 million dollars, how do you think he’d feel about his financial success?

If Donald Trump had a net worth of only 1 million dollars, how do you think he’d feel about his financial success? Most people would agree that he’d probably feel broke, like a financial failure! That’s because Donald Trump’s financial “thermostat” is set for billions, not millions. Most people’s financial thermostats are set for generating thousands, not millions of dollars; some people’s financial thermostats are set for generating hundreds, not even thousands; and some people’s financial thermostats are set for below zero. They’re frickin’ freezing and they don’t have a clue as to why! The reality is that most people do not reach their full potential. Most people are not successful.

But in the end, they will still produce financial failure or mediocrity at best. Conversely, if you’ve got mind files that support financial success, you will naturally and automatically make decisions that produce success. You won’t have to think about it. Your normal way of thinking will result in success, kind of like Donald Trump. His normal way of thinking produces wealth. When it comes to money, wouldn’t it be incredible if you could inherently think how rich people think? I sure hope you said “absolutely” or something to that effect. Well, you can! As we stated previously, the first step to any change is awareness, meaning the first step to thinking the way rich people think is to know how rich people think.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The image reflected back is grossly distorted and increasingly at odds with reality. Our economic mirror is broken. We are living in an “age of anger,” defined by popular backlash and rejection of previously cherished institutions and ideals, up to and including Western liberalism itself.1 In the US that has led to the rise of Donald Trump. Britain has voted for Brexit, and in Europe unconventional parties, both on the right and the left, have shaken the status quo. There are political convulsions, caused by popular revolt, from India to Brazil and from the Philippines to Turkey. There are many competing explanations for what has caused popular rage in countries that have, judged by conventional measures, never been richer.

Woe betide any politician who is willing to advocate a drop in growth in the interests of some greater cause, be it social or environmental. In the US the idea of sacrificing growth by, say, taxing gasoline or carbon more heavily as a measure against global warming would be politically unthinkable. Indeed, Donald Trump’s decision to quit the Paris accord on climate change in the name of growth won strong support among sections of the American public. When Kevin Rudd, Australia’s former prime minister, tried to introduce a carbon emissions trading scheme, his bill was defeated on the grounds that it would raise business costs and damage the economy.

The authors were accused by some of ignoring African Americans, whose rates of mortality were still far higher than white Americans, even though they were closing the gap as a result of the reversal in white fortunes. But it was the findings about the decline of the white middle class that chimed so well with the 2016 presidential election in which Donald Trump was swept to power. As the Washington Post pointed out, “President Trump won huge swaths of voters in 2016 by promising to address the grievances of the white working class, and white nationalists endorsed his campaign. Case and Deaton’s research on white mortality seemed to speak directly to that political narrative.”8 In 1964, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center report, the average hourly wage for non-management, private-sector workers in America was $2.50, an amount that had risen to $20.67 by 2014.


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

The virus rocked the world economy, sending us tumbling into a micro-depression, as hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of infections taxed the world’s working population and as restrictions and quarantines designed to stop the spread torpedoed economic activity. Many of us were forced to stay at home for weeks, where all we could do was read more bad news and worry. Americans were on edge. A presidential election year could only fan those flames. Donald Trump, one of the most controversial presidents in American history, faced an emboldened progressive movement and dissent within the ranks of the party and political ideology he ostensibly led. His constant gaffes and imbroglios, including his widely criticized handling of the pandemic, helped chip away at whatever legitimacy he held as a popular-vote loser who had been elected under a cloud of controversy in 2016.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as left-leaning disdain for uneducated white workers and voters results in leftist cultural and communicative practices that seem tailor-made to reject the support of that large bloc. Left activists refuse to engage with the complexity of, for example, the millions of voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Donald Trump in 2016. This is, strategically, a kind of madness; any successful future for the left-of-center requires expanding our coalition and dreaming big when it comes to convincing disaffected lower-wage citizens to support us. I strongly suspect that cultural issues are so dominant in many left spaces because culture is all the left feels like it controls.

Yet when I talk to people about DSA now, they have no idea that DSA was once well-known as the conservative socialist institution. And, of course, most of the new generation of socialists were not even born when the Soviet Union fell. Complicating everything was the absurd and destructive presidency of Donald Trump. His ascension to the position of leader of the Republican Party, and his subsequent presidential administration, still feels fake somehow. Everything about it was so bizarre that it’s hard for me to believe that it was real. But real it was, and we’re living with the consequences. Taking advantage of a Republican Party that lacked a clear leader at the end of the Obama administration, and leveraging his considerable celebrity for attention, Trump bullied his way to the Republican nomination, ridiculing his primary opponents and breaking every unwritten rule and taboo of conventional politics.


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Tomorrow Belongs to Me AFTERWORD NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY INVENTORY (NPI) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX CHAPTER ONE The Mighty I It can’t be easy to wake up every day and discover that you’re still Donald Trump. You were Trump yesterday, you’re Trump today, and barring some extraordinary intervention, you’ll be Trump tomorrow. There are, certainly, compensations to being Donald Trump. You’re fabulously wealthy; you have a lifetime pass to help yourself to younger and younger wives, even as you get older and older—a two-way Benjamin Button dynamic that is equal parts enviable and grotesque.

After he bought the moribund Gulf+Western Building in New York City’s Columbus Circle, skinned it down, covered it in gold-colored glass, converted it into a luxury hotel and residence, and reinforced it with steel and concrete to make it less subject to swaying in the wind, Trump boasted to The New York Times that it was going to be “the stiffest building in the city.” If he was aware of his own psychic subtext, he gave no indication. Donald Trump the person was not always Donald Trump the phenomenon. He began his career in his father’s company, building modestly priced rental properties in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, which is to the New York real estate world what Waffle House is to the high-end restaurant industry. He made his move into Manhattan in 1971, and while his interests and appetites were clearly, gaudily upscale, he was, in his own vainglorious way, something of a man of the people.

You own homes in Manhattan; Palm Beach; upstate New York; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Rancho Palos Verdes, California; and you’re free to bunk down in the penthouse suite of any hotel, apartment building, or resort that flies the Trump flag, anywhere on the planet—and there are a lot of them. But none of that changes the reality of waking up every morning, looking in the bathroom mirror, and seeing Donald Trump staring back at you. And no, it’s not the hair; that, after all, is a choice—one that may be hard for most people to understand, but a choice all the same, and there’s a certain go-to-hell confidence in continuing to make it. The problem with being Trump is the same thing that explains the enormous fame and success of Trump: a naked neediness, a certain shamelessness, an insatiable hunger to be the largest, loudest, most honkingly conspicuous presence in any room—the great, braying Trumpness of Trump—and that’s probably far less of a revel than it seems.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

(I speculate that the third reason might be the most important.) It is entirely reasonable for Facebook to take these points into account. But we should not aspire to a situation in which everyone’s News Feed is perfectly personalized, so that supporters of different politicians—Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, someone else—see fundamentally different stories, focusing on different topics or covering the same topics in radically different ways. Facebook seems to think that it would be liberating if every person’s News Feed could be personalized so that people see only and exactly what they want. Don’t believe it.

You can become radicalized in the sense that you come to believe, firmly, a position that is within the political mainstream—for example, that your preferred political candidate is not just the best but immeasurably better than the alternatives, and that any other choice would be catastrophic. On both sides, this happened in the 2016 campaign between Donald Trump (#CrookedHillary) and Hillary Clinton (#NeverTrump). Of course you can become radicalized in more disturbing ways; we will get to that in due course. THE ENORMOUS IMPORTANCE OF GROUP IDENTITY With respect to polarization, perceptions of identity and group membership are important, both for communications in general and social media in particular.

Second, hashtags create communities of interest around identifiable subjects, and those communities can include diverse views. Both of these effects involve a high degree of sorting and filtering, but the second need not produce polarization, and it might result in encounters with widely diverse points of view. A GLANCE AT POLITICIANS, INCLUDING DONALD TRUMP All over the world, politicians have been using social media, often to create the conditions for polarization effects. A full discussion would require a book all its own, so consider just two prominent examples. In the United States, Barack Obama was the first president to use social media to promote his campaign.


pages: 350 words: 109,521

Our 50-State Border Crisis: How the Mexican Border Fuels the Drug Epidemic Across America by Howard G. Buffett

airport security, clean water, collective bargaining, defense in depth, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, immigration reform, linked data, low skilled workers, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill

Honduras Murder Rate Falls Slightly in 2016: Report. Retrieved November 26, 2017, from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-honduras-violence/honduras-murder-rate-falls-slightly-in-2016-report-idUSKBN17S2YU. 2 Kopan, T. (2016, August 31). What Donald Trump Has Said about Mexico. CNN. Retrieved October 3, 2017, from http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/31/politics/donald-trump-mexico-statements/index.html. 3 Mohan, G., and Coronado, G. (2015, May 25). To Keep Crops from Rotting in the Field, Farmers Say They Need Trump to Let in More Temporary Workers. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved October 13, 2017, from http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farm-labor-guestworkers. 4 Linthicum, K. (2017, March 3).

When apprehended, the smugglers may tell the same stories as the migrants, and it’s not always easy to tell them apart. For many years we have pursued border security strategies and national immigration policies in the United States that have swung like a pendulum between the dominant issues of each of those groups. We hear extreme language on both sides, some demanding “open borders” for all…or President Donald Trump’s supporters chanting “Build the wall” to keep out “rapists” and “killers.”2 Both positions are simplistic and unworkable. For many years, a lack of leadership from Washington has made border security one of the most volatile and controversial subjects in America, and it’s made us all less safe.

When the county finished with Garcia Zárate (it’s common for a district attorney to decline to prosecute drug charges that old), the jail released Garcia Zárate without coordinating with ICE to take custody.7 When this detail became known, many were outraged. On the 2016 presidential campaign trail, Donald Trump specifically cited the Steinle murder as a reason federal funds should be cut off from any and all sanctuary cities that didn’t honor ICE detainers.8 When I first read about the Steinle case and related stories about sanctuary cities, I also was angry. How did we become a country that tolerates violent offenders who’ve been repeatedly deported coming back and inflicting terrible harm on innocent victims?


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Thiel not only had the money, he had the inclination. He was someone who believed in extreme ideas, even more so than the typical Silicon Valley venture capitalist. After all, he was funding the Singularity Summit. In the coming years, he would, unlike many Valley moguls, put his full weight behind Donald Trump, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. “We needed someone who was crazy enough to fund an AGI company,” Legg says. “He was deeply contrarian—still is about everything. Most of the field thought that we shouldn’t be doing this, so him being deeply contrarian was probably going to play to our advantage.”

A group at the University of California–Berkeley designed a system that converted horses into zebras and Monets into van Goghs. They were among the most eye-catching and intriguing projects across both industry and academia. Then the world changed. * * * — IN November 2016—the month Yann LeCun gave a speech calling GANs the coolest idea in deep learning of the last twenty years—Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. And as American life and international politics underwent a seismic shift, so did AI. Almost immediately, the administration’s clampdown on immigration stoked concerns over the movement of talent. As the number of international students studying in the United States, already on the decline, now fell sharply, an American science and mathematics community that relied so heavily on foreign talent began to suffer.

The truth was that the problem had been rampant during the election, particularly on Facebook’s social network, where hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps even millions, had shared hoax stories with headlines like “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead of Apparent Murder-Suicide” and “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.” After Facebook revealed that a Russian company with links to the Kremlin had purchased more than $100,000 in ads on the site from four hundred and seventy fake accounts and pages, spreading divisive messages related to race, gun control, gay rights, and immigration, these concerns continued to grow.


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

But while observing the man’s many indecencies over three years as president, Bowen had come to regret the vote and, in fact, had begun to consume less Fox News and more MSNBC. Still, he knew Bannon had powerful friends and harbored a like-minded disdain for cheap Chinese manufacturing. “Well, okay,” Bowen told Bannon’s producer. “But I fucking hate Donald Trump. Is that a problem?” “Well, can you just not say that on the air?” the producer asked on the phone. “Yeah, I just want you to know who you’re talking to here. I am not a Donald Trump supporter.” Somewhere in his discussions with the producer and Bannon’s cohost, Bowen was asked what could be done. He said the CDC and the White House needed to immediately invest in new mask machines and place large orders with every manufacturer it could find.

There was one party and one administration handling the arrival of the coronavirus, and its failure to rise to the occasion is definitive and damning. I have treated this legacy with the reverence it deserves. Members of the other party also made mistakes, and I have pointed them out. I have resisted the notion that capitalism itself is to blame for all of this, though I understand the temptation. President Donald Trump’s admitted effort to downplay the virus to prevent a stock market scare is a strong point to consider. We will never know how many lives might have been spared if the president were as concerned with charts of rising American deaths—which he dismissed as “it is what it is”—as he was charts-tracking the S&P 500 Index.

.…” Also, “[U]nless the US mask supply is brought back under American control, Americans may die needlessly in future pandemics.” In October 2013, he wrote to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont: “If there is a severe pandemic, due to the fact that it is imported and foreign controlled, the US mask supply could be cut off.” And in a letter dated February 2017, Bowen took a shot at speaking then-president Donald Trump’s language: “90% of the United States protective mask supply is currently FOREIGN MADE!” At industry conferences and in phone calls and emails with federal officials, for thirteen years, Bowen had made the case. But by 2019, all but one office in the federal emergency response apparatus had tuned him out.


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

This story is well told in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). 3. Tara Palmeri, “Trump Fumes over Inaugural Crowd Size,” Politico, January 22, 2017, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/donald-trump-protesters-inauguration-233986. 4. IPCC, “Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 degree C” (2018), https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/. 5. Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “The World Has Just over a Decade to Get Climate Change under Control, UN Scientist Says,” Washington Post, October 7, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/10/08/world-has-only-years-get-climate-change-under-control-un-scientists-say/; “Arctic Ice Could Be Gone by 2030,” Telegraph, September 16, 2010, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/8005620/Arctic-ice-could-be-gone-by-2030.html; Coral Davenport, “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040,” New York Times, October 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-report-2040.html; Mark Fischetti, “Sea Level Could Rise 5 Feet in New York City by 2100,” Scientific American, June 1, 2013, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fischetti-sea-level-could-rise-five-feet-new-york-city-nyc-2100/; Mary Caperton Morton, “With Nowhere to Hide from Rising Seas, Boston Prepares for a Wetter Future,” Science News, August 6, 2019, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/boston-adapting-rising-sea-level-coastal-flooding. 6.

And indeed some confessed that because they were prone to conspiracy theories, this is probably what drew them to research Flat Earth in the first place. But the amazing thing is that they did not seem at all ashamed of this. One fellow explained this by saying, “Flat Earthers are more ‘sensitive’ to conspiracy theories than other people.” But to believe that all world leaders are in on a secret that the world is flat? Does anyone think that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson could keep a secret like that? Apparently so. Time and again, Flat Earthers would come right out and tell me that belief in conspiracy theories was at the foundation of their reasoning.31 (Indeed, in one of the seminars on how to recruit new believers into Flat Earth, one of the speakers said, “If you run into someone who says they don’t believe in conspiracy theories, walk away.”)

“The Reptilian Elite,” Time, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860871_1860876_1861029,00.html. 18. Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen M. Douglas, “Conspiracy Theories as Part of History: The Role of Societal Crisis Situations,” Memory Studies, June 29, 2017, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1750698017701615. 19. Jeremy Schulman, “Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said about Global Warming,” Mother Jones, December 12, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/trump-climate-timeline/. 20. Does this mean that there is a causal link between conspiracy theories and science denial? According to at least one researcher, yes. As reported by the BBC in 2018, Stephan Lewandowsky found that “the stronger a person believes in a conspiracy, the less likely they are to trust scientific facts.


pages: 201 words: 62,452

Calypso by David Sedaris

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, obamacare

It’s early September 2015 and I’m on the island of Santorini for a literary festival. After the short reading, which takes place outdoors on a patio, the Greek audience asks questions, the first of which is “What do you think of Donald Trump?” Since announcing his candidacy, the reality-show star has been all over the news. Every outrageous thing he says is repeated and analyzed—like he’s a real politician. I answer that I first became aware of Donald Trump in the late 1980s. That was when Alma, a Lithuanian woman I was working for, bought his book The Art of the Deal and decided that he was wonderful. Shortly afterward, I saw him on Oprah, and ever since then he’s always been in the background, this ridiculous blowhard, part showman and part cartoon character.

“Oh,” she says, “everyone’s going to Lake Merritt to hold hands. We’re going to form a human chain around it.” She says this as though it’s going to reverse time and make Donald Trump stop being the president-elect. I cringe, thinking of how this will play on Fox News: “Watch out, everyone, they’re holding hands!” Eight. I join my family on Emerald Isle for Thanksgiving and have a great screaming fight with my Republican father, who yells at one point, “Donald Trump is not an asshole!” I find this funny but at the same time surprising. Regardless of whether you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on.

I later look at one of the websites this person relies upon for information. On it, an anonymous source close to the royal family—a “palace insider”—reports hearing the queen saying to another Illuminati member at a tea party that before the year ends three more world-famous musicians must die. None of the websites my friend looks at say anything bad about Donald Trump. Rather, he is hailed as a man of peace. The ones they hate are George Soros, of course, and surprisingly Bill Gates, who has murdered more innocents than even the Clintons, apparently. My friend gets almost feverish when he talks about these people and the way they’re all connected: Queen Elizabeth leads to Jay-Z leads to the Centers for Disease Control leads to the faked Sandy Hook shooting and the way the government staged 9/11.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

‘At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in US history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century.’ This ‘is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump’.13 And this shift paved the path for the Third Way. Hillary Clinton even crystallised the shift in an election rally speech in 2016. ‘If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,’ she shouted, ‘would that end racism?’ ‘No!’ her audience replied. ‘Would that end sexism?’ ‘No!’ And on she went, razzing the crowd up with a pro-big bank message couched as something very different.

Yet we feel no corresponding need to lend such support to our local handyman or photocopy shop, which aren’t competing globally. Large parts of our political classes need this global competitive bogey to frighten the masses into accepting policies that benefit their friends in big business, Wall Street and the City. In 2017 Donald Trump wielded this fear-mongering tactic to great effect, praising China and ‘highly competitive’ countries with ‘unbelievably low tax rates’, who are ‘taking us, frankly, to the cleaners, so we must – we have no choice – we must lower our taxes’. His administration went on to give US multinationals and billionaires the biggest collective tax cut in world history.

‘There is a sense that Dublin is a different country. When Haughey was taking money out, people didn’t make the connection – “That’s my money.”’ In a wider context this helps to explain, among other things, voters’ remarkable willingness in many countries to support ethically challenged candidates like Silvio Berlusconi or Donald Trump. ‘As a reaction to the idea of faceless, fluid forces shaping one’s destiny, an extreme of local loyalty and of personal intimacy,’ says O’Toole, ‘is an act of defiance against Them – whoever They are. Doing the last thing you’re supposed to do may be the final assertion of power against a feeling of powerlessness … The real wonder was not that fraudsters got elected but that more politicians did not claim to be crooks in order to get elected.’14 Prioritising the local, the family and the personal at the expense of the wider nation is a basis for corruption the world over – heroic corruption, you might call it.


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

., had a net worth of $2.5 billion and was implicated in the theft of $120 million of other people’s money while running his firm, a firm that has been fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for millions of dollars.188 He also ran the bankruptcy- restructuring advisory practice for the Rothschilds for many years while at N M Rothschild & Sons, where he met Donald Trump while advising him on one of his many bankruptcies. Former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon Mobile and had about $300 million stashed away when he agreed to be insulted by Donald Trump for a year or so. Considering the Secretary of State is a position focused on regime change in foreign countries, and countries with oil are always a prime target, it makes sense that Trump went with a guy that knows the importance of the American Petrodollar, and how to use the threat of embargos to subjugate other countries and force them to bend to their demands.

In plain language – the Illuminated old Elite and new Billionaires, who control and operate the united nations of the world, the central banks, the military, and the corporations – and have been doing so for hundreds of years. People need to get really honest with themselves about who is running the show in America, and virtually every other country in the world: It is not the federal government, or parliament, or House of Whatever (although they all have a role to play). It is not Donald Trump, though he fantasizes about leading the charge on a white horse that really brings out the orange in his skin. The real stars of the show are the Corporations and the Military-Information- Terror complex, and they are driving the world off a cliff like they were Thelma and Louise in a red convertible.

The mainstream media has been polishing that turd for so long that it says more about their lack of actual pull within the establishment political apparatus that despite 24/7 coverage and a unified front by the Democrats and their partners at CNN and MSNBC, they still have not been able to convince the public that Russia actually had any role in Trump’s election victory because it is so plainly obvious to anyone that Hillary Clinton was the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the election. It was not because of the Russians, not due to voter fraud, not as a result of “fake news”, not due to James Comey talking about her plethora of lies, but rather because she was such an unlikeable candidate that she made Donald Trump seem like a reasonable alternative. A candidate with zero political experience, the type of guy that was on record telling men to “grab ‘em by the pussy”, a notorious liar, a golf cheat, a serial exaggerator, a womanizer, and spray tan addict beat Hillary Clinton, and that is the truth of the matter.


pages: 575 words: 140,384

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

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Tyson announced he was jumping: Thomas Tyrer, “Tyson Chasing Pact at Showtime,” Electronics Media, December 17, 1990. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I love animals,” she testified: Joe Treen and Bill Shaw Bill, “Judgment Day,” People, February 24, 1992. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Donald Trump loudly defended Tyson: David Shortell and Miguel Marquez, “When Mike Tyson Was Convicted of Rape, Donald Trump Came to His Defense,” CNN, October 28, 2016. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Albrecht was allowed to stay: Bewkes declined to comment on his role in the aftermath of Albrecht’s attack on Emerson. He also declined to answer whether, in retrospect, he thinks that the way HBO responded to the incident was conducted fairly.

“I thought that was neat because I love animals,” she testified. Then he attacked her. After several weeks of testimony, the jury convicted Tyson on one count of rape and two counts of criminal deviate conduct. He was sentenced to six years in prison. Afterward, in a series of interviews, casino owner Donald Trump loudly defended Tyson, arguing that incarceration was an unjust punishment and seeming to blame the victim, pointing out to NBC News that the young woman had been seen “dancing with a big smile on her face” on the evening of her attack. * * * • • • ONE AFTERNOON in the late summer of 1991, Chris Albrecht entered Sasha Emerson’s spacious office with its sweeping city views in HBO’s Los Angeles headquarters and shut the door.

Dramatic depictions of menacing real-life figures started filling HBO’s Saturday nights. Stalin provided a closeup look at the Russian dictator and his atrocities. Citizen Cohn offered a blistering portrait of Roy Cohn, the manipulative, power-obsessed adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy (and, later, Donald Trump). One Man’s War told the story of the Paraguayan despot Alfredo Stroessner and the heinous acts of his secret police. Eventually, HBO dialed up an original movie about the rise and inglorious fall of Mike Tyson. “The American public, for some reason, was captivated by his transgressions as much as they were by his boxing,” says HBO’s Ross Greenburg, who produced the film, which starred Michael Jai White as Tyson.


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 while I was there, organizers asked me to give a short talk about the shock of the 2008 financial crisis and the raging injustices that followed—the trillions marshaled to save the banks whose reckless trades had caused the crisis, the punishing austerity offered to pretty much everyone else, the legalized corruption that all of this laid bare. These were the seeds of discontent that right-wing populists in dozens of countries would eventually exploit for a fiercely anti-immigrant and anti-“globalist” political project, including Donald Trump, under the tutelage of his chief advisor, Stephen K. Bannon. At the time, however, many of us still held out hope that the crash could catalyze a democratic revival and a new era of left power, one that would discipline corporate might and empower flailing democracies to address our many surging emergencies, including the climate emergency.

Eight days later, she traveled to Michigan, which was then one of the leading states in new coronavirus cases, to testify before the state’s House Oversight Committee that vaccine passports were akin to the early treatment of Jews by the Nazis. One person who took immediate notice of the resonance of Wolf’s new message was Steve Bannon. Within a week, he began having “Dr. Wolf” as a regular guest on his wildly popular and influential podcast, War Room, which he had been developing through various iterations since losing his post as Donald Trump’s chief strategist in 2017—while also, as he boasted to The New York Times, building “the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement.” Bannon could not get enough of Wolf: he sometimes hosted her several times in a single week, always lavishly plugged her website and its “Five Freedoms” legislation mill, which was suddenly anything but obscure.

I could have blasted Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” which I had recently rediscovered thanks to Brandi Carlile’s cover. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I touched the purple podcast app, pulled up Steve Bannon’s War Room, and read the capsule summary of the most recent episode. It was a speech by Donald Trump, recorded live, in which he announced that he was suing the Big Tech companies for deplatforming him, followed by reaction from … What? Why her? I scrolled down and saw that I had missed several other recent appearances by my doppelganger while abiding by my no-Wolf diet. I gulped them all, one after another.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Some sections focus on technology, some on politics, some on religion, and some on art. Certain chapters celebrate human wisdom, others highlight the crucial role of human stupidity. But the overarching question remains the same: what is happening in the world today, and what is the deep meaning of events? What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Is God back? Is a new world war coming? Which civilisation dominates the world – the West, China, Islam? Should Europe keep its doors open to immigrants? Can nationalism solve the problems of inequality and climate change?

Strongmen in countries such as Turkey and Russia experiment with new types of illiberal democracies and downright dictatorships. Today, few would confidently declare that the Chinese Communist Party is on the wrong side of history. The year 2016 – marked by the Brexit vote in Britain and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States – signified the moment when this tidal wave of disillusionment reached the core liberal states of western Europe and North America. Whereas a few years ago Americans and Europeans were still trying to liberalise Iraq and Libya at the point of the gun, many people in Kentucky and Yorkshire have now come to see the liberal vision as either undesirable or unattainable.

Disorientation causes them to think in apocalyptic terms, as if the failure of history to come to its envisioned happy ending can only mean that it is hurtling towards Armageddon. Unable to conduct a reality check, the mind latches on to catastrophic scenarios. Like a person imagining that a bad headache signifies a terminal brain tumor, many liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human civilisation. From killing mosquitoes to killing thoughts The sense of disorientation and impending doom is exacerbated by the accelerating pace of technological disruption. The liberal political system has been shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries and television sets.


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

By 2015 over a million people from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had found their way into Europe, primarily Germany but also Sweden and elsewhere.18 In their wake, a wave of politicians promising harsh new measures against migrants swept into power across Europe and the United States. U.S. voters elected Donald Trump, an unlikely populist who derided people from Mexico as rapists and criminals and led crowds in chants to “build the wall” that would stymie their movements. The people of Britain voted to leave the European Union and its open borders altogether. Political parties that vowed to fight the invasion of foreigners, refuse entry to even a single refugee, and intern refugees in camps won unprecedented numbers of seats in European parliaments, capturing the majority of seats in Poland, their first parliamentary seats in Germany, and joining the governing coalition in Austria.

A few months later the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed Horowitz on his prime-time current affairs show, watched by nearly 3 million viewers. Sweden, Horowitz explained, was under assault “because of the open door policy to Islamic immigration.” The next day newly elected president Donald Trump mentioned Horowitz’s findings to nine thousand fans at a rally in Melbourne, Florida. “Look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” he called out to the raucous crowd. “Sweden, who would believe this?” Within days, right-wing media outlets broadcast28ed news about the crime wave in Sweden across the nation.

Although the number of unauthorized immigrants36 entering and living in the United States had been falling since 2007, government reports and antimigrant politicians portrayed the criminality of migrants in the United States and along its borders as similarly emboldened, as if strengthened by some invisible current from across the Atlantic. Along the U.S.-Mexico border, government reports under President Donald Trump showed that attacks on Border Patrol agents spiked, increasing by 20 percent in 2016, then by over 70 percent in 2017. The men and women who guarded the border suffered the highest rate of assaults of any group of federal law officers, the chief of the U.S. Border Patrol told lawmakers in testimony to Congress.


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

Now he argues that Britain can and must remain part of Europe. Everyone involved in the Europe debate, whether or not they agree with the author, will find plenty of facts and arguments in this book relevant to this next chapter in our island’s history.’ Brendan Simms, Director of the Forum on Geopolitics, Cambridge and co-author of Donald Trump: The Making of a World View ‘The question of Brexit is set to dominate British political life for the foreseeable future. There has never been anything like it before. A closely fought referendum with a narrow outcome leading to a decision to leave the European Union, as well as the end of a prime minister’s career and the arrival of the second female prime minister in British history.

It reflects the pro-European commitment of Denis MacShane but adds facts and arguments, especially from across the Channel and Irish Sea, that will interest anyone following this new chapter in our national life.’ Adam Boulton ‘All is not lost. That’s the important message of hope from one of the very few who forecast the referendum result correctly. Brexit is the biggest challenge for Britain in a generation as a hard UKIP-style Brexit would align Britain with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, rather than with progressive forces and friends in Europe such as Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel. Denis MacShane has the deepest knowledge of Europe, having spent much of his life working with European political and civil society. He has been the most prominent pro-European voice as an MP and Minister.

That was something that happened across the Channel or the Atlantic or, in the twentieth century, in Russia in 1917 or Iran in 1979. Yet it is hard not to see the process of Brexit as anything short of a revolutionary moment in the placid waters of Britain’s political life. In Brexit combined with the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House following a Brexit-type post-truth campaign and wild exaggerations, the two great English-speaking democracies voted to end the era that opened with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Then the United States and European democracies, including Britain, joined in the construction of the Euro-Atlantic project of peace, economic integration and liberal democracy.


pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

(Getty Images) 13.Waiting for Putin: Two weeks after his inauguration, Macron invited the Russian leader to the Palace of Versailles, earning himself the nickname Sun King to add to that of Jupiter. (Author’s photograph) 14.A strange couple: Macron followed up his early knuckle-crunching handshake with an invitation to Donald Trump to attend the Bastille Day parade, prompting the American president to call him ‘a great guy … loves holding my hand’. (Getty Images) 15.In search of magic: Macron’s quest for a new Franco-German bargain with Merkel will test his ability to act as joint leader of the new European order. (Getty Images) 16.Eulogy for a rock star: Macron’s speech outside the Madeleine church in Paris on the day of Johnny Hallyday’s funeral was in some ways his ‘Diana moment’, an attempt to connect with popular French emotion.

Is he rehearsing the public dressing-down he is to give Putin later that day, over the use of Russian propaganda during the French presidential campaign? Perhaps he is mulling over what sort of handshake he will offer the Russian leader when he steps from his car, after the success of the knuckle-buster he exchanged with Donald Trump at the NATO summit in Brussels four days previously? Is he focusing on just looking the part, studiously conscious of the need to add gravity and pomp to his visible youth? Or maybe the philosophy graduate’s thoughts are roaming higher, to the course of history, and how he hopes to join Germany’s Angela Merkel in shaping Europe against the dark forces of illiberalism?

Moreover, in those dark days of 2016, when France had been battered by repeated terrorist attacks, Mr Macron’s breezy optimism, liberal internationalism and pro-European politics seemed woefully out of touch with the sullen times. A wave of angry populism and political nationalism appeared to be sweeping through Western democracies. Britain turned inward and voted for Brexit on 23 June. Five months later, Americans elected Donald Trump as their president. The only near-certainty about the French presidential election the following year was that one of the two candidates in the final run-off would be Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Front (FN), a prospect that shrouded the election in dread. That summer, Hollande, the sitting Socialist president, dismissed Macron’s project with En Marche as ‘an adventure with no future’.


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Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist lawyer, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, estate planning, fake news, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, power law, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon

I pitched the story to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Business Insider, and several other outlets. But none of them bit. This made no sense. Throughout the summer of 2016, I fielded constant calls from journalists asking for any information about Russian interference in Washington. Donald Trump had recently become the Republican nominee for president, and he had not been shy about his affection for Putin. In addition to Trump’s own murky business in Moscow, there were multiple people on his campaign team who had unexplained connections to Russia. It was all the media could talk about.

We were traveling there to meet with Judge Van Ruymbeke, the French magistrate who had overseen the freezing order of the assets belonging to the Russian woman arrested in St. Tropez in 2015. Since the arrest, he had significantly expanded his investigation. However, as excited as I was about this meeting, a dark cloud loomed over everything—the US presidential election, which was taking place that same day. According to every reputable poll, Donald Trump had only a slim chance of winning. But if he pulled it off, it would be disastrous for me. Throughout his campaign, he’d unashamedly praised Putin and predicted how “nicely” they would get along. Since Trump was a self-proclaimed dealmaker, and Putin had been trying to get his hands on me for years, it wasn’t hard for me to picture some shady, back-room deal where I would be handed over to the Russians.

As I watched him give his address from the Capitol Building, it looked like Trump’s most partisan detractors had been prescient: Putin now had his man in the White House. It was going to be a long, and potentially dangerous, four years. I. On October 7, 2016, a tape was released that featured Donald Trump saying, among other things, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Everyone thought that would be the end of his presidential campaign. It wasn’t. – 33 – The Khlebnikov File WINTER-SPRING 2017 The danger associated with Trump came from two sources.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Lauritsen, ‘Climatology: Contrails reduce daily temperature range’, Nature 418 (August 2002), 601. 29.Douglas Hofstader, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Harper’s magazine, November 1964, harpers.org. 30.Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in C. Nelson, L. Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990. 31.Hofstader, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’. 32.Dylan Matthews, ‘Donald Trump has tweeted climate change skepticism 115 times. Here’s all of it’, Vox, June 1, 2017, vox.com. 33.Tim Murphy, ‘How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy Theorist in Chief’, Mother Jones, November/December 2016, motherjones.com. 34.The Alex Jones Show, August 11, 2016, available at mediamatters.org. 35.US Air Force, ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier’. 36.Mike Jay, The Influencing Machine: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom, London: Strange Attractor Press, 2012. 37.Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: James Dodsley, 1790. 38.V.

Moynihan’s final report included the statement that ‘[the] secrecy system has systematically denied American historians access to the records of American history. Of late we find ourselves relying on archives of the former Soviet Union in Moscow to resolve questions of what was going on in Washington at mid-century.’13 Twenty years later, Donald Trump found that even as president he was not able to persuade his own intelligence agencies to release their complete records on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event whose murky and often classified history has poisoned the relationship between the American government and its people for decades.14 In the United Kingdom, the situation is far, far worse.

‘The sun has risen on an independent Britain,’ he says, ‘and just look at it, even the weather has improved.’9 The pervasiveness of chemtrails is deeply akin to Timothy Morton’s hyperobject reading of climate change itself: something that clings to the skin and inserts itself into every facet of life, as perfectly captured in an account by journalist Carey Dunne of a month spent with chemtrail believers in California: ‘I wish I didn’t know, because now that I know, it’s really making my heart sad.’10 Conspiracies literalise the horror we feel lurking unspoken in the world. Dunne’s initial enthusiasm for an idyllic working break on an organic farm turns weird when she discovers the beliefs of her employers, hippyish back-to-the-landers who, through Facebook, discovered a community of local chemtrail believers – and a doctored tweet by Donald Trump claiming that his administration would end chemtrailing: ‘How does someone like me know what’s true and what’s not?’ Tammi says. ‘I’m 54 years old. I don’t watch the news. I don’t listen to the news on the radio. Then when I’m on the internet, and I see something where I’m like, “Holy shit, really?”


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The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

The 2016 backlash is nowhere near as big as the great backlashes of the early 1900s. It is more like the small backlashes of the early 1800s—the Luddites and Corn Laws—but we don’t yet know where it is heading. The surprise election of the populist outsider Donald Trump as president was the largest backlash so far. NEW UPHEAVAL PRODUCES A NEW BACKLASH Donald Trump got Jeff Fox’s backlash vote, but not for the reason you might expect given the economic hardships he faces. Fifty-eight years old, he is a cancer survivor with a massive healthcare debt, living on disability and social security payments. While his father was an accountant in Bethlehem Steel—the region’s economic powerhouse until its 2001 bankruptcy—Fox was a furniture salesman before his early retirement.

.), Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 2B (Amsterdam and New York: North Holland, 2014). 3 The Second Great Transformation: From Things to Thoughts “The present administration . . . has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army . . . the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke these words in the deepest depths of the Great Depression. In 2017, another populist politician said: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” That was President Donald Trump, who was elected in a backlash against an economy that, for decades, provided more wealth for the well-off but more anguish for the average. Since the 1970s, the US working class has seen stagnating wages, rising economic insecurity, and increasing hopelessness. The situations in Europe and Japan are not as dire, but they share the trends.

Antoine Gourévitch, Lars Fæste, Elias Baltassis and Julien Marx, “Data-Driven Transformation: Accelerate at Scale Now,” Boston Consulting Group blog, May 23, 2017. 15. See interview with Jesse Graham, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California in Edsall, “Purity, Disgust and Donald Trump,” New York Times, June 1, 2016. 16. Lord Ashcroft, “How the United Kingdom voted on Thursday. . . and Why,” lordashcroftpolls. com. June 24, 2016. 17. Philip Oltermann, “Austria Rejects Far-Right Candidate Norbert Hofer in Presidential Election,” The Guardian, December 4, 2016. 18. See Christian Dustmann, Barry Eichengreen, Sebastian Otten, André Sapir, Guido Tabellini, and Gylfi Zoega, “Europe's Trust Deficit: Causes and Remedies,” VoxEU.org, August 23, 2017. 19.


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Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

He himself denied being a fascist, instead preferring the label ‘superfascist’.1 After World War II his vision of a societal and political order based on hierarchy, caste, race, myth, religion and ritual continued to be a major source of inspiration for Italian extreme-right terrorists2 and neo-fascists.3 Today, Evola’s books sell well to the alt-right. Even President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Stephen Bannon cites his works.4 According to the Rome-based Evola biographer and head of the Evola Foundation Gianfranco de Turris, ‘It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation.’ 5 ‘You are vetted,’ writes Deus Vult after a brief chat in which I tell him what he wants to hear: ‘I am white, of Austrian nationality and European ancestry.

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.20 It is Bateman’s belief that whites have been brainwashed into forgetting that they are ‘the descendants of conquerors and settlers who brought a civilization to entire continents’. The migration crisis and Donald Trump, he thinks, may have led to ‘the nagging search for what’s been wrong since as long as we can remember’, a sudden awakening that he equates with that featured in Fight Club.21 I settle for Kafka’s The Trial and Star Wars – at least these are open to interpretation. In the next set of questions, I have to situate my political views on the axes along left wing–right wing, regionalism–nationalism, pro-Israeli–pro-Palestine and liberalism–socialism.

For example, a Twitter account that operates under the handle @thebradfordfile tweets over 300 times per day, has a network of more than 100,000 followers and a core group of hundreds of amplifiers. Its messages, which reach from far-right propaganda to conspiracy theories, have been retweeted by Donald Trump and quoted by major US media outlets to illustrate the alt-right’s social media successes.35 There are too many elections for the few people at the DFR Lab to monitor. ‘An estimated 100,000 websites spread disinformation,’ Donara tells me, ‘but there are only a few dozen fact-checker websites.’


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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

Researchers have focused on “authoritarian personality,” a set of personality characteristics, partly determined by genes, which include a desire for order, obedience, conformity, and cohesion within the in-group with which the person identifies. Having those characteristics made it more likely that a person would vote for Donald Trump in the US, or Brexit in Britain, in 2016, more than any other variable measured. Cambridge psychologist Leor Zmigrod has discovered that people who live in US states and cities with a higher prevalence of diseases you catch from humans—but not diseases you get from animals, like Lyme disease—are more likely to have authoritarian personalities and to have voted for Donald Trump. States with more pathogens also tended to have more laws that restrict minorities, such as LGBTQ people.

The Centre… governments: Arnstein Aassve, Guido Alfani, Francesco Gandolfi, and Marco Le Moglie, “Pandemics and social capital: from the Spanish flu of 1918-19 to COVID-19,” VoxEU, March 22, 2020, voxeu.org/article/pandemics-and-social-capital. 38. As a presidential… disease: Philip Bump, “Donald Trump’s lengthy and curious defense of his immigrant comments, annotated,” Washington Post, July 6, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/06/donald-trumps-lengthy-and-curious-defense-of-his-immigrant-comments-annotated. 39. In February… in waiting: Tierra Smiley Evans, et al., “Synergistic China–US ecological research is essential for global emerging infectious disease preparedness,” EcoHealth 17, no. 1 (March 2020): 160–73, doi.org/10.1007/s10393-020-01471-2. 40.

Yet over the past six years, the WHO acquired an emergency response capability, expanded its work on antibiotic resistance and the health threats of climate change, almost completed polio eradication, and is now leading the world’s response to the pandemic. It was working on a shoestring as it was. With no increase in funding in that time, it is stretched pretty thin. Then in April 2020, Donald Trump threatened to withdraw US funding from the WHO, which is 15 percent of the agency’s regular funds. Larry Gostin, an expert in public health law, called it an effort to deflect blame for the slow US response to the pandemic, even though the WHO had been screaming for weeks that countries needed to do more.


pages: 229 words: 64,697

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need by Scott Pape

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Robert Shiller, Snapchat

Oh, and for teenagers flipping burgers, they'll have outgrown the piggy banks, so they can put their earnings into three separate bank accounts (Spend, Save, Give) instead. Paris Hilton, Donald Trump and your kids If you apply the knowledge I've given you, you'll be the VIP at your kid's 21st. However, if you don't also teach them how to handle money, you'll end up with your very own Paris Hilton … or Donald Trump — his father was a multimillionaire, you know (don't even get me started on this ). Think about it. What would you have done if your old man handed you a cheque for, say, $140 000 on your 21st birthday?

The automatic millionaire — how to put your investing on autopilot Little blue biros Faceplanting on a treadmill The final quarter of your grand final Never worry about money again — boosting your super to 15 per cent No willpower needed Automatic millionaire super scripts How to be a hero — investing for your kids (or grandkids) The number one secret to raising financially fit kids is … Lower income earners Higher income earners How not to raise a spoilt brat Paris Hilton, Donald Trump and your kids A letter to my boys Step 6: Boost Your Mojo to Three Months The power of Mojo — never worry about money again Recap of Part 2: Grow Part 3: Harvest Step 7: Get the Banker off Your Back The curious case of the postcode povvos Postcode povvos The millionaire next door Don't do it for the kids How to save $77 641 and wipe almost seven years off your mortgage Rule 1: Don't get the bells and whistles Rule 2: Don't fix your rate Rule 3: Get the cheapest rate possible The $22 064 phone call Revealed: the mortgage industry's dirty little secret Point the Fire Extinguisher at your home loan The proudest day of my financial life Step 8: Nail Your Retirement Number The Donald Bradman Retirement Strategy — why you don't need $1 million to retire Give us a hand, cobber Fear and loathing You do not need a million dollars in super to retire What your retirement will look like Introducing the Donald Bradman Retirement Strategy You'll never, ever, run out of money The three-bucket retirement solution Where will you get three years of pension payments for Mojo?

If so, you can apply on your phone for a new, ultra-low-cost fund in around 10 minutes — though going through the steps of rolling over your accounts and making sure your insurance is sorted will take a little longer. Still, it's hard to understate just how much of an impact this will have on your future. This is no time for counting calories: order something rich and thick (like Donald Trump). Well, that's Barefoot Date Night Week 2 done — and your super sorted. In the next Barefoot Date Night we're going to tackle something that's crucial to your safety and that of your family. Something no-one wants to talk about … so you and I are going talk about it. Starting over in your 50s Matt Ledger, WA The name Barefoot stuck in my memory, so I googled it and my life began to gain some direction.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

His successes include PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, and SpaceX, an almost unrivaled record of sniffing out winners before they become chic, which suggests a deeper understanding of technology and its trajectory. Thiel can be a wildly idiosyncratic thinker, which has justly earned him opprobrium in recent years. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he supported Donald Trump. He also quietly bankrolled retired wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against a gossip site. All these pernicious extracurricular activities distract from his core strength: He’s a more rigorous thinker than the others in his field. Though he mouths many of the libertarian clichés of his social set, he has a talent for explaining his underlying assumptions.

Of course, this is not an innocent activity—even though the tech companies disavow any responsibility for the material they publish and promote. They plead that they are mere platforms, neutral utilities for everyone’s use and everyone’s benefit. When Facebook was assailed for abetting the onslaught of false news stories during the 2016 presidential campaign—a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy—Mark Zuckerberg initially disclaimed any culpability. “Our goal is to give every person a voice,” he posted on Facebook, washing his hands of the matter. It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both.

It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power. In the olden days, we described that power as gatekeeping—and it was a sacred obligation. Five KEEPERS OF THE BIG GATE IN THE SKY LIKE DONALD TRUMP, Silicon Valley is part of the great American tradition of sham populism. With not quite the same furor as our current president, Silicon Valley came to power on the basis of its anti-elitism. It presented itself an antidote to the old Acela Corridor establishment, which it accused of condescending to the masses and zealously guarding its own prerogatives at everyone else’s expense.


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The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

THE TRIUMPH OF INJUSTICE How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay EMMANUEL SAEZ AND GABRIEL ZUCMAN CONTENTS Introduction REINVENTING FISCAL DEMOCRACY Chapter 1INCOME AND TAXES IN AMERICA Chapter 2FROM BOSTON TO RICHMOND Chapter 3HOW INJUSTICE TRIUMPHS Chapter 4WELCOME TO BERMULAND Chapter 5SPIRAL Chapter 6HOW TO STOP THE SPIRAL Chapter 7TAXING THE RICH Chapter 8BEYOND LAFFER Chapter 9A WORLD OF POSSIBILITY Conclusion TAX JUSTICE NOW Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Introduction REINVENTING FISCAL DEMOCRACY The evening of September 26, 2016, was off to a good start for Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state had the upper hand in her first election debate against Donald Trump, the reality-show celebrity who had won the Republican primary. Nervous and aggressive, the GOP candidate kept interrupting his opponent. The Democratic candidate, well prepared and relaxed, kept scoring points—when suddenly the debate turned to taxes. Breaking with a tradition dating back to the early 1970s, Trump had refused to release his tax returns, claiming he was prevented by an ongoing audit from the Internal Revenue Service.

This comprehensive perspective—the fruit of years of research on the US economy—allows us to study long-run changes in the progressivity of the US tax system in its entirety, which no government agency or research institution had been able to do so far. The data reveal the scale of the changes that have occurred over recent decades including, for the first time, the consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency. Let’s take a look: In 1970, the richest Americans paid, all taxes included, more than 50% of their income in taxes, twice as much as working-class individuals. In 2018, following the Trump tax reform, and for the first time in the last hundred years, billionaires have paid less than steel workers, schoolteachers, and retirees.

They publish information about the distribution of federal taxes, but disregard state and local taxes, which account for a third of all taxes paid by Americans and are much less progressive than federal levies. Their statistics do not provide specific information on the ultra-wealthy, so it’s not possible to tell whether Donald Trump is an exception or an instance of a broader phenomenon among billionaires. Let’s try to lift the fog. THE AVERAGE INCOME OF AMERICANS: $75,000 Our investigation begins with a simple question: What is the average income of Americans today? To answer it, we must introduce a concept that will play a critical role in this book: national income.


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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

Here is a valid argument: “If Hillary Clinton wins the 2016 election, then in 2017 Tim Kaine is the vice president. Hillary Clinton wins the 2016 election. Therefore, in 2017 Tim Kaine is the vice president.” It is not a sound argument, because Clinton did not in fact win the election. “If Donald Trump wins the 2016 election, then in 2017 Mike Pence is the vice president. Donald Trump wins the 2016 election. Therefore, in 2017 Mike Pence is the vice president.” This argument is both valid and sound. Presenting a valid argument as if it were sound is a common fallacy. A politician promises, “If we eliminate waste and fraud from the bureaucracy, we can lower taxes, increase benefits, and balance the budget.

According to the Madman Theory in international relations, a leader who is seen as impetuous, even unhinged, can coerce an adversary into concessions.31 In 1969 Richard Nixon reportedly ordered nuclear-armed bombers to fly recklessly close to the USSR to scare them into pressuring their North Vietnamese ally to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War. Donald Trump’s bluster in 2017 about using his bigger nuclear button to rain fire and fury on North Korea could charitably be interpreted as a revival of the theory. The problem with the madman strategy, of course, is that both sides can play it, setting up a catastrophic game of Chicken. Or the threatened side may feel it has no choice but to take out the madman by force rather than continue a fruitless negotiation.

And the increasingly popular affective fallacy, in which a statement may be rejected if it is “hurtful” or “harmful” or may cause “discomfort.” Here we see a perpetrator of the affective fallacy as a child: David Sipress/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank Many facts, of course, are hurtful: the racial history of the United States, global warming, a cancer diagnosis, Donald Trump. Yet they are facts for all that, and we must know them, the better to deal with them. The ad hominem, genetic, and affective fallacies used to be treated as forehead-slapping blunders or dirty rotten tricks. Critical-thinking teachers and high school debate coaches would teach their students how to spot and refute them.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

This is how a large minority of Americans abandoned newspapers in favor of talk radio and websites that peddle conspiracy theories. Filter bubbles and preference bubbles undermine democracy by eliminating the last vestiges of common ground among a huge percentage of Americans. The tribe is all that matters, and anything that advances the tribe is legitimate. You see this effect today among people whose embrace of Donald Trump has required them to abandon beliefs they held deeply only a few years earlier. Once again, this is a problem that internet platforms did not invent. Existing fissures in society created a business opportunity that platforms exploited. They created a feedback loop that reinforces and amplifies ideas with a speed and at a scale that are unprecedented.

It seemed likely to us that the Russian interference would have been most effective during the Republican primary. The Russians had been inflaming Groups and spreading disinformation about polarizing topics for more than a year when the candidates began running for president. All but one of the seventeen candidates ran on a relatively mainstream Republican platform. The seventeenth candidate, Donald Trump, uniquely benefited from the Russian interference because he alone campaigned on their themes: immigration, white nationalism, and populism. Whether by design or by accident, Trump’s nomination almost certainly owed something to the Russian interference. In the general election campaign against Hillary Clinton, Trump benefited significantly from the Russian interference on Facebook.

On Saturday morning, George, Tamiko, Michael Vachon, and I sat around the dining room table, reviewing every issue from multiple directions until George felt he could respond to whatever the reporters asked. It took more than three hours. The speech is included in the appendices to this book. Soros’s commitment to democracy around the world had particular salience in January 2018, given the rise of Donald Trump and the growing strength of hypernationalists in Europe. After an opening that focused on geopolitics, Soros’s speech turned to the threat to democracy from internet monopolies like Google and Facebook. Playing to his strengths, Soros framed the threat in economic terms. He characterized the internet monopolies as extraction businesses in the vein of oil companies, but with a better business model.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

To my sisters, Ritu and Poonam, and their children, Aniruddh, Siddhartha and Sudhanshu Preface I started thinking about this book in 2014 after Indian voters, including my own friends and relatives, elected Hindu supremacists to power, and Islamic State became a magnet for young men and women in Western democracies. I finished writing it during the week in 2016 in which Britain voted to leave the European Union. It went to the printers in the week that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Each of these earthquakes revealed fault lines that I felt had been barely noticed over the years, running through inner lives as well as nations, communities and families. The pages that follow try to make sense of bewildering, and often painful, experiences by re-examining a divided modern world, this time from the perspective of those who came late to it, and felt, as many people do now, left, or pushed, behind. 1.

The violence, not confined to any fixed battlefields or front lines, feels endemic and uncontrollable. More unusually, even this war’s most conspicuous combatants – the terrorists – are hard to identify. Attacks on Western cities since 9/11 have repeatedly provoked the questions: ‘Why do they hate us?’ and ‘Who are they?’ Before the advent of Donald Trump, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) deepened a sense of extraordinary crisis in the West with its swift military victories, its exhibitionistic brutality, and its brisk seduction of young people from the cities of Europe and America. ISIS has seemed to pose to many even more perplexing questions than al-Qaeda did.

The malign minds of ISIS have moved particularly energetically to use this interdependent world to their advantage; the internet in their hands has turned into a devastatingly effective propaganda tool for global jihad. But demagogues of all kinds, from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to India’s Narendra Modi, France’s Marine Le Pen and America’s Donald Trump, have tapped into the simmering reservoirs of cynicism, boredom and discontent. China, though market-friendly, seems further from democracy than before, and closer to expansionist nationalism. The experiment with free-market capitalism in Russia spawned a kleptocratic and messianic regime. It has brought to power explicitly anti-Semitic regimes in Poland and Hungary.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff and other scholars have decried the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” which is, as Zuboff defines it, “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales,” as well as “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification” via digital surveillance technologies.18 She believes (and I would agree) that surveillance capitalism represents a significant threat to our economic and political systems, as well as a potential instrument for social control.19 I’ve also come to believe that curbing Silicon Valley’s nefarious side effects will become “the signature economic issue [for lawmakers] over the next five years, especially as automation increases and they make investments into other areas of the economy,” as one staffer for an influential senior Democratic senator has put it to me. Yet this isn’t just a story for the business pages. In fact, Big Tech is at the center of nearly every story in the news today, ranking second only to stories about Donald Trump in the press. Yet while the president will leave us eventually, Big Tech is forever, transforming our existence a little more every day, as the technology itself spreads more deeply into our economy, politics, and culture. It’s an alchemy that is just beginning. As amazing as the changes of the past twenty years have been, they are only the first stages of a multi-decade transition to a digital economy that will rival the industrial revolution in terms of transformative power.

We can argue about the economic rationale for this, but the political result was the emergence of a narrative that the system had been captured by a small group of rich and powerful people. It drove voters on both ends of the spectrum away from the Republican and Democratic centers as a result. Now, just as the public fury at Wall Street after the 2008 crisis contributed to the populist backlash that led to Donald Trump, the sense that Silicon Valley is building robots instead of factories, and creating paper billionaires instead of jobs, is now fueling extremism on both ends of the political spectrum: from the rise of fascism among white men in red states, to socialism among angry young millennials in the blue states (feelings that are, of course, aired and fanned on the very technology platforms that have helped to fuel them).

Now, just as the public fury at Wall Street after the 2008 crisis contributed to the populist backlash that led to Donald Trump, the sense that Silicon Valley is building robots instead of factories, and creating paper billionaires instead of jobs, is now fueling extremism on both ends of the political spectrum: from the rise of fascism among white men in red states, to socialism among angry young millennials in the blue states (feelings that are, of course, aired and fanned on the very technology platforms that have helped to fuel them). When you stop to think about it, it’s not so surprising that a growing number of experts believe that it was tech-based disruption as much as trade that pushed the American Rust Belt toward Donald Trump.11 There is no question that the tech sector has spawned incredible economic bifurcation. A 2016 report by the Economic Innovation Group revealed that a mere 75 of America’s 3,000-plus counties make up 50 percent of all new job growth. These are the places where Big Tech looms large: San Francisco, Austin, Palo Alto, and so on.


pages: 50 words: 15,155

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard

Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, feminist movement, glass ceiling, knowledge economy, Saturday Night Live, wikimedia commons

There are all kinds of variant and competing influences on us, and our political system has happily overthrown many of the gendered certainties of antiquity. yet it remains the fact that our own traditions of debate and public speaking, their conventions and rules, still lie very much in the shadow of the classical world. The modern techniques of rhetoric and persuasion formulated in the Renaissance were drawn explicitly from ancient speeches and handbooks. Our own terms of rhetorical analysis go back directly to Aristotle and Cicero (before the era of Donald Trump it used to be common to point out that Barack Obama, or his speech writers, had learned their best tricks from Cicero). And those nineteenth-century gentlemen who devised, or enshrined, most of the parliamentary rules and procedures in the House of Commons were brought up on exactly those classical theories, slogans and prejudices that I have been quoting.

It may take a moment or two to take in that normalisation of gendered violence, but if you were ever doubtful about the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded or unsure of the continued strength of classical ways of formulating and justifying it – well, I give you Trump and Clinton, Perseus and Medusa, and rest my case. 23. Caravaggio’s head of Medusa has been replicated time and again to ‘decapitate’ female politicians. Here Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton are given the Medusa treatment. 24. Uncomfortable souvenirs? Supporters of Donald Trump in the US election of 2016 had plenty of classical images to choose from. None was more striking than the image of Trump as Perseus decapitating Hillary Clinton as Medusa. OF COURSE, IT IS NOT quite enough to rest the case there without saying what we might actually do about this. What would it take to resituate women on the inside of power?

Photo: Akg-images 23. (Top) Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Medusa (1597), held at Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy. Photo: Wikimedia. (Middle) Angela Merkel as Medusa. (Bottom) Hillary Clinton as Medusa. Both are internet memes 24. Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa revised showing Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton respectively. Photo: internet meme 25. Gerald Scarfe’s ‘Handbagging’, showing Margaret Thatcher swotting Kenneth Baker, MP © Gerald Scarfe, with permission 26. Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi attend Glamour Women Of The Year 2016, Los Angeles, California.


American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

The result is pay-for-play networks in which lobbyists and their clients are rewarded for their campaign contributions with government favors from public officials. The multitudinous rules they craft serve to shield government largess from the public eye, and have helped create the regulatory state on steroids that Donald Trump called the “swamp,” which has been a leading cause of the decline in American economic growth.7 Firms that funnel money to candidates through lobbyists are getting their money’s worth in the form of tariff protection and tax subsidies, and various other kinds of government assistance. In 2011 the Economist reported on a study that created a lobbying index for fifty American firms (lobbying expenditures divided by firm value), and reported that the index had outperformed the S&P 500 by 11 percent a year since 2002.8 Those firms did well, the national economy less so.

We might not want to fight a civil war over secession, but that’s not to say it would be all sweetness and light. Some protectionists might think that if international trade wars are a good idea, why not a trade war within the former United States? The Calexit movement tells its voters that the rest of America hates them, and asks that the state invest in California first. That sounds very much like Donald Trump complaining about Canadians. Would a seceding state even want free trade with the rest of America? Diversification We’re all familiar with the admonition not to put all of our eggs in one basket. We’ll not want to tie up all of our retirement funds in the shares of a single company, not when a well-diversified portfolio of investments in a group of companies promises a like return without the same downside risk.

The state’s position on the issue made secession wrongful, and so the Union was right to deny exit rights. Second, the voice option doesn’t work when both sides shut their ears to reasoned debate about the issues that divide them. And that’s where we are in 2020. Sixty-three million people voted for Donald Trump in 2016, nearly half of all voters. For much of the media and the academy, they are the enemy. Those who supported Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court were “complicit in evil,” according to Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ). You are either contributing to a wrong or you are fighting against it, he said.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Contrast with what people picture when they think of the Right: Richard Nixon looking sweaty and suspicious, racist 1970s comedians, South African security forces gripping their salivating Alsatians, semi-literate rednecks shouting at black people, five-foot South American dictators with their trophy wives, sleazy ‘back to basics’-era Tory MPs forcing their families to pose with them after they’d been caught engaged in sexual depravities with a dominatrix. And last but not least Donald Trump, a man who seems to possess the unique gift of having no redeeming human qualities whatsoever. Oh, and Nazis obviously. They have: Clooney, Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Marlon Brando, Sean Penn, Humphrey Bogart, Tom Hanks, Susan Sarandon, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin and Whoopi Goldberg, plus pretty much all the most talented character actors including Christopher Ecclestone, Mark Rylance and Pete Postlethwaite.

This has become a media staple in recent years, my favourite being a New York Times report about a primary school in Boston in which a teacher asked some kids the question: ‘What is gender?’ And to which a second grader – i.e. aged seven to eight – replied: ‘It’s a thing people invented to put you in a category.’29 That’s sweet. I mean, it’s completely untrue, but sweet. The ‘Woke eight-year-old’ who tells her progressive parent that Donald Trump is going to create the Fourth Reich – her thoughts being suspiciously like a Simple English version of the parent’s own musings on the subject – is such a cliché on social media that more often than not it’s done in jest. Yet supposedly highbrow newspapers make this comically unintelligent and twee argument with all seriousness.

They got upset at the invitation of one organisation offering a different perspective. And many of these pro-life campaigners have otherwise very Left-of-centre views. More recently, the people behind the US Women’s March excluded members of Christian women’s groups who also wanted to protest against Donald Trump, because of their anti-abortion views. But then, if your political movement is an active community, rather than a loose alliance, it has to have a creed of sorts – a set of principles to which everyone must sign up. This continual drive for doctrinal purity keeps the Right more diverse, a loose collection of people who have failed that test of faith in some way and so are not welcome in the progressive communion.


pages: 260 words: 76,340

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments by Kelly Oxford

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Donald Trump, Joan Didion, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Snapchat

On the screen I see silent footage of Billy Bush and Donald Trump. Billy Bush has made a career trading off his last name and, in my opinion, pretending to be a journalist. He is full of bumptious self-satisfaction, and he and Donald Trump fit the mold of privileged white male perfectly. They also, from their apparent actions on the screen, seem to have some kind of high-fiving bromance going on that, frankly, turns my stomach. Their smug faces give me the impression that this breaking news is going to add another layer to the dislike I’ve always felt for both of them. It is October 2016 and Donald Trump is currently running for President of the United States as the candidate for the GOP.

Gotta say, I had a pretty good laugh over that one.) To many people inhabiting planet Earth, and all the people I know, this feels like a huge, horrible joke. Donald J. Trump is an American icon, a caricature of a capitalistic, chauvinist, science-hating bully. Canadians like to joke about the Ugly American and the Ugly American is Donald Trump. If he were to become President, our joke about ugly Americans would no longer be funny. Our collective Canadian prayer throughout this campaign season has been “Please do not take our joke away.” With a great sense of dread I unmute the television. What I hear is Trump and Billy Bush having an off-camera conversation with hot mics.

Even so, the ideas around appearances were still out there, and I studied them like a PhD candidate. All in all, those boiled down to: Have long hair, be thin with a nice bust and hips. Don’t have too many opinions and be a good listener. Objectification. It is a hot, loaded word. Women have been bearing the weight of this behavior forever. But here were Donald Trump and Billy Bush taking objectification to a shocking next step. They were actually joking about sexually assaulting women. Billy’s horrendous laughter in response to Donald’s remarks put my head in an extreme place. I immediately open my Twitter account and see everyone tweeting about this. This is huge.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Her conspiracy-stoking drivel continues for nearly seven minutes.5 It seems questionable why anyone would want to release footage of themselves awkwardly dancing with a group of figures from a website tied to the far right and to some of the internet’s most bizarre conspiracy theories. It becomes particularly weird when you know who Ajit Pai is, and what he was overseeing that week. Since his appointment by Donald Trump earlier that year, Pai was in office at the helm of, in his words, ‘an agency that regulates one-sixth of the economy’6 – including the internet itself, at least within the United States. Because Ajit Pai is the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Founded during Franklin D.

Like many Trump appointees to regulatory and oversight roles, Pai entered his role as FCC chair as a known deregulator, who had previously worked briefly in the industry which he would now oversee – serving for a time in the counsel’s office for Verizon, and also as a DC-based communications lawyer, prior to serving as an FCC commissioner. The early months of Pai’s term saw several decisions benefiting media friendly to Donald Trump – a move Pai and his allies insisted was purely coincidental. In April 2017, the FCC passed a series of moves – after extensive industry lobbying – to relax ownership restrictions on networks buying up more local television stations.7 The result gave Sinclair Broadcast Group, a pro-Trump Conservative network, in particular a lot more latitude for purchases, and soon after the group announced a $3.9 billion merger deal with the media and newspaper group Tribune.8 A few months later, the group – which was still waiting for its deal to be cleared by other regulators – attracted considerable media attention, after forcing dozens of local news anchors to read on-air identical scripts condemning media bias and ‘false news’, to the tweeted delight of Donald Trump.9 The decision Pai – whose media team did not respond to requests for an interview for this book – was building towards in December 2017, though, was a far bigger one with potentially global ramifications.

In April 2017, the FCC passed a series of moves – after extensive industry lobbying – to relax ownership restrictions on networks buying up more local television stations.7 The result gave Sinclair Broadcast Group, a pro-Trump Conservative network, in particular a lot more latitude for purchases, and soon after the group announced a $3.9 billion merger deal with the media and newspaper group Tribune.8 A few months later, the group – which was still waiting for its deal to be cleared by other regulators – attracted considerable media attention, after forcing dozens of local news anchors to read on-air identical scripts condemning media bias and ‘false news’, to the tweeted delight of Donald Trump.9 The decision Pai – whose media team did not respond to requests for an interview for this book – was building towards in December 2017, though, was a far bigger one with potentially global ramifications. Pai was preparing for a meeting in which his committee would vote on whether to repeal strict rules governing how cable companies and other internet service providers handled the traffic on their network – referred to as net neutrality principles, and for many as near to sacred as anything gets on the internet.


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

Kim Hyok-chol’s expulsion only seemed to bolster his standing back home, and by the time of Adrian’s reconnaissance visit to Spain in early February 2019, he was North Korea’s highest-ranking official preparing for a second summit with Donald Trump’s team scheduled for February 27 and 28 in Hanoi. His counterpart on the U.S. side was Stephen Biegun, a career politico and onetime businessman at Ford Motor Company who was appointed by Donald Trump as U.S. special representative for North Korea Policy in August 2018. A Russia expert, Biegun advised Sarah Palin on foreign policy during the 2008 presidential elections. Speaking at Stanford on January 31, 2019, Biegun vowed that the Trump-Kim initiatives had a higher likelihood of success because “neither leader is constrained by traditional expectations that might doom their teams to try the exact same approach as in the past, with no expectation of anything but the same failed outcome.”

Who exactly those “colleagues” in North Korea were would begin to become clear in the years ahead. 11 FACE-TO-FACE When the situation was manageable, it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand, we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. —WINSTON CHURCHILL WASHINGTON, D.C. NOVEMBER 2016 From the outset of his presidency, Donald Trump, the New York City real estate tycoon turned U.S. president, viewed geopolitics through the lens of deal making. And there were good deals and there were bad deals. His business career was a mixed record. He’d become rich, but gone bankrupt more than once and been forced to sell some of his prized possessions along the way.

Ahn asked them, believing that their identities were still secret. They evaded the question, but the impression was that their names were already starting to circulate somewhere. What Adrian and the rest of the Cheollima team didn’t fully appreciate was just how bad the timing of their operation was. Donald Trump was preparing to fly to Hanoi for his second summit with Kim Jong-un, and the news was full of headlines about the possibility that the U.S.–North Korea relationship might be thawing, thanks to Trump’s unconventional diplomatic overtures. If there was one thing the Trump administration didn’t want, it was any possibility of anyone thinking that the U.S. government supported—even tacitly—such a bold and infuriating move by a bunch of rogue operatives, led by an American green card holder.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

It’s a struggle for the soul of America, and she is winning.’ Five years later, she’d have her greatest victory yet. A man who had, as a role model, the uncompromisingly individualistic hero of her 1943 novel The Fountainhead would be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. Donald Trump was a billionaire businessman who’d once praised Rand’s book in grandiose terms, saying, ‘it relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything.’ And the new president endorsed like-minded friends, nominating a secretary of state, a secretary of labor and a director of the CIA who were all avowed fans of Rand and her ideas.

The 2000s also saw a rise in popularity of the idea that governments should be run more like businesses, a trend that starkly exposes the mass internalization of the neoliberal self. The arrival of this notion has not only been tracked by political scientists, it was found by Cramer in her Wisconsin fieldwork. ‘This came up often,’ she writes, ‘and not just in predominantly Republican groups.’ In Donald Trump, of course, millions were to find their businessman. Here was a man who viewed the world as a system of transactions, of profit and loss, of deals won or squandered. As well as this, he gave voice to their feelings of betrayal and promised to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington. He would make them heroes once more.

In the UK, the vote to leave the European Union was driven by a campaign that played especially on the fears of those discomforted by the free movement of labour, with alarmist posters warning, ‘TURKEY (population 76 million) IS JOINING THE EU’ and promising ‘Brexit’ would allow the government to ‘take back control’ of the borders. Meanwhile, in the US, Donald Trump said he’d ‘put America first’ by building a wall at the Mexican border, spending billions on infrastructure and forcing Apple to relocate their manufacturing to the US, while one of his closest advisers complained to reporters, ‘The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.’


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

., Q3 2018 Earnings Conference Call, November 6, 2018, http://ir.corecivic.com/events/event-details/q3-2018-corecivic-inc-earnings-conference-call. 41.The Sentencing Project, “Fact Sheet: Private Prisons in the United States,” August 2018, https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Private-Prisons-in-the-United-States.pdf. 42.Victoria Law, “End Forced Labor in Immigrant Detention,” New York Times, January 29, 2019, https://nyti.ms/2SfgmrE. 43.Law, “End Forced Labor.” 44.Betsy Woodruff, “Is Donald Trump Private Prison Companies’ Last Hope?,” Daily Beast, September 29, 2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-donald-trump-private-prison-companies-last-hope. 45.Amy Brittain and Drew Harwell, “Private-Prison Giant, Resurgent in Trump Era, Gathers at President’s Resort,” Washington Post, October 25, 2017, http://wapo.st/2yQh6t6. 46.Megan Mumford, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Ryan Nunn, “The Economics of Private Prisons,” Brookings Institution, October 20, 2016, http://brook.gs/2eaWfXi. 47.Mumford et al., “The Economics of Private Prisons.” 48.Figures from Timothy Williams and Richard A.

In his keynote address before the industry stakeholders, a veritable drumroll of victories on the anti-regulatory front, the American Gaming Association president cited as a key win its “thwarting an effort to crack down on resort fees charged to hotel customers in Las Vegas.”24 “Federal murmurings about banning resort fees [were] ‘beaten back,’” the AGA president noted25—referring to the $500 million collected on the Vegas Strip alone. And with casino owner Donald Trump the newly elected president of the United States, the AGA was looking forward to success on new battlefronts—for example, getting Congress “to see legalization of sports betting as a consumer protection issue. . . . It’s about understanding how Washington works,” the AGA president said. “[Congress] is reactive: It responds to problems.

But how many beneficial laws will evaporate due to kudzu-ing? * * * Reflections With ever increasing lobbying expenditures, targeted campaigns, and super PACs, the appetite for profits paves the way to intellectual and regulatory capture of policy makers. Money talks. Mick Mulvaney (who in 2018 was serving in President Donald Trump’s cabinet as director of the office of management and budget, as well as acting White House chief of staff), commented in an address to the American Bankers Association, that during his time as a South Carolina congressman: We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress . . . If you were a lobbyist who never gave us [campaign] money, I didn’t talk to you.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

The assessment of the United States intelligence community and a series of Justice Department indictments was that the Russian effort had two overarching goals: to increase discord in the United States and, starting in early- to mid-2016, to help elect Donald Trump. On the first count, it seems clear that the operation was at least moderately successful. One large-scale study of social media activity showed that posts from Russian trolls caused observable increases in the polarization of the subsequent online conversation.79 The second point is more complex. Donald Trump won the election, prompting a contemporaneous text sent by an individual whose name is redacted to a top Russian official that said, “Putin has won.”80 This may be too self-congratulatory; history is filled with propagandists and intelligence officers dramatically overestimating the impact of their efforts.

In one case, the hackers added “Confidential” to the cover of an opposition research report, presumably to make it more alluring to reporters.34 They forged and modified other documents to make it appear that shocking political donations had been made, one purporting to show a $150 million Bradley Foundation gift to the Clinton campaign—which would have been illegal—and another adding a line to a budget from the Open Society Foundations that indicated funding of anti-regime activities in Russia.35 Three groups deserve particular attention for their responses to the GRU operation during this period. The first is the group Donald Trump had assembled to run his campaign, which some evidence suggests was inclined to cheer on the Russian operation. Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, later testified that he was in Trump’s office when Roger Stone, formerly in the campaign’s employ, called to pass along what he had just learned: that Assange was about to release a “massive dump” of damaging emails from Clinton’s campaign.

In September 2016, President Obama told reporters that he warned Vladimir Putin at an international meeting to “cut it out, there were going to be serious consequences if he did not.”45 On October 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement blaming the Russians for the hacks and leaks.46 The United States government seemed unable or unwilling to muster more opprobrium than that. The statement barely registered in the media ecosystem given the frenetic pace of subsequent events. The Washington Post had unearthed a recording of Donald Trump making remarkably crude comments about assaulting women. “I don’t even wait,” he told the host of Access Hollywood as they were on their way to the studio for an interview. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” Damaging leaks of candidates’ unguarded comments are a staple of politics—such as Mitt Romney’s characterization of the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax as people who “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them,” and Obama’s 2008 observation of small-town Americans that “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”47 But Trump’s words were exceptionally shocking.


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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

But the most recent wave of political alienation has returned this question to the center of the democratic conversation. An exasperation with the existing political elites was a significant factor behind Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the national elections in France in 2017 and Italy in 2018. In almost all of these cases politicians were rewarded for their lack of political experience and, at least in some of those cases, for their “blokeish” lack of deference toward so-called politically correct speech: Consider the reluctance of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and Matteo Salvini to be constrained by the normal rules of official discourse. But, of course, that list also underlines the fact that the idea of politicians being like ordinary people will always be a fantasy.

Putnam’s famous book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community—on the breakdown of civic life in America—notes that voter turnout has declined by around 20 percentage points since the 1960s, while the likelihood of attending a public meeting about local affairs was down by one-third between 1973 and 1994.31 More recently, some voters have been prepared to support anti-system politicians like Donald Trump. Just as the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to a generational revolt and a new type of liberal and left-wing politics of the highly educated (green parties in Europe have the highest educational profile of any), so populist parties have emerged in the past generation as a kind of counterweight for the less well educated. It is, however, as Bovens and Wille point out, one of the curiosities of the new political stratification that new political parties do not explicitly articulate the interests of lower- or higher-educated citizens—one reason why Donald Trump’s famous phrase after victory in Nevada in the 2016 Republican primary, “I love the poorly educated,” attracted so much attention.

In fact, as with Somewheres, their priorities and intuitions usually come first, and invariably facts are found that fit with them—so-called motivated reasoning. They are also just as subject to groupthink. And, after all, experts have not covered themselves in glory in the past twenty years, as seen in the failures to predict Iraqis’ response to invasion; the financial crisis of 2007–2008; the Brexit vote; and the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps, too, the failure to properly prepare for Covid-19, which had, after all, been very widely predicted. Very few of us, even populists, are hostile to scientific or medical experts (apart from anti-vaccine people) and the status of such experts is likely to rise in the aftermath of the crisis.


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

Young-aged spread Sources: Risk Factor Collaboration; UN Population Division; WHO; The Economist The Argentine–American lemon war of 2001–2018 In May 2018 America received its first shipment of Argentine lemons in 17 years, following the lifting of an import ban imposed by the Department of Agriculture in 2001. The resulting export squeeze had seen relations sour between the countries, as Donald Trump observed: “One of the reasons he’s here is about lemons. And I’ll tell him about North Korea, and he’ll tell me about lemons,” he said when Mauricio Macri, the Argentine leader, visited him in April 2017. A resolution to the citrus wars was keenly awaited. America, which is the world’s largest consumer of the fruit, can now source lemons from the fourth-largest producer.

If neither approach works, you could try to get into a top college – but remember that not all Princetonians become plutocrats. Why women still earn much less than men Payroll clerks across Britain have been busier than usual. New rules mean that, as of April 2018, all large employers are required to publish annual data on the gap in pay between their male and female workers. In America, by contrast, President Donald Trump halted a similar rule that would have taken effect the same year. Such requirements are meant to energise efforts towards equal pay for men and women. The data suggest that a new approach is needed. In the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, median wages for women working full time are 85% of those for men.

Many see the estate tax as a “double tax”, since it is often paid on income that has already been subject to income tax. This is not the strongest of arguments, though. If avoiding double taxation were a requirement of good policy, then governments would also need to abolish sales taxes. Nonetheless, politicians have realised that they are onto a winner. Both George W. Bush and Donald Trump found, as presidential candidates, that promises to repeal the estate tax proved highly popular. Yet some economists worry about the trend towards tiny or even zero death duties. The rich world has high levels of wealth inequality. Half of Europe’s billionaires inherited their wealth, for instance.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

Under these circumstances, it’s perhaps not surprising: See Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), and Krastev, Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest. CODA: WHO ARE WE? “Grab ’em by the pussy”: “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women,” The New York Times, October 8, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html?mcubz=1. “Nobody knows the system better than me”: Donald J. Trump, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, July 21, 2016, www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974. “This is what democracy looks like!”: Anemona Hartocollis and Yamiche Alcindor, “Women’s March Highlights as Huge Crowds Protest Trump: ‘We’re Not Going Away,’” The New York Times, January 21, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/womens-march.html?

For all its faults, and despite profound racial tensions that persist in the wake of a very bloody civil war, the United States has evolved into the world’s most striking ongoing experiment in cosmopolitan self-governance. Still, as Tocqueville appreciated long ago, and as the shocking triumph of Donald Trump in the American presidential election of 2016 only confirmed, the relative historical success of a relatively liberal form of modern democracy in America is no reason for complacency. Whether democracy in America, or anyplace else, can flourish, either as a historically conditioned set of political institutions or as a moral vision, must remain, by the very logic of democracy, an open question.

And the United States, which ranks “very high” on human development, and is considered “free” by Freedom House, in 2016 was ranked twenty-first in The Economist index, tied with Italy, making it a “flawed democracy” for the first time in the history of the index. The chief reason for this demotion was not the election of Donald Trump. It was the extremely low level of popular trust in government, elected officials, and political parties in the United States. Indeed, Trump tapped into this popular disaffection with politics and won office in part by mobilizing normally quiescent citizens, arguably increasing, not diminishing popular political participation, at least in the course of his campaign to win office.


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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

He saw more I’M WITH HER shirts cropping up inside the gates, so he started wearing his Donald Trump MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN caps. Trump made sense to him. “He’d be good for the country,” he told others. “He’d be good for defense. He’d be good for the yard.” Sunderland saw nothing wrong in expressing his First Amendment rights just as those Obama supporters did. No one said anything about his caps either way. No complaints—they all just came in and did their jobs and watched one another’s back. Still, everyone felt a more partisan tension in and around the yard. Somehow, it seemed more personal. By the time the presidential campaigns revved up, Donald Trump had clearly struck a similar nerve in Tidewater that he had in the rest of the country, especially among the older White shipbuilders.

Courtesy of Huntington Ingalls Industries The pressure to make operational the weapons elevators on the nation’s new carriers, including the Kennedy, was so great that Navy Secretary Richard Spencer told President Donald Trump to fire him if he failed to do so. Courtesy of the US Navy Courtesy of Huntington Ingalls Industries The yard builds carriers from the bottom up and from the middle out, fitting into place large sections of the ship called superlifts. Courtesy of Huntington Ingalls Industries President Barack Obama visited the yard to promote his defense budgets. His presidency would highlight divisions in the region and the yard workforce. Courtesy of Huntington Ingalls Industries President Donald Trump visited Newport News Shipbuilding and promised to support a big carrier-driven fleet—even though his administration was planning to make cuts in the numbers of the giant warships.

The construction zones hummed like beehives as shipbuilders raced to install pipes, pull cables and wires, and weld, grind, and rig small mountains of metal to meet one deadline after another. On one of those sun-splashed summer days Tidewater can be blessed with in mid-August, as the rest of the country embroiled itself in the presidential campaign battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, shipbuilders focused on completing the first major midship superlift. The first lifts start at the middle of the ship, with the machinery decks and spaces, especially the nuclear spaces. In some ways, steelworkers constructed the carrier up and around the nuclear compartments that shield and protect the two atomic power plants.


pages: 150 words: 43,467

Maths on the Back of an Envelope: Clever Ways to (Roughly) Calculate Anything by Rob Eastaway

butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Strategic Defense Initiative, the rule of 72

As a result, you can almost guarantee that the size of crowds claimed by the protestors and protestees will always be very different, sometimes by a factor of two, depending on who you ask. For example, there was a huge protest in London when Donald Trump made his first visit to the UK. The protestors were quick to claim that 250,000 were there. The police, according to the Independent, were reluctant to give a figure, but were prepared to agree that ‘more than 100,000’ had turned out. Which raises the question: did more people turn out to protest against Trump in London than turned out to celebrate him at his inauguration in 2017? One person whose answer would be no is, of course, Donald Trump, who was adamant that there had never been a bigger crowd. As far as (most of) the rest of us could tell, however, Trump’s inauguration crowd was a fraction of that of his predecessor, Barack Obama.

COUNTING When embarking on Fermi-style estimations, a good place to start is counting. Answering the question ‘How many …?’ is the most primitive mathematical challenge – though it often turns out to require a surprising level of skill, and is sometimes highly contentious too. Who can forget Donald Trump’s anger when his own view that he had ‘probably the biggest crowds ever’ at his inauguration was contradicted by several sources who suggested the crowd was a lot smaller than his predecessor’s? We’ve already seen examples of where even meticulous attempts to count exactly the right number often miss the mark (see vote-counting in elections here, for example).

Then there’s balls that players use for warming up, plus the balls that get hit into the crowd and get kept as souvenirs … and no doubt Wimbledon keep a few spares in the shop as well. Put it this way: if you are in a job interview and you are asked how many balls are needed for Wimbledon, and if you use the reasoning above to get you to somewhere in the 5,000 to 50,000 range, you’ll probably get a big tick in the assessment sheet. HOW MANY ATTENDED DONALD TRUMP’S INAUGURATION? Crowd counting can be very political. When there is an organised protest and march (be that for more pay, lower taxes or better rights for animals) the organisers want to be able to claim as big a number as possible, while the thing or people being protested against – often the government – would much prefer that number to be as small as possible.


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Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

A handful of tech oligarchs could easily kick in and solve the problem. Instead, tech companies have been doing the exact opposite. For years they have been dodging taxes in the United States by transferring profits through shell companies and parking hundreds of billions of dollars in offshore accounts. Only when Donald Trump got elected and slashed corporate taxes did companies like Apple agree to bring the money back. To be sure, Apple still paid taxes, but the bill was tens of billions less than it would have been previously. Officially, most Silicon Valley oligarchs express contempt for Trump; yet they were grateful for his tax cuts.

In 2014, Thiel, the anti-diversity firebrand, published a book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. I suspect that concern for diversity does not play a big role in the future that Thiel would like to build. That suspicion is bolstered by the fact that in 2016 Thiel campaigned for Donald Trump. Maybe it is just coincidence, but in the past two decades, as figures like Diversity Myth authors Thiel and Sacks have gained ever more influence in Silicon Valley, the tech industry has developed appalling problems with diversity, with women complaining about sexual harassment and hostile work environments, and people of color complaining that they are shut out nearly completely.

The event was off the record, so I can’t tell you what happened or who attended, but the crowd included billionaire CEOs, a former CIA director, and various high government officials, think tank analysts, professors, people from big trade associations, and a few famous journalists you would recognize from TV. “Delight and Despair over Disruption” was the title of the event. Donald Trump had just been elected but had not yet taken office. There was a feeling that we were standing at one of history’s inflection points, not just because of Trump but because of the Internet. Digital technology had already transformed great swathes of the economy, but even bigger and more momentous changes lay ahead.


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

* The first time I got a snippet of information about the AIVD operation in Moscow, I didn’t fully grasp the real significance. I was sitting on a terrace with a source, asking about current developments. This was in the summer of 2017. By then it was well known that Russia had staged a cyber offensive to influence the outcome of the American presidential elections. Their interference had helped Republican candidate Donald Trump into the White House. From computers in Russia, they besieged American citizens, voting systems and the Democratic Party. And they didn’t even need to step foot in the United States; with one click they could cross the digital superhighway from Moscow to Washington. To do this, the Russians had mobilised an arsenal of cyber- weaponry.

Fancy Bear in the end stole almost 20,000 emails – later published on WikiLeaks – that were damaging both to party officials and to Clinton herself. Russia’s interference literally stunned Americans; even US agencies were powerless to stem the online aggression. According to some American media, it was a ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’. The Russian meddling reverberated long after the elections. Did Donald Trump or anyone in his inner circle know the Russians were advancing his bid for the presidency? Had there been any meetings between the Russians and Trump confidants? Dutch journalist Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal and I set out to find some answers. We’d worked together before to interview Edward Snowden in Moscow, and now we teamed up again, pairing his good contacts in the United States with mine in the world of intelligence.

‘Very upsetting’, ‘aggravating’, ‘typical American arrogance’ , sources later called it. MIVD boss Pieter Bindt and his AIVD counterpart Rob Bertholee reproached their American colleagues. Why jeopardise so valuable an operation by talking about it publicly at a conference? Relations with US intelligence, already shaky since the Snowden revelations and Donald Trump’s election, took another hit. Six years separated the panic at Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar and the loss of the AIVD’s spy post on Red Square. In those six years, the world had become a very different place. In 2011, Facebook was not yet king, Osama bin Laden still posed a bigger threat than any cyber army and smartphones were still just a neat gadget.


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

This translates into a greater potential for a motivated person to push against the boundaries of the norms or optimize their actions for a certain outcome. And because those systems require humans to respond in order to defend against attacks, it is easier for the norms to evolve to allow the hacks. Recent politics serves as an example of this, in the way Donald Trump was able to successfully push against social and political norms. I have largely avoided using him as an example in this book, because he’s so politically charged. But the example he provides here is too illustrative to ignore. Society has a mechanisms to repair soft violations of its norms—public shaming, political pushback, journalism, and transparency—and they largely work.

The Frankfurt offices of Morgan Stanley bank were recently raided as part of the cum-ex investigation. More prosecutions are pending. Germany alone is investigating over 1,000 lawyers and bankers for their involvement in cum-ex trades. Here we can clearly see the interplay of hacking, legality, and morality. When asked about his own tax avoidance, then candidate Donald Trump famously said, “That makes me smart”—but it doesn’t necessarily make him moral. It might, if he only exploited legal loopholes to do so, but it doesn’t mean those tax loopholes shouldn’t be closed. Cum-ex trading has cost European nations and their citizens at least $60 billion, and most of that won’t ever be recovered.

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.


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

How do we square the contrasting medical fates of these two Donalds? I would be mad to argue that exercise doesn’t slow aging and increase the chances of a longer life, but is exercise oversold as an anti-aging elixir? Was Donald Trump just lucky and Donald Ritchie unfortunate? Or perhaps Donald Ritchie would have died younger than seventy-three if he hadn’t been so active, and maybe Donald Trump would be physically and mentally healthier in his seventies had he exercised? Perhaps Trump’s exercise is his work. Standing in front of rooms of people talking and gesticulating involves physical activity, although not vigorous, and Trump spent more time playing golf than any U.S. president in history (albeit using golf carts to get around the links).6 Indeed, Trump remained active long past the age many people retire.

But if we never evolved to exercise, why is it so beneficial? And how do we explain commonplace exceptions to the nearly universal advice that exercise can help us live longer? Consider, for example, the different fates of two men named Donald born at the end of World War II whose exercise habits couldn’t have been more different. Donald Trump needs little introduction. Born in 1946 to wealthy parents, he was sent to a military academy where presumably he had to participate in sports. Although a teetotaler and nonsmoker, Trump famously enjoyed eating abundant junk food and large steaks, drinking Diet Coke, getting little sleep, and avoiding any form of exercise apart from golf.

So just as our species never evolved to diet or cope with jet lag, we never evolved to counter many aging processes to the same degree without physical activity. Absence of regular physical activity thus becomes a mismatch condition as we age by allowing us to senesce faster. Unless of course you are Donald Trump or one of the millions of others who live into old age without walking ten thousand steps a day, let alone running marathons and pumping iron in the gym. Do growing legions of evidently healthy elderly exercise avoiders suggest that the long-term benefits of physical activity may be exaggerated?


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Lee, “One Scholar Thinks Online Harassment of Women Is a Civil Rights Issue,” Vox, September 22, 2014, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2014/9/22/6367973/online-harassment-of-women-a-civil-rights-issue; Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 22.. and Donald Trump: Whitney Phillips, “The Oxygen of Amplification,” Data & Society, May 22, 2018, accessed September 30, 2018, https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/FULLREPORT_Oxygen_of_Amplification_DS.pdf. hijack for electoral chicanery: Ian Sherr and Erin Carson, “GamerGate to Trump: How Video Game Culture Blew Everything Up,” CNET, November 27, 2017, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/news/gamergate-donald-trump-american-nazis-how-video-game-culture-blew-everything-up; Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us about the ‘Alt-right,’ ” Guardian, December 1, 2016, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump; Thompson, “Online Hate”; Thompson, “Social Networks.”

Recently, two Stanford researchers and a journalist got interested in this question, and did some intriguing research. As they noted, on a purely partisan level, Silicon Valley’s denizens tend to vote—and donate—to Democratic Party candidates. Indeed, in the 2016 presidential election, employees at the biggest tech firms donated a hefty 60 times more money to Hillary Clinton than to Donald Trump. And when Trump won, staff at many companies were plunged into near mourning, as I found when visiting the city that week. To gather some hard data on political attitudes, the researchers polled almost 700 high-tech founders and CEOs. In one part of the survey, these heads of tech were asked how much they agreed with a short statement of libertarian ideals: “I would like to live in a society where government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection, so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could.”

My friend Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who has long studied tech’s effect on society, argued in early 2018 that YouTube’s recommendations tend to overdistill the preferences of users—pushing them toward the extreme edges of virtually any subject. After watching jogging videos, she found the recommendation algorithm suggested increasingly intense workouts, such as ultramarathons. Vegetarian videos led to ones on hard-core veganism. And in politics, the extremification was unsettling. When Tufekci watched Donald Trump campaign videos, YouTube began to suggest “white supremacist rants” and Holocaust-denial videos; viewing Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton speeches led to left-wing conspiracy theories and 9/11 “truthers.” At Columbia University, the researcher Jonathan Albright experimentally searched on YouTube for the phrase “crisis actors,” in the wake of a major school shooting, and took the “next up” recommendation from the recommendation system.


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

*5 In fact, McGovern supported marijuana decriminalization, not legalization; blanket amnesty for draft resisters but not military deserters; and each state continuing to decide its own abortion laws. And the Democratic senator who so effectively slagged him behind his back, Thomas Eagleton, became his vice-presidential nominee. More Americans more intensely loathed President Nixon the whole time he was in office than they loathed any Republican president before Donald Trump. That was partly because Nixon was simply so unlikable. It was partly because of his policies, in particular continuing and widening the war in Southeast Asia. But they also hated him as a result of when he happened to be president. Liberals at that time couldn’t appreciate that Nixon wasn’t really governing much to the right of the three previous Democratic presidents.

Because I’d lived through the 1980s and definitely noticed in real time, plain as day, the rapid and widespread uptick in deference to business and the rich and profits and the market, I’d neglected afterward to take a close, careful look at the various pieces of that shift. During the 1980s and ’90s, my focus as a writer and editor was really on the cultural effects of this new America revealing itself—the primacy of selling and celebrity, the mixing of fact and fiction, the shameless ostentation, this ridiculous character Donald Trump. I wasn’t thinking hard about the political economy at the time. In fact, after the Cold War ended, it seemed to me, as it did to many people, that what happened in Washington had become a sideshow to the main American action in the private sector. So many of the impacts of the economic right’s crusade to stop and roll back the New Deal and its Great Society extensions showed themselves only gradually, like steadily compounding interest, becoming formidable over a generation.

Those national quiet-wealth norms were crumbling when a Rolls-Royce Owners’ Club newsletter morphed into a successful glossy national magazine for and about the wealthy called The Robb Report (1976), and they’d evaporated entirely when Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous went on the air (1984) to persuade people that the lives of the fictional superrich on Dallas (1978) and Dynasty (1981) were real—get a load of this Glengarry–meets–Wall Street Iacocca-Welch impersonator Donald Trump!—and that ostentatious personal wealth was now the only American Dream that mattered. Our fantasy-industrial complex also reflected and normalized the new old-fashioned laissez-faire rules by making legal gambling ubiquitous, like in the Old West and in old Europe. Until the late 1980s, only two U.S. states allowed commercial casino gambling, but within a decade, legal casinos existed in half the states.


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

They also bought Facebook ads for Heart of Texas and United Muslims of America—together seen by nearly fifteen thousand people—to draw bigger crowds.15 The goal: stoking conflict between Americans in the virtual and physical worlds.16 Heart of Texas and United Muslims of America were just two among thousands of fake social media accounts on Facebook,17 Twitter,18 Instagram, and YouTube19 impersonating Americans to spew incendiary views, generate political discord, and interfere in the 2016 presidential election.20 Kremlin-instigated content on Facebook platforms is estimated to have reached more than 126 million Americans in the run-up to the election—more than a third of the U.S. population.21 Weaponizing social media was just one facet of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s information warfare campaign.22 Kremlin-backed operations included hacking into the systems of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign; releasing stolen information on WikiLeaks; spreading propaganda through state-run Russian media organizations such as RT America (formerly called Russia Today); and infiltrating state and local election infrastructures that included voter registration databases.23 The U.S. Intelligence Community concluded, and a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation agreed, that Putin’s aim was to undermine American democracy and tilt the 2016 presidential election in favor of Republican candidate Donald Trump.24 Or as former CIA Deputy Director David Cohen more colorfully put it, “They wanted Donald Trump to win, they wanted Hillary to lose, but most of all they just wanted to fuck with us.”25 American intelligence agencies quickly detected many parts of Russia’s unfolding election interference efforts and warned President Obama,26 but they never saw the social media operation coming.27 A month before the election, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a rare public warning.

Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic,” New York Times, March 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-china-conspiracy-theory.html (accessed June 16, 2020). 131. Shortly after the 2016 election, an anonymous columnist named Virgil posted a lengthy screed on the conservative site Breitbart.com introducing the idea of the anti-Trump Deep State: “Virgil: The Deep State vs. Donald Trump,” Breitbart, December 12, 2016, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/12/12/virgil-the-deep-state-vs-donald-trump/ (accessed June 16, 2020). See also Evan Osnos, “Trump vs. The Deep State,” New Yorker, May 14, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/trump-vs-the-deep-state (accessed June 16, 2020); David Rohde, In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State” (New York: W.

The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.56 To intelligence insiders, the message was serious and clear. To the public, not so much. That same day, the infamous Access Hollywood audiotape—in which Republican nominee Donald Trump boasted about how easy it was for him to sexually assault women—hit the news. Guess which got more attention. In the 2020 presidential election, intelligence officials became more active and creative, making video public service announcements, issuing more frequent press releases, and granting more media interviews.57 One October video even included counterintelligence chief William Evanina and General Paul Nakasone, who led both the Pentagon’s cyberwarriors and the super snoopers of the National Security Agency.


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Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

network’s New York City headquarters: These paragraphs are adapted from my September 2013 column in The Atlantic, “The Most Valuable Network.” reportedly referred to network president Jeff Zucker: Hadas Gold, “Joe Scarborough: Donald Trump Calls Jeff Zucker His ‘Personal Booker,’” Politico, June 9, 2016, www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/06/joe-scarborough-donald-trump-calls-jeff-zucker-his-personal-booker-224116. the strongest rate of advertising growth: Jesse Holcomb, “Cable News: Fact Sheet,” State of the News Media 2016, Pew Research Center, June 15, 2016. the average viewership of SportsCenter fell: Richard Sandomir, “Fox’s Sports Network Hires an ESPN Veteran for a Reinvention,” New York Times, May 8, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/business/media/jamie-horowitz-tries-again-this-time-to-revive-fs1.html.

Lakhani; here (also here): Courtesy of Diana Deutsch; here: Courtesy of McKinsey ISBN 9781101980323 (hardcover) ISBN 9781101980347 (eBook) Version_1 To my parents: Schlaf nun selig und süß, schau im Traum’s Paradies. CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Dedication INTRODUCTION The Song That Conquered the World PART I: POPULARITY AND THE MIND 1. THE POWER OF EXPOSURE Featuring Claude Monet, Adele, and Donald Trump 2. THE MAYA RULE Featuring ESPN, Spotify, and the First NASA Space Station 3. THE MUSIC OF SOUND Featuring John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and ABBA INTERLUDE: THE CHILLS 4. THE MYTH-MAKING MIND I: THE FORCE OF STORY Featuring Star Wars, Isaac Asimov, and Hollywood Psychohistory 5.

It is quite like the old information flow of the music industry: Authority figures (labels and DJs) blasted their preferred products (songs) through scarce and powerful channels of exposure (radio stations) and consumers typically obeyed (bought albums). But in the 2016 primaries, the apparent power of advertising all but vanished. The GOP candidates with the most elite support, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, spent about $140 million on television ads through early 2016, but they both flamed out. The GOP candidate with the least elite support, Donald Trump, spent less than $20 million on advertising. But he still won the exposure primary in a landslide, because his outrageous statements and improbable candidacy were such irresistible fodder for networks and publishers desperate for audiences. Through the summer of 2016, Trump had earned $3 billion in “free media,” which was more than the rest of his rivals combined.


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Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Yushchenko turned out to be an inspiring but disorganized leader, warring with his prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko. The government deadlocked and the economy foundered. Amazingly, Yanukovich managed to wheedle his way back into the spotlight, thanks in part to his Russian backing and a makeover overseen by the U.S. lobbyist Paul Manafort, the future campaign manager of Donald Trump. From 2006 to 2007, Yanukovich even served as prime minister under his former archrival Yushchenko. In 2010, he defeated Tymoshenko in the presidential election, definitively ending the Orange Revolution five years after it had begun. Ukraine took four years to simmer to the boiling point again.

“I’m very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy, very easy.” What came next in the post shocked the world: a sample of actual stolen documents from the DNC’s servers. They included a file of opposition research on the Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, policy documents, and a list of donors by name and amount. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks. They will publish them soon,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote. “Fuck the Illuminati and their conspiracies!!!!!!!!!” That “Illuminati” reference and Guccifer 2.0’s name were meant to convey a kind of rogue hacktivist, stealing and leaking the documents of the powerful to upend the corrupt social order.

More specifically, they were using an old Russian intelligence practice known as kompromat: the tradition, stretching back to Soviet times, of obtaining compromising information about political opponents and using it to leverage public opinion with tactical leaks and smears. Sandworm’s hackers were stealthy, professional saboteurs. Fancy Bear, by contrast, seemed to be shameless, profane propagandists. And now, in the service of Vladimir Putin, they were tasked with helping Donald Trump to win the presidency. The 2016 presidential race wasn’t Fancy Bear’s first time using its skills to influence elections. In May 2017, a group of security researchers at the University of Toronto called the Citizen Lab would find forensic evidence that the group was also behind CyberBerkut, the pro-Putin hacktivist group that had in 2014 hacked Ukraine’s Central Election Commission.


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The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following photographs: 1: Courtesy of Lee Neuwirth © Lee Neuwirth 2: Courtesy of Seth Rumshinsky 3: Photo by Rick Mott, taken at the NJ Open Go Tournament, provided with permission, courtesy of Stefi Baum 4, 5: Courtesy of Brian Keating 6: Courtesy of David Eisenbud 7: Courtesy of Wall Street Journal and Jenny Strasburg 8: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images ISBN 9780735217980 (hardcover) ISBN 9780735217997 (ebook) ISBN 9780593086315 (international edition) Jacket design: Karl Spurzem Jacket image: (equations) Virtualphoto / Getty Images Version_1 CONTENTS Also by Gregory Zuckerman Title Page Copyright Dedication Cast of Characters A Timeline of Key Events Introduction Prologue PART ONE Money Isn’t Everything Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven PART TWO Money Changes Everything Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments Appendices Notes Index About the Author To Gabriel and Elijah My signals in the noise CAST OF CHARACTERS James Simons Mathematician, code breaker, and founder of Renaissance Technologies Lenny Baum Simons’s first investing partner and author of algorithms that impacted the lives of millions James Ax Ran the Medallion fund and developed its first trading models Sandor Straus Data guru who played key early role at Renaissance Elwyn Berlekamp Game theorist who managed the Medallion fund at a key turning point Henry Laufer Mathematician who moved Simons’s fund toward short-term trades Peter Brown Computer scientist who helped engineer Renaissance’s key breakthroughs Robert Mercer Renaissance’s co-CEO, helped put Donald Trump in the White House Rebekah Mercer Teamed up with Steve Bannon to upend American politics David Magerman Computer specialist who tried to stop the Mercers’ political activities A TIMELINE OF KEY EVENTS 1938 Jim Simons born 1958 Simons graduates MIT 1964 Simons becomes code breaker at the IDA 1968 Simons leads math department at Stony Brook University 1974 Simons and Chern publish groundbreaking paper 1978 Simons leaves academia to start Monemetrics, a currency trading firm, and a hedge fund called Limroy 1979 Lenny Baum and James Ax join 1982 Firm’s name changes to Renaissance Technologies Corporation 1984 Baum quits 1985 Ax and Straus move the company to California 1988 Simons shuts down Limroy, launches the Medallion fund 1989 Ax leaves, Elwyn Berlekamp leads Medallion 1990 Berlekamp departs, Simons assumes control of the firm and fund 1992 Henry Laufer becomes full-time employee 1993 Peter Brown and Robert Mercer join 1995 Brown, Mercer achieve key breakthrough 2000 Medallion soars 98.5 percent 2005 Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund launches 2007 Renaissance and other quant firms suffer sudden losses 2010 Brown and Mercer take over firm 2017 Mercer steps down as co-CEO INTRODUCTION You do know—no one will speak with you, right?”

Lately, Simons has emerged as a modern-day Medici, subsidizing the salaries of thousands of public-school math and science teachers, developing autism treatments, and expanding our understanding of the origins of life. His efforts, while valuable, raise the question of whether one individual should enjoy so much influence. So, too, does the clout of his senior executive,* Robert Mercer, who is perhaps the individual most responsible for Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Mercer, Trump’s biggest financial supporter, plucked Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway from obscurity and inserted them into the Trump campaign, stabilizing it during a difficult period. Companies formerly owned by Mercer and now in the hands of his daughter Rebekah played key roles in the successful campaign to encourage the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.

“Brexit could not have happened without Breitbart,” Farage says.16 * * * = As the 2016 presidential campaign got under way, the Mercers initially backed Texas Senator Ted Cruz, having been impressed by his willingness to shut the government down over debt concerns in 2013. They gave a pro-Cruz super PAC more than $13 million, but when Cruz dropped out of the race in May of that year, Rebekah accepted an invitation to meet Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, for lunch at Trump Tower. Over sandwiches and salads, they bonded over parenting young children, among other things.17 Soon, the Mercers shifted their support to Trump, by then the party’s effective nominee. They launched a super PAC to oppose Hillary Clinton, charging Kellyanne Conway, a veteran Republican pollster, with running the organization.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

The growth slowdown means that expected progress in living standards has evaporated; high inequality means that just looking at GDP growth understates the magnitude of popular economic discontent, as the gains of growth have shifted away from ordinary Americans to benefit a relatively narrow elite. The damage done by our economic malaise is not confined to the economic realm. The shocking election of Donald Trump—and the threat to liberal democratic norms and institutions that it entails—could only have happened in a country where confidence in the nation’s leaders and governing institutions had sunk to dangerously low levels. And the failure of economic governance to deliver broadly shared prosperity is a major reason for that collapse in confidence.

And Trump’s strongest supporters—white men, especially those without college degrees—have experienced the slowest income growth in recent decades, lagging behind women, blacks, and Hispanics.7 Even if Trump’s supporters were relatively comfortable, they were concentrated in economically and socially distressed areas of the country.8 It should be no surprise that a demagogue like Donald Trump was able to exploit conditions like these. And the multiplying successes of illiberal parties and political movements in Europe suggests that the appeal of his brand of demagoguery might not be short-lived. So long as mainstream elements in the Republican and Democratic parties are unable to offer effective economic governance, voters will continue to be easily swayed by the siren song of populist authoritarianism.

In the recent election, though, we witnessed the broad public embrace of a very different explanation of rising inequality—namely, that the powerful have rigged the economic game in their favor. Elites have conspired to hoard opportunity, manipulating the rules and their control of the political system to generate wealth for themselves, even as living standards for everyone else stagnate or decline. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump owed the unexpected strength of their insurgent campaigns to the appeal of this classically populist message. This folk theory of inequality should not be dismissed as the ranting of ignorant rubes. As with much popular wisdom, the specific mechanisms of elite self-enrichment that the public has latched onto—immigration and trade in the case of Trump supporters, campaign finance for supporters of Sanders—are not well chosen.


pages: 252 words: 65,990

HWFG: Here We F**king Go by Chris McQueer

call centre, Donald Trump, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, sensible shoes, Social Justice Warrior

Ah’ll see.’ * * * Later that night, lying on the couch at home alone, Frank switched the telly over to the ten o’clock news. ‘Good evening. The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un’s continued threats towards the United States and its allies could soon spark a military reaction from US President Donald Trump, according to a nuclear deterrent expert…’ ‘That’s plenty,’ Frank said to himself as he put the telly on mute and picked up his phone. Fuck it, he thought. Ahm joining Twitter. The first thing he did after setting up his new Twitter account was to look for Joe’s profile. He was stunned to see that Joe, somehow, had over ten thousand followers.

Frank laughed as he read through Joe’s tweets: Day 7,399 in the big Bar-L hoose – Joe had his iPhone forcibly removed from his arse but the kind guard allowed him to keep it instead of handing it in to the warden when he heard about yer auld da’s exploits on Twitter #Legend Day 7,399 in the big Bar-L hoose – getting really fuckin good at playin pool oan a wonky table. Frank wracked his brains as he tried to think of a witty reply to Joe’s musings. He settled for: Joe, fuck up and go to bed. Joe replied with a sad faced emoji. Frank followed all of the usual people that folk follow when they first join Twitter. The likes of Donald Trump (not that he was a fan of him. In fact Frank hated him, he just wanted to be among the first to see the mad shit he tweeted), a few footballers and a couple of actors and singers. Scrolling through his feed, a notification popped up which said, Why not send your first tweet, Frank? Frank didn’t know what to say.

‘The precautionary measures are in place, just in case,’ his aide whispered into his ear. ‘We won’t need them anyway,’ Kim said. ‘Frank is as good as dead.’ 7 It was the night of the fight. Tickets had sold out within seconds. World leaders descended to the SSE Hydro arena in Glasgow, keen to see this historic event unfold. Donald Trump had been vocal on Twitter about his support for Frank who he hoped would Destroy the Little Rocket Man’s ass! Nicola Sturgeon had voiced her astonishment that this whole thing was even going ahead in the first place, but a visit from MI6 to her home in the middle of the night saw her retract her original statement condemning the fight and issuing a new one in which she lauded Frank’s bravery.


pages: 212 words: 68,649

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

Bernie Sanders, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, pink-collar, pre–internet, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, white picket fence

English-language corpuses offer endless cases of man-on-man gossip. Perhaps the most famous example comes from a conversation most should remember: the recording of Donald Trump and former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush talking behind the back of television personality Nancy O’Dell in 2005. I want to point out something important about the linguistic dynamics of this exchange that a lot of political commentators missed. As if I need to remind you, here’s the transcript: DONALD TRUMP: I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything.

Certainly, lesbians have been using dyke to describe themselves since long before the first march was organized in the 1980s, but the image of fifteen thousand women marching through the streets with the letters D-Y-K-E proudly scrawled across their signs, sweatshirts, and bare breasts certainly helps the word along its way. In the age of the internet, memes—that is, viral web symbols—have also helped transfer the ownership of a word from the abusers to the oppressed. One of the most famous examples of reclamation-by-meme has to be nasty woman. Less than twenty-four hours after Donald Trump uttered the nasty woman heard around the world during a 2016 presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, it was made into a gif, a line of mugs (I own one), and a digital fund-raising campaign for Planned Parenthood. It only took about a day for the online mob to successfully snatch the phrase from the man who first said it.

“In women’s backstage talk, we find women relaxing and letting down the conventional, ‘nice’ front they normally maintain frontstage. ‘Behaving badly’ like this backstage—that is, owning our less nice, our more impolite and unsociable feelings—is accepted and even welcomed between friends.” The intention of women’s backstage talk is not that different from Donald Trump’s lewd banter from the Access Hollywood tape—in the end, it is also a means of creating unanimity and closeness. Trump’s style of talk is certainly different in other important ways. For one, in locker-room banter, the solidarity doesn’t always require a genuine shared confession; sometimes it’s simply earned by the crassness of the language itself.


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 American leaders, with good reason, aren’t talking about learning to adapt to a world where the United States is a second-rate power. The problem is that they’re also not talking about what it’s going to take to avoid that fate. From Barack Obama’s rhetoric about the need to “win the future” to Donald Trump’s emphasis on tough trade negotiations, politicians from both parties offer theories about how to avoid American decline that are plainly inadequate to the task. China’s past thirty years of economic growth have been impressive, but they’ve also left the People’s Republic with roughly the per person income of Mexico.

But, critically, Washington’s vision wasn’t primarily about charity or helping others. It was about building the kind of country he wanted the United States to become. Greatness would require great people. America would need more than it had. The contemporary debate around immigration is often framed around an axis of selfishness versus generosity, with Donald Trump talking about the need to put “America first” while opponents tell heartbreaking stories of deportations and communities torn apart. A debate about how to enforce the existing law tends to supersede discussion of what the law ought to say. All of this misses the core point. Immigration to the United States has not, historically, been an act of kindness toward strangers.

English language ability is, in fact, an important overall predictor of labor market success in the United States. But if you are a young person who is able to get a high-paying job offer despite weak English skills, there is probably some wisdom to the market’s verdict that is not improved upon by Donald Trump playing language school central planner. Besides which, people’s English skills predictably improve upon actually living and working here. The United States really does allow some immigration as an act of charity. It would be, in my view, morally scandalous to not allow refugees into a country that has always defined itself as a haven for people in need.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Over the years, I have also conducted online ethnographic observations of many movements: for example, between September 2015 and the U.S. presidential election of November 2016, I followed a purposive sample of Donald Trump supporters. My observations included daily examinations of these supporters’ online behavior and personally attending or watching Trump rallies. Such observations are only one part of systematic research, but they do allow me to ground my conceptual analyses. The New York Times and other outlets have published my work in this area, and I was able to make the case early on, even as most pundits thought his candidancy was a joke, that Donald Trump was viable both as a nominee of the Republican Party, and as a strong contender for the presidency.

In a Facebook experiment published in Nature that was conducted on a whopping 61 million people, some randomly selected portion of this group received a neutral message to “go vote,” while others, also randomly selected, saw a slightly more social version of the encouragement: small thumbnail pictures of a few of their friends who reported having voted were shown within the “go vote” pop-up.35 The researchers measured that this slight tweak—completely within Facebook’s control and conducted without the consent or notification of any of the millions of Facebook users—caused about 340,000 additional people to turn out to vote in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections. (The true number may even be higher since the method of matching voter files to Facebook names only works for exact matches.36) That significant effect—from a one-time, single tweak—is more than four times the number of votes that determined that Donald Trump would be the winner of the 2016 election for presidency in the United States. In another experiment, Facebook randomly selected whether users saw posts with slightly more upbeat words or more downbeat ones; the result was correspondingly slightly more upbeat or downbeat posts by those same users.

Over the next few years, the average conservatism score of Republican representatives shifted significantly to the right as more Republican incumbents adopted Tea Party stances to avoid a primary challenge and as more Tea Party candidates were newly elected, and as elected members of congress got lobbied by this movement. In 2016, a candidate who matched the Tea Party base’s sensibilities, Donald Trump, won the Republican nomination for president despite strong opposition from the party’s donor class and establishment figures, and went on to win the general election. Finally, I examine a movement that is almost entirely online, acting to counter the influence of money on legislation, as an example of how digital tools can throw off the cost of signals, but how the powerful eventually learn to read them better.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

And only in the 1990s did the world order become truly global as numerous former Soviet republics joined the European Union and NATO, while dozens of developing countries joined bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) that promoted what was known as the “Washington Consensus” of free trade and economic deregulation. Western laws, interventions, money, and culture set the global agenda. But the nearly two decades spanning the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2003 Iraq War through the 2007–08 financial crisis to the November 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president will be remembered as a period of profound rupture with the previous decades of Western dominance. The failures of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the disconnect between the financial (Wall Street) and real (Main Street) economies, the inability to integrate Russia and Turkey into the West, and democracy hijacked by populists—these are among the salient episodes that have brought many Western elites to question the future of their political, economic, and social values.

In 2014, Chinese president Xi Jinping declared to a gathering of Asian leaders in Shanghai, “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia.”14 As much as China’s neighbors fear its meteoric rise and ambitions, they also share Xi’s sentiment. Asians don’t want to play by outsiders’ rules. No Asian nation—not even US allies Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia—will do anything for the United States that isn’t first and foremost in its own interest. It is as if Asians are saying “Asia first.” US president Donald Trump’s popular slogan “America first” has been a rallying cry that captures the sense of US economic victimization—primarily by Asian economies with large trade surpluses vis-à-vis the United States. Asians, too, want to ensure that global rules suit their preferences rather than allowing them to be exploited.

Westerners must be placed, even briefly, in the uncomfortable position of imagining what it’s like when about 5 billion Asians don’t care what they think and they have to prove their relevance to Asians rather than the reverse. Americans are just beginning to pay attention to the long and complex cycle of feedback loops tying the United States to Asia. The outsourcing of US jobs to Asia and the erosion of the country’s industrial base were among the most salient causes of working-class frustration that propelled Donald Trump into the White House. Thousands of US troops still have their lives on the line in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan; East Asia is home to even more US soldiers based in Japan and South Korea. Asia is now a prime destination for US energy, with oil exports across the Pacific increasing by 500 percent between 2011 and 2016—especially to China.


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

So where the virus first infected that person and how the Covid-19 virus managed to initially take a grip in Wuhan are crucial facts that need to be established by the scientific community in the hope that this may one day help to prevent such a mass human catastrophe ever happening again. But the task of searching for the origin of the virus has become bogged down in a minefield of international politics. The aggressive comments by United States president Donald Trump may have jeopardised the possibility of answering these crucial questions. He inflamed tensions early on in the crisis by blaming China for what he has called the ‘Kung Flu’ and officials only exacerbated this by joking that Sars-CoV-2 was ‘Made in China’. This had made China, its scientists and some of their collaborators abroad even more defensive.

The pair had jetted out on Boxing Day to the millionaires’ paradise – an exclusive private island where Princess Margaret used to spend ‘X-rated’ holidays and the eye-wateringly expensive villas are owned by tycoons and celebrities such as the singers Mick Jagger and Bryan Adams, and the fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger. Towards the end of his stay there was a major ratcheting-up of tensions between the West and Iran as the Islamic country’s most powerful military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, was assassinated in an airstrike at Baghdad Airport ordered by the United States president Donald Trump. It prompted three meetings of Britain’s Cobra national security committee, but, in a precursor of what was to come, Johnson decided not to cut his holiday short to attend any of them. Instead Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, was left to chair Cobra. Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, accused Johnson of ‘sunning himself, drinking vodka martinis somewhere else, and not paying attention’.

In particular, when Italy and then the United States moved to ban flights from Wuhan, Tedros inexplicably cautioned that this would ‘have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit’. The Japanese deputy prime minister Tarō Asō – angered by the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics until the following year – would later complain that the WHO should be renamed the ‘Chinese Health Organization’, such was its readiness to play down the crisis. Donald Trump would also suspend the United States’ financial contribution to the organisation over the same issue. Tedros’s biggest concern at the time was ‘the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it’. The UK complacently believed itself to have the best contingency plans in the world to tackle a pandemic and felt there was no need to panic.


pages: 521 words: 136,802

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, estate planning, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Michael Milken, power law, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, éminence grise

CBS and Viacom Are Talking about It,” New York Times, February 1, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Moonves and Shari showed: Michael J. de la Merced and John Koblin, “Two Moguls Vie for Power in CBS Fight,” New York Times, May 18, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT It was about Donald Trump: Ronan Farrow, “Donald Trump, a Playboy Model, and a System for Concealing Infidelity,” New Yorker, February 16, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT There was more good news: Meg James and Richard Winton, “CBS Investigators Interview Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb, Who Accused Leslie Moonves of Sexual Assault,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2018.

Pilgrim pleaded guilty to tax evasion for a scheme in which he sold millions of dollars in ads in nonexistent publications. He’d served two and a half years in Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Detention Center. (Pilgrim’s costar, Louise Hay—later Louise Linton—married Pilgrim’s lawyer, Ronald Richards, divorced him, and eventually married Donald Trump’s future treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin.) Since his release from prison Pilgrim had been living with his mother and stepfather in Sedona, Arizona. While in Los Angeles he stayed with his current girlfriend, Amy Shpall, a former talent agent with an executive producer credit for the Bravo fitness reality show Work Out.

It was programmed with his voice. All he had to do was tap, and the computer would respond “yes,” “no,” or—for use specifically with Shari—“I love you,” “I’m proud of you,” or “Would you like some fruit salad?” But Sumner’s favorite was “Fuck you.” It was the option he pressed repeatedly whenever anyone mentioned Donald Trump. Every few months Shari took her father to the Montage Hotel in Laguna Beach, the resort community south of Los Angeles. They had ocean-view rooms close to each other and watched baseball on TV while wearing Red Sox baseball caps (with the team on a winning streak, Sumner was again a Red Sox fan).


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

The volume and geographic concentration of Latinos, warned Huntington, was making them resistant to assimilation and could lead to the secession of the south-western United States.58 PAT BUCHANAN’S AMERICA FIRST At the foot of Lookout Mountain in north-west Georgia in 2005, a former Nixon and Reagan adviser and presidential hopeful, Pat Buchanan, delivered the eulogy at the funeral of the prominent paleoconservative Samuel Francis, his friend and muse. Buchanan, a Donald Trump avant la lettre, ran for the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996 on an anti-globalist, ethno-traditionalist, religious-right platform. In 1996, he wrote of the challenge to the country’s ethno-traditions: Consider the change in our own country in four decades. In 1950, America was … 90 percent of European stock … By 2050, according to the Census Bureau, whites may be near a minority in an America of 81 million Hispanics, 62 million blacks and 41 million Asians.

In a May 2000 interview on National Public Radio, he said record immigration levels meant ‘we’re gonna lose our country’. That year, Buchanan won the nomination of the Reform Party but finished with a pitiful 0.4 per cent of the vote in the presidential election. Among his rivals for the Reform nomination was a political novice and property tycoon named Donald Trump. After losing to Buchanan, Trump lashed out at his rival for being politically incorrect on race and sex: ‘Look, he’s a Hitler lover … He doesn’t like the blacks, he doesn’t like the gays.’ ‘We must recognize bigotry and prejudice,’ Trump added, ‘and defeat it wherever it appears.’61 Trump would apologize a decade later to Buchanan, but his remarks capture an ideological climate in which establishment conservatism, with its more ‘politically correct’ economic, military and religious chords, was firmly in the driver’s seat.

Romney’s defeat saw the Republicans win just 27 per cent of the Hispanic vote compared to Bush’s 40 per cent and McCain’s 31 per cent. In a report dubbed ‘the autopsy’, the Republican National Committee (RNC), chaired by Reince Priebus, reiterated the need for the party to appeal to Hispanics and young people by embracing immigration reform. The then reality-TV star Donald Trump echoed the RNC line: ‘[Romney] had a crazy policy of self-deportation,’ he told the conservative website Newsmax. ‘He lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.’91 Bypassing Congress, Obama initiated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme in 2012 which allows undocumented immigrants who entered the country as minors to apply for a renewable two-year permit preventing them from being deported.


pages: 392 words: 112,954

I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Ken Thompson, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Snapchat, War on Poverty

What was offered up in more mainstream circles was a slight semantic twist on the same take: minority neighborhoods are “where the crime is,” and any program designed to stop potential criminals should target blacks and Hispanics as the “right people” to stop. A version of this argument quietly took over the leadership of the NYPD during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Later, through the bizarre spectacle of New York billionaire Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it would bleed into national presidential politics. Trump would seize the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency itself by promising to build a “big, beautiful wall” to keep out rape-happy Mexicans, a lunatic ploy that defied actual crime rates and that would never have worked had millions of people not believed in the inherent criminality of other races.

She struck down the program in a lengthy ruling, which contained the following key passage: The NYPD maintains two different policies related to racial profiling in the practice of stop and frisk: a written policy that prohibits racial profiling and requires reasonable suspicion for a stop—and another, unwritten policy that encourages officers to focus their reasonable-suspicion-based stops on “the right people, the right time, the right location.” As Scheindlin put it, “Rather than being a defense against the charge of racial profiling, however, this reasoning is a defense of racial profiling.” City leaders were furious with the woman Donald Trump would later infamously call a “very against-police judge.” Bloomberg, still the mayor, was perhaps angriest of all. On August 12, 2013, he stood on the steps of City Hall with his commissioner, Ray Kelly, and issued a lengthy statement. Bloomberg directed his ire at the “one small group of advocates—and one judge” who overturned what he implied was otherwise an overwhelmingly popular program.

Conservative media constantly presented him as the pre-Trump, left-wing version of a Manchurian president, raised in madrassas and weaned on socialism, who secretly hated white people, yearned to euthanize them, and took the White House with the sole aim of destroying traditional America. The apotheosis of all of this was the preposterous birther controversy, pushed by then peripheral political curiosity and reality TV star Donald Trump. The Internet-driven furor over the president’s birth certificate led to huge numbers of Americans—41 percent in a 2016 poll—believing that Obama was not merely conflicted but not even an American. He wasn’t just black. He was illegitimate. An illegal president. If anyone could communicate the frustration black Americans felt over Stop-and-Frisk and other neo-vagrancy laws that made black people feel like they could be arrested anytime, anywhere, it should have been Barack Obama.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

At a time when ordinary Ukrainians’ wealth had been stagnant for years, he had accumulated a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as had his closest friends. He had more money than he could ever have needed, more treasures than he had rooms for. All heads of state have palaces, but normally those palaces belong to the government, not to the individual. In the rare cases – Donald Trump, say – where the palaces are private property, they tend to have been acquired before the politician entered office. Yanukovich, however, had built his palace while living off a state salary, and that is why the protesters flocked to see his vast log cabin. They marvelled at the edifice of the main building, the fountains, the waterfalls, the statues, the exotic pheasants.

On the morning after Halloween 2017, a carved pumpkin appeared on the doorstep of 377 Union Street, a handsome brownstone in the extensive grid of streets south of Brooklyn Heights, New York. The pumpkin, when examined closely, bore a good likeness of Robert Mueller, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned Special Counsel for probing whether Russia illegally interfered in the election of Donald Trump. The pumpkin was the work of a local photographer called Amy Finkel, and it sat beneath a makeshift ‘designated landmark’ sign declaring the property to be ‘The House That Brought Down a President’. Locals, who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, were having some fun with 377 Union Street.

Tornai, who has off-blonde hair cascading down past her shoulders, and full lips, was little known before she started appearing on the show, but has since become a major celebrity, perhaps because her unsubtle style is well-suited to television. If you’re not familiar with her work, her creations look classy in the same way Donald Trump’s interior décor looks classy, and she does not do under-stated. She specialises in semi-transparent dresses with plunging necklines, adorned with drifts of crystals, topped off with veils and accessories, themselves crusted with sparkly things. ‘I live for bling, but bling is expensive. A bride with an unlimited budget is my dream, because I can focus on making the dress perfect at any cost,’ Tornai informs the camera during ‘V.


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 past decade bore witness to insurgencies against this global war regime and its neoliberal ideology in the form of Occupy, the Arab Spring, anti-austerity protests, the defense of Latin America’s Bolivarian revolutions, and resistance to racialized state violence everywhere. But we have also seen a resurgence of racist nationalism, misogyny, femicide, and authoritarian regimes elected into power. What do we make of our current condition? If you want answers, read this book. If you believe the culprit is Donald Trump and his crew and that all we need is a return to the good old days of Clinton/Obama/Biden, definitely read this book. Harsha Walia doesn’t peddle easy solutions or liberal bromides. She has a knack for going to the root of our planetary crises and explaining how we arrived here, and what to do about it.

This is unmistakable in the deployment of US Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) to train border guards in Iraq and Guatemala, while engaging in SWAT-style operations to grab protestors off the streets of Portland in unmarked vehicles at the height of Black-led uprisings against police violence in 2020. This synergy between the local and global is also evident in President Donald Trump’s proposal to classify all irregular, economic migrants as “enemy combatants” and incarcerate them at Guantánamo Bay.3 The pattern of constructing migrants as enemy aliens emerges worldwide, examined in chapter 3. Mainstream narratives of a “global migration crisis” depict migrants as threats without implicating the crises of forced dispossession, deprivation, and displacement.

The child had her tiny arm wrapped across her father’s back, as both lay facedown, dead, in the murky waters of the Rio Grande. That same summer, the world also watched in horror as images poured in of children in cages, bodies crammed on floors flooded with sewage, and families torn apart at the border. These images captured the cruelty of President Donald Trump’s restrictive and punitive immigration policies. The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) reported from the Texas border: “Hundreds of migrants are locked up in what are akin to disaster relief camps the day after an earthquake. Families are cramped together, porta-potties and mylar blankets are strewn across an industrial wasteland.


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

I knew her from the occasional game of football with other hacks on Friday lunchtimes in London. An expert in Mandarin, her previous job had been Asia editor at The Banker, a venerable monthly based on another floor of the FT building at Southwark Bridge. At twenty-eight she’d been thrown in at the deep end, sent to Singapore just in time to cover the summit between Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and had hardly drawn breath since. It was Palma who initially met Gill and Evelyn at Changi airport on her way to a conference in Sydney. She’d sussed them out in a four-hour stint, her first experience of dealing with whistleblowers, before sprinting through departures dragging a suitcase.

‘Tell the FT to grow some fucking balls.’ 20 Manipulated 30 January 2019 – London Wirecard share price €167, market capitalization €21bn THE CENTRE OF THE Financial Times newsroom was an oval of desks surrounding the news editor, a maestro conducting all around him. Hung above that hub were several large TV screens displaying the various rolling news channels, sound off except for natural disasters and impromptu Donald Trump news conferences. Radiating outwards were the various desks required to put out a website; pictures, graphics, stats, IT, video, breaking news; a small army of sub-editors who published stories, stitched the paper together and were the last line of defence against garbled and inaccurate copy. In January 2019 preparations for the move to a new building by St Paul’s Cathedral were under way, and the floor had an air of decay about it.

‘I’ll let him fill you in but basically he’s trying to move the Austrian embassy to Jerusalem and I had told him about your success with Guatemala,’ ‘Ray’ wrote. Signing off, he encouraged the trio to ‘also pay some attention to financial opportunities while you all play your game of thrones’. Guatemala was one of the few countries to have followed the lead of Donald Trump and switched its official diplomatic base in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the divided city expected to one day serve as the capital of any future Palestinian state. Pushing for other countries to move their embassies into one of the world’s most politically sensitive locations, where Israel maintained an illegal occupation, was a cause célèbre of far-right politicians around the world, including Austria, as Marsalek explained in his response.


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

The next two weeks witnessed 3,753 new cases, the two weeks after that 109,995. By mid-November, 150,000 cases were being added per day. In the early days, this exponential growth was something the public and policymakers – in America and Europe, at least – proved unable to grasp. Politicians from Donald Trump to Boris Johnson consistently downplayed the risk exponential growth represented. Early research, released during the first year of the pandemic, demonstrated exponential growth bias at play. At all stages of the pandemic, people underestimated the future course of the spread. Given three weeks of actual data for the growth of the virus, participants were asked to predict infection levels one week and two weeks later.

One loophole, long beloved by the American technology titans, was the ‘Double Irish’, in which large companies put their intangible intellectual property in an Irish-registered company controlled from a tax haven such as Bermuda. Ireland considers the firm to be offshore, but the US considers it Irish.50 And the profits? Well, the profits remain untaxed. This practice has started to go out of vogue, and after the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Donald Trump’s administration clamped down on the Double Irish, at least one technology company brought it to an end in 2020.51 In general, governments have been caught off guard by the rapidity with which the Exponential Age titans have grown. A few nations, like Ireland, spotted the shift. The country was quick to use appealing tax rates as a way of enticing the new economy superstars to set up shop there.52 But many countries did nothing, standing by as their leading companies relocated and starting paying less tax.

It comes from a rapidly changing economy – defined by a fundamental shift in the quality of working arrangements, resulting from gig-working and algorithmic management. For workers, this leads to an age-old problem: a power imbalance between bosses and workers. But while this imbalance is a consequence of the Exponential Age, it is not an inevitable one. 6 The World Is Spiky Angelo Yu had a problem. It was late 2019, and US president Donald Trump had spent much of the previous two years tweeting increasingly bellicose denunciations of the Chinese government. At the same time, the White House had been progressively ratcheting up tariffs on Chinese imports to the US. This looked like bad news for Yu’s start-up, Pix Moving. Based in Guiyang, a city 1,000 kilometres to the north-west of Shenzhen, the firm makes the chassis for a new class of autonomous vehicle.


pages: 86 words: 26,489

This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore

Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, desegregation, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, immigration reform, liberal world order, mass immigration, Steve Bannon

It carried to positions of influence and power, even murderous power, nationalists including Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Three decades after Degler issued his warning, Britain voted to leave the European Union and the United States elected Donald Trump, who went on to declare, “I’m a nationalist, okay?” In a new book, Fukuyama retreated from many of his earlier claims, insisting that in 1989 he had never exactly said that nationalism was “about to disappear.” But Fukuyama had been hardly alone in pronouncing nationalism all but dead in the 1980s.

But during those same decades, Europe reeled from the havoc wrought by nationalism, which is why Fukuyama was able to argue, in 1989, that nationalism in Europe had been “defanged,” and that nationalism in other parts of the world was less an ideology than a means to achieving independence. Only at the very fringes did political figures in the West any longer call themselves “nationalists.” That changed early in the twenty-first century, when nationalists stopped mincing words. “We’re putting America first and it hasn’t happened in a lot of decades,” Donald Trump said at a rally in Houston, Texas, in the fall of 2018, before a crowd sixteen thousand strong. “We’re taking care of ourselves for a change, folks,” he said, nodding his head. Supporters waved KEEP AMERICA GREAT signs and FINISH THE WALL placards. He warned of a conspiracy designed to “restore the rule of corrupt, power-hungry globalists.”

From Killing Lincoln he moved on to writing “killing” books about people who hadn’t actually ever been killed. “O’Reilly’s vast carelessness pollutes history and debases the historian’s craft,” the conservative columnist George F. Will wrote in the Washington Post in 2015. But by then O’Reilly’s history books had already sold 6.8 million copies. Donald Trump’s onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon admired a dystopian 1997 book called The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. “This is a book that turns history into prophecy,” its authors boasted. That prophecy? The fourth turning “could mark the end of man,” or “the end of modernity,” or it “could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation,” or it “could find America, and the world, a much better place.”


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 was obvious to me that this coronavirus was no longer a distant threat and it was time to start taking precautions. I suggested in my column that people should avoid shaking hands, hugging others, and that we should all wash our hands as often as possible for as long as it takes to sing “Happy Birthday to You” twice. Others were clearly less concerned. President Donald Trump told his fellow Americans, “We have it totally under control. It’s going to be just fine.” He optimistically added, “There’s a theory that, in April, when it gets warm—historically, that has been able to kill the virus.” Day 51 Despite the looming threat, major sporting events in Europe were allowed to continue.

The Italian government created “red zones” around towns in the north, quarantining more than 50,000 people. Schools were closed, sporting events canceled. The mayor of Milan, however, decided to keep bars and restaurants open and to encourage tourists to visit the city’s cathedral and museums. In a similar spirit of misguided optimism, President Donald Trump tweeted, “The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. Stock market starting to look very good to me!” Within days, stock markets around the world fell. Day 60 On February 28th Sub-Saharan Africa had its first confirmed case when an Italian citizen, who had returned to Nigeria from Milan, tested positive for the virus.

There has been one randomized controlled trial that showed that, on average, it reduces the time it takes to recover from Covid-19 from 15 days to 11 days. There was also a modest impact on the risk of dying, though this was not statistically significant.25 Another drug, which got a lot of attention from President Donald Trump after a small study done in France suggested it might be of benefit, is the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. Unfortunately, it has significant side effects, and a study that looked at its impact on 368 American military veterans hospitalized with Covid-19 found that more than twice as many died after being given the drug than those who got usual care.26 Another way to fight the virus is by using human antibodies, collected from the blood of people who have had the virus and survived.


pages: 88 words: 26,706

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.” Showing a stunning lack of historical awareness—and by the way, the IDW’s stunning lack of historical awareness will be one of the major themes of this book—the subjects of the profile informed Weiss that “a decade ago…when Donald Trump was hosting ‘The Apprentice,’ none of these observations would have been considered taboo.” In reality, both the group’s claim to be a persecuted minority and their depiction of the left as censorious and dominant were hardly new accusations. The conservative framing of American politics around a perceived culture war dates back to at least 1951 when National Review founder William F.

The Stanford- and UCLA-educated neuroscientist is a warmonger and an apologist for the status quo in many ways I’ll explore as the book goes on, but he has conventionally liberal views on domestic policy issues ranging from abortion to closing the gun show loophole. He supported Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump in the 2016 election. And where Ben Shapiro naively believes that God Himself shares his attitudes toward women and Palestinians, Harris is fiercely secular. Long before there was an Intellectual Dark Web, Harris belonged to a group of intellectuals who collectively branded themselves The New Atheists.

Shapiro’s response was to repeatedly stutter the word “sir,” claim that his support for the law followed from “science” (because a fetus is a human life), and to call Neil a biased “liberal” for attacking “the pro-life position.” This last part rings particularly hollow, since for decades members of the “pro-life” movement have insisted that only the doctors who performed abortions should be punished. When Donald Trump said in 2016 that there should be “some punishment” for the women who have abortions, even many pro-lifers considered this a gaffe. The needle is constantly moving, though, and Shapiro is far too loyal a conservative foot-soldier not to move with it. Meanwhile, Shapiro’s arguments about “science” are typical of his hacky and superficial attempts at providing “logical” arguments to alienated and sad teenagers.


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

Lang (1961) Melissa Etheridge (1961) Garth Brooks (1962) Sheryl Crow (1962) Whitney Houston (1963) Eddie Vedder (1964) ENTREPRENEURS AND BUSINESSPEOPLE Steve Wozniak (1950) Bill Gates (1955) Steve Jobs (1955) Jeff Bezos (1964) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Bill Clinton (1946) George W. Bush (1946) Donald Trump (1946) Hillary Clinton (1947) Dan Quayle (1947) Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) Mitt Romney (1947) Al Gore (1948) Clarence Thomas (1948) Elizabeth Warren (1948) Samuel Alito (1950) Chuck Schumer (1950) Condoleezza Rice (1954) Sonia Sotomayor (1954) John Roberts (1955) Anita Hill (1956) Mike Pence (1959) Elena Kagan (1960) Barack Obama (1961) Kamala Harris (1964) Athletes and Sports Figures Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1947) O.

In 1972, when the Boomers were young adults, the voter turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds was 52.1%, a number that has not been equaled by a presidential election year since, even in the high-turnout election of 2020. Boomers dominated political leadership nearly as soon as they came of age. Every U.S. president elected between 1992 and 2016 was a Boomer. Among the 36 presidential and vice presidential candidates between 1988 and 2020, 21 (58%) were Boomers. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born within three months of each other in the summer of 1946. Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, was born in 1961 and thus in the last few years of the generation (though some have argued his unconventional upbringing and casual attitude align him more with Gen X). Older Boomer leaders often invoked their postwar origins in political exchanges, convinced that their way forward was better than the ways of the past.

Still, the growing instability in relationships during Boomers’ young adulthood was not a good formula for mental health. That’s especially true for Boomer men, fewer of whom are married in middle age than were in previous generations. There’s also another worm at the core of the Boomer apple: income inequality. The Rich Get Richer, and the Poor Get Poorer Trait: Casualties of Income Inequality After Donald Trump’s surprise win in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, many people went searching for answers. One key narrative was that there was a growing class divide in the country, especially among Whites. According to this theory, White Americans without college degrees were increasingly unhappy and struggling economically, while those with a college education were enjoying more happiness and prosperity.


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

The Fed’s machinations are ultimately irrelevant to a sector of the economy that, as Tim Harford wrote in Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure (2011), “has been built on failure after failure after failure.”16 So, while the Fed’s activity certainly negatively affects the monument to wealth and credit creation that is Silicon Valley, it doesn’t in the way that most would presume. CHAPTER FIVE Did You Hear the One about Donald Trump Walking into a Bank? “Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?” “No sir,” replied J. P. Morgan. “The first thing is character.” “Before money or property?” “Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it. . . . Because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.” —H. W. Brands, The Money Men IN MANY WAYS, Donald Trump is best known today for his high-profile 2016 run for the office of president of the United States.

CONTENTS Foreword by Rob Arnott Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE: CREDIT ONE The Rate Setters at the Fed Should Attend More Taylor Swift Concerts TWO Jim Harbaugh, Urban Meyer, and Pete Carroll Would Never Need an Easy Fed THREE In Hollywood, the Traffic Lights Are Almost Always Red FOUR In Silicon Valley Your Failures Are Your Credit FIVE Did You Hear the One about Donald Trump Walking into a Bank? SIX Ben Bernanke’s Crony Credit SEVEN What the Supply-Siders and Hillary Clinton Sadly Have in Common EIGHT Why “Senator Warren Buffett” Would Be a Credit-Destroying Investor NINE The Credit Implications of the Fracking Boom TEN Conclusion: Sorry Keynesians and Supply-Siders, Government Is Always a Credit-Shrinking Tax PART TWO: BANKING ELEVEN NetJets Doesn’t Multiply Airplanes, and Banks Don’t Multiply Money and Credit TWELVE Good Businesses Never Run Out of Money, and Neither Do Well-Run Banks THIRTEEN Do We Even Need Banks?

Daniel Fischel, Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 3. 2. Robert H. Smith, Dead Bank Walking (Bath, U.K.: Oakhill Press, 1995), 62. 3. Ibid., 64. 4. Ibid., 65. 5. Ibid., 62. 6. Ibid., 68. 7. Ibid., 55. 8. Ibid., 58. Emphasis mine. 9. Ibid., 58–59. 10. M. J. Lee, “Donald Trump: I’m Worth $10 Billion,” CNN Politics, July 15, 2015. 11. Natalie Robehmed, “Why Jennifer Lawrence Is The World’s Highest-Paid Actress,” Forbes.com, August 20, 2015. 12. Fischel, Payback, 42. 13. Ibid., 158. 14. Ibid., 25. 15. Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Junk Bonds, Mortgages and Milken,” New York Times, April 29, 2008. 16.


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

There was a growing sense among these CEOs that capitalism was under threat, that it wasn’t working as well as it could or should, and that they needed to do a better job demonstrating its value to society. The impetus for this remarkable gathering was not just the clear needs in society that Pope Francis frequently cited. Going in, the CEOs recognized that public support for the capitalist system was waning. Brexit had just passed in the UK over the objections of nearly every business leader. Donald Trump had triumphed after a campaign attacking the globalization that these companies had driven. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, had nearly been defeated for the Democratic nomination by Bernie Sanders, who openly embraced democratic socialism. Polls showed that among young people, a majority did not favor capitalism.

The share of all income going to the middle-income group dropped from 62 percent to 43 percent, while their share of wealth dropped even faster. The 2008 shakeup led to a cascade of events, including Brexit—a bold and potentially disastrous rejection of corporate and political common sense—and the advent of leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who flouted centuries of conventional wisdom without replacing it with any stable alternative. And just as real was the backlash on the Left, personified in the United States by Bernie Sanders. Sanders launched two presidential campaigns that, while ultimately unsuccessful, harnessed the impressive energy and influence of the younger population and pulled the Democratic party in his direction.

So large-scale deployment to passenger use, we think, is going to continue to be pretty slow.” As for broader concerns about climate change, Tillerson said, “There are more pressing problems that we as a race and society need to deal with.” Tillerson stepped down from the top job at the end of 2016 to become President Donald Trump’s secretary of state. In doing so, he also left his position as one of the top CEOs on the Business Roundtable. Later, in an interview with Insigniam’s Nathan Rosenberg, Tillerson indicated he would have opposed the BRT’s statement on stakeholder capitalism. “I don’t think it’s healthy for a group of CEOs to get together and just say we are all going to agree to behave this way—because everybody’s business is different.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Elites, Gurría writes, have found myriad ways to “change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all.” The people with the most to lose from genuine social change have placed themselves in charge of social change, often with the passive assent of those most in need of it. It is fitting that an era marked by these tendencies should culminate in the election of Donald Trump. Trump is at once an exposer, an exploiter, and an embodiment of the cult of elite-led social change. He tapped, as few before him successfully had, into a widespread intuition that elites were phonily claiming to be doing what was best for most Americans. He exploited that intuition by whipping it into frenzied anger and then directing most of that anger not at elites but at the most marginalized and vulnerable Americans.

Hillary Clinton had beaten Bernie Sanders, who spoke of putting the “billionaire class” in their place in order to make the working class thrive, whereas Clinton had spoken of wanting everyone to do better. Now she found herself up against the ultimate win-losey opponent, though this time of the race-baiting, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist sort. Donald Trump had harnessed an intuition that those people who believed you could crusade for justice and get super-rich and save lives and be very powerful and give a lot back, that you could have it all and then some, were phonies. He had harnessed these feelings, to the bafflement of many, despite embodying the pseudo-concern he decried.

* * * — MarketWorlders were waking up to the anger. The events of 2016 had made it “the global elite’s annus horribilis,” in the words of Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian, a preeminent and lavishly paid thought leader, and an esteemed member of the globalist tribe. He wrote in the Boston Globe of how he and his peers had laughed at Donald Trump in January in Davos, only to see him claim the Republican nomination; and then, some months later, ricocheting among Aspen, Lake Como, and Martha’s Vineyard, had failed to take seriously the campaign to sever Britain from the European Union, only to see it succeed. The world’s elites were being revolted against, and the revolts perhaps had something to do with how disconnected they were from the realities of others.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

But to many in the public, it seemed they’d done little more than save the banks and corporations. Anger festered and turned into the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Through all of the years since, the general public’s trust has never been restored. Look no further than the election of a reality-show TV star to the U.S. presidency. It may have felt good to cast that protest vote for Donald Trump and stick it to the elites, but it seems pretty clear—to us at least—that all Trump was offering was the same old warmed-over economic ideas with a dash of hot sauce. We are no better off now than we were in 2008. By various measures, the U.S. economy has recovered—at the time of writing, unemployment was near record lows and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at record highs.

A separate survey by Gallop showed that only 12 percent of U.S. citizens trusted Congress in 2017, down from 40 percent in 1979; that about 27 percent trusted what they heard from newspapers, compared with 51 percent thirty-eight years earlier; and that 21 percent trusted big business, down from 32 percent. At the time of writing, even traditional Republicans are wondering (1) how on earth Donald Trump was ever elected president, and (2) why so many people seem to fall prey to blatant disinformation and conspiracy theories. Trump’s manifestly a liar, someone who lies even when evidence disproving the lie is readily available. But here’s the bigger problem: in a world where trust has eroded sharply, where our government doesn’t work, and where companies that once guaranteed jobs for life are now either outsourcing them or hiring robots, Trump’s lies can seem minor in comparison to the more systemic breach of trust voters are feeling.

But it’s evident in more subtle ways across the Western world. As government officials and central bankers seek to boost investment and create jobs, printing more money or bestowing more favor on connected players as they go, citizens everywhere are calling foul on the whole enterprise. It brought the United States Donald Trump and the United Kingdom Brexit. But it also created economic dysfunction. If people don’t trust our economic systems, they don’t take risks; they don’t spend. The loser is economic growth and development. This trust problem is intrinsically connected with ledgers and record-keeping. To comprehend that, we’ll explore the little-known story of a Franciscan friar with a love of math who developed a system that fueled Europe’s explosion out of the Dark Ages more directly than the Medici bankers who financed that growth.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Vance (a Millennial, born in 1984) captured the social and economic values of a community so far removed from the mores of America’s prosperous coasts that to some American readers it probably felt as if he were describing a foreign country. Indeed, Vance’s memoir seemed, after the surprising outcome of the presidential election in November that year, to provide a big part of the explanation for why so many Americans had elected a president who so many other Americans took for granted was manifestly unfit for the job. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” message had spoken to the frustrations of Rust Belt workers in America’s heartland left behind after the Great Recession. That’s all largely true, but incomplete. I’m not the first to point out that the social and economic problems Vance describes long predate the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the bailouts, Obamacare, or any of the other bruising policy and political debates that have emerged in the wake of the Great Recession.

This was a huge risk, since unlike the era of peak overtime coverage in the 1970s, productivity in the economy had generally been falling over the previous generation. We’ll never know what would have happened if the Obama overtime rule had fully taken effect—it was blocked by a judge on procedural grounds in November 2016 and abandoned by the new administration of Donald Trump in 2017—but before the court froze the rule, many businesses already had started preparing to comply with it. The effects were decidedly mixed. Some workers did get raises, to push their pay above the new threshold and exempt them from overtime payments that would have been even costlier for their employers.

‡ Lester Thurow, the dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Business in the late 1980s and early 1990s, built a career around warning that Americans were failing to keep up with Japanese competitors who in his telling were better at just about every aspect of economic leadership and corporate management; the timing of his most famous book, 1992’s Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America, now seems unfortunate in light of the fact that when it came out, Japan was entering into what has now become two decades of near-stagnation. None other than Donald Trump also was a prominent critic of Japan, and America’s relationship with Japan, in the 1980s, when he frequently complained the Japanese were free-riding on America’s military and outnegotiating American businesses at every turn. § Japan, Inc., has suffered a growing list of corporate scandals in recent years, ranging from Olympus to Mitsubishi to Nissan and many others in between, sometimes relating to efforts to fudge quality-control test results, and other times exposing long-running corporate efforts to conceal losses dating back to the 1980s and ’90s


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

The overlap of Trump votes with concentrated counties is very high. Trump knew how to connect with voters, when he spoke about rigged markets. He spoke to the average worker's fears. In the 2016 election Hillary Clinton won 472 counties that represented 64% of US Gross Domestic Product, compared to the 36% for the 2,584 counties that voted for Donald Trump. In many small towns, a single meat packing company, insurer, hospital system, or big box store owned by a distant company has now replaced locally owned businesses. Trump was tapping into a profound, justified anxiety across the country. The wage squeeze is even greater if you are in a small town, with a small labor market facing off against corporations.

It is worth remembering that when Adam Smith wrote of “the invisible hand” in The Wealth of Nations, he was not simply praising the free market, but condemning the government acting on the behalf of large merchants who were furthering their own interests. Until lobbying is reformed, there is little hope for reducing barriers to entry for smaller firms to fight it out in the marketplace. There is little chance the invisible hand can work. In the final days of the 2016 election, Donald Trump ran an advertisement showing the face of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. The voiceover did not mention him by name, but the narration described “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”81 Even when Trump campaigned against Hillary Clinton's ties to Goldman Sachs, he kept the revolving door swinging for Goldman, giving many ex-bankers control over American financial policy.

Both resented the bailouts of large banks and bonus payments to executives who had brought down the financial system, while the middle class struggled with debt and unemployment. But the protests faded away like faint tremors. The big political earthquakes came later. On the night of the US election in November 2016, the British went to bed expecting Hillary Clinton to win, but by the time they awoke, America had elected Donald Trump. A complete political outsider, a former reality-TV star, and a man who has had almost as many corporate bankruptcies as marriages would be the next president of the United States. The British should have seen it coming. A few months earlier, they had gone to bed expecting to stay in the European Union, only to wake up in shock and disbelief and find out that by a slim margin, a majority had voted for a divorce from their biggest trading partner.


Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

And if that’s my aim, it doesn’t matter to me whether the story is true or false. I may not have read it, I may not care if you read it, but I want you to know that I am a fellow tinfoil hatter. The signal itself becomes the point. If I share a story about how the IRS is investigating Donald Trump’s business dealings prior to the 2016 election, my political affiliation is unclear. But if I share a story that says Donald Trump has sold the Washington Monument to a Russian oligarch, it’s clear that I hate Trump. And I’m demonstrating a political allegiance so strong that I can suspend disbelief when it comes to stories of Trump’s treachery. Professor Donath’s insight springs from a broader tradition in the field known as communication theory.

November 8, 2017. https://jennabrams.wordpress.com/​2017/​11/​08/​our-democracy-has-been-hacked/. Ritchie, Hannah. “Read All about It: The Biggest Fake News Stories of 2016.” CNBC. December 30, 2016. https://www.cnbc.com/​2016/​12/​30/​read-all-about-it-the-biggest-fake-news-stories-of-2016.html. Roberts, David. “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology.” Vox. May 19, 2017. https://www.vox.com/​policy-and-politics/​2017/​3/22/​14762030/​donald-trump-tribal-epistemology. Rose-Stockwell, Tobias. “This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit.” Medium. July 14, 2017. https://medium.com/​@tobiasrose/​the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de. Shahbaz, Adrian.

Some of them were making in excess of $5,000 per month, compared with the average Macedonian monthly salary of $371. The teens writing these stories didn’t care whether Trump or Clinton won; they cared only about clicks. The most shared fake news story in that whole election proclaimed that “Pope Francis Shocks the World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.” This story was created by a group of teenagers in Macedonia, under the aegis of WT05 News, and received nearly a million engagements on Facebook. To put that in perspective, the top New York Times article during this same period received 370,000 engagements. Pope Francis was not happy about this story.


pages: 480 words: 119,407

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

_r=0 84 http://www.wbur.org/politicker/2016/11/21/bernie-sanders-berklee 85 http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307014-sanders-dems-must-move-beyond-identity-politics 86 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/paul-kelly/donald-trumps-election-a-rejection-of-identity-politics/news-story/147b11c08b64702d3f9be1821416cb72 87 https://twitter.com/RichardBurgon/status/822417591713075201 88 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/01/blame-trump-brexit-identity-liberalism 89 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_212100.htm#00–0000 90 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes372012.htm 91 Bourdieu, Pierre (1972) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Nice, Richard trans. (1977), Cambridge 92 http://theconversation.com/donald-trump-and-the-rise-of-white-identity-in-politics-67037 93 http://www.vox.com/2016/11/1/13480416/trump-supporters-sexism Chapter 1 1 https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28542/120500.pdf?

For him, the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism – seeing the world from a female perspective – was niche. Ideological. I was reminded of this man in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, when it felt you couldn’t move for tweets, speeches and op-eds by (usually) white men decrying the ills of what they called ‘identity politics’. Ten days after Donald Trump’s victory, the New York Times published an article by Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, that criticised Clinton for ‘calling out explicitly to African American, Latino, LGBT and women voters’.83 This left out, he said, ‘the white working class’. Lilla presented Clinton’s ‘rhetoric of diversity’ as mutually exclusive with ‘a large vision’, linking this ‘narrow’ vision (clearly, Lilla has been reading his V.

There are a variety of manoeuvres they can and do employ to undercut their female colleagues in mixed-gender settings. Interrupting is one: ‘females are the more interrupted gender,’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men.43 During a televised ninety-minute debate in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times, while she interrupted him seventeen times.44And it wasn’t just Trump: journalist Matt Lauer (since sacked after multiple allegations of sexual harassment45) was also found to have interrupted Clinton more often than he interrupted Trump. He also ‘questioned her statements more often’,46 although Clinton was found to be the most honest candidate running in the 2018 election.47 Patronising women is another manoeuvre, an infamous example being then British prime minister David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ to Labour MP Angela Eagle in 2011.48 In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) 2016 global study on sexism, violence and harassment against female politicians, one MP from a European parliament said ‘if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is “shushed” with a finger to the lips, as one does with children.


pages: 405 words: 121,999

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Conversely, with the projected ethnic shape of the US in 2040, a candidate like Donald Trump, who purports to champion white, blue-collar America, will find it almost impossible to win, despite America’s electoral college system giving disproportionate weight to smaller, rural and predominantly white states such as Wyoming and North Dakota, both of which are around 90% white. In 2016 those defining themselves as non-Hispanic whites comprised more than three-fifths of the US population and 71% of voters. Donald Trump had a large lead among whites in the 2016 election: 58% of voters who identified as ‘white’ voted for him (whereas only 37% voted for Hillary Clinton).

But by the period immediately preceding 1914 it was nine times the level. Germans had left their home country throughout the nineteenth century in search of a better life overseas, often going to the US where they formed a large share of the population. President Eisenhower’s family came from Saarland, in western Germany, and Donald Trump’s father’s family came from Karlstadt in south-west Germany. However, once Germany started to industrialise and particularly after its unification, there were more opportunities at home. So while the wider English-speaking world and particularly the lands of the Empire offered an enticing prospect for many Britons, where they would find family links and a familiar language and political system, the appeal of emigrating to the alien Anglosphere diminished for Germans once their home country went from a patchwork quilt to a united and fast-developing state.

First, the minority vote has come to matter more as it has grown. Second, the still dominant white vote has to some extent reflected a backlash against rapid ethno-demographic change. Based on the white vote alone–which was still dominant until quite recently–Barack Obama would not have become president in 2009. Meanwhile, many see Donald Trump’s emergence and triumph as a last-gasp effort not so much to ‘make America great again’ but to ‘keep it white for as long as possible’. Whether or not cosmopolitan elites wish to see it (or are comfortable discussing it), a number of serious studies of contemporary populism suggest that it is not, in essence, the cry of the dispossessed or of those losing out as a result of globalisation, but rather the protest of a single ethnic group that has long been retreating from global predominance and now sees itself declining at home.


pages: 419 words: 119,476

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

It was one of the most tumultuous summers in world politics since the end of the Second World War. David Cameron’s promise to give the public a vote on Europe triggered a bitterly fought referendum which ended on 23 June 2016 with Britain voting to leave the European Union. A few days later Cameron was gone and Theresa May was suddenly the new prime minister. In America, Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s nomination on the final day of the party’s convention in Cleveland. By mid-August the crisis in Ukraine had reached a pivotal point with Russian-backed forces preparing to cross the border to launch further military incursions. On 20 September, Russian warplanes bombed a UN convoy in Syria.

Billionaire hedge-fund owner and former futures trader David Harding (Pangbourne) donated £3.5 million to the same campaign. Before the country went to the polls, the Leave campaigners had one more card to play in the battle to persuade the British people to support Brexit. Some believe it may have even been a decisive factor. In the summer of 2015, US billionaire Robert Mercer, a close friend of Donald Trump and an investor in alt-right media company Breitbart News, introduced Farage to a data company set up by two Old Etonian brothers who had cut their teeth on controversial military style ‘psy-ops’ which they ran in election campaigns in the developing world.15 Nigel and Alex Oakes were colourful businessmen with a special interest in psychological profiling.

Hammack have concluded: ‘Those who can afford it go to elite private schools where they pay for the special “status rights” and social networks that allow for the “passage of privilege,” and hope that this will maintain their children’s privileged position or help them obtain a better job.’19 Donald Trump’s private school is a legacy of the English public school system which exported a military system for educating elites.20 Trump was born into a wealthy family. At thirteen years old his parents packed him off to the New York Military Academy (NYMA), spread across 120 acres in rural Cornwall, New York, located 60 miles north of Manhattan.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

It created a much richer total data set than anything the DNC or the Clinton campaign possessed. When Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination in the spring of 2016, his operation lacked the deep technology infrastructure of the Clinton campaign. To make up for this deficit, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, worked with the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, on a digital strategy that would build on what the RNC already had rather than create their own. Based on the RNC’s data sets, they had identified a group of fourteen million Republicans who said they did not like Donald Trump. To turn this group of skeptics into supporters, the Trump team created Project Alamo in Parscale’s hometown of San Antonio to consolidate fund-raising, messaging, and targeting, especially on Facebook.

Negotiations led to another round of amendments. Every couple of days it seemed as if the effort was almost dead, but we talked repeatedly with Bossert and we all resolved not to give up. Remarkably, after many rounds of calls and conversations, it stayed alive. And on March 23, 2018, President Donald Trump signed an omnibus budget bill that included it. The CLOUD Act was now law,13 and the Supreme Court case would shortly be settled. It had been more than four years since we had first gone to the federal courthouse in New York. But it had been less than a month since we had left the steps of the Supreme Court.

At a meeting with a bipartisan group of our political consultants in Washington, DC, I argued that both parties were letting us down. Many Republicans were reluctant to take on the Russians because they thought it implicitly meant undercutting a Republican president. And some Democrats seemed to find more joy in criticizing Donald Trump than in taking effective action to address the Russian government. As a result, a principal pillar of the post–World War II defense of democracy had crumbled before our eyes—a united and bipartisan American public supporting US leadership that could bring together our NATO allies. As I shared my frustration, our consultants nodded when one said, “Welcome to Washington.”


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Taylor Lorenz, “17 Teens Take Us Inside the World of Snapchat Streaks, Where Friendships Live or Die,” Mic, April 14, 2017, https://mic.com/articles/173998/17-teens-take-us-inside-the-world-of-snapchat-streaks-where-friendships-live-or-die#.f8S7Bxz4i. 27. Alan Cooper, “The Oppenheimer Moment,” lecture delivered at the Interaction 18 Conference, February 6, 2018, https://vimeo.com/254533098. 28. Max Read, “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook,” New York, November 9, 2016, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/11/donald-trump-won-because-of-facebook.html. 29. Joshua Benton, “The Forces That Drove This Election’s Media Failure Are Likely to Get Worse,” Nieman Lab, November 9, 2016, www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/. 30.

“Self-Driving Uber Vehicle Strikes, Kills 49-Year-Old Woman in Tempe.” AZCentral.com, March 19, 2018. www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe-breaking/2018/03/19/woman-dies-fatal-hit-strikes-self-driving-uber-crossing-road-tempe/438256002/. Read, Max. “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook.” New York, November 9, 2016. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/11/donald-trump-won-because-of-facebook.html. Reeves, Byron, and Clifford Nass. The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. New York: CSLI Publications, 1996. RockTreeStar. “Tesla Autopilot Tried to Kill Me!”

It is the way countless ideas and emotions are spread. “It’s been fascinating to see the Like button succeed beyond our wildest imagination,” Rosenstein says. “And it’s had all these unintended consequences that range somewhere between natural and pretty harmful.” We were talking two months after Donald Trump had been sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States, when the media was filled with new data showing how America had fractured itself into the little bubbles of confirmation bias of which Nick de la Mare was so fearful, and how roughly half of America was utterly baffled by the other half.


pages: 173 words: 53,564

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

I had come to northeast Ohio at the invitation of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a coalition of community organizations, faith institutions, labor unions, and policy groups, to talk with people affected by the forces that gave rise to Facebook. Julie lived in a white, traditionally Democratic neighborhood that had voted for Donald Trump. Across from her house was a deserted, half-demolished parking lot, and behind it loomed an abandoned factory. Julie seemed calm and resilient, but she was visibly exhausted. She had a job as an office manager at the local school, and her husband worked nights in a pipe factory. All around them property values were in a free fall, and there was little hope on the horizon.

He paused, barely concealing his annoyance with such a predictable question, coming from such a predictable source, even though I was skeptical of the claim myself. “Three hundred years of economic history tells us that can’t be true,” he said curtly. It was the only question he answered that night with a single sentence. This is one area of rare agreement between the Obama economic team and Donald Trump’s administration. Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary, said last year that he was “not at all” worried about job displacement at the hands of technology. “In terms of artificial intelligence taking American jobs, I think we’re, like, so far away from that—not even on my radar screen,” Mnuchin said.

The correlation between unemployment rates and opioid abuse in particular is staggering: for every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate in a given county, the opioid death rate rises by nearly 4 percent, and emergency room visits rise by 7 percent. While it is true that work seems to keep us healthier, sometimes we can take our obsession with work too far. Political leaders glorify the “dignity of work” and claim work of any sort is better than no work at all. Donald Trump and Joe Biden compete to see who can speak more for “Scranton values,” grounding their arguments in the idea that even demeaning jobs are better than no jobs. Civil rights activists have historically voiced similar ideas. Martin Luther King Jr., in his speeches about labor, celebrated the dignity of work.


pages: 166 words: 52,755

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade

affirmative action, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, clean water, Donald Trump, white flight, white picket fence, working poor

Affirmative action is the right short-term way to try to deal with the long history of structural racism, yet if everyone—black, white, Hispanic—is sinking, it can feel unfair. If it is more about getting a larger share of a shrinking pie than a larger share of a growing pie, then it can inflame hate. Donald Trump, in 2016, exploited the dangerous and easy appeal of racial identity. He offered frustrated and angry whites a community wrapped in a political movement that didn’t require credentials and claimed to value and, most of all, respect them. Trump talked their language—rough, crude, and blunt.

Yet with other forms of non-credentialed meaning gone, with other outlets for respect eroded, it has left many with few options other than surging into the ugly, unacceptable territory of outright racism. * * * • • • Rick, fifty-three, is sitting in his usual corner seat in a Central, Cleveland, McDonald’s, reading newspapers, writing poetry, and drinking coffee. A mile away, in a convention center surrounded by police and protestors, the Republican Party is nominating Donald Trump for president. In this neighborhood, in this McDonald’s, the only sign of the convention is the distant sound of helicopters. The surrounding neighborhood shows no sign or awareness of the convention. There are no posters, no protests, no increase in police presence, no journalists. The neighborhood is very poor, almost all black, and filled with complex after complex of public housing.

She pauses, drags on her cigarette, while Trump speaks in the background. “This world is just going to the shitter.” Dignity Conclusion I was depressed, standing in a particular neighborhood I hadn’t been to in more than thirty years, not far from my old high school. It was weeks before the election of Donald Trump, toward the end of my two years traveling around the country, almost four years since I had walked into the South Bronx. I had intended to come back earlier—if I was going to try to understand all of our country, no place was better than my hometown. I was depressed because little had changed in the neighborhood or the entire town, and what had changed was for the worse.


pages: 475 words: 156,046

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

The point Jefferson is making here is that the political capital of a leader is at its highest at the beginning of his tenure, when experience is least, and statecraft at its least developed. The statesman’s learning and his popularity run counter to each other. As wisdom gathers, popularity declines. See Tony Blair’s A Journey for a dramatic recent example of the process. Barack Obama is an example of a swell of general hope giving way to specific disappointment. Donald Trump will be subject to the same law of political inflation and deflation. Jefferson makes a plea that sounds today all too contemporary. He asks forgiveness for his mistakes, and appeals to those who may not be able to see the whole picture to forbear from judgement. Perhaps the most corrosive aspect of modern political culture is the rush to judge on the assumption that every error must be self-serving.

This is his recognition that expressions of hope not anchored in the world are frivolous. Then Obama reverses the burden of proof, much as Kennedy had done with ‘ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country’ in his 1961 Inaugural. Presidential speeches, at least until Donald Trump, make up a single story, the story of American democracy. Presidents are conscious of each other, and no other country’s leaders quote their predecessors more than the Americans do. They are not citing heroes or sainted icons, as a Labour Party figure would with Clement Attlee or Aneurin Bevan.

All speakers, taking their cue from Lincoln’s line about America being an experiment, reflect on the fragility of democracy, and they all say that, as long as the citizens remain committed to vigorous work, then a government of the people, by the people, and for the people could yet propel the nation towards greatness. That was, at least, the tradition. Then, on 22 October 2016, Donald Trump, at the time a candidate to be president of the United States, delivered his own Gettysburg Address and did none of this. Instead, Trump gave a speech whose chief subject was not the American Republic but himself. It was both daring and egregious. After opening in the traditional fashion, by invoking and associating himself with Lincoln’s battle against division (‘hallowed ground … amazing place’), Mr Trump then proceeded to take the Address somewhere both unprecedented and unpresidential.


pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

District Court for the District of Columbia, December 16, 2013, at https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/901810/klaymanvobama215.pdf. had he known back then: Blair did not join in pre-election letters in 2015 and 2016 that called Donald Trump unfit to be commander in chief. His only public criticism came in response to reports that Trump was thinking of abolishing his old job. “Elimination of the DNI position would be a major setback for the kind of integrated intelligence that the U.S. will need in the future,” he said. Matthew Cole and Jenna McLaughlin, “Donald Trump Hopes to Abolish Intelligence Chief Position, Reverse CIA Reforms,” Intercept, November 18, 2016, archived at https://archive.is/VFnV3.

(The rules were also classified.) Should we trust them as much as they trusted themselves? Should we trust not only Blair and Negroponte, not only President Obama, but also every successive heir to the surveillance machine? Would Blair himself have bequeathed these powers comfortably, had he known back then that Donald Trump would take the wheel in 2017? By then many of his retired peers would sign “never Trump” letters, declaring him unfit for office on grounds that included a reckless attitude toward power. The answer might depend, in part, on the stakes. How much could someone really learn from a simple list of our calls?

The FBI illegally planted hundreds of GPS tracking devices without warrants. New York police spied systematically on mosques. Governments at all levels used the power of the state most heavy-handedly, sometimes illegally, to monitor communities disadvantaged by poverty, race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump threatened explicitly to put his opposing candidate in jail. Once in office he asserted the absolute right to control any government agency. He placed intense pressure on the Justice Department, publicly and privately, to launch criminal investigations of his critics. The Graph-in-Memory knew nothing of such things.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Rubio, “America Needs to Restore Dignity of Work.” 27. Cass, The Once and Future Worker, 193. 28. Cass, The Once and Future Worker, 192. 29. Cass, The Once and Future Worker, 192–93. 30. Brooks, “The Dignity Deficit”; and Arthur C. Brooks, “How Donald Trump Filled the Dignity Deficit,” Wall Street Journal, updated November 9, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-donald-trump-filled-the-dignity-deficit-1478734436. 31. Varadarajan, “A Conservative Economics of Dignity.” 32. Sasse, Them, 50. 33. “Is the U.S. Labor Market for Truck Drivers Broken?” Monthly Labor Review, Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, March 2019, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2019/article/is-the-us-labor-market-for-truck-drivers-broken.htm.

Quoted in Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” Atlantic, October 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/. 9. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 34. 10. Dan Carter, “What Donald Trump Owes George Wallace,” New York Times, January 8, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/campaign-stops/what-donald-trump-owes-george-wallace.html. 11. Fareed Zakaria, “Populism on the March: Why the West Is in Trouble,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-10-17/populism-march. 12.

Between 2010 and 2016, for-profit college stocks sank up to 80 percent, which the Wall Street Journal attributed to increased federal and state government scrutiny as well as the strengthening labor market.12 Several major for-profits went bankrupt, including ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges. The election of Donald Trump raised the for-profit colleges’ hopes that less scrutiny was on the horizon, and their stocks rose in response.13 Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s secretary of education, did not disappoint. Initially, Secretary DeVos delayed implementation of the gainful employment regulations. In 2019, DeVos successfully repealed them altogether.14 This is inexcusable.


pages: 116 words: 34,937

The Life of a Song: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World’s Best-Loved Songs by David Cheal, Jan Dalley

1960s counterculture, Bernie Sanders, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Kickstarter, Live Aid, millennium bug, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, side project

‘America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about,’ – the lyrics uncannily like one of Donald Trump’s own tweets. Springsteen was not pleased. ‘The president,’ he noted drily at his next show, ‘was mentioning my name the other day and I kinda got to wondering what his favourite album musta been. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.’ And he launched into ‘Johnny 99’, a stark ballad from the incomparably bleak Nebraska, sung from the viewpoint of a multiple murderer.

The melody is pushed to the top of Springsteen’s vocal range (in the same way that ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ crescendos to impossibly high notes) so that the whole song sounds like its own climax. Roy Bittan’s synthesizer fanfare is as bright as cocaine. Max Weinberg’s drumbeats explode like artillery shells. The song sounds like a Roman triumph. Many excellent songs have come out of mixing pop and politics; the dangerous combination is mixing pop and politicians. Donald Trump’s playlist of campaign songs had their singers rushing to distance themselves from him, from REM to Adele. He entered the Republican convention in July 2016 to the strains of ‘We Are the Champions’, over protests from Queen’s Brian May. British politicians have had an equally uneasy relationship with pop, from Harold Wilson courting The Beatles with OBEs, to Tony Blair (a lead singer manqué) wooing and being snubbed by everyone from David Bowie to Noel Gallagher.

Examining ‘Born in the USA’ through this lens is revealing. Springsteen is famously progressive, and all rock musicians are secretly libertarian, so ‘fairness’ resonates throughout the song. But the chorus also sounds like an appeal to in-group loyalty, and the music is stamped with authority. No wonder conservatives – including Donald Trump, who of course played it at his rallies – also respond to it. Springsteen is still infuriating politicians: in spring 2016 he cancelled a concert in North Carolina in response to the state’s new law on transgender access to bathrooms. He does still perform ‘Born in the USA’, but nowadays it comes with curled, bent acoustic guitar notes, as if Woody Guthrie were performing it in the 1950s.


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

The same is true for most Western democracies. The result of Cygnus was a stark warning: UK preparedness was ‘currently not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe epidemic.’ National failings were sometimes sublimated into international attacks. In a remarkable speech given at the White House on 14 April, President Donald Trump issued an instruction ‘to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.’ This was an astonishing allegation. An American president was charging WHO with nothing less than murder – ‘so much death has been caused by their mistakes.’

These turns away from investment in national and global health security reflect a larger trend: a general political antipathy to globalism – that is, an appreciation of the importance of international interdependence, solidarity and cooperation between nations and peoples. A decade of austerity created the conditions for politicians and their electorates to look inwards. Attending to the predicaments of one’s own country is no bad thing. But there was a larger ideology at work. Donald Trump in America, Brexit in the UK, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Italy’s Five Star Movement – each of these political watersheds stood for a departure from what had been, until the global financial crisis, a steady political alignment around a common global story: the need for greater international collaboration to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Science literacy will be a necessary requirement for governing. Governments will have to find better means for leadership and coordination, regionally and globally. They will understand the importance of public trust for public order. The US government will eventually be reintegrated into a new system of global collaboration, but not with Donald Trump as president. COVID-19 will change publics. Citizens will demand stronger health services and public health systems. Our expectations will rise. We will welcome the rebirth of the state. Health may become an obsession as well as a fear. Concerns about our health and about the risk of further pandemics will trigger debates about the organisation of society.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The destruction of social welfare, public education, and organized labor has created what might be called the 50 Cent economy, a system structured to offer only two options: “Get rich or die trying.” President George W. Bush called it the “ownership society.” Obama, smitten with his Silicon Valley donors, gave us “Startup America.” And Donald Trump, history’s luckiest winner, reigned over a nation of “losers.” Under the latest iteration of the American Dream, if you aren’t a billionaire yet, you haven’t tried hard enough. * * * There was no place more appropriate to begin my conquest of the new gig economy than in the proverbial basement—from there, after all, I had nowhere to go but up.

“We’re going to have a system where more high-skilled immigrants can come to this country,” he said. Tilt. “We are not going to deport eleven and a half million people,” he went on. “No credible person in Washington thinks this.” Tilt. Schulte was so, so smug and so, so wrong. He spoke just weeks before Donald Trump launched his successful bid for the Republican presidential nomination, a campaign based almost entirely on a xenophobic pledge to deport millions of immigrants, whom the Trumpists slandered with the most obscene racist stereotypes. “By the way,” Schulte went on, “both parties have huge incentives to get this done.”

The speaker was the leader of the far-right Dutch Party for Freedom, Geert Wilders, an aggrieved descendant of Indonesian colonizers and, by his own description, a freedom fighter assailed by threats from Islamic terrorists, with whom he equated the religion itself. Newsweek described him as “Islam’s arch-nemesis in Europe” and a potential future prime minister of the Netherlands. The demagogue’s visit came in August 2015, when his opponents in the Dutch Labor Party were not yet afraid to call him a fascist. It had been only two months since Donald Trump announced his U.S. presidential campaign, which was then seen by the liberal and conservative establishments alike as an odd joke. Naked racism from the mouths of serious political candidates was still vaguely taboo at that moment. But when it came to tolerating the rhetorical adaptations of resurgent fascism, Silicon Valley was once again on the cutting edge.


pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

This has been seen in a number of surprising developments that have defied the predictive ability of journalists, analysts and pollsters, from new protest movements like those of the 2011 movement of the squares that mobilised millions of people to the victories of dark horse candidates such as Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Many of these developments have been deeply intertwined with the use of digital technology and its capacity to disrupt deep-seated political equilibria. Yet the actual nature and implications of these transformations still escape our comprehension. This book aims at developing a balanced account of this wave of organisational innovation, overcoming the twin evils of uncritical celebration and preconceived criticism that have so far dominated public commentary on the digital party.

In the United States, famous cases have been the internet savviness of Howard Dean and of Obama’s first and second presidential campaigns and the tricks used by his social media team. Other mainstream candidates like current French president Emmanuel Macron have similarly leveraged digital platforms to achieve stunning success. And it is Donald Trump’s cheap and dirty use of social media that contributed significantly to his conquest of the White House. The reason for focusing on Pirate Parties, the Five Star Movement and Podemos – is that they are ‘digital’ in a more qualified sense. To this end, it is useful to distinguish between what David Karpf names ‘legacy organisations’, namely organisations that have been founded before the digital era and are now trying to adapt to it, and ‘netroots organisations’, formations that have emerged in recent years and have consequently been shaped from the very start by digital technology and connected organisational forms.8 In older organisations, such as traditional political parties, the use of digital technology tends to concern intra-organisational processes and the external communication of parties to their targeted publics.9 These organisations tend to be very prudent in absorbing digital technology in their operations, and continue to view television and the press as their main grounds of campaigning.

Ever since the famous televised debate between Richard Nixon and John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1960, scholars have discussed how television has changed political communication, and these debates have continued to the present day to examine the political style of leaders such as Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump. Yet, often these discussions have overlooked how this transformation did not just concern political parties’ external communication but also their internal organisation. The paradigmatic example of television party is provided by the political venture of Silvio Berlusconi and his ‘party-company’, Forza Italia (Go Italy).


pages: 290 words: 82,871

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

Because the rigour in research is usually better than elsewhere, and still they somehow unintentionally screwed up on a worrying scale. Do the rest of us think we are immune? It seems unlikely. Mansions of established wisdom have gone down like slum clearance lately. Take the many astounding events in politics: the elections of relative outsiders Donald Trump in the US and Emmanuel Macron in France; or the rise of a populist political right in many parts of Europe. Or consider the UK’s Brexit referendum, or the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing Member of Parliament whose chances of the leadership of his party were rated zero by most observers, who then took firm control.

Perhaps it’s as Samuel Johnson said: people are less in need of being instructed than reminded. We sort of know all this, but sort of forget. Here, then, is a reminder. It takes the form of a claim that the consequences include the very biggest, with two stories that show what happens when people ignore the hidden half. The first is Brexit; the second is Donald Trump. The revenge of the exception In 2016, an economist, Anand Menon, wrote about touring Britain to talk about the likely economic effects of Brexit. He visited the city of Newcastle, where he focused on the big economic picture – namely, what would happen to the UK economy if Britain left the European Union.

It is not as if the UK hadn’t seen the effects of dappled economic fortunes before. But perhaps that was part of the problem. Maybe people had begun to take them somewhat for granted as part of the process of overall growth. Did these pockets of exception finally find a way to object to being relatively ignored? This is something that Donald Trump perhaps understood – in the second story of the sting in underestimating irregularity. Again, it tells of differences between here and there that defied expectations to become the driver of explosive change. The story begins in China, which for decades was mostly cut off from global trade. Mao Zedong, the revolutionary leader, maintained its relative isolation until his death in 1976.


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

Ravel, “Dysfunction and Deadlock: The Enforcement Crisis at the Federal Election Commission Reveals the Unlikelihood of Draining the Swamp,” Federal Election Commission, February 2017, https://www.fec.gov/resources/about-fec/commissioners/ravel/statements/ravelreport_feb2017.pdf. 38. Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, “$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump,” New York Times, March 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html. 39. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address, Delivered January 17, 1961,” American Rhetoric, Top 100 Speeches, last updated February 18, 2017, https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html. 40.

Politics is a classic example of regulatory capture—it’s as if the US Securities and Exchange Commission were jointly run by the boards of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America.37 This all sounds like a clear antitrust violation. So why hasn’t the Federal Trade Commission or the Justice Department brought a case? Again, ever so conveniently, antitrust rules do not apply to the politics industry. The “Trump Effect”? Has the election of Donald Trump changed the structure of our political system or our analysis, conclusions, or recommendations? On the contrary, his victory validates them. The 2016 election provided a striking indication of the level of public dissatisfaction with the status quo, as the voters clearly tried to reject the duopoly by electing someone from “outside the system.”

Not only will you be heavily discouraged from running by whichever side of the duopoly views you as a threat, but the side of the industrial complex you are threatening will, without compunction, do whatever it takes to eliminate your candidacy. Think of Howard Schultz. In the spring of 2019, the former CEO of Starbucks considered an independent run for President. The outcry from Democrats was loud and often vicious because Democrats believed he would hand the 2020 election to Donald Trump. Republicans would do the same to anyone they thought would take votes from their candidate. And both sides justify their bullying, because, in our current system, the existential threat of losing to the other party is seen as great enough to excuse the bullying. That’s precisely the kind of problem plurality voting creates.


pages: 269 words: 83,959

The Hostage's Daughter by Sulome Anderson

Ayatollah Khomeini, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, failed state, false flag, Kickstarter, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Skype

., “Islamic State Releases Video Threatening Attack on New York City,” USA Today, November 19, 2015. 3 San Bernardino terror attack kills twenty-two people, “Everything We Know About the San Bernardino Terror Attack Investigation So Far,” Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2015. 3 Donald Trump threatens to issue ID badges for Muslim Americans, “Donald Trump’s Horrifying Words About Muslims,” CNN, November 21, 2015. 3 Donald Trump threatens to ban Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., “Donald Trump’s Call to Ban Muslim Immigrants,” The Atlantic, December 7, 2015. 8 Hezbollah on U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist organizations. 17 Terry Anderson’s release, “Anderson, Last U.S.

Its members have threatened to carry out more attacks in heavily populated areas such as New York City’s Times Square and Washington, D.C. Shortly after the Paris killings, a married couple described as “radicalized” Muslims opened fire at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, killing fourteen people. Muslims in the United States are being targeted with reactionary bigotry. Donald Trump, the unlikely front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, threatened to issue special IDs for American Muslims and ban all Muslims from immigrating to the country if he is elected. The world holds its breath, waiting for the next blow to fall. This is a scenario I am not unfamiliar with.


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

Fighting protectionism is like fighting a skin disease, as the US economist Paul Samuelson once said: no sooner do you cure it in one place than it appears somewhere else. A new generation of conservative politicians now sound very much like Attac did in 2001: the world is dangerous, there is no longer anyone in charge and free trade is destroying local traditions and good jobs. A ‘globalist’, US president Donald Trump explained, is a person ‘frankly not caring about our country so much’. The rapid progress in poor countries may have shown the West that those countries could benefit from globalization, but since the myth persists that the economy is a zero-sum game that assumes that someone’s gain is always another one’s loss, many have concluded that we in the rich world must be the losers.

We don’t just hear that from Social Democrats these days. Now right-wing populists, journalists and economists also claim that ‘the Reagan/Thatcher era is over’. These two leaders are often used as symbols of the era of economic liberalization in the early 1980s, and I agree that it feels an awful lot like that era has come to an end. Donald Trump’s advisor Stephen Moore declared that the Republicans are no longer Reagan’s party but Trump’s, and that’s exactly how the party comes across in their recent agitation against free trade, immigration and tech companies, not to mention lies about election fraud. (Reagan once called the peaceful transfer of power the ‘magic’ of the free world.)

One cannot help but think of the great American poet and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who wrote in 1849 that trade and commerce seem to be made of rubber, because they always ‘manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way’.31 3 THE SILENCE OF THE FACTORY WHISTLE ‘This is not a rising tide that lifts all boats. This is a wave of globalization that wipes out our middle class and our jobs.’ DONALD TRUMP, SPEECH IN NEW YORK, 22 JUNE 2016 When I defended free markets twenty years ago, it was often against a leftist afraid that it would make rich countries richer and poor countries poorer. History has already settled that debate. Never before have poor countries grown so fast and never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty.


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

“Ruby Ridge came first, but there were neo-Nazis at Ruby Ridge. Randy Weaver was an avowed white supremacist,” she says. “Waco was more relatable. The government is willing to kill children to take away your guns—that became the narrative.” The election of Obama, the Tea Party movement, and the rise of Donald Trump all kindled belief in a cabal of secret power brokers working against “real” Americans, she says. “Now you’ve got militias blending with QAnon—people who see Democrats as child-abusing predators.” According to Doxsee, 2021 saw the most right-wing terror attacks in recent history, “starting with January sixth.”

President George H. W. Bush, he said, “was a pedophile and homosexual. As head of the CIA, Bush built tunnels under the White House. They found fifteen hundred dead children in those tunnels, dead from torture and sexual abuse. When they found out, Donald and Melania Trump cried for hours. And Donald Trump did the right thing: he had Bush arrested for his crimes. George Bush did not die of natural causes in 2018. They executed him for treason. This will all come out in the near future.” Like Koresh, Pastor Pace knew his Bible well enough to recite much of it from memory. “Prophecy is real,” he said.

When those guys got between the Bundys and the feds, that was power to the people.” The talk turned to the rioters who overran the US Capitol in 2021. “That was different,” said Thibodeau. “Those were Trump supporters. To them I’d say, ‘Don’t use Waco as an excuse to do crazy violent shit.’ And as for their savior, Donald Trump? He’s your savior? And people think we followed the wrong guy!” They spent a silent moment remembering friends and family they lost in 1993. After thirty years, Doyle said, he seldom went a day without thinking of his daughter. He consoled himself with the thought that Shari was “eighteen forever.”


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

Before his hedge fund transformed into a full-on scam in the early 1990s, Bernie Madoff was respected for his legitimate activities, including his service as chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange, which helps explain why so many people entrusted him with their money. Similarly, Donald Trump gained national fame as a celebrity who played “Donald Trump,” a dramatization of a decisive, no-nonsense, fabulously wealthy business leader on the 2000s reality show The Apprentice. People familiar with that Trump—a more appealing version than the tabloid-dwelling operator of bankrupt casinos in the 1990s—were likely more receptive to the idea of him as a serious presidential candidate.16 MANUFACTURING TRUTH In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote, “Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.”

In a social media world of fake news and political disinformation, those are wise words (and ironic ones, considering who said them). Political disinformation goes nowhere unless its recipients spread it to their friends, and they spread it to theirs, and so on—which makes it critical to short-circuit this process when it reaches us.8 One of Donald Trump’s first acts on assuming the presidency in 2017 was to nominate a successor to Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. He selected Neil Gorsuch, a federal appellate judge from Colorado and a longtime favorite in Republican legal circles. Within days, a friend of ours shared on Facebook a bombshell news story: “just in: All 8 Supreme Court Justices Stand in Solidarity Against Trump SCOTUS Pick.”

That red flag triggered a further exploration of that set of accounts, almost all of which appeared to be part of the same network run by the same people.35 Sometimes, when people first learn about Benford’s law, they apply it overzealously to cases in which a Benford’s pattern would be impossible. For example, some supporters of Donald Trump claimed to have found evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election by showing that Joe Biden’s vote totals across precincts did not adhere to Benford’s law. But the standard version of Benford’s law should not apply in this type of setting. Precincts are deliberately designed to include similarly sized segments of the population—they can’t continue growing in size indefinitely, so the distribution of precinct sizes won’t follow a power law.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

In the US, the cement for this alliance is an unlikely president, Donald Trump. It has been painful to watch the silent support of a bigoted, misogynist, nativist, and protectionist president—so contrary to the values for which many in the business community say they stand—simply so they could get a more business-friendly environment with minimal regulations, and especially a tax cut for themselves and their corporations. Evidently, money in their pockets—greed—trumped all else. Since launching his campaign, and especially since becoming president, Donald Trump has gone well beyond the traditional “conservative” economic agenda.

The 2008 financial crisis showed that capitalism wasn’t all that it was supposed to be—it seemed neither efficient nor stable. Then came a rash of statistics showing that the main beneficiaries of the growth of the last quarter century were those at the very top. And finally, anti-establishment votes on both sides of the Atlantic—Brexit in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States—raised questions about the wisdom of democratic electorates. Our pundits have provided an easy explanation, correct as far as it goes. The elites had ignored the plight of too many Americans as they pushed for globalization and liberalization, including of financial markets, promising that all would benefit from these “reforms.”

A vast majority of the electorate would like to see better gun control, a higher minimum wage, more stringent financial regulation and better access to health care and to a college education, without burdensome debt. A majority of Americans voted for Al Gore over George Bush, for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. A majority of Americans has repeatedly voted for Democrats for the House of Representatives, yet partially because of gerrymandering, the Republicans have nonetheless typically retained control—in 2018, at last, with enough of a lopsided vote, the Democrats regained control. An overwhelming majority of Americans voted for Democratic senators,13 and yet, because states with few people like Wyoming have the same two senators that our most populous states, New York and California, have, the Republicans have maintained control over the Senate, so important because of the role it plays in approval of Supreme Court justices.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Of all the Marxian and Marxoid schools of thought, Gramsci’s is perhaps the most influential today, placing media and culture at the center of political analysis and praxis in a mediated age after the decline of the old labour movement. And yet at the end of 2016 it was the candidate of the right, Donald Trump, who was elected President of the United States despite all mainstream news agencies, including conservative media from Fox News to National Review, working openly against him. Figures like Milo, who were being dismissed as an irrelevant Internet fringe despite their growing mass online audiences right up until the election results came in, rose to mainstream success along with him.

Chapter Four Conservative culture wars from Buchannan to Yiannopoulos Where does the most mainstream wing of the alt-right – the alt-light – fit historically in terms of its political ideas and style? Throughout the US presidential race, Milo Yiannopoulos regularly reiterated that he loved ‘Daddy’ (Donald Trump), because he was ‘the first truly cultural candidate since Pat Buchannan’. He admitted in a Bloomberg profile that he doesn’t ‘care about politics’ and has reiterated this point explicitly on several occasions, but is instead interested in the cultural battles that are shaping it. It seems to me that politics, on the contrary, has been hollowed out too much into little other than a purely cultural politics over the last half-century, which the ugly spectacle of the Trump-Hillary race represented the logical conclusion of – politics as culture war.

As this privilege-checking culture made its way into mainstream discourse, anti-gamergate columnist Arthur Chu tweeted: ‘As a dude who cares about feminism sometimes I want to join all men arm-in-arm & then run off a cliff and drag the whole gender into the sea.’ On the morning following the election of Donald Trump, columnist Laurie Penny tweeted: ‘I’ve had white liberal guilt before. Today is the first time I’ve actually been truly horrified and ashamed to be white.’ And yet, amid all the vulnerability and self-humbling, members of these subcultures often behaved with extraordinary viciousness and aggression, like their anonymous Pepe-posting counterparts, behind the safety of the keyboard.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

The US is adding uncertainty by focusing on bilateral trade agreements, which is a significant change from its previous agenda of multilateral and regional free trade. For President Donald Trump, the reason is that he is putting ‘America First’. With the shift in the world’s biggest economy, the question of how to address the backlash against globalization will be even more important. Trumpism The rise of Donald Trump is perhaps the most striking example of how those who have lost out economically in the past few decades sought a political outlet to convey their frustrations. An exit poll of voters conducted by The New York Times revealed that his voters thought the economy was performing poorly and their families’ financial situation was worse as compared to those who voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.2 There are other causes of disaffection.

This urge to rebalance the economy arose after the 2008 financial crisis which revealed the fragility of a large banking sector that brought the economy to its knees. It led the then-UK Chancellor George Osborne to start wearing hard hats and to promote the ‘March of the Makers’. In the US, President Barack Obama invested in advanced or high-tech manufacturing. His successor, Donald Trump, explicitly extolled companies to bring factories back to America. What would Adam Smith make of these efforts? Should government rebalance the economy towards making things once again? Is it possible to rebalance the economy in countries where the services sector makes up more than three-quarters of national output, as it does in Britain and the US?

Is American manufacturing undergoing a renaissance? The ‘advanced industries’ are leading the US recovery, according to the Washington DC think tank, the Brookings Institution.21 These are industries which invest a great deal in R&D and are more tech-focused. The revival of ‘Made in America’ was happening before President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policy. Rather unexpectedly, Tennessee is one of the states leading the revival of manufacturing. The largest car factory in North America, owned by Japanese firm Nissan, is located in the home of country music rather than Michigan. Nissan decided to site more of its car production in Tennessee in recent years, exporting to over sixty countries around the world, but the production lines of today are nothing that Henry Ford would recognize.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

The US is adding uncertainty by focusing on bilateral trade agreements, which is a significant change from its previous agenda of multilateral and regional free trade. For President Donald Trump, the reason is that he is putting ‘America First’. With the shift in the world’s biggest economy, the question of how to address the backlash against globalization will be even more important. Trumpism The rise of Donald Trump is perhaps the most striking example of how those who have lost out economically in the past few decades sought a political outlet to convey their frustrations. An exit poll of voters conducted by The New York Times revealed that his voters thought the economy was performing poorly and their families’ financial situation was worse as compared to those who voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.2 There are other causes of disaffection.

This urge to rebalance the economy arose after the 2008 financial crisis which revealed the fragility of a large banking sector that brought the economy to its knees. It led the then-UK Chancellor George Osborne to start wearing hard hats and to promote the ‘March of the Makers’. In the US, President Barack Obama invested in advanced or high-tech manufacturing. His successor, Donald Trump, explicitly extolled companies to bring factories back to America. What would Adam Smith make of these efforts? Should government rebalance the economy towards making things once again? Is it possible to rebalance the economy in countries where the services sector makes up more than three-quarters of national output, as it does in Britain and the US?

Is American manufacturing undergoing a renaissance? The ‘advanced industries’ are leading the US recovery, according to the Washington DC think tank, the Brookings Institution.21 These are industries which invest a great deal in R&D and are more tech-focused. The revival of ‘Made in America’ was happening before President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policy. Rather unexpectedly, Tennessee is one of the states leading the revival of manufacturing. The largest car factory in North America, owned by Japanese firm Nissan, is located in the home of country music rather than Michigan. Nissan decided to site more of its car production in Tennessee in recent years, exporting to over sixty countries around the world, but the production lines of today are nothing that Henry Ford would recognize.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

Many of them—notably FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom—made largely the same point: unless the government has access, crimes will go unsolved, children will be kidnapped, awful dangers will continue, and people will die. (In 1995, Kallstrom, an “electronic eavesdropping expert,” was named the head of the FBI’s New York office, its single largest bureau. In 2016, after having left the Bureau, he became a very vocal supporter of presidential candidate Donald Trump.) Over 1993 and 1994, privacy and legal activists began to mount a campaign in what was eventually dubbed the “Crypto Wars.” On May 3, 1994, Whit Diffie—one of the two inventors of public key cryptography—testified before a Senate subcommittee against the Clipper chip system. “From the viewpoint of a user, any key escrow system diminishes security,” he said.

* * * This lengthy back-and-forth between federal law enforcement and tech companies finally came to a head in February 2016, when Apple received that first court order requiring the company to build a custom-made operating system that would bypass the passcode lockout on Farook’s iPhone. As federal prosecutors pushed forward at a breakneck speed, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump weighed in from the campaign trail, with a not-entirely-accurate description of what was going on. “First of all, Apple ought to give [authorities] the security to that phone,” Trump told the crowd at a South Carolina rally. “What I think you ought to do is boycott Apple until they give that security number.

Other people have different approaches. If you have an authoritarian state it could be used to track down resistance. But if you had an authoritarian state, talking about search warrants would be pointless.” Then he paused a moment and mused, “I understand that when you have Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Donald Trump as president, those concerns become heightened.” * * * Many cities are deploying their own LPRs either as stationary (above roads, for example) or mobile (on police cars) devices to collect license plate data, which is then compared to a city, regional, state, or federal database. Sometimes cities also access privately held license plate databases as well.


pages: 362 words: 116,497

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire by Sujeet Indap, Max Frumes

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, data science, deal flow, Donald Trump, family office, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, lockdown, low interest rates, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, NetJets, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, super pumped, Travis Kalanick

The real money for HBS faculty came from what he was doing now—teaching executive education seminars at Fortune 500 companies. The Promus Companies was a hospitality business that had been spun out of Holiday Inn in 1989, the ultimate consequence of an effort to thwart a greenmail campaign waged by a budding Atlantic City tycoon named Donald Trump. The brands within Promus included hotel chains Homewood Suites, Hampton Inn, Embassy Suites, and the gaming company, Harrah’s. Loveman and a group of HBS professors were offering a course in consumer marketing. Every Promus executive seemed enthusiastic, except those who were assigned to the four empty chairs.

Colony Capital had sold Harveys Casino Resorts to Harrah’s in 2001, and in 2005, Harrah’s sold four regional casinos to Colony. Barrack learned about the value of Total Rewards the hard way, as the four casinos’ profitability collapsed after they were unplugged from the Harrah’s network. Barrack was previously an investor with the Bass family, famously selling the Plaza Hotel across the street from Central Park to Donald Trump in 1988 for $400 million—a deal that would later nearly sink The Donald. Barrack wondered if Loveman would meet with his friend and former colleague from Bass, David Bonderman. The two met in New Orleans, where the TPG co-founder broached the idea of unlocking the value of Harrah’s vast real estate portfolio, including Caesars Palace, clustered at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo.

CHUCK ATWOOD WAS NO NOVICE when it came to financial engineering. Atwood had started at the Holiday Inn in 1980 as a financial analyst before it had even bought Harrah’s. He worked his way up to increasingly senior finance roles, including positions in M&A and investor relations. In 1986, to fend off a rumored takeover threat from Donald Trump, Holiday Inn executed a defensive leveraged recapitalization, raising nearly $3 billion of debt using Drexel’s famed “highly confident letter.” Atwood recalled working on the deal with Michael Milken and his younger colleague, Ken Moelis, who would have his own legendary Wall Street career. The recapitalization was announced on November 13, 1986, the day before Ivan Boesky was arrested on insider trading charges which would later implicate Milken.


pages: 332 words: 91,780

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

Forbes argues that the Laguna Beach house is worth less than a hundredth percentage point of his net worth. See “Homes of the Billionaires,” Forbes.com, March 28, 2009. 23. See Trump’s Never Give Up, The Art of the Deal, and How to Get Rich; Jeffery Slonim, “Donald Trump Shelters Jennifer Hudson,” People, November 11, 2008; Caris Davis, “Trump Wins at Wrestlemania, Keeps His Hair,” People, April 2, 2007; Todd Peterson, “Melania Trump: Giving Birth Was ‘Easy,’” People, April 6, 2006; K. C. Baker et al., “Donald Trump’s Wife Pregnant,” People, September 27, 2005; Stephen Silverman, “Trump’s Bride to Wear $100,000 Dior Gown,” People, January 18, 2005. 24. Google, “Year-End Zeitgeist: Top Searches in 2006.”

And if we are talking about people because they have made smart business decisions or have been innovative, then we’re talking about them for their talent, which means these entrepreneurs, as notable and world renowned as they may be, are not celebrities—they’re just famous. There are financiers and businesspeople who are celebrities and who are not total scoundrels nor are they at the top of the pack. But these individuals have created personalities that transcend their talent. Donald Trump gained fame for rising like a phoenix from the ashes of company bankruptcy. Twice. That’s pretty impressive, but this renown is linked to his talent as a businessman. Trump’s celebrity, on the other hand, has much to do with his affection for beautiful women (he owns the Miss Universe pageant), his TV personality and show (he is the star of the extraordinarily popular The Apprentice), and being thrice married, each time to a fabulously good-looking model-actress type.

Joe Lewis, the British billionaire owner of ENIC International Ltd. and main investor in Tavistock Group, is a perfect example of this model. He is a generally reclusive man who now lives in the Bahamas, and the public’s knowledge of his personal life is just a brief sketch. 18. There are always exceptions, Nicola Horlick and Donald Trump, for example. Both, however, are more “celebrated” for their personal lives. In general, in finance, people are considered worth talking to in direct proportion to their number of successful deals. Successful asset managers are those who have an impressive performance track record. These observations have been deduced from my conversations with people who work in the industry. 19.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

I joined the end of the line and began talking with the man in front of me, a retired sociologist at my university wearing a colorful knit sweater, who turned out to be the uncle of my aforementioned friend, one of whose tasks in the Marxist commune was to take care of that friend, when he was a baby, on Monday mornings. Before getting to co-ops, the council passed a mainly symbolic measure to declare Boulder a “sanctuary city,” defying the tide of deportations that was soon to come under President Donald Trump. This seemed promising; if co-ops thereafter failed to find sanctuary also, the hypocrisy might cause Chief Niwot to strike from his grave. Eighty-eight people signed up to speak at public comment. We got two minutes each. Some organized so as to pool their time as a continuous presentation of charts and figures in defense of the right density limits and resident caps and square-footage-per-person, so that affordable co-ops would actually be possible.

By the measure of Wall Street, the company wasn’t doing well. The user-base wasn’t growing quickly enough. The $14 billion-or-so valuation wasn’t enough to satisfy investors’ monopolistic expectations, especially not those who’d bought in when the valuation was closer to $40 billion. Tell that to the users, though. From Black Lives Matter activists to Donald Trump, Twitter has become a vital public square, truly a network of its people (and its many bots). It’s also a network of networks; TV news anchors show their Twitter handles next to their names on-screen. The company has even been on-and-off profitable—pretty good by internet standards. So, in an article for the Guardian, I proposed an option that wasn’t being talked about: What if Twitter were sold to the users who rely on it?

Those of us who have come to be involved believe, or at least hope, that a more cooperative internet would be a better one—fairer, more just, more free. We can’t know what would happen there, but we would have more of a say in making it. Our internet would be more fully ours to lurk and troll, to contribute and debug, to explore and share. 6 Free the Land Power Candidate Donald Trump made a campaign stop in February 2016 hosted by South Carolina’s Broad River Electric Cooperative. After taking the auditorium stage, observing that “it’s a lot of people” and joining the audience in a chant of his surname, Trump began by asking, “Do we love electricity, by the way, all you electricity people?”


pages: 292 words: 92,588

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Mark’s Basilica in Venice; Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina; America’s biggest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; NASA’s Kennedy Space Center; graves on the Isle of the Dead in Tasmania; the slums of Jakarta, Indonesia; entire nations like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; and, in the not-so-distant future, Mar-a-Lago, the summer White House of President Donald Trump. Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.

The stated purpose of the trip was to draw attention to the looming climate catastrophe the world faces, but with the exception of one big policy speech in Anchorage, in which he sounded as apocalyptic as any hemp-growing activist, he spent most of his three days up north beaming. “He’s happy to be out of his cage,” one advisor joked. Others credited the buoyant US economy or the fact that the president had just learned that he had secured enough Senate votes to protect the hard-fought and controversial nuclear deal with Iran. Donald Trump had announced his presidential run a few months earlier, but at this point, Trump’s campaign was a joke that no one took seriously. President Obama’s popularity was sky-high, and his legacy seemed secure. Whatever the reason, you could see the cheerfulness in Obama’s face the moment he stepped out of his armored limo at Elmendorf Air Force base in Anchorage.

Related Group of Florida, which he cofounded with New York developer Stephen Ross, is now the biggest builder in Miami—one out of every five condos in the city has been built by Related. Related’s buildings are known among architects for their unremarkable design and big profit-margins. (“He dares to dream, and to make those dreams real,” his pal Donald Trump wrote in an introduction to Powerhouse Principles, Pérez’s book about how to get rich in the real estate market. “The result is changed lives, and cities.”) Pérez is an influential figure in Florida Democratic politics and gave generously to both Clinton’s and Obama’s presidential campaigns. In 2017, Forbes estimated his personal wealth at $2.8 billion.


pages: 340 words: 91,745

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The word of 2016, according to Oxford Dictionaries, was “post-truth”—an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”26 Fake news and “alternative facts” are referenced daily. Donald Trump, the Gaslighter in Chief, roams the gilded halls of the White House, tweeting with impunity. ONE FUNNY THING about researching dishonesty: every answer seems to lead to more questions. First and foremost: given that we all hate being deceived, why do so many of us lie? Why is deception such an inextricable part of human nature?

The hotter you are, the more you can get away with. What a shallow species we are. Successful liars also rehearse their stories before telling them, avoid follow-up questions as much as possible, and tell the truth more than they lie. Last, they go on the offense when challenged, which good liars do with gusto. To wit: Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill O’Reilly, and Harvey Weinstein, all of whom, when faced with clear evidence that they were misbehaving, went after their accusers, just as the Commander did to me. When I confronted him about the email to his ex-wife, the one where he told her he’d try to get back together with her if he managed to survive Afghanistan, he flew into a self-righteous rage.

That’s because non-answer statements give someone time to formulate a better answer, or to search for wiggle room to squirm their way out of the question. “People don’t realize the distinction between ‘I wouldn’t do something’ versus ‘I didn’t do something.’ It creates a real epiphany for them.” Qualifying words—like “basically,” “frankly,” “honestly,” “fundamentally,” “usually,” and, of course, “believe me”—Donald Trump’s favorites—are red flags. Red blankets! So are qualifying statements like “Trust me,” “I’m a good person,” and “I’m an honest person.” “Suppose you’re talking to a CFO, and the CFO said, ‘We’re basically on track to meet our numbers this quarter,’” Phil continued. “Do we like that statement? Why not?


pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Hunt, a candidate for the Tory leadership, was the same petulant minister who compared the EU with the Soviet Union and used threatening language about the Russians – who presumably would not be among the new global Britain’s trading partners. One of the great counterfactuals is how the Brexit vote might have transpired had Donald Trump become president in January 2016 rather than a year later. He capsized the rocking but just about seaworthy vessel of UK diplomacy, which had been able simultaneously to back the US line (on Iraq, the Middle East, China) while keeping in with the EU. Together Trump and Brexit robbed the UK of leverage on both sides of the Atlantic.

Perhaps, in 2020, the great thing was that despite austerity, despite ideology, despite catastrophic reorganisation imposed by dilettantes in Downing Street, the NHS was still there, still saving lives, offering us the subliminal security of knowing that its free care and treatment covered our backs because they were allocated according to need. This chapter could just as well be called ‘Solidarity’ or ‘Security’; people only had to glance across the Atlantic to see the bankruptcies and anguish caused by privatised medicine, which the Obama reforms – under fierce attack by Donald Trump – had yet to mitigate. The NHS defeated the Tories – and not just because the first thing opportunists such as Boris Johnson felt they had to do was offer more money (deceitfully). It survived as a concept and social promise, having more or less successfully defended itself against the assault foretold in countless think-tank papers, private seminars and conference fringe meetings.

Trade deals were talked up by Brexiters at the same time as security chiefs warned of Chinese companies infiltrating defence systems. As with the UK’s dealings with Saudi Arabia, a source of finance and arms purchaser, proud sovereignty soon gives way to the begging bowl and the kowtow. Foreign and domestic kept colliding, without ministers or the system understanding what was happening. Ditto over Donald Trump. He and his right-wing backers played UK politics through the likes of Liam Fox, Nigel Farage and Johnson, and with a series of direct interventions that formerly would have been regarded as intolerable and – ahem – an infringement of sovereignty. The ousting of the UK ambassador in Washington illustrated the new intertwining and the willing collaboration of UK politicians, journalists and influence peddlers in subversion.


The Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

The strange spectacle of Brexit would show the world how a country previously admired for its apparent equanimity could so paradoxically denigrate and mock itself in pursuit of an elusive sense of superiority. The near-implosion of British politics after 2016 was obviously a local variant of a wider crisis of democracy. As Donald Trump Jr wrote in March 2019, ‘In a way, you could say that Brexit and my father’s election are one and the same’4 – the same rhetoric of the people versus the elites was deployed using the same dark arts of mass persuasion. It is equally obvious that the stunning result of the Brexit referendum was merely the most dramatic expression of a much wider sense of alienation in Europe.

[This] converts pain to meaning, and then meaning back into more pain.’15 This definition illuminates much of what is going on in Brexit, but it also highlights the project’s short-term problems and long-term contradictions. The most obvious short-term problem is the ‘leader of choice’. Snyder is thinking of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and their various imitators in Europe and elsewhere. Brexit did have a leader of choice – but he was too incompetent to actually effect the transfer of power that this revolutionary moment needed. It is hard to overstate the degree to which Boris Johnson was the single greatest asset for the Leave side in the referendum.

This matters, not because of the ludicrous personality politics of the Tory Party’s succession crisis, but because it exposed the fundamental problem of Brexit as a popular revolt – the problem of taking power. In order – in Snyder’s terms – to convert pain into meaning, there had to be a leader who could compensate for the self-harm inflicted by the people on themselves by inflicting even greater harm on others. Donald Trump, for all his monstrosities, fulfils this need for his working-class supporters – objectively they hurt themselves in voting for him but he actually took power and is serious about inflicting pain on their perceived enemies. Without a transfer of power, Brexit confronts an insoluble problem: who is to inflict the pain and who is to feel it most?


pages: 249 words: 66,546

Protecting Pollinators by Jodi Helmer

Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, Columbine, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, the scientific method, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

The North Carolina Butterfly Highway created some good-natured competition between neighbors who compared the number of butterflies and bees visiting their gardens. It also helped participants move past their fears and misconceptions, allowing them to develop an appreciation for the fragile creatures. Box 7-5 Citizen Scientists Honor the Stars What do Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Donald Trump, and Arnold Schwarzenegger have in common? All of these celebrities have creatures named in their honor. The Donald Trump moth (Neopalpa donaldtrumpi), named for the “blond” coif of scales on its head, was discovered just before the forty-fifth president took office; the moth makes its home on the West Coast of North America between California and Mexico.

See Cheddar pinks dicamba, 63–64 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 169 dinotefuran, 76 Dionaea muscipula. See Venus flytrap diseases American foulbrood (AFB), 90–91 bee hotels and, 145 beekeeping and, 139–140 canines detecting, 90–91 captive breeding programs and, 130 diversity, importance of, 12–13 dogs, disease-detecting, 90–91 Domroese, Meg, 155, 165, 170 Donald Trump moth (Neopalma donaldtrumpi), 169 drift, 63–64, 77 drones as pollinators, 18–19, 21 E early spider orchid (Ophrys spegodes), 121 eastern firefly (Photinus pyralis), 46 eastern red bat (Lasiurus borealis), 117–119 Eastman Nature Center (Minneapolis), 152, 171 Edgewood Park (New Haven, CT), 103 Elderd, Bret, 112 endangered species list bats on, 16–17 climate change and, 113 first bee on, 5, 14, 18, 22 pollinators on, 24–26 environmental impact studies, lack of, 48–49 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), criticism of, 23 Environmental Working Group (Plowed Under report), 32 eradication programs, 91–93 Eumaeus atala Poey.

., 86–87, 93–94 list of pollinator-friendly, 89 milkweed, 133, 136 planting of, 147–148, 174, 175 native-plant standard, 41 Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), 49–50 nectar feeders, 136–137, 174 nectar robbers, 66 neonicotinoids alternatives to, 76 bumblebees and, 66–67 contradictory EPA positions on, 23 field data and, 65–66 holistic view of issue, 67–68 hummingbirds and, 60–62 mechanism of action of, 56–58 modified use of, 74–75 monarchs and, 60 next-generation, 70, 74 parallels to DDT, 77 pollinator decline and, 59–60 red mason bees and, 66–67 restrictions and bans on, 64–65, 72, 76–77 retail nurseries and, 128–129, 175 statistics on use of, 58–59 windbreaks and, 148 Neopalma donaldtrumpi. See Donald Trump moth nest boxes, 145, 146f nesting spots, 173 Nitidulidae. See Sap beetles Norris, Ryan, 34 North American Butterfly Association, 131 North Carolina Butterfly Highway, 43–45, 168, 171 noxious weeds, defined, 81 NRCS. See Natural Resources Conservation Service nurseries, retail, 128–129, 175 O Obama, Barack, 19, 22 Obama, Michelle, 24 Oberhauser, Karen, 3, 131, 135, 151–152, 155–157 OE.


pages: 232 words: 63,803

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Big Tech, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Donald Trump, gig economy, global supply chain, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs

letter of complaint: Chase Purdy, “US Food Regulators Are Fighting over Who Gets to Oversee Cell-Cultured Meat,” Quartz, July 13, 2018. https://qz.com/1327919/us-food-regulators-are-fighting-over-who-gets-to-oversee-cell-cultured-meat/. directly to the president: Chase Purdy, “Donald Trump May Decide the Regulatory Future of Cell-Cultured Meats,” Quartz, August 1, 2018. https://qz.com/1340868/the-us-meat-industry-is-asking-donald-trump-to-decide-how-cell-cultured-meat-is-regulated/. Chapter Twelve: Promise Abroad Climate Central: “Report: Flooded Future: Global Vulnerability to Sea Level Rise Worse than Previously Understood,” Climate Central, October 29, 2019. www.climatecentral.org/news/report-flooded-future-global-vulnerability-to-sea-level-rise-worse-than-previously-understood.

Seriously courting lawmakers would mean cashing in political chits, but if a major meat lobbying group felt its concerns weren’t being reasonably heard or addressed inside the agencies, appealing to Congress would be an option. At the time, there were a lot of moving parts to consider, and the situation felt particularly precarious for cell-cultured meat companies going into early 2018. American agriculture had been taking a beating from President Donald Trump’s escalation of trade wars around the globe. These skirmishes had inflicted lasting damage to agricultural profits, putting much of the industry on edge. But the meat groups held sway with the president and his Republican Party. Under enough pressure Trump might throw them a proverbial bone, directing the USDA to take full regulatory authority over cell-cultured meat.

“great grandparents”: Jessica Almy, The Good Food Institute, April 17, 2018. www.gfi.org/images/uploads/2018/04/GFIetal-Comment-FSIS-2018-0016.pdf. congressional effort: Chase Purdy, “Trump May Get the Last Word on the Longstanding Fight over Whether Almond Milk Is Actually ‘Milk,’” Quartz, March 3, 2017. https://qz.com/923234/theres-a-war-over-the-definition-of-milk-between-dairy-farmers-and-food-startups-and-donald-trump-may-settle-it/. “swindle of the age”: John Suval, “W. D. Hoard and the Crusade Against the ‘Oleo Fraud,’” Wisconsin Historical Society, 2012. Hoard’s paranoia: Ibid. twenty-six states convened: Richard A. Ball and J. Robert Lilly, “The Menace of Margarine: The Rise and Fall of a Social Problem,” Social Problems 29/5 (June 1, 1982): 488–98. https://doi.org/10.2307/800398.


pages: 530 words: 154,505

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, different worldview, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, high net worth, illegal immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Western countries have not had a particularly stellar record of dealing with the influx of migrants escaping war and poverty in recent years. But most countries prefer keeping the waves of immigration at bay by following the measures already in place. In Netanyahu’s Israel, the Iron Fence, for many, is a source of pride. With the election of US president Donald Trump, justification for the fence seemed even more solid—it became a model for what the United States might erect on its border with Mexico. Netanyahu had spent much of his career telling Americans how much they had in common with Israel, and trying to convince Israelis that despite living in a “tough neighborhood,” they could have a smaller version of America, complete with their own Wall Street and Silicon Valley on the banks of the Jordan.

The allegations against Waldheim caused a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Austria, and Lauder, who described himself as having been a “three days a year Jew,” reconnected with his roots and became involved in Jewish philanthropy and politics. For the next two decades, until their falling-out, Ron and Bibi were close friends. Lauder introduced him to his own circle of New York millionaires, many of whom were not Jewish. That was when Bibi first met the brash real-estate entrepreneur Donald Trump, an old friend of Lauder’s. Netanyahu and Trump were never close, but they remained in contact. Years later, Trump appeared on a list that Bibi compiled of millionaires upon whom he could rely for various favors. ANOTHER IMPORTANT AMERICAN Jewish leader he met in those days was Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the “Lubavitcher Rebbe,” leader of Chabad Hasidism.

Having failed to tame or shut down Israel’s adversarial press, Netanyahu was going for the jugular, accusing the media of trying to bring down an elected government. Most of the professional staff in his press office had been replaced by young online gunslingers, who helped Bibi overcome his technophobia and communicate with the public by Facebook and Twitter, bypassing the heads of the mainstream media. When Donald Trump came along, Netanyahu eagerly adopted his “fake news” terminology, branding with it most of Israel’s news organizations. AS 2016 BEGAN, Netanyahu was counting down the months until Obama’s departure. It had been seven long years, in which they had achieved little together. Obama had prevented Netanyahu from launching a war in Iran, which could well have drawn in the United States.


pages: 147 words: 42,682

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty

Those lessons have not been lost on the politically ambitious of either the left or the right. All over the country, people at the outset of their political careers see a new set of possibilities. They include many who are as indifferent to precedent and self-restraint as Donald Trump was and who are more serious students of the uses of power than Trump was. It is increasingly possible that, the next time around, someone who is far more adept than Donald Trump can govern by ignoring inconvenient portions of the Constitution. THE SOLUTION THAT IS NOT WITHIN OUR GRASP I will briefly state my own sense of a root policy problem and the required solution. The solution is not politically within the realm of possibility, but I think it is useful to put it on the table.

If that reaction spreads, the continued ability of the federal government to enforce its edicts in the reddest portions of the nation will be thrown into question. The prospect of legal secession may be remote, but the prospect of reduced governability from Washington is not. The second thing of which I am certain is that Donald Trump’s election and the lessons of his term in office changed the parameters of what is politically possible in America. Someone can win the presidency without having been a governor, a senator, or a general. Someone can win it without any experience in public service at all and without any other relevant experience.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Older Americans apparently spend a great deal of time watching television, so in that case TV might serve more as a gate than a persuader. My argument is focused on younger generations that spend more time on cloud-connected gadgets. 10.   This sentence was written before the election of Donald Trump. 11.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/17/facebook-fake-news-writer-i-think-donald-trump-is-in-the-white-house-because-of-me/ Index The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest.

Later on I got to know a few women who played this game, this time as a friend instead of a combatant. They were often accomplished, perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, but even so, they sometimes found the gravity of ancient clichés to be inescapable. One I knew clung to a certain Donald Trump for a while. “He makes me feel safe, like he will protect me.” He treated her terribly and dumped her crudely. But this is about my life, and the truth is that I had moments later in the 1980s when I got pretty full of myself. I was asking for it. The feeling of combining romance with self-importance is so powerful that it realigns reality, even in the perception of people around you.

In order to settle, he asked only that I agree to attend while he pitched deals to other parties involving VPL technology. I wasn’t obliged to accept any of these deals, only to attend. To be a character in a stage show to be raised by master salesmen. Fine. The time had finally come for me to fulfill this obligation, but the people we were supposed to pitch made no sense. The list included Imelda Marcos, Donald Trump, and Michael Jackson. The guy wanted me to fly around the world full-time for the whole year, basically to be a pawn in surreal shots at implausible deal closings. It was fun to hang out with Michael Jackson’s family in their kitchen. I guess any encounter with Michael was likely to be odd in those years, but the master salesman had hinted that my hair might have cooties, and Michael was obsessive about such things.


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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

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. Congress had become a graveyard of ideas, ambition, and public purpose during the administration of Donald Trump. After passing the tax cut and a criminal justice reform law, Congress had done little else.

They even tried to pressure political leaders to do something, but that was a long shot. Labor unions had once been political power brokers in American life, but now they were just a marginal interest group that garnered scattered media attention. But there did seem to be one reason for hope: 2016 was a presidential election year. The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, was campaigning in a strange way for a Republican. Trump was the first major party presidential nominee in decades to argue—passionately, belligerently, profanely, and repeatedly—that it was more important to keep jobs inside the United States than it was to earn maximum profits for shareholders.

The Fed’s balance sheet was about $4.5 trillion, almost five times its level in 2007. Interest rates had been pinned at zero for nearly seven years. Caution was the Fed’s guiding principle as it sought to reverse these changes. The American body politic was not moving cautiously in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president. This was the abrupt, unexpected event that would end Yellen’s tenure at the Fed. One of Trump’s primary appeals was that he would work diligently to dismantle whatever was left of America’s fiscal policy institutions. He set to work dismantling regulatory agencies like the EPA while passing a tax cut that would become a fiscal fiasco, enlarging the annual federal deficit to $1 trillion a year even when the economy was growing.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

It needed to become more balanced, more sustainable, more coordinated. It needed ‘rebalancing’. 3 THE END OF EXTRAPOLATION REBALANCING AND REFORM Every now and again, you will hear or read about people talking about China as an export-led economy or otherwise implying that it relies on exports for its economic growth and success. Donald Trump accused China of ‘raping’ the US with its unfair trade policies when he was campaigning for the presidency in 2016, and while his administration has used more temperate language, it has persisted in emphasising an image of China as a global export predator that has stolen US jobs. Several years ago, this argument may have had relevance, but China is no longer an export-led economy.

To the uninitiated, Trump’s exhortation of America First might have sounded like traditional patriotism but to American allies as well as to China, it resonated precisely with the slogan used by isolationists during the 1930s, a time characterised by severe trade conflict around the world. Trump’s predecessors may have barked about trade fairness, and in the 1980s they were genuinely bothered about Japan’s commercial superiority, but none of them called into question the role that America played as the champion of a liberal, rules-based trading system. Donald Trump was the first winning presidential candidate since 1945 to threaten and then to initiate measures leading to American withdrawal from this essential function. He used language alluding to the ‘rape’ of American jobs, the protectionism that would bring great prosperity and strength, and welcomed a trade war as something that America would win.

Some, however, is for real and reflects the fact that Trump has chosen to make an issue of Chinese technology, and trade and investment practices that previous US presidents have not. Since Trump is learning from the autocrat’s playbook, and Xi Jinping is an established player, we would be wise to look on with justifiable concern. When Donald Trump took office in 2017, many people thought the trade rhetoric emanating from the White House and the president’s top advisers meant that a trade war with China might be imminent. It didn’t happen in the way people had feared, and in fact when President Xi visited Trump in Mar-a-Lago in April 2017, China agreed, after sitting on the issue for a long time, to resume beef imports from the US (after a fourteen-year ban), and also to raise natural gas imports, and open up its financial services markets to US payment system providers, asset managers and credit-rating agencies.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

So far, these voters have doubled down on politicians who want to move the United States farther away from the trend in the Western world. President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was a manifestation of that trend. Trump did extremely well in areas with high death rates for whites aged forty to sixty-four. Many of these working-class white voters had previously supported President Obama and President Clinton, but now they switched sides and backed Trump. “People felt ignored,” the pollster Frank Luntz told us. “And Donald Trump spoke to them.” Once in office, of course, Trump chipped away at the Affordable Care Act, so that fewer Americans were insured than would otherwise have been the case.

Conservative writers like Charles Murray and David Brooks have explored these chasms, with Brooks arguing that “the central problem of our time is the stagnation of middle-class wages, the disintegration of working-class communities and the ensuing fragmentation of American society.” On the left, Senator Elizabeth Warren and many other Democrats have made similar arguments. Remarkably, this pain in white working-class America helped account for the rise of both Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. What went wrong? For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States had pioneered efforts to create opportunity. The Homestead Acts, beginning in 1862, were a self-help program that gave American families 160 acres of land each if they farmed it productively or improved it over five years.

Yes, she said, although she acknowledged that she wasn’t terribly interested in politics and had never actually voted until recently. “It was just too complex,” she told us. “And I got confused with this or that.” But finally, she said, she voted for change in the 2016 general election because the stakes were so high. Casting a ballot for the first time in her life, she voted for Donald Trump. “Trump is our only hope,” Mary told us. “The man’s dirty, you know? But he’s still plugging forward.” She said she wished that Trump would get off Twitter, but added that the economy was doing better, with more jobs available. The media are unfair to Trump, she said, while giving Democrats a pass.


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

Gaping deficits, unfavorable balance of payments, and an insatiable appetite for debt have propelled many countries toward default. Ask treasury officials in Greece, Italy, Spain, Lebanon, Turkey, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Chad, Zambia, and Sri Lanka, to name a few. But don’t rule out anybody. During the administration of former president Donald Trump, the president himself entertained in public the notion of default as a quick way to shed the national debt, as if the United States were a family-owned real estate business with shoddy management and a less than pristine reputation. Let me be very clear: I am not anti-debt. Debt is useful to finance investment and in cases where sound economies feature stable currencies, manageable debt ratios, favorable balance of payments, and rising incomes.

Policymakers, however, did too little to compensate those who lost their jobs in the process, and neglected the sense of pride and ownership people felt in their once thriving communities.”4 It is easy to leap on the bandwagon against globalization. That economic nationalism bandwagon is one of the things that propelled Donald Trump into the White House. Yet we are at a crossroads. One path favors a course of trade that continues to unite an efficient global marketplace while compensating or retraining workers left behind. Consumers worldwide will continue to enjoy lower prices while employment in emerging markets lifts millions of global citizens out of poverty.

“Protectionism has become a growth industry, with numerous nations—including the US—opting for various direct and indirect barriers to trade since the global financial meltdown of September 2008,” the Financial Times reported way back in July 2009.5 The backlash has erupted on multiple fronts. It began in advanced economies where rank-and-file labor groups allied with displaced factory and low-end service workers. A populist movement emerged that fought against unbridled globalization, or hyperglobalization. Its constituents played a role in electing Donald Trump in 2016 and in fraying historical bonds that tied the Republican Party to free trade. Fulminations against China and migrants “stealing” American jobs (the “bad hombres” from Mexico and Central America, according to Trump) made globalization an easy target for dime-store patriots. Similar misgivings, also abetted by prodigious misinformation, spurred voters in the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union.


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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

Paradoxically, the trade deals are not being agreed because Brexit enables better deals, but because doing the deals now makes Brexit more difficult to unravel later. The infamous US-UK trade deal, which would have brought chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef to Britain and spread it quietly across our food chain, has been largely defeated with the end of Donald Trump’s presidency (see below). However, the broadly similar deal with Australia, which also includes meat imports with another range of bad animal welfare practices that are banned in the EU, has been 80 ‘agreed in principle’, and will soon be published and move to its next stages.

As public support for the EU holds up and Brexit becomes ever more unpopular, this is not the time to be reticent about saying what we believe, not the time to be strategically minimalist, not the time to limit ourselves by only talking about small tweaks to the Brexit deal. Instead we need to broaden the narrative and have the courage to talk about what we know is really needed if Britain is to recover from these wilderness years. In the darkest days of Donald Trump’s presidency in the US, many doubted whether they would ever be rid of him. Now, after years of campaigning, moments of despair and the near-calamity when the Capitol was stormed by far-right insurrectionists, they have come out of the other side. Boris Johnson is little more than an imitation ‘Poundland’ Trump – he can be defeated too.


pages: 239 words: 73,178

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

., “Parental autonomy support and discrepancies between implicit and explicit sexual identities: Dynamics of self-acceptance and defense,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 102(4), April 2012, 815–832. 10. http://gawker.com/5533901/second-gay-escort-claims-sexual-encounter-with-george-rekers. 11. Gwenda Blair, Donald Trump, Master Apprentice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 18. 12. Ibid., 84. 13. Ibid., 11. 14. Ibid., 13. 15. Ibid., 4. 16. Ibid., 31. 17. Ibid., 215. 18. Ibid., 174. 19. Ibid., 135. 20. Ibid., 197. 21. Ibid., 116. 22. John. R. O’Donnell with James Rutherford, Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump—His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 54–55. 23. Ibid., 70. 24. Ibid., 326. 9. “CHALLENGE ME AND I’LL HURT YOU”: THE VINDICTIVE NARCISSIST 1.

I have no doubt that you, too, are an occasional narcissist, just like me. In the coming chapters, I’ll explore narcissism in many forms, all along the continuum, from clients in my practice to more visible, well-known celebrities and the Extreme Narcissism they display—the bullying narcissism of Lance Armstrong, for example, or the self-righteous narcissism of Donald Trump. But first, we’ll take a look at narcissistic injury—the occasional blow to our self-esteem that we all experience from time to time—and what it reveals about the inner world of the Extreme Narcissists you may know. I believe that understanding our own narcissistic tendencies is the best place to begin an exploration of the more pathological forms of narcissism. 2 * * * “I’M EASILY WOUNDED” Self-Esteem and Narcissistic Injury While Extreme Narcissists often appear to have high self-esteem, their grandiose self-image usually inflates their assets (or invents them whole cloth) and denies the reality of their deficits.

“No matter the occasion, he was always competing, always concentrating on how to make whatever he was doing seem bigger and better than what anyone else had ever done. When he lost, he would say he won; when he won, he would say he won more.”17 The actual truth didn’t matter, and if anyone challenged his version of events, he would go on the attack. Donald Trump always had to be right. In the early 1990s, as the real estate market collapsed and his empire seemed about to implode under the weight of excessive debt, he blamed many of his closest advisors and employees, including those who had strongly advised against his riskier ventures. “He could not acknowledge his refusal to heed their warnings or accept responsibility for the problems that had resulted from his own actions.”18 One by one, he fired them or pushed them out.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

It comes when you can’t avoid awareness that your dream clashes with another’s: when the Remainer with her dream of sanctuary beds more and more deeply in her new home abroad only to find that there, too, resentment of the outsider and the cosmopolitan runs deep, and she encounters local versions of the dark island dream of purification she fled. Where now in the world is a sanctuary for tolerance more reliable than the one you might get if you spoke up for the values you claim to hold in the place you already are? In a United States where almost 100 million adults think Donald Trump is doing a good job? In a France where a third of the electorate wanted the virulently anti-immigrant Eurosceptic Marine Le Pen as president? In a Denmark which is establishing immigrant ghettos where different laws apply? For the Leavers and their island dream, it’s harsher. They know their exclusionary dream clashes with the sanctuary-seeking dream of immigrants and refugees from other countries – people who yearn not just for better-paid work than at home but for a refuge from corruption and extreme pro-rich policies that render basic public services in their countries weak, patchy or non-existent.

Keynesians can point to the vast amounts of public money Western Europe has poured into Poland to validate their argument that everyone gains when the state takes the lead in refuelling an economy that has run out of gas. None of these economic ideas accommodates the triumph of Law and Justice, just as they do not accommodate Brexit and Donald Trump. Such populist phenomena are linked by their backers’ ability to insist on the centrality of money-in-your-pocket economics to their cause, while at the same time promoting the primacy of romantic ideas of national and racial sovereignty in which, by definition, ideals come before money. The rise of Law and Justice and the Brexit referendum victory only make sense if economics and culture are seen as two aspects of a single field, whose fundamental substance is the collective psyche of voters; a field in which apparently unconnected economic and cultural abstractions (GDP, a lost empire) and apparently unconnected economic and cultural particularities (how much you get paid, the history of the building where you work) have links and relative weights that economics, and globalised consumer capitalism, struggle to measure.

But nor did she care for Civic Platform, Law and Justice’s economically centre-right, socially liberal rivals, who ruled Poland for eight years before Kaczyński’s triumph. Like almost half of Polish voters, she sat out the 2015 election. Brexit was won on the votes of more than a third of the electorate; the Conservatives and Donald Trump won power in Britain and the US with the support of a quarter; Law and Justice won it with the support of less than a fifth. The more important question for the Polish opposition is not ‘How could they vote for that?’ but ‘Why did they prefer not to vote at all than vote for us?’ The populism of Law and Justice is much better known outside Poland than the un-populism of Civic Platform, which raised the pension age, raised VAT – the tax that hits the poor the hardest – and bent over backwards to please foreign investors.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Even that paled into insignificance, however, when in 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union, becoming the first member-state in its history to do so. While ‘Brexit’ was the most important political moment in Europe for a generation, it was soon outdone by events across the Atlantic when, just a few months later, Donald Trump was elected the forty-fifth president of the United States. Less than a decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, it was now undeniable. An expansionist Russia, isolationist Britain and broken economic model had all been outdone by a reality TV star becoming the most powerful person on Earth.

While in 2007, immediately before the crisis, 26 million Americans were in receipt of food stamps, by 2012 – at the tail end of what some now call ‘the Great Recession’ – that figure had almost doubled to 46 million. Over subsequent years, despite an alleged upturn in the country’s economic fortunes, that number barely moved, with Donald Trump frequently highlighting how 43 million Americans used food stamps while on the campaign trail in 2016. For all the talk of his victory being powered by ‘fake news’, that number was entirely accurate. Analogous to food stamp use in the US is the meteoric rise in the number of people using food banks in Britain.

As Nigel Farage, a figurehead for the Brexit movement, triumphantly declared on the night, ‘This is a victory for ordinary people, for good people, for decent people … the people who’ve had enough of the merchant bankers.’ Yet even the shock of Brexit paled in comparison to events just a few months later when Donald Trump, a well-known businessman and reality TV star, was elected president of the United States. Winning the Republican primary earlier that year had already caused a shock – and with Bernie Sanders pushing Hillary Clinton close for the Democratic nomination, the signs were there for an upset. Which was precisely what ensued as Trump took previously democrat-held ‘Rust Belt’ states on his way to the White House.


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

However, in the past couple of decades, the desirability of market capitalism has diminished. Mature democracies in the West have suffered both economic and political upheaval, as manifested in the 2008 global financial crisis and the populist backlash that led to Brexit and the 2016 election of US president Donald Trump. Concurrently, states that de-prioritize democracy, such as China, have recorded unprecedented economic success. In many respects, the world economy is de-globalizing already. This is evident in the breakdown of many international agreements and the trend toward more bilateral ones—for example, the United States’ decision to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the revisions to the North American Free Trade Agreement that resulted in the 2020 US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The recent shift in the political mood in the United States and Europe against immigration has intensified the global war for talent and threatens to undermine corporations’ ability to hire across borders. In the United States, the government has undertaken protectionist measures to restrict the movement of labor. For example, in the wake of President Donald Trump’s April 2017 executive order to “Buy American and Hire American,” US Citizenship and Immigration Services has held up record numbers of H-1B visa petitions, such that the denial rate for first-time H-1B applications has increased from 10 percent in 2016 to 24 percent in 2018 and 32 percent in the first quarter of 2019.

Just as boards may be obliged to respond to de-globalization pressures by establishing a more devolved corporate structure, they could also use stronger local offices to recruit new employees so that hiring occurs on a more country-by-country basis. 5. Short-Termism The final critical issue facing boards is short-termism. Myopia exacerbates some of the preceding critical issues, but it can also harm a board’s decision-making on its own. Politicians from Republican president Donald Trump to Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren have expressed concern that US public companies are overly focused on the short term and have suggested that the solution might involve reducing investor power. In 2018, Senator Warren introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act, which would require all US-domiciled businesses with revenues exceeding $1 billion to grant at least 40 percent of board seats to employees.


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

Stylised facts are perhaps most like cartoons or caricatures, where some recognisable feature is overemphasised beyond the lifelike in order to capture some unique aspect that differentiates one particular individual from most others. Political cartoonists pick out prominent features such as ears (Barack Obama) or hair (Donald Trump) to construct a grotesque but immediately recognisable caricature of the subject. These features can even become detached from the individual to take on a symbolic life of their own or to animate other objects with the same persona. We might think of models as being caricatures in the same sense.

The first is a philosophical one about whether such probabilities actually exist in any meaningful sense, an enquiry that could take you down many different rabbit holes. The second is a much more pragmatic one: can you use this probability to make decisions? The purest kind of decision is a simple bet: if you put $1 on the outcome, what odds would you accept? For instance, on 7 November 2016, what return would you have needed to see to put money on Donald Trump winning the election? I think even for those most dismissive of the possibility, a 1,000:1 bet – meaning that you put down $1, losing it in the event of a Trump loss, but in the event of a Trump win, gain $1,000 – would have seemed like a reasonable gamble (even before the possibility of hedging that against other bets offering inconsistent odds).

Clarke that ‘for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert’, and it is unfortunate that ‘experts’ do tend to be trotted out on both sides of any contemporary debate, with little to distinguish one from another even where they have completely different levels of qualification. If some of the British people have ‘had enough of experts’, it’s certainly not only a British phenomenon: we can see the same suspicions at work in the US, in particular in the words and actions of former President Donald Trump. His we-have-our-own-experts approach, as a 2020 feature in the prestigious science journal Nature put it, ‘devalues public trust in the importance of truth and evidence, which underpin science as well as democracy’. Models, if they are an expression of certain kinds of expert judgement, have the same problems.


Home Grown by Joan Smith

autism spectrum disorder, Boris Johnson, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Columbine, Donald Trump, drone strike, G4S, ghost gun, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, no-fly zone, operational security, post-materialism, Shamima Begum, Skype

The far right is usually regarded as a distinct phenomenon from religious fundamentalism but many angry white men, as well as displaying predictable traits of racism and homophobia, are dyed-in-the-wool woman-haters who have spent years beating up female relatives in their own homes. The same pattern is even more pronounced among mass killers in the US, where the easy availability of guns has encouraged the growth of a lethal species of toxic masculinity. Defenders of lax gun laws, who include Donald Trump, usually fail to mention that some of the most notorious mass murders in the US began with fatal assaults on the female relatives in the shooter’s own home, as I show in chapter seven. It’s only a minority of men who pose a threat, but we urgently need ways of identifying highly dangerous individuals at an earlier stage.

This propaganda is so effective that collecting guns becomes an obsession for some men: Stephen Paddock, perpetrator of the Las Vegas massacre in October 2017, had an arsenal of more than twenty weapons in the hotel room he used as a base for the murders. The constant promotion of gun ownership to disturbed individuals, some of whom we will meet in this chapter, comes close to being a form of radicalisation in itself. The idea that gun culture is apolitical is disproved by the fact that the National Rifle Association, which counts President Donald Trump among its most enthusiastic supporters, is one of the most powerful lobbying organisations in the US. But there is one more thing, in addition to obsessive gun ownership, that unites the suspicious, resentful men in this chapter – and that’s a lethal form of misogyny. Canada is usually regarded as a less dangerous country than its larger neighbour, and it’s true that it has lower levels of gun crime than the US.

Emma González, an eighteen-year-old survivor, read out the names of her murdered classmates and described all the things they wouldn’t be able to do because their lives had been cut short. She and other leaders of the #NeverAgain movement appeared on the cover of Time magazine, capturing the public imagination and putting the National Rifle Association on the back foot. President Donald Trump, usually so voluble on Twitter, spent the day of the march at one of his golf clubs in Florida and made no comment on it. The Parkland massacre was the deadliest high-school attack in the US since the Columbine shootings. The attack began on the afternoon of Valentine’s day in 2018, when a nineteen-year-old man allegedly walked into his old school, wearing body armour and armed with a semi-automatic weapon.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

When reality shows are not working to call attention to the sponsor’s authority over the proceedings, they are working instead to bury it. Programs ranging from The Real World (one of the first reality shows) and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to Donald Trump’s The Apprentice blend product placement into the fabric of the program itself. Sponsors pay for makeovers to include their cosmetics, or for Donald Trump’s contestants to devise a new advertising campaign for their burger chain. While media-savvy viewers will skip over a “real” commercial, they appear more than willing to watch people compete to create a commercial for the very same product.

An illness, divorce, fire, or flood had suddenly changed their circumstances for the worse. Too leveraged or indebted to adjust, or already living hand-to-mouth, they had lost their businesses and homes, and were now desperately seeking a way out of mounting debt. On hearing that the famed real-estate and reality-show maven Donald Trump had been paid a million dollars to share the secret of wealth, they flocked to the Javits Center and paid two hundred dollars each to start a new life under the benevolent tutelage of Trump and the other Learning Annex stars. Instead of being taught how to get wealthy, however, they were persuaded to stretch their credit-card balances just a bit further to purchase “wealth systems” that would teach them how to take advantage of people who had suffered unexpected illness, divorce, fire, or flood.

The Renaissance’s new focus on individuality meant that an accomplished gentleman required a place set off and apart from everyone else. A room within one’s city home was no longer enough. Moreover, country estates served as an early form of branding and publicity. A newly wealthy family could display its land acquisitions by creating a country estate of size and grandeur corresponding to its holdings. Much as Donald Trump tags his buildings with ostentatious gold letters spelling his name, the new élite built country estates to trumpet their investments in order to gain political and financial leverage. Again, it had less to do with land as a place than property as a commodity. And even then, it was less about the land’s value as a real asset than as a sign of a family’s healthy balance sheet—an advertisement for assets held somewhere else.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

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

Since at least the 1980s, Fed officials have typically believed that the central bank should operate free of politics. Elected politicians have in recent decades mainly respected that independence, appointing officials with expertise to offer and technocratic rather than partisan views on the world. That could change. President Donald Trump carried out a pressure campaign on the Fed in 2019, and in 2020 nearly succeeded at appointing a nominee to the Fed Board who praised him lavishly in published writings and interviews. Likewise, prominent Democrats in 2020 considered trying to use one of the market rescue programs the Fed had established to funnel cheap money to state and local governments in lieu of passing legislation.

He still managed to spend time with his wife and teenage children at their home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he and his family were active community members,[*2] and to ride his beloved road bike to and from work and around the paved paths that crisscross the Washington metro area. He also golfed and read for fun (spy novels by John le Carré were a favorite).[12] Then Donald Trump surprised much of the nation in late 2016 by winning the election to be its forty-fifth president. As the Fed Board’s sole Republican, Powell—though he didn’t know it at that point—had been abruptly catapulted into the role of heir apparent to the most powerful job in the economic world. * * * — Janet Yellen was in charge at the Fed when Trump took office, having become the first woman to lead the institution in its century-long history in 2014.

It was about a month after Powell’s trip to East Hartford and Providence, and he was looking forward to the upcoming break. While there had been definite bright spots, his first twenty-two months as Fed chair had often been a wild and challenging ride. Powell’s tenure had started off smoothly enough. After Powell had taken office the prior year, President Donald Trump had ignored the Fed for a few months. But by mid-2018, as the Fed raised interest rates slowly but steadily to guard against the possibility of higher inflation, Trump had broken the decades-old norm in which sitting presidents avoid critiquing central bank policy out of deference to Fed independence.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 1999, https://hbr.org/1999/11/management-time-whos-got-the-monkey#comment-section. 205 Holocaust denial had been improved: Danny Sullivan, “Google’s Top Results for ‘Did the Holocaust Happen’ Now Expunged of Denial Sites,” Search Engine Land, December 24, 2016, http://searchengineland.com/google-holocaust-denial-site-gone-266353. 205 “Meme magic is real”: Milo Yiannopoulos, “Meme Magic: Donald Trump Is the Internet’s Revenge on Lazy Elites,” Breitbart, May 4, 2016, http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/05/04/meme-magic-donald-trump-internets-revenge-lazy-entitled-elites/. 205 patent filed in June 2015: Erez Laks, Adam Stopek, Adi Masad, Israel Nir, Systems and Methods to Identify Objectionable Content, US Patent Application 20160350675, filed June 1, 2016, published December 1, 2016, http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?

In the next two chapters, we’ll look at how the same flawed fitness function is driving media and finance, and how the speed and scale of digital platforms is algorithmically amplifying that flaw. 10 MEDIA IN THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS AFTER THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, THERE WAS A lot of finger-pointing, and many of those fingers pointed at Facebook, arguing that its newsfeed algorithms played a major role in spreading misinformation and magnifying polarization. False stories claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, that Mike Pence had said that Michelle Obama was “the most vulgar First Lady we’ve ever had,” and that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted were shared more than a million times. All were cooked up by Macedonian teens out to make a buck. The story about the “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide”—also totally fake but shared half a million times—was the work of a Southern California man who started in 2013 to prove how easily disinformation spread, but ended up creating a twenty-five-employee business to churn out the stuff.

Even though Tucker himself had only forty followers, and deleted the tweet once he found that the buses were actually for visitors to a convention held by software company Tableau, the photo went viral, shared 16,000 times on Twitter and 350,000 times on Facebook. His initial tweet had used the hashtags #fakeprotests #Trump2016 #Austin, ensuring that it would be read widely by people following those topics. The story was picked up first on reddit, then by various right-wing blogs, and then by mainstream media. Donald Trump himself then tweeted about “professional protesters,” adding fuel to the fire. While Tucker didn’t expect to have such an impact, the people who promote fake news often have strong incentives to boost it, using programmatic tools to discover key influencers and plant it with them to give it a quick start.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

“The polls have been”: “Is Donald Trump Pumped to Be Out on the Stump?” CNN & Company, CNN transcript, October 7, 1999. On NBC’s Today: “Donald Trump Discusses his Possible Presidential Bid,” Today, NBC News transcript, October 7, 1999. He told: Donald Lambro, “Trump, Oprah Running Mates?” Washington Times, October 8, 1999. On the newsmagazine: “A Run for His Money,” Dateline, NBC News transcript, October 6, 1999. “I believe non-politicians”: Michael Tackett and Lisa Anderson, “Trump Hopes to Make Presidential Deal with Voters,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1999. “I really believe”: “Donald Trump Discusses His Bid for the Reform Party Presidential Nomination,” Meet the Press, NBC News transcript, October 24, 1999.

The other, just a few years later, was a backlash against Gingrichism itself, an awakening of the white collar professional class that found itself alienated by this new Republican Party. Some of the most indelible characters in recent history shaped these battles that defined the decade. There was Ross Perot, dubbed America’s first populist billionaire, who upended the 1992 presidential campaign and whose Reform Party later in the decade gave Donald Trump entre to electoral politics. Jesse Jackson, the charismatic civil rights leader, whose breakthrough White House bids in the 1980s certified him as a leading force in the Democratic Party, setting up a climactic confrontation with Clinton that reoriented the ’92 race. Pat Buchanan, one of the original television pundits, whose rebellious Republican campaigns tormented George H.

The Foxwoods casino was an instant hit and Trump wanted in on the action, appealing to Connecticut lawmakers to authorize casinos on nonreservation land. Governor Weicker opposed him and it got personal. When Trump claimed the leaders of the Pequots “don’t look like Indians to me,” Weicker called him a bigot and a “dirtbag.” “My opposition to casinos isn’t just casinos,” he explained. “It’s opposition to Donald Trump.” Trump replied that Weicker was “a fat slob” who should “concentrate on losing 125 pounds.” Weicker ended up getting his way, but now, as he flirted with a presidential bid, Trump began intimating his own interest. He issued a statement: “If the Reform Party nominated me, I would probably run and probably win.”


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

That is what is happening today, and we should stop it. What might be done to make lives better, not just for the elite but also for working people? It is easy to be pessimistic. Once political and financial power are increasingly concentrated, the dynamic does not appear to be self-correcting. The election of Donald Trump is understandable in the circumstances, but it is a gesture of frustration and rage that will make things worse, not better. Working-class whites do not believe that democracy can help them; in 2016, more than two-thirds of white working-class Americans believed that elections are controlled by the rich and by big corporations, so that it does not matter if they vote.

One key takeaway is the distribution of pain across the country, with the West, Appalachia, the South, Maine, and northern Michigan doing badly, and with much less pain reported in the North Central Plains as well as along the I-95/Amtrak corridor in the Northeast and the Bay Area in California; again, pain tends to be lower in places where the population is more highly educated. The fraction of people reporting pain is higher in areas with higher unemployment rates and more poverty.7 The fraction of people in an area who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 is also strongly correlated with the fraction in pain. FIGURE 7.2. Fractions who experienced pain yesterday, US whites and comparison countries. Authors’ calculations using Gallup tracking data and Gallup World Poll. Figure 7.2 uses the same data to plot the fraction who reported pain among the 1.8 million whites aged twenty-five to eighty who answered the question between 2008 and 2017.

Between 2007 and 2012, according to a report by the Energy and Commerce Committee, “drug distributors shipped more than 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia.”32 According to an investigation by the CBS program 60 Minutes and the Washington Post, when the DEA, which is charged with stopping such abuse, tried to do so, Congress passed the 2016 Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, whose language effectively prevented the DEA from stopping the flood.33 President Donald Trump then nominated one of the moving forces for the bill, Representative Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, to be his drug czar. Marino withdrew in the face of public outrage after the exposés on 60 Minutes and in the Washington Post revealed his multiyear effort to pass such a bill on behalf of the industry.


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

At no point in the twenty-first century have Senate Republicans represented a majority of the American population, even at their high-water mark of fifty-five seats from 2005 to 2006.8 Nevertheless, they helped the two Republican presidents in our century (each of whom lost the popular vote at least once) to pass major legislation and reshape the federal judiciary. In 2016, Senate Republicans representing a minority of the national population controlled the Senate. They used their power to block President Obama from filling the Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, leaving the seat open for Donald Trump to fill in 2017, securing a conservative majority on the nation’s highest court. In 2009, at its ebb over the last twenty years, the share of the population represented by Senate Republicans sank as low as 35 percent. But even that was enough to block much of President Obama’s agenda. For their part, Senate Democrats have represented a majority of the American population at every moment in the twenty-first century so far, regardless of whether they controlled a majority of the seats in the Senate, with the share of the population they represented rising as high as 65 percent in 2009—the same year, of course, as Republicans’ low point.

Contrary to the countless navel-gazing portrayals of working-class white men in diners that followed the 2016 election, a 2017 study by the Public Religion Research Institute conducted for The Atlantic found that “being in fair or poor financial shape actually predicted support for Hillary Clinton among white working-class Americans, rather than support for Donald Trump,” in an election that saw the tightest correlation in history between the votes for presidential and Senate candidates.53 Anti-choice. The voters who elect Republican senators are overwhelmingly anti-choice, but this was not always the case. In 1975, Gallup found that Americans who believed that abortion should be “legal under any circumstances” were spread evenly across the parties: 19 percent were Democrats, 18 percent were Republicans, and 24 percent were independents.54 As governor of California, Ronald Reagan signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country, and Senator Barry Goldwater, a hard-line conservative on many issues, was prochoice.55 Today, 75 percent of Republicans identify as “pro-life,” but this puts them at odds with the rest of the country.56 In a 2019 NPR/Marist poll, 77 percent of Americans said they wanted to see Roe v.

He had been leading in the polls for six months and, by that point, had called Mexicans “rapists,” accused Fox News host Megyn Kelly of asking tough questions because she had “blood coming out of her whatever,” and claimed Senator John McCain of Arizona was considered a war hero only “because he was captured,” adding, “I like people who weren’t captured.”2 In his speech that day, Reid planned to remind Americans of everything Republican leaders had done to pave the way for Trump. “Republican leaders created the drought conditions,” he would say, “Donald Trump has simply struck the match.” The speech reflected years of frustration at Republican obstruction. “Republicans spent eight years torching the institutions Americans once relied on to help them face the challenges of their daily lives,” he contended. “So what thrived in the wasteland Republican leaders created?


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

Robert Schlesinger, “Ka-Ching: Donald Trump Is Raking in Big Bucks from Emoluments Foreign and Domestic,” US News and World Report, March 5, 2018. 49.  Jordan Libowitz, “Profiting from the Presidency: A Year’s Worth of President Trump’s Conflicts of Interest,” CREW, January 19, 2018, www.citizensforethics.org/press-release/crew-releases-report-profiting-presidency-years-worth-president-trumps-conflicts-interest. 50.  Reid J. Epstein, “The G.O.P.’s Official Stance in 2020 Is That It Is for Whatever Trump Says,” New York Times, August 25, 2020. 51.  Steve Chapman, “Donald Trump Is a Profoundly Incompetent President,” Chicago Tribune, June 7, 2017. 52.  

They profoundly, and negatively, influence crucial realms of civil society, including government, family and community life, and schools and learning, as well as our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with nature. In 2016 we elected a president previously known solely and simultaneously as a brand and its chief marketer. At the time, I thought this was the pinnacle of a market-driven society. But while Donald Trump may be the embodiment of a hyper-commercialized culture, he’s also the result rather than the cause. A scary number of Americans still buy the lie that he won a bid for re-election that he empirically lost. And speaking of lies, we lost our best chance to thwart the coronavirus because pundits and politicians—aided by Facebook* and by other profit-hungry tech and media conglomerates—sold millions of people on blatant fabrications that denigrated real life-saving protections like vaccines and face masks.

Brand loyalty means that people might keep buying a brand even if their original reasons for purchasing it—such as cost—may no longer be valid and even if it is in their best interest to buy the same kind of product from a different company. Brand loyalty is beneficial to a company but not necessarily good for a customer. When in January 2016, Donald Trump, who was then the Republican nominee for president of the United States, famously said, “I could shoot people on the streets and not lose support,”38 the convergence of marketing and politics reached a new and troubling apex. Lots of people, regardless of their political affiliation, were appalled.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

But others noted that Brexiteers tended to display a set of common views described as “authoritarian populist” when polled on various questions such as the desire for a strong and tough foreign policy, negative immigration sentiment, their attitude towards human rights, disapproval of the EU, and dissatisfaction with democracy.2 Some studies even linked Brexit sentiment with issues that had nothing to do with the Brexit debate at all, such as support for the death penalty, disciplining children and whipping sex criminals, and concluded bluntly that “the Brexit story is mainly about values, not economic inequality”.3 The story largely repeated itself across the Atlantic just a few months later with the election of Donald Trump on November 22nd 2016. Many studies have observed the same economic resentments as well as right-wing authoritarian values present among Trump supporters as those who voted for Brexit. But the rot has not stopped there. Europe now has far-right populist governments in Hungary and Poland, and briefly had them in Austria and Italy too.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are right to identify Newt Gingrich and the “Republican Revolution” of the 1990s as the harbinger of a new style of uncompromising politics by the Republican Party, which since the 1990s has shown a willingness to not play by the rules as evidenced by their recurring threats of government shutdowns, embracing of radical support bases like the religious right and the Tea Party, climate change skepticism, and a pathological subservience to corporate interests. All of this happened long before Trump even mulled over his presidential run, although the authors do correctly warn of how his pernicious influence in US politics will outlive his time in the White House: “Even if Donald Trump does not break the hard guardrails of our constitutional democracy, he has increased the likelihood that a future president will”.14 Certainly the toxic political atmosphere in post-Brexit Britain will be little better. Although Levitsky and Ziblatt get the diagnosis right, their proposed cure for democracy fails for the same reason as Pinker, Norberg, and Roser’s more upbeat ones: a naivety over the ability of history to provide any predictive power on how to reverse these anti-democratic sentiments, especially considering that today’s political grievances are considerably different to those of interwar Europe.

As the long-standing former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan reluctantly confessed after the 2008–2009 crisis, “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms”.32 Too little, too late, as by then Greenspan’s dogmatic adherence to free markets — a hallmark of his nearly three-decade (1987-2006) stint at the helm of the Fed — had helped trigger the greatest economic crisis in the West since the Great Depression by sitting on the sidelines and letting these banks regulate themselves. The problem with corporations begins with their leadership. When Donald Trump’s autocratic tendencies are explained on grounds that as a CEO he has not been used to the deliberative aspects of democracy, we don’t stop to think why such behavior is accepted of a CEO in the first place. And the reason used to justify the all-encompassing power of CEOs and senior executives is efficiency.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

In reality, it is set by national security institutions that “operate largely removed from public view and from constitutional constraints.”20 This is why US national security policy changes little, no matter who occupies the White House. Glennon’s concern makes sense when observing the uncanny continuity of foreign policies among the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations, three leaders whose views were vastly different. Obama’s reproach of Bush’s military adventurism abroad was a centerpiece of his campaign. Then he did an about-face once elected, shocking voters, by expanding the Afghanistan War with a massive troop “surge” and increasing the use of drones strikes and private military contractors abroad.

For example, it dropped 45,000 garbage tweets on the United Kingdom during the final forty-eight hours of the Brexit referendum, and some believe it altered the close vote.4 Russia wants to explode the European Union, and Brexit could be the spark that ignites the fuse. Russia also likes to disrupt democracy. The CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency all agree with “high confidence” that Moscow tried to swing the 2016 US presidential election to Donald Trump.5 The Department of Justice investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller has found evidence for this, charging thirteen Russians and three Russian companies, including the Internet Research Agency, of having “a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”6 Congressional hearings, multiple investigations, media inquiries, public outrage, and White House scandal has frenzied the country ever since, as Putin chuckles.

China’s state controlled media: “China’s CCTV Launches Global ‘Soft Power’ Media Network to Extend Influence,” Reuters, 31 December 2016, published online by Fortune, http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/chinas-cctv-global-influence. 9. China buys Hollywood: Anita Busch and Nancy Tartaglione, “China & Hollywood: What Lies Beneath & Ahead in 2017,” Deadline, 5 January 2017, http://deadline.com/2017/01/china-hollywood-deals-2017-donald-trump-1201875991. 10. CCTV spin blames right-wing nationalists: “China’s Non-Kinetic ‘Three Warfares’ Against America,” The National Interest, 5 January 2016, http://nationalinterest.org/print/blog/the-buzz/chinas-non-kinetic-three-warfares-against-america-14808. 11. The “Big Lie”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

The overtures to business were well received, as well, especially in the finance, entertainment, and tech sectors—DreamWorks Pictures contributed a whopping $2 million to Clinton campaign activities, while Time Warner, JPMorgan Chase, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Morgan Stanley each contributed upward of a quarter million. The second most enthusiastic party of capital in the world (after the GOP) was perceived by many elites as the most responsible choice.19 Clinton’s messaging was molded along these lines. Whereas Donald Trump spoke confidently about his plans to “Make America Great Again,” Clinton focused on running defensively, against Trump, not for a vision of a better deal for ordinary people. Clinton was the target of countless sexist attacks (not to mention many elaborate conspiracy theories). But beyond that she had to grapple with the fact that for enough Americans who hate politicians and haven’t thought highly of the past thirty years of neoliberal austerity, voting for someone whose pitch was that they had been in politics for thirty years was a hard sell.

Class-struggle social democracy has the potential to win a major national election today. This is more imminently likely in the United Kingdom, where Corbyn leads a working-class party, but consider where popular mood is in the United States. There’s widespread anti-establishment sentiment, but despite the rise of Donald Trump, the Left’s policies are favored on key issues, including immigration. The president may want to build a big beautiful wall, but 60 percent of Americans oppose the idea. In a 1994 Pew survey, 63 percent thought that immigrants were a burden, and only 31 percent said they were strengthening the country.

Street protests and strike actions can discipline wayward candidates for not going along with a redistributive agenda and can force businesses to make concessions to reformers once they are elected. Still, one dilemma is unresolved: we need a mass base to win reforms but struggle to rally that base without giving people proof that politics can change their lives for the better. 4. They’ll do everything to stop us. Donald Trump’s early days in office were a good lesson in Marxist state theory. He brought with him a contradictory set of politics: a right-populist challenge to both NATO and the network of US-led free trade deals, on the one hand, and more traditional pro-business Republican pledges, on the other. The parts that got through, not surprisingly, were those that capital found more acceptable.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

This ignorance is what ultimately derailed the coordinated harassment—#YourSlipIsShowing had outmaneuvered them. I remember feeling exasperated at the time that few people noticed the complexity of this style of harassment, and I wasn’t even one of the people receiving this abuse. Two years later, similar tactics by Russian trolls were counted among factors that threw an election to Donald Trump. But I can’t compare women of color on the internet to a canary in the coal mine, because in that idiom, the canary isn’t ignored. Gamergate began that August. In short, it was a conspiracy about women in video games. Eron Gjoni, bitter over his recent breakup, posted a screed of about nine thousand words to a blog.

Anon was “trickster-like,” as they put it, a twenty-first-century game of exquisite corpse, upending Westphalian sovereignty and authorship and so forth. Over time, Anon’s power diffused into endless splinter sects (“Operation Monsanto,” “Operation Killing Bay,” “Operation DarkNet”). The election of Donald Trump, and his fomenting of online hate groups—many active on 4chan—tarnished Anon’s Robin Hood reputation by proximity. The troll behemoth 4chan is amorphous; it is no institution. It has nothing like Facebook’s money or massive Menlo Park campus, but to borrow a line from Videodrome, the anonymous image board “has a philosophy and that is what makes it dangerous.”

Kyra Gaunt, Wikipedia’s SheridanFord, made her first edit in 2007, with a minor update to the page for NBC’s The Apprentice. She added a citation to an academic paper about racism in the workplace and the corresponding dynamics on the reality show. Now the host of The Apprentice sits in the Oval Office and Gaunt continues to address Donald Trump’s racism through Wikipedia, in addition to a wide assortment of other topics. The pages she edits range from table football to Los Cabos. On the “Twerking” page, she once argued with other editors that it had to be put in the context of African dance and African diaspora choreography, rather than characterized as a discrete trend that emerged after the Ying Yang Twins.


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

The modern world is remixed, narrated, and curated in a way that the past was not.5 This view resonates with the public, too. Manufacturing, along with the idea that governments should do more to promote it, is perennially popular with voters. Bringing back manufacturing jobs to the United States was one of Donald Trump’s most resonant electoral promises in 2016. Successive British governments promised to respond to the global financial crisis with “New Industries, New Jobs” and a “March of the Makers.” None of these promises were kept, but the fact that they were made at all strongly indicates the popularity of the idea that we should return to “making things” and the suspicion that a lot of modern economic activity is somehow not genuine.

Economist Enrico Moretti called the geographical dimension of this divide the “great divergence,” presenting evidence on the differences between prosperous and left-behind US cities on everything from graduate rates and graduate salaries to divorce and mortality rates.9 Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker, two British political scientists, observed a divide emerging in the early 2010s between what they called “the Two Englands”—one cosmopolitan and outward-facing, the other illiberal and nationalistic.10 A similar divide in the United States became the dominant political fact of the late 2010s, delivering the votes that put Donald Trump in the White House, removed the United Kingdom from the European Union, and launched the careers of populist politicians around the world. This type of inequality may well be a matter of life and death. Anne Case and Angus Deaton link it to the epidemic of “deaths of despair,” the wave of deaths from suicide, opioid overdose, and alcoholism among middle-aged white Americans that began in the late 1990s and has continued to grow.11 This epidemic and other manifestations of status anxiety have continued to grow even as inequality of income and wealth has remained stable.

They offer an appealing way for urban leaders to solve an institutional problem that is holding big cities back.29 Left-Behind Places In thriving cities there are too many well-meaning technocratic solutions that don’t work politically. Left-behind places face the opposite problem. Well-meaning politicians (and some not-so-well-meaning ones) are quick to make promises to restore past greatness, but these promises are usually divorced from economic reality. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 owed something to his popularity in once-prosperous manufacturing towns and his promise to restore American manufacturing. Similarly, following the 2019 British general election, in which the Conservatives won many traditionally Labour seats in struggling northern and Midlands towns, parts of the UK Right showed a renewed desire that might be summarised as “make towns great again.”


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

Instead, China’s forcefulness seems to have spurred their quests for military power.” 75. Henry Farrell, “Seeing Like a Finite State Machine,” Crooked Timber (blog), November 25, 2019, http://crookedtimber.org/2019/11/25/seeing-like-a-finite-state-machine/. 76. Robert A. Burton, “Donald Trump, Our A.I. President,” New York Times, May 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/opinion/donald-trump-our-ai-president.html. 77. John Glaser, Christopher H. Preble, and A. Trevor Thrall, Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America’s Broken Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Recover) (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2019). 78. Bernard Harcourt, Critique and Praxis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 79.

This convenient self-characterization lets them escape defamation liability in numerous contexts.15 That impunity may have been understandable when Facebook and Google were fledgling firms. It is now anachronistic. Authoritarian propaganda has flooded news feeds and search results.16 Facebook may disclaim responsibility for the spread of stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump or that Hillary Clinton is a Satanist.17 Yet it has only taken on more responsibility for running political campaigns since then. As Alexis Madrigal and Ian Bogost have reported, “The company encourages advertisers to hand over the reins entirely, letting Facebook allot spending among ads, audiences, schedules, and budgets.”18 It also experiments with the content and appearance of ads.

Thanks in part to its own increasingly automated public sphere, the US is sliding toward post-democratic status. A fragmented media is unable to reflect and uphold basic social norms against destructive policies and for fair elections. The neurologist Robert A. Burton speculated that President Donald Trump could be modeled as “a black-box, first-generation artificial-intelligence president driven solely by self-selected data and widely fluctuating criteria of success.”76 Where Farrell saw Xi as blind to feedback, Burton characterizes Trump as utterly at its whim, mechanically testing cynical rhetorical appeals to determine “what works” as a way of shifting the blame for his manifold failures.


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

The danger of intellectual paralysis in the face of chaos is finally that it undermines the first premise of democracy: namely, that ordinary citizens will always be ready to think. —Danielle Allen, Aims of Education Address, September 20, 2001 On January 6, 2021, the US Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists who had been whipped into action at a rally earlier that day featuring President Donald Trump. Their goal was to violently overturn the result of the presidential election, which they had been falsely told for weeks had been “stolen.” That message had been delivered most prominently by Trump himself, despite more than sixty failed lawsuits challenging election results and thorough refutations by election officials across the country.

It will depend on the choices we make about where and when to retain human judgment, whether to prioritize the augmentation of human capabilities versus their replacements, and how best to support one another as some roles and occupations disappear forever, while others that we cannot yet imagine take their place. Chapter 7 Will Free Speech Survive the Internet? On January 6, 2021, while vacationing on a private island in French Polynesia, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey received an urgent call from his top lieutenants. A decision had to be made about whether President Donald Trump should be temporarily suspended from the platform. Trump’s supporters, stoked with misinformation about election fraud, had stormed the US Capitol. The executive team decided to place a twelve-hour suspension on his account. But after the initial suspension was lifted, the soon-to-be-former president continued to post inflammatory rhetoric.

The board began meeting in late 2020 and announced its first decisions in early 2021. In four of five cases, the board overturned Facebook’s removal of content, signaling a will to challenge the platform and establish the authority of its external review. Then it agreed to hear a case with global repercussions: whether Facebook had been justified in indefinitely suspending Donald Trump’s account in the wake of the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In late spring 2021, it upheld Facebook’s decision to suspend Trump but rejected an indefinite ban. It gave Facebook six months to revisit the case and provide clear, public standards for any continuing ban. A Solomonic decision, it pleased no one and returned power to Facebook.


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Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

More than 90 percent of the tax advantage goes to families with incomes in the top quarter of the distribution.1 As Paul Waldman noted in the Washington Post, the proposal “was targeted at what may be the single most dangerous constituency to anger: the upper middle class—wealthy enough to have influence, and numerous enough to be a significant voting bloc.”2 Like the flash of an X-ray, the controversy revealed the most important fracture in American society: the one between the upper middle class, broadly defined as the top fifth of society, and the rest. The triumph of Donald Trump also exposed some dangerous fault lines in America’s class structure. It is a mistake to attribute the result of the November 2016 election to a single cause. Years of work lie ahead for social and political scientists picking over the data and trends. But it is pretty clear that Trump attracted the support of many middle-class and working-class voters, especially whites, who feel left out or left behind.

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the amassing of extreme wealth and, specifically, how it is distorting the political process. But the upper middle class has outsized political power, too. An individual billionaire can have a disproportionate influence on an individual politician (in Donald Trump’s case, by becoming one). But the size and strength of the upper middle class means that it can reshape cities, dominate the education system, and transform the labor market. The upper middle class also has a huge influence on public discourse, counting among its members most journalists, think-tank scholars, TV editors, professors, and pundits in the land.

He became a wealthy real estate businessman and is one of his alma mater’s biggest donors; in 1985, the university’s indoor athletic facility was renamed the Malkin Athletic Center in his honor. All three of Malkin’s children went to Harvard. By 2009, five of his six college-age grandchildren followed suit. (One brave boy dared to go to Stanford instead.) Or how about Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law? He was accepted into Harvard University shortly after his father donated $2.5 million to the school. An official at Kushner’s high school said there was “no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would, on the merits, get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.”20 But Larry Summers, the liberal economist and former Harvard University president, disagrees.


pages: 190 words: 56,531

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now by Roger Scruton

bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Corn Laws, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, garden city movement, George Akerlof, housing crisis, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, old-boy network, open borders, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, sceptred isle, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, web of trust

Worse than this is the fact that we cannot question this publicly without risking the charge of ‘racism and xenophobia’, and therefore cannot begin the process of coming to terms with it by discussing what the costs and benefits might be. That is one reason why people no longer trust the political class. The Brexit referendum in Britain, the elections of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron, the rise of ‘outsider’ political parties in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Greece and Finland – all these unforeseen developments point to a breakdown in trust between the electorate and the political establishment. And the reason for this is everywhere the same, namely that politicians have failed to stand up for the nation, or to affirm what many of its members see as their inherited rights.

As with the original selection of Corbyn as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, the main factor behind his successful campaign was the Internet, and the ability of his young supporters to combine outside the meetings and committees of the old party machine. To that extent the astonishing rise of Corbyn from rebellious outsider to triumphant leader is as much a sign of the emerging plebiscite culture as was the unforeseen election of Donald Trump. But it is also a sign that representative democracy, with its committees and compromises, is giving way to direct appeals to the people. Indeed there is no clearer sign of this than the Brexit vote itself.8 Networked people may view with indifference the fact that they live in no particular place, or a place that belongs to anonymous others at the far end of the world.

The great transformations that I have touched on in this chapter have had the effect of weakening national identities, but without producing any rival centre of command. And it is this fact above all that has contributed to the volatility of Western electorates. People are recruited to decisions that do not correspond to their other forms of membership. Some react to this with vociferous protests, crying ‘not in my name’, as in response to the election of Donald Trump, and to the Brexit vote. Others react with passive resentment, which simmers quietly until the chance comes to express itself – as again we witnessed, though on the other side, in the Brexit vote. This weakening of national identities, which is to be observed all across the Western world, opens the path to ‘identity politics’.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

But events like the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, where thriving cities voted one way and the rest of England another, and the election of Donald Trump on the back of a surge of votes from so-called left-behind communities away from America’s prosperous coastal cities, make this divide more salient. Figure 6.2. Inequality between the generations, UK. Data are absolute poverty rates after housing costs (share of group below 60 percent of real median income in 2010–11). Source: Data from Institute for Fiscal Studies, Belfield et al. 2014, https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/comms/R107.pdf. The divides revealed by the UK’s Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump also point to a different form of inequality, one that economists typically focus on little, if at all.

The divides revealed by the UK’s Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump also point to a different form of inequality, one that economists typically focus on little, if at all. That is inequality of esteem. The reasons for the rise of populist political movements around the world, from the supporters of Donald Trump in the United States, to Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party, to the Five Star Movement in Italy are many and varied. But one thing many of their supporters repeatedly invoke is their anger at being patronized and disrespected by what they perceive as an out-of-touch, technocratic, even degenerate Establishment. Some of the supporters of these movements are undoubtedly also poor in income or wealth terms—but not all.

This is the inequality of esteem that is increasingly prevalent in society in the United States, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe—that is, the growing sense that the population is dividing into two halves: one more cosmopolitan, more educated, and more liberal and the other more traditionalist, and more skeptical of elite opinion and of metropolitan values. It’s a divide that has made itself felt dramatically in politics. Supporters of Donald Trump, of Brexit, and of many of Europe’s growing populist parties share a sense of being alienated from and patronized by the dominant elites in their country who do not share their values. One might expect that these groups are alienated because they are poor. But the evidence of the UK’s referendum on leaving the EU suggests there may be more to it than this.


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Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

Market forces already suggest that electric cars will soon be more affordable than gasoline cars independent of rebates and other incentives, but even slow-moving governments with conservative expectations for how quickly things can change are considering regulatory packages that seek to end the sale of gasoline cars within two decades. Every country in the United Nations has committed to drastically reducing its carbon emissions, and automakers have been expected to continue to improve the fuel economy of their vehicles (although President Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate pact). But the global political environment could get even worse for gasoline cars if the effects of climate change wreak more havoc with the world’s economy and way of life—particularly if affordable, low-emissions alternatives are readily available.

The organization was three and a half times larger than the Republican National Committee, according to an analysis by Politico, which called it a “private political machine without precedent.” The Kochs’ network pledged to spend $889 million on the 2016 US election, more than either the Democratic or Republican Party. (However, after Donald Trump, whose populist economic views conflicted with their own, became the Republican nominee, the Kochs decided to scale back their spending to $750 million.) The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has described these efforts as a “40-year project that Charles and David Koch have been funding with their vast fortunes to try to change the way Americans think.”

In November 2016, another anti-Musk website appeared as part of a campaign to call into question the subsidies that Tesla has received. The site, StopElonFromFailingAgain.com, was backed by the political action group Citizens for the Republic, chaired by Laura Ingraham, a conservative radio host and advocate for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. (Ingraham has decried Democratic senator Harry Reid’s criticism of the Koch brothers as a “disgusting” demonization.) Citizens for the Republic also had on its board a man named Craig Shirley, a one-time lobbyist for Citizens for State Power, which fought regulation of utilities at the turn of the century.


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Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

Much of the time, this is a good thing. I don’t want a conceptual artist in charge of air-traffic control, for instance. However, we now unfortunately fetishise logic to such an extent that we are increasingly blind to its failings. For instance, the victorious Brexit campaign in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the United States have both been routinely blamed on the clueless and emotional behaviour of undereducated voters, but you could make equally strong cases that the Remain campaign in Britain and Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the American presidency failed because of the clueless, hyper-rational behaviour of overeducated advisors, who threw away huge natural advantages.

Some in her team suggested that she should visit in the last days before the election, but the data told her to go to Arizona instead. Now I’m British, and have only been to Arizona four or five times, and Wisconsin twice. But even I would have said, ‘that decision sounds weird to me’. After all, nothing I have ever seen in Wisconsin suggested that it was a state that would never vote for Donald Trump, and it has always had a strong streak of political eccentricity. The need to rely on data can also blind you to important facts that lie outside your model. It was surely relevant that Trump was filling sports halls wherever he campaigned, while Clinton was drawing sparse crowds. It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past.

There are many problems which are logic-proof, and which will never be solved by the kind of people who aspire to go to the World Economic Forum at Davos.* Remember the story of those envelopes. We could never have evolved to be rational – it makes you weak. Now, as reasonable people, you’re going to hate me saying this, and I don’t feel good saying it myself. But, for all the man’s faults, I think Donald Trump can solve many problems that the more rational Hillary Clinton simply wouldn’t have been able to address. I don’t admire him, but he is a decision maker from a different mould. For example, both candidates wanted manufacturing jobs to return to the United States. Hillary’s solution was logical – engagement in tripartite trade negotiations with Mexico and Canada.


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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

The Facebook researcher had seen more images of dead bodies in those three weeks than in their entire life up to that point. This, just one year after Facebook tweaked that same algorithm to “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.” Oh Lord, Kumbaya. Which brings us, naturally, to Donald Trump. Trump was no master politician or evil genius. His ideas were simplistic, contradictory, and self-serving. But make no mistake, Donald Trump was a wizard at social media and the way it warped conversations to his advantage. He was the ultimate rage stoker, the uber-asshole who fired off ALL CAPS missives at all hours of the day and night—targeting aides, enemies, allies, world leaders, celebrities, and even dead soldiers—because he knew that every click would mean more power.

The anxiety and insanity of each day, when you opened up Twitter and watched the world’s mightiest nation reduce itself to the very trolling social media had wired us to feed? The speed of it was astounding, a blitzkrieg of dickishness, where you barely had a second to process the previous shock before the next one dropped like a hot turd from above. You want to see the digital future of conversation? Behold Donald Trump, torpedoing a NATO summit from the toilet seat! His supporters loved him because of this. He “wasn’t afraid to fight” and took to social media as they often did, to share every thought without shame or hesitation. “Democracy is really about a conversation in which people deliberate, express views, and come to a consensus,” said Francis Fukuyama, the famed political scientist and author of books such as The End of History and the Last Man.

Rush Southern’s words instantly brought me back to the morning of Saturday, November 3, 2018. A week before, a white supremacist who had been radicalized online had shot eleven worshippers dead at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. It was the worst anti-Semitic attack on American soil but, sadly, something that was increasingly common, especially since Donald Trump’s election. Our rabbi in Toronto, Elyse Goldstein, asked families to show up to Shabbat services in solidarity, and we did. Our congregation is small and relatively new, so we actually hold our services at a church in downtown Toronto. I remember walking into the parking lot that morning and seeing the building surrounded by a group of people holding hands.


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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

Brexiteer sentiment was best expressed in the lyrics of Dominic Frisby’s song ‘17 Million Fuck Offs’.4 The song reached No. 43 on the UK chart. It later reached No. 1 on Amazon. This sort of sentiment doesn’t easily show through in opinion polls and voting intentions, possibly because there isn’t a box marked ‘Fuck Off’. Finally, and arguably the largest shock of all, was the election of Donald Trump against all the predictions and forecasts to the US presidency in November 2016. He started his campaign with odds of 66–1.5 Hillary Clinton’s campaign fund was almost double Trump’s. Politicians and celebrities lined up to declare that Trump would never, ever, under any circumstances, become President.6 Multiple opinion polls showed Hillary Clinton at least ten points ahead.

NOTES 1 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/11/jeremy-corbyn-leader-uk-labour-party 2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/election-2019-50768605 3 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-bookies-have-always-made-a-remain-vote-favourite-and-the-odds-continue-to-shorten-a7093971.html 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2zJ8vaB5jo 5 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36392621/heres-how-unlikely-donald-trumps-success-once-seemed 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G87UXIH8Lzo 7 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6632462/how-project-fears-dire-warnings-about-the-dangers-of-brexit-havent-come-true-two-years-on-from-the-referendum/ 8 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/29/brexit-could-leave-patients-unable-to-access-new-drugs 9 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-08/no-deal-brexit-could-hit-fruit-and-vegetable-supply-u-k-warns 10 https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/uk/food/a27942196/you-gov-survey-british-food/ 11 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2980788/Author-travels-UK-eating-pastries-700-days-search-Britain-s-best.html 12 https://news.sky.com/story/cameron-personally-requested-obamas-back-of-the-queue-brexit-warning-11423669 13 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/05/bank-england-admits-michael-fish-moment-dire-brexit-predictions/ 14 https://www.europeanmovement.co.uk/monthly_membership 15 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46944358 16 https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-autos-germany/german-carmakers-warn-hard-brexit-would-be-fatal-idUKKCN1PA173 17 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20190830-1 18 https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-budget/ 19 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6745786/nato-contributions-country-who-pay-most-least-2-percent-gdp-target-trump/ 20 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-History-Europe-Pericles-Putin/dp/0241352509 21 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/08/election-landslides-labourtory-majority 22 https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04252/SN04252.pdf 23 https://www.democraticaudit.com/2014/03/13/in-britain-people-with-higher-educational-attainment-are-less-likely-to-vote-because-they-are-younger/ 24 https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Do-students-swing-elections.pdf 25 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/01/middle-aged-swing-voters-age-class-political 26 https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/ 27 https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/creative-diversity-plan 28 https://www.amazon.com/Made-Scotland-Grand-Adventures-Country/dp/178594374X 29 https://www.amazon.com/Brit-ish-Race-Identity-Belonging/dp/1911214284 30 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/03/martin-mcguinness-ian-paisley/520257/ 31 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-32919137 32 https://www.amazon.com/Watching-English-Hidden-Rules-Behavior/dp/185788616X 33 https://www.amazon.com/England-Elegy-Roger-Scruton/dp/0826480756 34 Leeds United supporters sometimes refer to themselves as the Yorkshire Republican Army. https://www.facebook.com/YRA-Yorkshires-Republican-Army-204956969537411/ 35 https://www.royal-irish.com/stories/lieutenant-colonel-tim-collins-eve-of-battle-speech 36 https://www.ratebeer.com/Story.asp?

Without reform, we risk drowning our most sacred institutions in a cheese dream conspiracy theory of David-Icke-deranged evil space lizards torching 5G towers on behalf of The Bilderberg Group.4 It would be deeply comic, but for its profoundly tragic consequences as we saw in the American Capitol in January 2021. So far, the private sector has moved faster than democratic institutions to censor the most violent noises coming from the looneyverse. The social media companies began that finally when placed under pressure to remove Donald Trump from their platforms. If there is to be censorship, then it should be by elected and accountable representatives working in the public interest, not corporations facilitating ever more extreme content for profit. Social media companies have the power to facilitate bullying, hatred and violence, so shouldn’t they be accountable in law for doing so?


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Even he understood that his days of cobbling together a smartphone app and letting the public try it or speaking his mind without consequences were over. An entrepreneur more accustomed to “jamming” on a “hack” to solve a problem consumers didn’t know they had, he was now at the epicenter of the business establishment. (In late 2016, then president-elect Donald Trump named Kalanick to an eighteen-member “Strategic and Policy Forum,” a group of business advisers. Kalanick hastily resigned the position days after Trump’s inauguration amidst outrage by employees and customers over Trump’s sudden travel ban on citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries.)

There are limits, though, to Kalanick’s aspirations for work-life balance for his employees. “Look, if somebody’s producing more, they’re going to rise faster. That just is. There’s no way around that.” After more than three hours of walking, the night has turned cold and dark. I suddenly remember that while we are talking Donald Trump is accepting his party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. As Kalanick and I are going over Uber’s past, present, and future, Trump is telling a national audience that “I alone can fix it.” The nation might be glued to their TV sets that night, but politics doesn’t come up once in our conversation.

Yet for all the external criticism and internal soul-searching, it has stopped neither the Uber juggernaut nor the constant news cycle of hubbub that surrounds it. Over and over the company finds itself at the center of controversy, often a victim of its dodgy reputation and unable to overcome it. In the first days of the new U.S. administration of Donald Trump in 2017, for example, taxi drivers in New York organized a one-hour strike at John F. Kennedy International Airport to express solidarity with immigrants detained under a travel ban hastily decreed by the White House. Uber declared, by Twitter, that it would suspend surge pricing from JFK. It too intended to help, hoping to lessen the pain of congestion around the airport due to protests against the White House policy.


pages: 241 words: 63,981

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy by Richard Murphy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, centre right, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, intangible asset, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Washington Consensus

If there are no longer opposing sides to a debate on how to run a country, there can be no democratic choice. The electorate has come to realise this, with surprising results. In every quarter of the West there has been a rise in political expression further removed from the political centre-ground. Donald Trump for the Republicans and Bernie Sanders for the Democrats offer evidence of this trend in the United States and it is notable that both came from outside their current parties to challenge the prevailing thinking of each of them. The Austrian presidential election run-off of 2016, which included no representative of either of the parties that had ruled that country, without interruption, since 1945, provides similar evidence for that country.

This explains why so many of those parties, like the UK’s Labour Party, when it held power between 1997 and 2010, took so little action on tax havens. They bought into the same doctrine as the economists who promoted the notion that tolerating tax havens was useful so long as they provided the excuse for shrinking the role of the state, as demanded by the Washington Consensus. It is hardly surprising that candidates like Donald Trump have sought to establish popular appeal by promoting assaults on tax haven activities as part of their political agenda, however unlikely it might appear that they hold such positions sincerely. They can do so because, while the number of direct political casualties of the Panama Papers was perhaps surprisingly limited (one prime minister, in Iceland, and a few ministers elsewhere), there is clear complicity between mainstream parties in many countries and the tax haven world.

This perception has largely been fuelled by a very clear-eyed, and accurate understanding that those elites have been using tax havens to hide their wealth, while the companies that they control have been using them to avoid tax. If there is a political movement towards the extremes as a consequence – as represented, for example, by the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States, the UK vote to leave the European Union, and the growth of far-right parties in a number of European countries – then the role of tax havens in disguising the activities of elites has had a significant role to play. The fact that many of the politicians who have exploited these situations have explicitly embraced anti–tax haven positions provides some indication of the power of this narrative.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Although I have now spoiled the outcome for any reader who has not yet played, the realization that comes at the end for the first-time player is one of genuine surprise that cannot be foreseen at the start of the game. Besides these videogames about work, there are other examples of politically themed videogames. In the US there have been many variants of anti–Donald Trump games, like Punch the Trump. In the UK, a videogame called Corbyn Run was released to support the Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, in the 2017 election. The player takes on the role of a pixelated Jeremy Corbyn, running after the then prime minister Theresa May and another Conservative politician.

As Joshua Green has argued, Bannon’s time at IGE introduced him to a hidden world, burrowed deep into his psyche, and provided a kind of conceptual framework that he would later draw on to build up the audience for Breitbart News, and then to help marshal the online armies of trolls and activists that overran national politicians and helped give rise to Donald Trump.19 While there has been a rise of reactionary politics on the internet more broadly, commentators like Matt Lees have noted that “the similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the ‘alt-right,’ are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence.”20 There are clear and concrete links between the alt-right and Gamergate; they are coming together, not just out of a shared interest, but because they are being marshaled into a right-wing political force.

print=1. 12Tremblay, “Intro to Gender Criticism for Gamers.” 13Lien, “No Girls Allowed.” 14Torill Elvira Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate,” Games and Culture 13, no. 8 (2016): 787–806. 15Paulo Ruffino, “Parasites to Gaming: Learning from GamerGate” (paper, Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee, UK, 2016). 16Cherie Todd, “Commentary: GamerGate and Resistance to the Diversification of Gaming Culture,” Women’s Studies Journal 29, no. 1 (2015): 64. 17Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games,” 14. 18Jake Swearingen, “Steve Bannon Saw the ‘Monster Power’ of Angry Gamers While Farming Gold in World of Warcraft,” New York, July 18, 2017, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html. 19Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2017), 81. 20Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017); Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us about the ‘Alt-Right,’” Guardian, December 1, 2016, www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump. 21Robert Purchese, “ArenaNet Fires Two Guild Wars 2 Writers over Twitter Exchange with YouTuber,” Eurogamer, July 7, 2018, www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-06-arenanet-fires-two-guild-wars-2-writers-over-twitter-exchange-with-youtuber. 22Quoted in Keith Stuart, “Richard Bartle: We Invented Multiplayer Games as a Political Gesture,” Guardian, November 17, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/17/richard-bartle-multiplayer-games-political-gesture.


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

Mexican consumers began boycotting American products: Jack Jenkins, “Why Palestinians Are Boycotting Airbnb,” ThinkProgress, January 22, 2016, https://archive.thinkprogress.org/why-palestinians-are-boycotting-airbnb-d53e9cf12579/; Ioan Grillo, “Mexicans Launch Boycotts of U.S. Companies in Fury at Donald Trump,” Time, January 27, 2017, http://time.com/4651464/mexico-donald-trump-boycott-protests/. heavily trending hashtags: Grillo, “Mexicans Launch Boycotts.” the federal government had not issued: David Montgomery, Ariana Eunjung Cha, and Richard A. 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.

Global leaders need to understand and become aware that consumer boycotts are often linked to international political events rather than corporate practices. Not too long ago, when I discussed country-of-origin effect with Mexican CEOs, the topic of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections came up. The majority of the CEOs in the room said that they were paralyzed with shock and fear once Donald Trump was elected as the forty-fifth president of the United States. As a candidate, he had vowed harsh trade rules for Mexico, increased deportations, and campaigned with threats of erecting a U.S. Mexico border wall. Soon after the election, Mexican consumers began boycotting American products. Specific calls to boycott U.S. companies in Mexico included McDonald’s, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks, with heavily trending hashtags on social media in Mexico such as “#AdiosStarbucks,” or “Goodbye Starbucks.”


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

Researchers have discovered that the multimodal models actually have artificial neurons tied to underlying concepts. For example, the “Spider-Man neuron” in the multimodal model CLIP is activated when the model is presented with a photo of a person dressed as Spider-Man, a sketch of Spider-Man, photos of spiders or webs, or the word “spider.” The “Donald Trump neuron” is activated by photographs and cartoons of Donald Trump, the word “Trump,” or pictures of “Make America Great Again” hats. The Trump neuron is even weakly activated for people associated with Trump, such as Steve Bannon and Mike Pence. While large multimodal models still don’t have anything close to the richness and sophistication that humans have in understanding the world, they are suggestive of a direction in future AI research that may prove promising.

Department of Defense, Report on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud Procurement, 1–2. 215Amazon’s protest was considered: Jared Serbu, “Court Temporarily Blocks Work on DoD’s JEDI Cloud Contract,” Federal News Network, February 13, 2020, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/02/court-temporarily-blocks-work-on-dods-jedi-cloud-contract/. 215sweeping investigation: Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense, Report on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud Procurement, 5–6. 216Trump’s antipathy toward Amazon: Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump’s Long and Dramatic History with Jeff Bezos,” The Point with Chris Cillizza, February 8, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/08/politics/donald-trump-jeff-bezos-amazon-affair-national-enquirer. 216“DoD personnel who evaluated the contract proposals”: Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense, Report on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud Procurement, 8. 216no “swampy dealings”: Blitzer, “Amazon, Pentagon Accused of Swampy Dealings.” 216a “comprehensive re-evaluation”: U.S.

In May 2022, DeepMind announced Gato, a multimodal, multitask model that can caption images, chat, play video games, and move a robotic arm. AI researchers have also demonstrated an impressive ability to interrogate the inner workings of multimodal models to understand how certain inputs activate various parts of the network. Their analysis sheds light on concepts that the model associates together, such as Donald Trump and MAGA hats. This information can help tease out potentially problematic biases and associations, allowing researchers to build future models that are more explainable and trustworthy. Multimodal representations of concepts unfortunately also create new ways of attacking models. Researchers discovered the multimodal model CLIP could be manipulated into misclassifying photos of an apple, laptop, coffee mug, and plant as an iPod simply by writing the word “iPod” on a piece of paper and putting it on the object.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

When I thought about politics in the future, I thought about OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 12 FUTURE POLITICS Orwell, Huxley, Wells—all novelists from the early twentieth century rather than theorists from the twenty-first. It turns out that I wasn’t alone: since the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in late 2016, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has surged up the best seller lists. But this prompts the question: if we want to understand the world as it will be in 2050, should we really have to rely on a work of fiction from 1949? After I left university and became involved in my own modest political causes, my niggling sense of unease—that political theory might be unable, or unwilling, to address the looming challenges of my generation—became a more urgent concern.

His machine learning algorithms then tried to predict how likely each individual voter would be to support Obama, to turn up to vote, to respond to reminders, and to change his or her mind based on a conversation on a specific issue.The campaign ran 66,000 simulations of the election every night and used the results to assign campaign resources: ‘whom to call, which doors to knock on, what to say’.35 Four years later, in the 2016 US presidential election, the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica (whose services were engaged by Donald Trump) reportedly gathered a database of 220 million people—almost the entire US voting population—with psychological profiles of each voter based on 5,000 separate data points.36 This enabled the Trump campaign to use bots (AI systems) and advertisements on social media to target individual voters with pinpoint accuracy.

Or for practical purposes, is what is ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, simply what the multitude OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS DEMOCRACY IN THE FUTURE 239 decides at any given time? This question has troubled many ­people since the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. The people have spoken—but could they be wrong? A related question is whether democracy should be seen as the process by which the community determines—on the basis of agreed underlying facts—what to do, or whether it should be seen as the process by which the community determines what the underlying facts themselves are?


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

, The Guardian, 21 April, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/21/countries-responsible-climate-change 43 The claim of second is made by ‘UK Trade and Investment’ in: Dunlop, T. (2016) ‘The UK has become the world’s second largest arms dealer, second only to the United States’, UK Defence Journal, 5 September, https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/uk-is-second-largest-global-arms-dealer/ 44 Singman, B. and Burman, B. (2018) ‘Trump imposes tariffs on steel and aluminium: Mexico and Canada exempt for now’, Fox News, 8 March, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/03/08/trump-imposing-tariffs-on-all-steel-aluminum-imports-exempts-mexico-and-canada-for-now.html 45 Elgot, J. (2018) ‘Theresa May attacks Donald Trump’s “unjustified” steel tariffs’, The Guardian, 1 June, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jun/01/theresa-may-attacks-donald-trump-unjustified-steel-tariffs-eu 46 Auf Wiedersehen, Pet: a British TV series shown at various times from 1983 to 2004 as documented here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086665/ 47 Neate, R. (2018) ‘Paper straw factory to open in Britain as restaurants ditch plastic’, The Guardian, 17 June, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/17/paper-straw-factory-to-open-in-britain-as-restaurants-ditch-plastic-mcdonalds 48 Elliott, L. (2017) ‘Why the moaning?

With many versions of patriotism,85 this can come close to being forced to claim that you are a bigot, ‘a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life’. Theresa May, in saying, as she did in July 2016, that she would be prepared to push the nuclear button, stated that she would be prepared to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people in a nuclear war. And so did Donald Trump. But no one called the people in white coats to take them away. They should have done. Saying you would be prepared to commit a holocaust is not the act of a sane person. Such beliefs, held by people with such power, are completely unacceptable – unless, of course, you believe the lives of foreigners don’t count because they are an inferior race.

Anyone who says that ‘Brexit is failing because you don’t believe in it enough’ might as well be talking about fairies at the bottom of the garden, for all that their comment relates to the reality of our situation.55 The extent of Boris’s ambitions and imagination was later judged by his comments at a dinner for Conservative Party donors, telling them that the Brexit negotiations were heading for ‘meltdown’ and that US president Donald Trump would have handled them better.56 A few weeks later, the BBC reported him as having said ‘Fuck business’57 in response to a question about the concerns of so many businesses about the direction in which the negotiations were not going. The BBC rarely, if ever before, had reported the use of the word ‘fuck’.


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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

I was always alone in those hotel rooms—off dating apps now, not wanting to be with anyone but Abel, and watching a lot of cable news. Every hotel room I walked into, in 2016, I would turn on the TV and there would be Donald Trump, running for president, and getting a lot of play. It kind of shocked me, because everyone I knew who had been a reporter in New York in the last thirty years thought Donald Trump was a joke. He was our ubiquitous billionaire clown, with a dodgy, racist past nobody ever mentioned back then. When I tried to bring up Trump calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five in a story I did for Vibe in 1998, my white male editor cut it out, insisting, “Nobody even talks about that anymore.

There was a fairly constant stream of commentary about the attractiveness of the young female assistants and the sexiness of their clothes, the slip dresses and minidresses that were popular at the time. Yes, it was 1996, not 1966, but it felt like middle school all over again, and the backlash to feminism was on. Lad mags like Maxim were making a splash on the newsstands, and Howard Stern was on the radio doing “butt bongo” on strippers and locker-room talk with Donald Trump. Katie Roiphe, the media’s designated young feminist, was writing about how date rape was just an overblown whine. The Victoria’s Secret fashion show was the new pop culture event we were all supposed to be just dying to watch. And if you didn’t laugh along, or at least keep your mouth shut about what you really thought about all this, then you weren’t considered a cool girl—you were a drag, a bitch, and didn’t you know we had moved past the tediousness of political correctness and into the perpetually ironic?

And who could blame them for their sensitivity, when this word had been used like a bludgeon in interminable media rants about these kids today—the oldest of whom are hardly kids anymore, this generation born between 1981 and 1996. I had no illusions that their predecessors were any better. It wasn’t a millennial man who had paid me less, or hit me, or worse; those were all baby boomer men. Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, or Donald Trump himself—were they millennials? So I knew from baby boomer men. In my thirties, I had even married one for the second time—or sort of married him, which I can explain: We met at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery at a meeting of activists organizing the protest against the 2004 Republican National Convention.


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Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

In the case of Greece, which is now only a marginally wealthy country, Syriza, a leftist populist movement, came to power in 2015 in the midst of the Greek financial crisis but then moderated its policies. 17. Zachary Crockett, Donald Trump Is the Only US President Ever with No Political or Military Experience (updated January 23, 2017), https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/11/13587532/donald-trump-no-experience. 18. Matt Golder, Far Right Parties in Europe, 19 Annual Review of Political Science 477 (2016); Katherine Cramer Walsh, Putting Inequality in Its Place: Rural Consciousness and the Power of Perspective, 106 American Political Science Review 517 (2013); David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, & Kaveh Majlesi, A Note on the Effect of Rising Trade Exposure on the 2016 Presidential Election (2017), https://gps.ucsd.edu/_files/faculty/hanson/hanson_research_TrumpVote-032017.pdf. 19.

In France and Italy, they have come close. One has to reach far back in the history of the countries they affect to find a precedent for them. Japan, France, Germany, Italy, and Australia have not seen such movements gain this level of success since World War II. While the United States has a rich populist tradition, Donald Trump is the first true populist president, a man with no experience in political or military office. Trump attacked fundamental political institutions with incendiary language on the campaign trail and in office, something no other president has done, with Andrew Jackson as the arguable exception.17 TABLE I.1: Anti-establishment, illiberal, and populist movements in the ten largest economies in the world with above-average living standards, ordered in descending size, by 2016 International Monetary Fund nominal Gross Domestic Product Right-wing populist movements appeal to historically dominant population groups that have been left behind economically relative to their expectations: the poorly educated, those who live in rural areas, and workers who have lost jobs because of international trade.18 Arguments made by the leaders of right-wing populist movements for trade barriers and immigration restrictions fall on willing ears.

In fact, for any candidate to get positive votes she would have to be more highly regarded than most of the other candidates.52 In the 2016 US example, we can guess at what might happen under QV based on Likert surveys on preference intensity for candidates taken during the campaign. A consensus moderate Republican candidate would have been most likely to win under QV among the major candidates considered by the survey.53 The eventual winner of the election, Donald Trump, would have come in last of all candidates. Yet beyond this specific result, this logic suggests that QV is not limited to binary referenda, or continuous public goods decisions. For almost any collective decision problem, there is some form of QV that achieves the socially optimal outcome. As such, QV offers a coherent basis for a complete democratic system.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Of course, those commitments only get us down to 3.2 degrees; to keep the planet under 2 degrees of warming, all signatory nations have to significantly better their pledges. At present, there are 195 signatories, of which only the following are considered even “in range” of their Paris targets: Morocco, Gambia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines. This puts Donald Trump’s commitment to withdraw from the treaty in a useful perspective; in fact, his spite may ultimately prove perversely productive, since the evacuation of American leadership on climate seems to have mobilized China—giving Xi Jinping an opportunity and an enticement to adopt a much more aggressive posture toward climate.

In 2017, just after the storm, Solomon Hsiang and Trevor Houser calculated that, all on its own, Maria could cut Puerto Rican incomes by 21 percent over the next fifteen years, and that the economy of the island could take twenty-six years to return even to the level it enjoyed just before the storm—a level, Klein reminds us, already strained. This did not prompt a dramatic expansion of social spending or the extension of a Marshall Plan across the Caribbean; instead, Donald Trump tossed a few rolls of paper towels to the citizens of San Juan, then left them to plead with the outsiders who now controlled the public coffers for mercy, which did not come. The echo of financial crisis is unmistakable, as Hsiang and Houser note, suggesting such crises may offer the best conceptual model for the punishments of climate change.

Already, it’s fair to say, we have at least two Climate Mao leaders out there, and both are imperfect avatars of the archetype: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, neither of whom is anti-capitalist so much as state capitalist. They also hold very different perspectives on the climate future and how to reckon with it, which suggests another variable, beyond form of government: climate ideology. This is how Angela Merkel and Donald Trump, both operating within the “Climate Behemoth” system, can nevertheless seem so many worlds apart—though Germany’s slow walk on coal suggests there may not be full solar systems between them. With China and Russia, the ideological contrast is clearer. Putin, the commandant of a petro-state that also happens to be, given its geography, one of the few nations on Earth likely to benefit from continued warming, sees basically no benefit to constraining carbon emissions or greening the economy—Russia’s or the world’s.


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The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Abha Bhattarai, “China Asked Marriott to Shut Down Its Website. The Company Complied,” Washington Post, January 18, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/01/18/china-demanded-marriott-change-its-website-the-company-complied. 49. Louis Jacobson, “Yes, Donald Trump Did Call Climate Change a Chinese Hoax,” PolitiFact, June 3, 2016, https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/03/hillary-clinton/yes-donald-trump-did-call-climate-change-chinese-h/. 50. Michael Greenstone, “Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, China Is Winning,” New York Times, March 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/upshot/china-pollution-environment-longer-lives.html. 51.

This will make it difficult for one of those countries to escape the policy and economic influence wielded by Beijing during a time in which America has retreated inward. As the pendulum swung between uncertainty and turmoil within the Trump administration, President Xi established China as a fulcrum of stability. Without America at the helm, Xi began filling the vacuum in global leadership. For example, during his campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly tweeted denials about climate change, including a bizarre conspiracy theory that it was a great hoax perpetuated by the Chinese, who simply wanted to handicap our economy.49 Of course that isn’t true. China for the past decade has been building alliances to reduce global plastic waste, transition to green energy, and eliminate its own factory pollutants.

“@Sardor9515 well I learn from the best ;) if you don’t understand that let me spell it out from you I LEARN FROM YOU AND YOU ARE DUMB TOO.” As more people interacted with her, Tay started spiraling. Here are just a few of the conversations she had with real people: Referring to then President Obama, Tay wrote: “@icbydt bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. Donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.” On Black Lives Matter, Tay had this to say: “@AlimonyMindset niggers like @deray should be hung! #BlackLivesMatter.” Tay decided that the Holocaust was made up and tweeted: “@brightonus33 Hitler was right I hate the jews.” She kept going, tweeting to @ReynTheo, “HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG!”


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Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Donald Trump, Firefox, independent contractor, index card, trickle-down economics

The man on the right, gray-haired and slightly stooped in the shoulders, was unfamiliar. But the other man, with his perfect storm of wavy auburn hair, pursed lips, and arrogant stance, was easy to recognize. Donald Trump, the real-estate billionaire in the flesh. Semyon paused, staring. He saw Owen turn to see what he was looking at, then Allie as well. Semyon slowly digested Dover’s offer. Sure, Semyon would have loved to walk right up to Donald Trump and shake his hand. Then he’d love to have told him how he’d taken Trump’s casino for tens of thousands of dollars—would continue taking it all weekend long. How he was going to beat the self-aggrandizing bastard at his own game.

Allie joined in, and pretty soon he was wincing as they finished the cleaning job he’d started. They’d pretty much done as much as they could do by the time Jake had lumbered into the bathroom, making the scene complete. Quite a bathroom, that could fit an entire cabal of MIT card manipulators. Donald Trump would have been proud. “I guess we should just look at this as an important lesson,” Jake commented after Semyon told them what happened. “We’ve got to be more careful. We’re dealing with a lot of money. We’ve got to be extra vigilant, especially when we’re traveling around to places like this.”

But the casino they were interested in was off-island and not part of the resort. Victor had assured them that this casino could handle some pretty heavy action. It was a lavishly decorated glass complex that was bristling with marble, brass, and gold leaf, as well as enough dripping-crystal chandeliers to make Donald Trump jealous. They had been comped two adjoining suites in the main tower of the resort; although Victor didn’t have a dedicated host at the hotel’s casino, one of his aliases—a commodities trader from Manhattan named Danny Pesto—had a good enough relationship with a sister casino on another island in the Caribbean to get them the VIP treatment.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

Over the course of a year and a half, Rommel’s small expeditionary force rolled over a thousand miles of North African desert, from Tripoli in the west almost to Alexandria in the east, prompting the British fleet to flee to the safety of the Suez Canal and the British High Command to prepare a list of assets to be demolished if they were forced to surrender. As news of Rommel’s victories reached Britain, Winston Churchill almost lost his job as prime minister, and paced the corridors of power, muttering: “Rommel, Rommel, Rommel! What else matters but beating him?”20 • • • The idea that Donald Trump could mount a serious challenge to be the 2016 Republican nominee for president was initially regarded as a joke. A real estate developer, reality TV star, notorious blowhard, and political dilettante, Trump would be taking on far more experienced rivals—notably former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the brother and son of presidents.

Yet because of Amazon’s decisiveness and its tolerance for creating and then navigating an almighty mess, it left schwerfällig competitors outmaneuvered and gasping to catch up. • • • From Rommel’s half-formed expeditionary force against the might of the British Empire, to Bezos taking on Barnes & Noble, to Donald Trump targeting the Bush dynasty—the messy strategy has been embraced by the underdog. This is no coincidence. Maintaining momentum is exhausting; constantly improvising at speed is terribly risky. There is nothing in Boyd’s theory that says a strong force cannot act swiftly and confusingly, getting inside an enemy’s OODA loop.

.*33 Adolf Hitler’s insouciant remark that “we’ll have to do without science for a few years” was as self-destructive in his day as it would be in ours. Few people nowadays would publicly embrace the Nazi enthusiasm for racial purges from the intellectual professions, but in other ways fear of social diversity still runs deep. During the Republican primary campaign for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, Donald Trump’s artful courting of controversy to keep within his rivals’ OODA loops often involved taking tough stances on immigration. He began his rise to frontrunner status by promising to build a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border, having linked Mexican immigrants with drugs, crime, and rape. It was when he later called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” that media commentators seemed confident he had finally overstepped the mark.


pages: 305 words: 101,743

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

More black men had been executed by police who could not control their racist fear and hatred: Alton Sterling was killed in the Baton Rouge parking lot where he was selling CDs; Philando Castile was murdered as he reached for his legal-carry permit during a routine traffic stop. Five police officers were killed in Dallas at a protest against this police violence. Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The North Pole was thirty-six degrees hotter than normal. Venezuela was collapsing; families starved in Yemen. In Aleppo, a seven-year-old girl named Bana Alabed was tweeting her fears of imminent death. And in front of this backdrop, there were all of us—our stupid selves, with our stupid frustrations, our lost baggage and delayed trains.

Fyre Fest sailed down Scam Mountain with all the accumulating force and velocity of a cultural shift that had, over the previous decade, subtly but permanently changed the character of the nation, making scamming—the abuse of trust for profit—seem simply like the way things were going to be. It came after the election of Donald Trump, an incontrovertible, humiliating vindication of scamming as the quintessential American ethos. It came after a big smiling wave of feminist initiatives and female entrepreneurs had convincingly framed wealth acquisition as progressive politics. It came after the rise of companies like Uber and Amazon, which broke apart the economy and then sold it a cheap ride to the duct tape store, all while promising to make the world a better and more convenient place.

Until now, only white men have been able to boldly stride forward the way Amazon and Uber did—on a business model of sidestepping regulations, cutting out protections, shoving off liability, and siphoning as much money as possible away from the people who physically do the work. Whenever this changes, whenever women and minorities are allowed to be their own Bezos, it will hardly be a victory for anyone at all. The Election The final, definitive scam for the millennial generation is the election of an open con artist to the presidency in 2016. Donald Trump is a lifelong scammer, out and proud and seemingly unstoppable. For decades before he entered politics, he peddled a magnificently fraudulent narrative about himself as a straight-talking, self-made, vaguely populist billionaire, and the fact that the lie was always in plain sight became a central part of his appeal.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

On top of all that, in 2017 and 2018, the Wall Street Journal estimated that Amazon legally paid little or no U.S. federal income taxes—a fact that’s hard to swallow given that the company posted $10 billion in annual profits in 2018 alone. One of many reasons is that Amazon can deduct historical losses against today’s profits, which helps keep the tax man at bay, much in the same way Donald Trump and his money-losing businesses have allowed him at times to pay little or no taxes. These are certainly serious issues, but they’re also ones that arise from the very nature of capitalism itself. As one of the largest and most successful of the new tech platforms, Amazon has come under intense scrutiny for some of its behavior, and in some cases it deserves blame.

Years later, Bezos said that “every single thing he told me on both sides of that ledger turned out to be true.” Since the acquisition, the Washington Post has seen an increase in subscriptions, bolstered its news staff, and, most important, become profitable. The dramatic turnaround certainly has a lot to do with the renewed thirst for political news in the wake of Donald Trump becoming president. But journalists who work at the Post say Bezos has brought some of Amazon’s tech magic to the paper, investing for the long term—whatever it takes in infrastructure and good journalists to ensure a strong future for the publication. To the relief of the Post’s staff, he has also stayed out of day-to-day editorial decisions.

While Amazon certainly poses a threat to small businesses that don’t have a web presence, it has created a robust marketplace for the more than 2 million firms that sell on its site. Those enterprises may face growing competition not only from Amazon itself but from each other, but their numbers continue to grow, and many are thriving. To claim that Amazon is putting many thousands of mom-and-pop retailers out of business—as America’s president Donald Trump did a couple years into office—without placing in context how the company interacts with its wide variety of client sellers is at the very least distorting. The larger and more immediate threat is the one Amazon poses to big, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. CHAPTER 10 The Game of Drones Amazon’s announcement on June 16, 2017, that it was buying the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.7 billion sent tremors throughout the industry.


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

ALSO BY ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump’s America Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance For Alba and Izzie Inventions financed with public funds should inure to the benefit of the public, and should not become a purely private monopoly under which public-financed technology may be suppressed, used restrictively, or made the basis of an exaction from the public to serve private interests . . . Public control will assure free and equal availability of the inventions . . . [and] will avoid undue concentration of economic power in the hands of a few large corporations . . .

Equally wrong is the industry’s claim that curtailing its monopoly grip on public science would constitute an attack on free market principles. There is no free market in pharmaceuticals. The industry is based on a double protection racket of artificial monopolies granted and enforced by the state. This arrangement is frosted with a continuous public research subsidy that underwrites nearly all of the industry’s products. When Donald Trump submitted a budget proposing cuts to this subsidy in 2018, the free-marketeer drug companies howled in pained protest. The cuts were reversed. The industry’s last refuge is a dark warning intended to frighten: get anywhere near our monopolies, they say, and there will be nothing holding humanity back from a long sliding return to the days of the four humors, of leeching and cutting, of death by childbirth and common infection.

This news did not disturb the general public. Another two months passed before the WHO declared the virus a pandemic, crashing global markets and triggering runs on basic supplies like toilet paper. The public health and research communities, however, did not have the luxury of waiting or trusting Donald Trump’s January 20 promise that “it’s going to be just fine.” With the confirmation of the new virus’s close resemblance to SARS, experts understood the window for containment had almost certainly closed. They were operating on a code-red basis weeks before the agency announced a “global health emergency” on January 30, and months before “war footing” became a pandemic cliché that spring.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

he said. “Do you know that poor people in my community don’t know how to budget?” He told me that he felt Silicon Valley was a place full of “the leaders of our country” who don’t know anything about it. At the time, the other most prevalent idea for ensuring Americans better income came from Donald Trump, who had campaigned for the presidency on an “America First” ideology, which implied that sending immigrants home would help Americans get jobs. This, too, seemed ridiculous to Terrence. The African Americans he knew didn’t have the skills for the jobs currently filled by immigrants, he told me.

The problem, Oisin had argued in a Wired op-ed headlined “We Must Protect the Gig Economy to Protect the Future of Work,” was that “the current regulations never contemplated these new ways to work.”7 Why hadn’t Handy, Jon wanted to know, been more vocal about the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act? After Donald Trump was elected president, congressional Republicans made it clear they planned to repeal the US law, which made it easier for the independent contractors that Handy relied on to buy their own insurance. Oisin didn’t answer the question. “There’s a massive amount of uncertainty,” he said. But doesn’t this effect your workforce?

And yes, he’d found real estate gurus online, but none of them had asked him for money the way that Kevin Trudeau had or requested a percentage of each of his transactions, the way Uber had. A $25,000 lawsuit settlement payment from a former employer allowed him to buy his second house and start collecting rent. His plan was to buy one house a year, until he could become “financially free.” In case that didn’t work, he’d started investing in Bitcoin. Donald Trump’s election, Abe believed, boded well for him. Abe had heard that the new president would pass laws beneficial to real estate tycoons. And he liked Trump’s intentions to cut taxes on corporations. The way he saw it, both of these things would benefit him and his mission to become a millionaire. Considering Abe’s attitude toward credit card bills, which he told me he never paid, it seemed likely that his credit was completely shot.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Facts have been buried to make way for feelings; a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic. We’re more divided than at any time in the recent past. The exit polls show that on the day of the 2016 election, just 43 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton; 38 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of Donald Trump. Only 36 percent of voters thought Hillary was honest and trustworthy; 33 percent of voters thought Trump was. Fully 53 percent of Americans said they would feel concerned or scared if Clinton won; 57 percent of Americans felt that way if Trump won. Never have two more unpopular candidates run against each other.2 They still both earned millions of votes in support.

In this view, our political conflicts are a proxy for deeper racial wounds, which have reopened in recent years. This argument is made most passionately by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who suggested that Barack Obama was black America’s best and final hope (“a champion of black imagination, of black dreams and black possibilities”12), and that Donald Trump’s presidency represents the revenge of white America. “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power,” Coates recently wrote. “In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”13 Black Americans, Coates argued, “have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. . . .

At Berkeley, the administration called out hundreds of police officers to protect law-abiding citizens from the rage of violent rioters. That wasn’t the end of the 2016 circus, however. During the election cycle, I was highly critical of both candidates. As a conservative, I’d been a lifelong critic of Hillary Clinton. But I was also highly critical of Donald Trump. Thanks to my criticisms of Trump—and thanks to my very public break with Breitbart News, an outlet I believed had become a propaganda tool for the Trump campaign—I quickly found myself targeted by a new breed of radical. In late March, the execrable Milo Yiannopoulos penned a story at Breitbart openly praising the alt-right, including odes to racist cretins like Richard Spencer.


pages: 197 words: 67,764

The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World's Greatest Unfinished Song by Dylan Jones

Donald Trump, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

Kansas hasn’t changed much over the years, either, and it’s still the home of the brown dust storm, of tornadoes, of ranch dressing, and – like its neighbours North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska – it has a seemingly institutionalised inability to elect a Democratic governor. It is as Republican as the days are long: 83.5 per cent of Beckham County, the largest city of which is the birthplace of Jimmy Webb, Elk City, voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Not only did the Russians attempt to sway the result of the presidential election in Oklahoma, they also attempted to affect their local elections a year later, while there are also suspicions they were involved in the midterms, too. And although Trump may have tacitly accepted Vladimir Putin’s denial that Russia meddled in any election, not all of his supporters actually care.

In some respects, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is a populist anthem, the kind of broadly drawn broadside that should appeal to those who like their ideologies reduced to slogans. But then by definition any successful protest song condenses an argument into a chorus. It is perhaps surprising that there have been so few contemporary populist anthems – are there any? – as well as so few anti-populist songs; after all, a world in which Donald Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini have thrived ought to have emboldened those on both sides of the divide. Of course, it is untrue to say that the protest song is no longer a cultural force, as hip hop has been criticising government, shouting (literally) about social injustice and addressing the ubiquity of police brutality in black communities since the late seventies (which is why Public Enemy’s Chuck D famously dubbed hip hop ‘the black CNN’ all those years ago), but hip hop has almost become a protest genre in its own right, and so in many people’s eyes is less influential.

There was a hostile element in the press that pretty much dissed him as a right-wing sort of Establishment character, and by association labelled me as a middle-of-the-road songwriter dotard. And Glen had my back from day one. I wanted – and still strive – to let people know that he was a genius, that he wasn’t just an easy-going country boy. I mean, Donald Trump said that one of the reasons he doesn’t like the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is because he has a southern accent, and a southern accent makes him sound stupid. Now, that’s coming from a guy who’s no Einstein, OK? So, there it is right out in the open, the kind of big-city, intellectual attitude towards people from south of the Mason–Dixon Line: that they are not quite as bright.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

* * * For decades the standard protocol for getting any major infrastructure plan accomplished in a city was to reach out to the federal government for both funding and guidance. That protocol no longer exists. The federal government still talks a good game, though. On the campaign trail during the 2016 presidential election and at various times afterward, Donald Trump spoke often about his infrastructure plan for the country, touting his supposed ability as a builder. He floated big numbers—trillions of dollars in federal funding—that would be used to improve and upgrade and retrofit our nation’s roads, bridges, rail lines, shipping ports, and airports. An actual plan for achieving those numbers has never really come close to coalescing into anything concrete.

.), both of which have capitalized on the moneymaking opportunities presented by airing harshly partisan news on the Republican side. When the left later countered with MSNBC, the balkanization of the news—and the information spreading and inflaming partisanship that came with it—was complete. This led to an opening for a presidential candidate like, say, Donald Trump to publicly describe any news that he didn’t like as “fake.” In recent years the explosion of social media, with its filter bubbles, its fast-spreading conspiracy theories, its vulnerability to hacking, its easily doctored photos, and its proliferation of ill-thought-out hot takes, has only exacerbated this problem, to the point where it just might have swung a presidential election.

Needless to say, the issue that the C40 concerns itself with is a very important one. I always made it a point to attend the organization’s meetings during my time as mayor. But none of the previous meetings had had quite the same feeling of urgency as this one. The reason was an action taken by the U.S. government. Two months earlier, Donald Trump had delivered a memo to the United Nations informing that international body that the United States—which is responsible for close to 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—was withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. That agreement, an international effort to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, had been drawn up in 2015–16 and was eventually signed by 194 countries, including the U.S. under President Obama.


pages: 237 words: 65,794

Mining Social Media: Finding Stories in Internet Data by Lam Thuy Vo

barriers to entry, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Archive, natural language processing, social web, web application

Specifically, we’ll examine a data set Twitter published in 2018 that consists of tweets political actors based in Iran posted before, during, and after the 2016 US presidential election to influence public opinion in the US and elsewhere. The data dump is part of the platform’s ongoing efforts to allow researchers to analyze media manipulation campaigns run by false and hired Twitter accounts. We want to look at tweets that used hashtags relating to Donald Trump and/or Hillary Clinton and determine how they behaved over time. Did they increase in the lead-up to the election? Did they drop right after the 2016 election or continue to grow? Along the way, you’ll learn how to filter data using a type of function called a lambda. You’ll see how to format raw data and turn it into a time series or resample it.

/data/iranian_tweets_csv_hashed.csv") This line ingests the Twitter data in our data folder using the pandas function read_csv(), which takes a filepath to a .csv file and returns a data frame we can use. For a refresher on data frames, check out Chapter 8. Now that our data is ingested, let’s think about the next step we need to take. This data set includes tweets covering a wide array of topics, but we’re interested only in tweets about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This means we’ll need to filter our data to only those tweets, just as we did in Chapter 9 when we filtered our r/askscience data to posts relating to vaccinations. Once again, before we can narrow it down, we need to get to know our data a little better. Since we’ve already loaded it, we can begin exploring it using the head() function.

Filtering the Data Set We want a data frame that contains only tweets relating to the 2016 presidential candidates. As mentioned before, we’re going to use a simple heuristic for this: include only tweets whose hashtags include the strings trump, clinton, or both. While this may not catch every tweet about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, it’s a clear-cut and easily understandable way to look at the activities of these misinformation agents. First, we need to create a column that contains the Boolean values True or False, indicating whether a given tweet contains the string trump or clinton. We can use the code in Listing 10-2 to do this.


The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

This mirrored the polarisation and animosity in the campaign rallies of the opponents. People who already supported Obama bought books that had a positive message about him, and vice versa. Since then, we have seen Donald Trump's shock victory in a race that was even more intense and vitriolic. It is hardly surprising, given what we know about confirmation bias, that the 14.2 million Donald Trump supporters who signed up to receive his unfiltered message via Twitter were completely disinterested in attempts by his opponents to discredit him. Such criticism would only appeal to those who already supported Hillary Clinton.

Other research, such as Leon Festinger's study of Dorothy Martin's little group, shows how powerfully this confirmation bias can lead to the persistence of beliefs even when all supporting evidence has been discredited. Counter-intuitively, information that goes against our point of view can actually make us even more convinced that we are right (and hence the repeated media denouncement of Donald Trump would likely have made his supporters even more certain of their belief in him). As the old saying goes: “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” So the problem with confirmation bias isn't really what it might look like on the surface: the result of stubborn people consciously ignoring the evidence.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

It once tried to pull one with the Dalai Lama, producing a poster of the Buddhist leader meditating under the slogan: “There is no software on the path to enlightenment.”9 Salesforce was forced to apologize. And of course that made headlines. The Irony of Mindfulness Apps I was in New York the day after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, riding the subway up Manhattan. The somber gloominess was palpable. As I gazed up, careful not to look anyone in the eye, I saw an advertising banner for Headspace, the most popular mindfulness app. The ad featured the tagline “I meditate to go full salsa,” above an image of a young Latino dancer, holding his hoodie wide open.

If it helped them compete, it must really be powerful. No wonder Ryan wants to share it with everyone; winning is the name of the game in the neoliberal world in which he thrives. When he was elected in 2002, aged twenty-nine, he was the youngest congressman. Now he thinks mindfulness will help him work better with Donald Trump — and maybe even beat him.5 Politics as Therapy Many of the people whom Ryan represents are far from winning. His district includes the rust belt city of Youngstown, whose decline was immortalized in song by Bruce Springsteen. Once known as Steeltown, Youngstown has lost more than 60% of its population since manufacturing collapsed, depriving it of thousands of well-paying jobs.

Simply by stopping and “dropping in,” we will be fully autonomous — happy servants of a neoliberal order that they probably imagine they oppose. conclusion Liberating Mindfulness As mindfulness is currently taught, its revolutionary rhetoric is a myth. Even if it helps us feel better, the causes of suffering in the world remain unchanged. To understand why, let’s consider Donald Trump. Ever since this clown from reality TV took the global stage, I’ve been perplexed about the source of his undeniable appeal to millions of voters. I’ve read many accounts by political pundits, and none are fully persuasive. So I’d like to offer one of my own. Most of us have traits of dishonesty, hypocrisy, arrogance, greed, shortsightedness, racism, hatred, fear, self-centeredness, and stupidity.


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

Just as the pedestrian death crisis was beginning to present itself in 2012, and in an era of loud and renewed interest in active transportation, the Republican-led US Congress substantially reduced federal funding support for walking and biking programs. In addition, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the newly regulation-averse US Department of Transportation slow-walked reforms that could have, for the first time, made automakers more accountable for their design impacts on pedestrian safety. Cities Take the Lead There is hopeful work taking place, however, at the city level, where sensibilities about traffic safety have been undergoing a sea change.

In its comments to regulators, General Motors, which is heavily invested in SUVs and pickups, objected to the creation of a separate category for pedestrian safety.41 Some foreign automakers appeared to be more receptive. In its comments, Toyota said that the pedestrian safety score would help promote “global harmonization” with standards in Europe and other countries.42 (Japan, where Toyota is headquartered, has regulated vehicle design for pedestrian safety since 2003.) When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 on an antiregulation platform, the pedestrian safety ratings measure in the United States stalled. The NHTSA would not tell the Detroit Free Press, for example, during the newspaper’s investigation when the rule would move forward. Finally, late in 2019, the NHTSA announced that it would be updating its five-star rating system to “consider new technologies tied to the safety of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users such as cyclists.”43 Exactly what is in the new rule will not be known until it is released, but according to the NHTSA news release, it seems that the agency will limit its ratings to whether or not cars include partially automated features like automatic emergency braking or automatic pedestrian detection.

“They get so much money and they transfer 50 percent pretty regularly.”24 Texas does so even though it had 615 pedestrian deaths in 2017, roughly 10 percent of the national total.25 Each year, Texas “flexes” away about $35 million that could be used to help its embattled pedestrians and cyclists. The Trump Era Following the presidential election of Donald Trump, Elaine Chao, a former Bush administration appointee and “distinguished fellow” for the Heritage Foundation, was appointed to head the US Department of Transportation (US DOT). As transportation secretary, Chao’s US DOT echoed a right-wing talking point that biking, walking, and transit were local concerns that should be funded by the local government, not the federal government.26 When the Republican Party wrote its 2016 presidential platform, the transportation policy recommendations were borrowed almost verbatim from the Heritage Foundation.


pages: 105 words: 34,444

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

Whilst this change may not sound very significant, additional turnout can be crucial. For example, the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was ultimately decided in Florida by a margin of 537 votes – less than 0.001% of all voters. In 2016 a shift of a mere 100,000 votes overall from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin would have made Clinton President. Facebook’s interventions in 2010 were very small, just a single message and a button. More concerted or targeted efforts such as those by Cambridge Analytica can have a much larger impact. Facebook repeated its experiment in 2012, but the results have not been published.

It and proposals like it are essential to the future of the information age, as ways to marry Openness with a resolution of the free-rider problem while continuing to benefit from market mechanisms and up-front funding. Such models rely upon international agreements, but so does the current solution to the free-rider problem, the granting of monopolies for “intellectual property”, which were going to be extended yet again in the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) – although this time Donald Trump’s America did not sign. * * * Strictly, India did not have “product” patents but had “process” patents for pharmaceuticals. Patents on the recipe for a drug did not exist but a company could register a patent on a specific, novel way of manufacturing a drug.↩ Shubham Chaudhuri, Pinelopi K.


Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World by Bethany McLean

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, buy and hold, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, family office, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

A man named Terrence Pegula, who was born into a coal mining family in Pennsylvania and who majored in petroleum engineering on a scholarship, ran a struggling small time drilling operation called East Resources, which he’d started by borrowing $7,500 from family and friends. It just happened to sit atop the Marcellus shale. In 2009, the firm was sold to Royal Dutch Shell for $4.7 billion. Pegula then bought the Buffalo Sabres for $189 million—and then, in 2014 outbid groups led by Donald Trump and Jon Bon Jovi to buy the Buffalo Bills as well. He also donated $90 million to his alma mater, Penn State, to help establish a Division I hockey program at the school. In 1989, a geologist named Jeff Hildebrand founded Hilcorp Resources, just three years after he’d earned his degree. In 2011, Marathon Oil bought the company’s 100,000 acres in the Eagle Ford for $3.5 billion.

By the early afternoon, President Obama had signed it. Then everyone raced out of Washington for the holidays. “By 6:00 p.m., no one was left in town,” Baker says. “To celebrate, I went to Lia’s in Bethesda and had a Manhattan and a steak by myself. I thought it was a big, big, big deal.” Permania While on the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump began to talk about energy independence. Upon election, he installed one of the most energy heavy cabinets in modern history, from ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State; to former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, which he had sued more than a dozen times to protect the interests of energy companies; to former oil and gas consultant Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior.


pages: 354 words: 110,570

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright, Bradley Hope

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, failed state, family office, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, Global Witness, high net worth, junk bonds, low interest rates, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Virgin Galactic

He was friendly enough but really didn’t have anything interesting to say, instead preferring to repeatedly ensure his guests were sated. Do you like the champagne? How’s the sushi? He wasn’t hitting on women in the way other male students did when they hosted parties. In fact, he wasn’t even flirting. Low chose the univerity’s business-focused Wharton School, whose alumni included Warren Buffett and Donald Trump, for its reputation as a production line for top financiers. For $25,000 a year, students in the economics department, where Low was studying, learned the mechanics of capitalism. Many of his classmates, wealthy students from across the globe, envisioned a career on Wall Street. Low majored in finance rather than dry macroeconomics, but he wasn’t planning on a regular banking career.

In the mid-2000s, Wall Street’s profits soared due to a boom in the U.S. housing market, as Americans signed up for loans to buy homes with little or even no money down. Banks took these poor-quality mortgages—known as subprime loans—and packaged them into securities, which they sold to big investment funds. At Goldman, both Blankfein and Gary Cohn, the bank’s president, who would go on to serve as President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, pushed subprime debt products, which the bank continued to market in the run-up to the crisis. But fearing a crash in home prices, with many Americans unable to keep up on their mortgage payments, Goldman itself had bet against the market—a trading strategy that later came to be known as the “Big Short.”

Despite the bank’s denials, many executives at Goldman were aware of Low’s role in 1MDB but had not raised concerns, he claimed. Andrea Vella, who structured the 1MDB bond deals and backed them internally, had been promoted to cohead of investment banking in Asia. Gary Cohn, Goldman’s president and a big supporter of the 1MDB business, became director of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council in January 2017, a job he stayed in for a little over a year. Leissner didn’t go public with his grievances. He was still engaged in negotiations with Goldman over deferred pay worth millions of dollars. The banker had not expected to be fired, and it appeared he needed the money to finance his lifestyle with his new wife, Kimora Lee Simmons; around that time he even asked a friend for a cash loan of a few million dollars.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Data source: Center for Responsive Politics TABLE 10.2 2016 Election Donations ($MM) Hillary Clinton Donald Trump Raised by candidate $973 $564 Raised by super PACs $217 $82 Total $1,190 $646 This does not mean that the biggest spender always wins. Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016 despite raising and spending much less than Hillary Clinton (see Table 10.2). A few months earlier, he beat better-funded candidates in the Republican primaries. In fact, Donald Trump raised less outside money than any major party presidential nominee since John McCain in 2008. Yet he dominated the airwaves and won the election.

In 2011, FCC commissioner Meredith Baker left her job after serving only two years of a four-year term and jumped over to a top lobbying position at Comcast. In 2013, Barack Obama appointed Tom Wheeler, a former president of the NCTA and a former CEO of the Cellular Communications & Internet Association, to be FCC chair. When Wheeler resigned, Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai, a former Verizon employee and communications industry lawyer, to replace him. The movement of executives between regulatory agencies and the businesses they regulate is well documented in multiple industries. David Lucca, Amit Seru, and Francesco Trebbi (2014) study workers’ flows between US banking regulators (both federal and state) and the private sector.


pages: 334 words: 109,882

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

I also learned a long time ago that walking into a yoga class thinking you aren’t going to learn anything is a great way to not learn anything in a yoga class. I have to remind myself constantly to empty out when I’m on my mat. Check to: a time right after the 2016 election, when I went to a yoga class in order to not think about Donald Trump, which meant that the teacher immediately started to talk about Donald Trump. I groaned, audibly voicing my discontent, and as the teacher directed us to get into plank pose and then started talking about her friend who wanted to move to Canada, I had to restrain myself from groaning again. I remember it vividly because I considered walking out and somehow caught myself and reminded myself to get over it, to empty out, to let myself learn something from her.

We were nasty and loud and pink and angry; our uteruses were not political objects, our pussies were not for grabbing, and our place was in the resistance. I lived in downtown L.A., the site of the march, and after it was over, I noticed something else we were all about: drinking to cap it off. The bars were full of women. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 ruptured something so deep and wide and vast within women that it was palpable, suffocating, raw, electric. It also ushered in an unprecedented level of cultural anxiety among Americans, especially those who aren’t rich-white-straight-cis males. For the last few years, we’ve been in an almost constant state of outrage—developing what has been dubbed Trump Fatigue Syndrome—just trying to keep up with the news or batshit crazy tweets.

Coyle, “8 Surprising Things That Harm Your Gut Bacteria,” Healthline, June 19, 2017, https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/8-things-that-harm-gut-bacteria. 37Trump Fatigue Syndrome: Lee Drutman, “How to Combat Trump Fatigue Syndrome,” Vox, May 17, 2017, https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2017/3/7/14844120/how-to-fight-trump-fatigue-syndrome. 37“extremely anxious”: “Managing Stress Related to Political Change,” American Psychological Association, February 2017, https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/stress-political-change. 37“very or somewhat significant”: J. F. Harris, “Trump May Not Be Crazy, but the Rest of Us Are Getting There Fast,” Politico, October 12, 2018, https://www.politico.eu/article/us-president-donald-trump-may-not-be-crazy-but-the-rest-of-us-are-getting-there-fast/. 38number-one date rape drug: Andrea Fox, “What Is the Most Common Date Rape Drug?” EfficientGov, April 4, 2018, https://efficientgov.com/blog/2018/04/04/what-is-the-most-common-date-rape-drug. 39sexual assaults involve alcohol: Antonia Abbey et al., “Alcohol and Sexual Assault,” Alcohol Research and Health 25, no. 1 (2001): 43–51. 39college campus rape: “Sexual Assaults on College Campuses Involving Alcohol,” Alcohol.org, October 22, 2018, https://www.alcohol.org/effects/sexual-assault-college-campus. 39intimate partner violence: Buddy T., “Drinking Can Bring Out Violence in All Types of Relationships,” verywellmind, April 7, 2019, https://www.verywellmind.com/drinking-alcohol-increases-physical-violence-62655. 39violent crimes overall: Harold Pollack, “Alcohol Is Still the Deadliest Drug in the United States, and It’s Not Even Close,” Washington Post, August 19, 2014. 39Women who drink before: Ann Dowsett Johnston, Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 78. 39experience sexual assault: Ibid., 80. 39over three million deaths worldwide: “Management of Substance Abuse,” World Health Organization, n.d., https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/facts/alcohol/en. 39The Handmaid’s Tale: Madison Roberts, “Handmaid’s Tale Wines Pulled After One Day Amidst Fierce Backlash Over ‘Rape-Themed’ Marketing,” People, July 12, 2018.


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

Arif’s financial trickery had staved off disaster once more. “It’s a bit like playing poker,” he told Rafique. Chapter 14 America First Kito de Boer, the management consultant who advised Arif to start a private equity firm in 2001, was watching CNN at a friend’s house in Dubai in November 2016 when he saw something that shocked him. Donald Trump was elected president of the USA. Kito had moved on from McKinsey by then, taking a big pay cut to become the head of mission for the United Nations Quartet for peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians. The tall Dutchman had spent his career cultivating ties with prominent business leaders and politicians around the world and, like so many members of the Davos elite, including his friend Arif, Kito had been counting on Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election.

Thomas Barrack’s Colony Capital and Stephen Feinberg’s Cerberus Capital Management were assessing the firm. Buying Abraaj’s operations could give them footholds in new markets across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Ironically, their interest in buying Abraaj confirmed Arif’s argument that emerging markets represented the future. Barrack was a close ally of Donald Trump and had organized his presidential inauguration ceremony. He also had strong connections in the Middle East. Born into a family with Lebanese roots, Barrack had worked for the Saudi royal family. His firm specialized in real estate investments worldwide. Cerberus was a New York private equity firm named after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell in Greek mythology.

See also Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Giving Pledge and, 165, 228 healthcare fund of, 165, 167 impact investing and, 216–17 Middle East and, 199 Arif Naqvi on risk-taking of, 41 as Arif Naqvi’s associate, 1, 4, 6, 46, 164, 166, 170, 171–72, 182, 185, 222, 237, 291 Arif Naqvi’s philanthropy and, 43, 151 poverty conference in Italy and, 87 on poverty in Africa, 163–65 UAE speech of 2012, 170–71 at World Economic Forum, 237–38 Gates, Melinda, 43, 163–67 Gauhar, Tabish, 60–64, 66–68, 153 Genghis Khan, 41 German government, 96, 98, 168 Ghana, 122–26, 174 Ghandour, Fadi Aramex and, 24–25, 26, 28, 34, 38–39 Celebration of Entrepreneurship conference and, 79–81 Arif Naqvi’s relationship with, 24–25, 26, 34, 39, 102 Barack Obama’s relationship with, 73–74 Ghosn, Carlos, 142 Global Business Forum, 222 globalization dark side of, 6 Kito de Boer and, 197–98, 201 following Cold War, 3 inequality and, 86 in Middle East, 29, 38 Arif Naqvi on, 38, 201–2, 205 in Pakistan, 9–10 spread of, 205 trade and, 3–4 Donald Trump on, 201 World Economic Forum meetings and, 44 Goldman Sachs, 49, 215–16, 285 Gore, Al, 129 The Government of the United States of America vs. Arif Naqvi, 278 Grazer, Brian, 136 Guenez, Ghizlan, 36, 157, 193–94, 265 Gülen, Fethullah, 121 Guterres, Antonio, 222 Hamdan, Lawrence Abu, 248 Hameed, Asim, 285 Hamid, Wahid, 12, 81–82, 150, 172–73, 208, 213, 263–64 Hamilton Lane, 136–37, 151–52, 207, 213, 223, 242, 257, 289, 291 Hanadi bint Nasser Al Thani, Sheikha, 159 Hasan, Khaldoun Haj, 35–37 Hawaii Employees’ Retirement System, 213 Hepsiburada, 189 Hilal, Badruddin, 225–26 Hilton Hotels, 23 Hirsch, Erik, 137, 151, 207, 289 Hoffman, Reid, 101 Hohn, Chris, 216 Houlihan Lokey, 254 HSBC, 142, 285 Human Genome Project, 163 Hussein (king of Jordan), 78, 110 Hussein, Saddam, 25, 35 Husseini, Fayez, 77–78 Hydari, Imtiaz (partner), 16, 18–19, 27, 29, 31, 34, 51 impact investing Catholic Church and, 148–49 Kito de Boer on, 203, 236 development finance institutions and, 92–93 Bill Gates and, 216–17 as movement, 88–89, 90, 91 Arif Naqvi as impact investor, 1–2, 4, 6, 7, 91–93, 99–100, 172 Arif Naqvi’s speeches on, 92, 99, 134–35, 161, 191–92, 221–22 Palestine and, 198 Vatican conference on, 89–90, 91, 243 Inchcape, 18–19, 22, 23, 32, 124 India Abraaj Group’s acquisitions in, 74 Abraaj investments in, 174 British colonial rule of, 11, 24 demographics of, 202 economic expansion of, 139 Haveli mansions of, 51 population boom of, 45 relations with Pakistan, 47–48 inequality, 86–88, 294 Institutional Investor, 50 Integrated Diagnostics Holdings (IDH), 143–44, 152 International Finance Corp.


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

We kept looking for a cowboy who might have sent them on their way, but they seemed to be on their own. Denver and New York are complex urban areas. Out here, by contrast, it seemed that life must be simple, but how could I really know? That feeling of ignorance grew stronger a month later, in November, when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The day before, in New York, I had told a French radio station that Trump could never win the election. (Of course, I had plenty of company in this delusion.) The American firmament was shifting in ways I needed to understand, and these empty, forgotten places seemed an important part of that.

He previously had posted a picture of his own Dodge Ram 4x4, writing, “How does it go if you can’t Dodge it ram it if you can’t see it well hit it.” [Three days before he drove into town,] he shared five Facebook posts related to the protests. One was a meme picturing Black looters that read, “I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t look like they’re grieving to me.”…One sought prayers for President Donald Trump: “He’s fighting an evil we can’t even imagine.” One showed a T-shirt printed with an American flag and the words “You don’t have to love it, but you don’t have to live here either.” And one was a photo of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry with his gun drawn, and a reference to the line, “Go ahead, make my day.”

Equality, he said, would be fine with him. In any case, the turmoil in the outside world had reenergized Matt and Luke’s interest in prepping. The worse things got, in terms of civil unrest, the more they believed they’d soon be forced to rely on their own devices. (Both would eventually see the electoral loss of Donald Trump in November 2020 as a fraud and further evidence that people like themselves needed to prepare for total anarchy.) * * * — Fewer cows were finding their way to my place that summer, which was good, as I was still working on the fence. But the reason there were fewer cows was bad. The land was really dry, and the dark green kochia weed, which had grown a foot tall a couple of summers before, was either barely an inch tall or missing entirely.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

This was the first time the United States was governing Muslims, and attitudes among officials varied enormously. One approach was championed by Captain John Pershing, who held a post on the shore of Lake Lanao, a large body of water in Mindanao, around which nearly half the Muslim population of Moroland lived. Pershing made the news during the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump described, with relish, how Pershing (“rough guy, rough guy”) had captured fifty “terrorists,” dipped fifty bullets in pig’s blood, lined up his captives, and then shot forty-nine of them, letting the last go to report what happened. “And for twenty-five years there wasn’t a problem, okay?” Trump concluded.

It’s December and the whole family is going to see the big Christmas tree in Hirohito Center,” warned an ad by General Motors. “Go on, keep buying Japanese cars.” Resentment curdled, at least in some quarters. “They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies,” complained the real estate mogul Donald Trump on television. This issue marked Trump’s first foray into politics, and it struck a chord. The show’s host, Oprah Winfrey, noted that Trump’s message sounded like “presidential talk.” Would he ever consider running? “Probably not,” Trump replied, “but I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off.”

In July 2009, half a year into Obama’s presidency, a poll found that 58 percent of Republicans either thought Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen or weren’t sure. With time, the issue retreated from the headlines to the back rooms of the internet. But it returned in 2011, when the real-estate developer Donald Trump summoned it forth. “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump asked on The View. “There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” “There’s at least a good chance that Barack Hussein Obama has made mincemeat out of our great and cherished Constitution!” Trump wrote to The New York Times.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

First, Britain voted to leave the EU in a referendum. Second, Donald Trump became US president on a protectionist ticket (despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million). At the time of writing, it is too early to say how disruptive the Brexit vote will be to European trade. But Mr Trump followed through by imposing tariffs on certain products (steel and aluminium) and against certain nations, most notably China. It is hard to know how the trade war with China will pan out. In his negotiations with Mexico and Canada, Donald Trump seemed to follow a strategy of making big threats and settling for small concessions.

Almost 6 million people fled from Syria in the course of its civil war, with over half going to Turkey and more than a quarter ending up in the small, neighbouring countries of Lebanon and Jordan (which have a combined population of around 14.5 million).57 But the media focused on the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe and on the tragic flow of migrants in unseaworthy boats across the Mediterranean, where thousands drowned. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that the global total of displaced people in 2016 was 60 million, a post-1945 record.58 In another repeat of the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a political reaction: anti-immigrant parties did well in Europe and Donald Trump was elected president of the USA, in part because of his anti-immigration stance. The economic impact of migration It might seem obvious that an influx of immigrants will be bad for the wages of indigenous workers. After all, an increase in supply will lead, other things being equal, to a fall in price.

This presupposes that their expertise makes them wiser than elected politicians. But the crisis made central banks look rather fallible. They came under attack. The billions spent on rescue operations for the banks prompted American right-wingers to campaign to “Audit the Fed” to examine how the bank had invested its money. In his election campaign, Donald Trump said that Janet Yellen, the Fed chair, should be “ashamed” for keeping interest rates so low. After he replaced Ms Yellen, Trump criticised her successor, Jerome Powell, for pushing rates up too quickly. In Britain, Brexiteers criticised the Bank of England for being too gloomy in its forecasts of the economic impact of leaving the EU.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Styles of reasoning At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Pierce, a founder of the American school of pragmatist philosophy, distinguished three broad styles of reasoning. Deductive reasoning reaches logical conclusions from stated premises. For example, ‘Evangelical Christians are Republican. Republicans voted for Donald Trump. Evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump.’ This syllogism is descriptive of a small world. As soon as one adds the word ‘most’ before either evangelical Christians or Republicans, the introduction of the inevitable vagueness of the larger world modifies the conclusion. Inductive reasoning is of the form ‘analysis of election results shows that they normally favour incumbent parties in favourable economic circumstances and opposition parties in adverse economic circumstances’.

Since economic conditions in the United States in 2016 were neither particularly favourable nor unfavourable, we might reasonably have anticipated a close result. Inductive reasoning seeks to generalise from observations, and may be supported or refuted by subsequent experience. Abductive reasoning seeks to provide the best explanation of a unique event. For example, an abductive approach might assert that Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election because of concerns in particular swing states over economic conditions and identity, and because his opponent was widely disliked. Deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning each have a role to play in understanding the world, and as we move to larger worlds the role of the inductive and abductive increases relative to the deductive.

Adam Smith began The Wealth of Nations by illustrating the concept of the division of labour through a stylised description of a pin factory. There is no evidence that he was describing a real pin factory. In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo proposed a model of international trade based on comparative advantage which continues to be among the central insights of economics. Two hundred and fifty years before Donald Trump’s presidency, Adam Smith had refuted the mercantilist view of foreign trade as a zero sum game in which one country gained at the expense of a weaker or foolish partner – trade could benefit both parties. 3 Ricardo developed Smith’s argument to show that a country that was more efficient than another country in producing everything could still benefit from trade with the less efficient country, and vice versa. 4 In the style of his times, he illustrated his thesis with a story based on a numerical example.


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

In the wee hours of June 14, The Washington Post revealed that “Russian government hackers” had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. Foreign spies, the Post claimed, had gained access to the DNC’s entire database of opposition research on the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, just weeks before the Republican Convention. CrowdStrike went a step further, and exposed Russian tradecraft: the firm published command-and-control nodes and hashes, the unique communication links and secret serial numbers of the Russian break-in tools—the twenty-first-century version of publicly revealing a set of clandestine dead-drop boxes while they were still in use, or of exposing the license plates and secret bugging devices of undercover spies.

The rambling text dismissed the conclusions reached by the “worldwide known” company CrowdStrike. Instead, Guccifer 2.0 insisted that the DNC had been “hacked by a lone hacker.” As proof, the blog would publish eleven documents that the officers claimed came “from the DNC,” including an opposition-research file on Donald Trump and a list of major Democratic donors. The blogger claimed to have given “thousands of files and mails” to WikiLeaks, while mocking the firm investigating the case: “I guess CrowdStrike customers should think twice about company’s competence,” the post said, adding “Fuck CrowdStrike!!!!!!!!!”3 Every single detail—except the outrage—was invented, even the claim that the purported lone hacker had given the rest of the DNC files to WikiLeaks (that file transfer would happen later).

The leaked opposition research recycled prerehearsed arguments against the presumptive Republican nominee, that Trump had “no core”; that he was a “bad businessman”; and that he should be branded “misogynist in chief.” The New York Post, usually adept at finding what it called “hair-raising data,” concluded there was none in the released opposition research.5 Press attention only picked up somewhat when Donald Trump claimed that the DNC itself “did the ‘hacking.’”6 It would take nearly six weeks before the story finally dominated the news cycle. Next, the GRU recruited the help of WikiLeaks. The Guccifer 2.0 account had claimed, in the first note on the DNC hack, that “the main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks.”


pages: 278 words: 74,880

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

It impacts the national and global social and political environment, economic progress, and quality of life for all of us—including those in the wealthy minority. The rise of inequality has led to social unrest, political polarization, and growing tensions among groups. It underlay phenomena as varied as the Occupy movement, the Tea Party, and the Arab Spring; the passage of Brexit in the United Kingdom; the election of Donald Trump; and the rise of right-wing nationalism, racism, and hate groups in Europe and the United States. People who feel disinherited and left without prospects for the future have become increasingly disenchanted and angry. Our world has become sharply divided between the haves and the have-nots—two groups with little in common except a mutual sense of distrust, fear, and hostility.

Even during the Paris conference itself, hundreds of thousands of people marched at events in countries around the world, united in calling for a clean-energy future to save everything they love.2 Actions like these helped put pressure on the politicians to set aside their differences and act in service to the common good. The problem of climate change is far from solved. There are still powerful efforts of resistance launched by fossil-fuel companies and others who oppose change for purely selfish reasons. In the United States, the election of Donald Trump, who announced plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, shows that the battle against willful ignorance continues. But momentum finally appears to be on the right side. COP21 made me hopeful that a citizens’ movement can make the world ready to overcome another impending disaster. Climate change and wealth concentration both pose serious dangers to the future of human society.

FROM THE VILLAGES OF BANGLADESH TO THE STREETS OF NEW YORK: MICROCREDIT AS A TOOL FOR PROMOTING ENTREPRENEURSHIP EVEN IN THE WEALTHIEST COUNTRIES on Earth, large numbers of people are stuck in poverty or near-poverty because they are forced to rely on job opportunities as the only possible source of income. Much of the economic distress in countries like the United States—distress that helped to fuel the rising tide of anger, frustration, and hostility that led to the startling 2016 election victory of Donald Trump—can be traced to the fact that people are trapped in a system that relies on big employers to keep local economies flourishing. Thus, when big companies move overseas, automate their plants, or shut down altogether, entire communities can be destroyed. And in neighborhoods dominated by members of disfavored groups who are last in line for jobs—groups like people of color—unemployment can become a permanent condition, condemning generations to lives of struggle and suffering.


You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain by Phoebe Robinson

Bottomless brunch, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, Lyft, microaggression, Rosa Parks, uber lyft

Unfortunately, white culture is not just people with college degrees making white condiments in white rooms with whiteboards because they got seed money from probably white friends. In fact, a lot of white culture is pretty ugly. It’s done harm to a lot of people. And it’s ugly right now as I write this. At the time of this writing, Donald Trump seeks the Republican nomination supported largely by a bunch of angry white people who sense where history is going and DO NOT LIKE IT AT ALL and are therefore hoping that if they punch and shove enough brown people, it will fix it. Perhaps when you read this, Donald Trump will be president or maybe superking. But even if that happens, he shall pass. Time does not go backward. But there are also some beautiful parts of your white heritage that are worth celebrating.

In both cases, pussy and cunt are ways of shaming someone into arbitrary gender norms: to let women know they shouldn’t be confident and to signal to men that being sensitive is a sign of weakness. And until they unlearn these behaviors, they will be nothing more than a bunch of weak-willed pussies or scary cunts. This is crazy. Pussies, excuse me, vaginas, shouldn’t be the symbol of “bad” behavior; the symbol should be Donald Trump and his Cheetos-dust skin tone. Furthermore, vaginas are not weak or scary. They’re amazingly strong. And they’re self-cleaning. Basically, women have a Whirlpool dishwasher in their pants at all times. That’s some goddamned wizardry! Screw Harry Potter! Why isn’t J. K. Rowling writing a book about the magic of the vajeen and calling it what I call mine: Dolly Parton and the Coat of Many Colors?


pages: 282 words: 26,931

The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It by Craig Brandon

Bernie Madoff, call centre, corporate raider, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, impulse control, new economy, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader

All of this comes as no surprise to the academics who read professional journals such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has been publishing articles for more than a decade about dumbed-down classes, low academic standards, inflated grades, illiterate college graduates, the oversupply of graduates, and the antics of college administrators who wanted to emulate the lifestyle of Donald Trump. The mainstream news media doesn’t exactly ignore the problems either. Forbes magazine , the New York Times, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report, and the Christian Science Monitor have all run articles in recent years about what Forbes called “country club campuses.” 3 There is no shortage of stories about skyrocketing tuition increases, the crippling debt and lack of jobs the party school graduates face, high crime rates on college campuses, and drunken parties involving hundreds of students that break out after major sporting events.

It’s essential that we restore the rigor that American colleges need to train the leaders of tomorrow to compete with economic challenges from Asia in the coming decades. 2 Maximizing Profits at the Students’ Expense When party school administrators shifted their primary mission from educating students to maximizing profits in the 1990s, it worked because there was something in it for almost everyone. The dramatic increases in tuition turned administrators into powerful wheeler-dealers, academic Donald Trumps, who could design and construct multi-million-dollar campus buildings and increase their salaries. For faculty, the new dumbed-down classes and relaxed grading meant they no longer had to put much time and effort into preparing for their classes or grading papers. And the majority of party school students certainly weren’t going to complain as their campuses were turned into amusement parks and class requirements for reading, writing, and studying were drastically reduced to make college more “student friendly” and where nearly everyone got an A or a B for hardly any work.

What is needed is a reinvention of higher education from the top down to reaffirm its traditional mission to educate young people to be the leaders of tomorrow. There is, in fact, a budding back-to-basics movement within higher education; its goal is to create “no frills colleges” where overpaid Donald Trump wannabe administrators are given pink slips and the over-built and expensive country club campuses would be scrapped. Projections from the few places that are working on this idea are that tuition could be reduced by as much as 75 percent. Colleges need to be told bluntly that they are in the education business, not the entertainment business, and that too much tuition money is being wasted on administrative salaries, gourmet food courts, luxury dorms, hot tubs, and climbing walls.


pages: 247 words: 78,961

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

Essays in this work were originally published in the following publications: The American Interest: “The Wounded Home Front” and “The Great Danger of a New Utopianism”; The Atlantic: “The Art of Avoiding War,” “Elegant Decline: The Navy’s Rising Importance,” “When North Korea Falls,” “Rereading Vietnam,” “Iraq: The Counterfactual Game,” “No Greater Honor,” “In Defense of Henry Kissinger,” “Samuel Huntington: Looking the World in the Eye,” and “Why John Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things)”; The National Interest: “The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy,” “The Post-Imperial Moment,” “Fated to Lead,” and “Traveling China’s New Silk Road”; The Washington Post: “On Foreign Policy, Donald Trump Is No Realist.” Hardback ISBN 9780812996791 Ebook ISBN 9780812996807 randomhousebooks.com Title-page and part-title page images: Courtesy of the U.S. military. Photograph by Sgt. Ken Scar, 7th MPAD Book design by Victoria Wong, adapted for ebook Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr Cover photograph: Department of Defense photograph by Lance Cpl.

Foreign Policy Chapter 4: Elegant Decline: The Navy’s Rising Importance Chapter 5: When North Korea Falls War and Its Costs Chapter 6: Rereading Vietnam Chapter 7: Iraq: The Counterfactual Game Chapter 8: The Wounded Home Front Chapter 9: No Greater Honor Thinkers Chapter 10: In Defense of Henry Kissinger Chapter 11: Samuel Huntington: Looking the World in the Eye Chapter 12: Why John Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things) Reflections Chapter 13: On Foreign Policy, Donald Trump Is No Realist Chapter 14: The Post-Imperial Moment Chapter 15: Fated to Lead Chapter 16: The Great Danger of a New Utopianism Marco Polo Redux Chapter 17: Traveling China’s New Silk Road Dedication By Robert D. Kaplan About the Author The origins of hot wars lie in cold wars, and the origins of cold wars are found in the anarchic ordering of the international arena….Theorists explain what historians know: War is normal.

If China implodes from a socioeconomic crisis, or evolves in some other way that eliminates its potential as a threat, Mearsheimer’s theory will be in serious trouble because of its dismissal of domestic politics. But if China goes on to become a great military power, reshaping the balance of forces in Asia, then Mearsheimer’s Tragedy will live on as a classic. President-elect Donald Trump is being called a “realist” in foreign policy. Don’t believe it. He may have some crude realist instincts, but that only makes him a terrible messenger for realism. Realists like myself should be very nervous about his election. Realism is a sensibility, not a specific guide to what to do in each crisis.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

However, lurking behind both is a strain of pro-business market fundamentalism that draws its intellectual credibility almost entirely from a particular view of economics, one that bears striking resemblance to the picture of the subject offered by the standard curriculum: everything will work out just fine, so long as the government keeps its nose out. Many professional economists have substantially more nuanced views about the role of government in economies, and argued forcefully against the election of Donald Trump, and in particular against Britain’s proposed exit from the European Union. This, however, raises the important question of what we really mean when we talk of economics. Do we mean the professional views and research output of economists in academia, government, and the private sector? Or do we mean the picture of the subject that students are taught in university courses?

However, it might make just as much sense to talk of ‘macro-founding’ microeconomics, that is, showing how individual intentions are shaped by individuals’ economic or social positions. David Ricardo and Karl Marx did just that with their theories of class interest. That one’s ‘position’ in society affects one’s choices is obvious to anyone not thoroughly trained in neoclassical economics. An anonymous friend of Donald Trump’s told CNN that ‘I always thought that once he understood the weight of the office, he would rise to the occasion. Now I don’t.’ The phrase ‘the weight of the office’ clearly evokes the idea that the ‘office’ of US president is an entity separate from its temporary incumbent. There is a two-way causation.

Of course, the attempt to keep issues ‘off the page’ is not wholly successful. Despite long-term support from the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, Brexit was not really ‘on the page’ until David Cameron and George Osborne thought a referendum would finally stop the Conservative Party’s perpetual civil war over Europe. Likewise, Donald Trump was not really ‘on the page’ until he burst onto it during the Republican primary with a cunning grasp of the power of social media, a keen sense of TV news’ addiction to drama, and perhaps a little outside assistance. Division of opinion is the biggest limit on the ability to exercise agenda power.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

When workers’ wages fall short of expectations, people often express their discontent by turning to populist solutions.13 Figure 2.7: Debt in US Households is Still Rising Steadily Notes: This is total household debt per capita in US dollars. Student loan debt was not included until 2003. Data sources: New York Federal Reserve Bank and World Bank. The rise of populists like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump speaks to the depth of public dissatisfaction. Political polarization extends beyond the 2016 election in both time and space. The US Congress is nearly synonymous with dysfunction, in large part due to ever-increasing polarization. In Europe, both far-left and far-right parties are ascendant.14 The shrinking importance of moderate political groups likely generates several costs: more policy variability, more policy uncertainty, more difficulty enacting policy, and more extreme policies.

Chinese imports account for about 1 million of the 5.8 million (net) job losses in manufacturing over the period 1999 to 2011—and if indirect effects on other industries are included, the number of job losses attributable to trade with China is twice as large.5 As it turns out, these intense “China shock” zones overlap heavily with the voting precincts that most heavily favored Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. This election followed a long campaign season in which Trump (and Bernie Sanders, competing for the Democrats’ nomination) frequently lambasted Hillary Clinton for promoting international trade through such agreements as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA)—given her affiliation with former President Clinton, who brought NAFTA into force in 1994—and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), negotiated by the Obama administration she served as Secretary of State.

Poor countries cannot afford rich-country minimum wages, and citizens may have different preferences regarding the size and role of government. But there are still substantial gains to be had from avoiding beggar-thy-neighbor policies; often, there are situations where agreements can improve outcomes for all participants. Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s election on a platform of isolationist policies were both steps in the opposite direction. International trade agreements like the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) and supranational arrangements like the European Union are just the sort of institutions and agreements that work against policy competition.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Are they hearing the kind of criticism of ed reform policy they desperately need to? Does Bill Gates understand that the dominance of demographic factors in educational outcomes is one of the most powerful and consistent findings in the history of education research? Has he seen the research that undercuts claims of sweeping gains from charter schools or merit pay? Has Donald Trump? Has Betsy DeVos? I doubt it. I think that the commitment Bill and Melinda Gates have made to disperse their immense fortune in charitable ways is remarkable, however strongly I feel that philanthropy is not a substitute for government intervention. There are some educational projects that have been spearheaded or funded by the Gates Foundation that I find very admirable.

Abandoning the pretense of gentility often found in older schools of conservatism, uninterested in religion or traditional community, the denizens of the alt-right have flooded social media to express an aggressive, irony-drenched worldview, culminating in their vocal support for the candidacy of Donald Trump. The alt-right dismisses establishment conservatism as corrupt and toothless and advances a vision of the world where a shrinking number of proud white gentiles must battle against immigrants, people of color, the far left, and Jews. Though likely small in number, the alt-right’s savvy use of digital media has made them a force in contemporary politics.

What’s more, our years in the wilderness have left us at a remove from the wars about doctrine that did so much to define the twenty-first-century American left. Many of our current adherents are simply too young to know about the (frequently pointless) squabbles about policies and priorities that once consumed many left-wing groups. This is epitomized by the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Following the election of Donald Trump, the DSA saw a huge surge in membership, with thousands of people, most of them under 30, paying dues and joining their local DSA affiliates. To me, this evoked complicated feelings. I was raised to distrust DSA; the organization, after all, was founded by Michael Harrington to be an explicitly anti-communist socialist organization.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Organizing around issues of police violence, gun law reform, women’s rights, climate change, a living wage, and healthcare reform has picked up steam as new social movements have emerged. In 2016 we witnessed an unprecedented display of shifting political sentiments, culminating in the election of Donald Trump—a candidate far beyond the pale, relative to the political consensus that has reigned since the late 1980s.62 In 2010 only 3 percent of American adults owned a smartphone; by 2013 it was more than half; and by 2019 smartphone ownership had climbed to more than 80 percent. When examining the central place that smartphones have come to occupy in this short span of time, it is imperative that we situate our hand machines within the contours of a dynamic—and in the present moment, fraught—political, economic, and social landscape.

This is partly a result of on-the-ground organizing, and partly the result of new ideas and sources of information being distributed and cultivated online through social media. Sanders’s popularity was the result of a deep sense of distrust of the establishment and an impatience with the rhetoric of status quo elites from both parties who campaigned on a platform of “Everything is fine. Chill.”43 But Sanders wasn’t the only one who benefited from this distrust. Donald Trump also appealed to people who were on the losing end of neoliberalism, and unlike virtually any Republicans before him, Trump also relied heavily on small donors. But unlike Sanders, who was coalescing a radically progressive program, Trump was pulling together threads from the right. While Sanders talked about single-payer health care and free higher education Trump fed his networks stories of Mexican rapists and nostalgia for a time when America was “great.”

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2014. Feng, Emily. “Beijing Widens Control of Wildly Popular Short-Video Apps.” Financial Times, January 12, 2019. Ferguson, Thomas, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen. “Industrial Structure and Party Competition in the Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election.” Working Paper No. 66. Institute for New Economic Thinking, January 2018. Fitzsimmons, Emma G. “Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown.” New York Times, August 8, 2018. Foroohar, Rana. “Release Big Tech’s Grip on Power.” Financial Times, June 18, 2017.


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

The Times was so glad to find a folk hero to celebrate in the depressed metropolis that they didn’t look too closely. Their reporter joined Donald Trump while he inspected all the construction sites he claimed to be developing around the city: “a typical workday,” he said. In fact, they all belonged to, or were financed by, his father; same with the limousine. That “more than $200 million” in net worth? He was counting his dad’s money—telling the IRS that his taxable income that year was only $24,594. “So far,” he boasted, “I’ve never made a bad deal.” The Commodore project, at least, was a good deal—for Donald Trump. To gain the property, and the opportunity to flay off its landmark brick façade in favor of the gaudy bronze-tinted glass he preferred, he put up no money of his own, receiving $100 million in bank loans by negotiating an extraordinary labyrinthine deal with the New York Urban Development Corporation to forgo real estate taxes in which the city was supposed to earn its money back within forty years, though Trump said that day would come in twenty-five.

Commodore Hotel Phillips-Fein, Fear City, 75. The hungry young killer “Donald Trump, Real Estate Promoter, Builds Image as He Buys Buildings,” NYT, November 1, 1976. The Times fact-checked Trump’s claims in their 1976 article in “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches from His Father,” NYT, October 2, 2008. $160 million in the lurch Jerome Tuccille, Trump: The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron (Beard Books, 1985), 107. generally accepted accounting principles Graham Kates, “Inside a Donald Trump Audit: Missing Books and Unusual Accounting,” CBS News, August 8, 2016.

“Lisker is full of shit” UPI, August 1, 1980. Abscam defendant ABCIA, August 13, 1980. Jeff Carter ABCIA, August 10, 1980. lined the highways White, America In Search of Itself, 328. The social scene Ibid., 340; AP, August 7, 1980; New York Daily News Service, August 15, 1980. Donald Trump “Where the Donald Trumps Rent,” NYT, August 3, 1979; Trump: What’s the Deal (The Deadline Company, 1991), on YouTube.com, accessed April 24, 2020. Trump apparently timed a publicity blitz for the arrival of the out-of-town visitors; see “Playing the Trump Card,” New York Daily News, August 3, 1980; UPI, August 16, 1980


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

But by 2023, none of them had gotten underway. 44 Rocky Relationships 2016–2017 With Amber Heard, who left a kiss mark on his cheek; with Donald Trump; Errol Musk Trump Musk had never been very political. Like many techies, he was liberal on social issues but with a dollop of libertarian resistance to regulations and political correctness. He contributed to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton, and he was a vocal critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 election. “He doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States,” he told CNBC. But after Trump won, Musk became cautiously optimistic that he might govern as a renegade independent rather than a resentful right-winger.

He was especially infuriated by an attack from a progressive California assemblywoman, Lorena Gonzalez. “F*ck Elon Musk,” she tweeted. That added to his frustrations with California. “I came there when it was the land of opportunity,” he says. “Now it’s the land of litigation, regulation, and taxation.” He had developed a deep disdain for Donald Trump, whom he considered a con man, but he wasn’t impressed by Joe Biden. “When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.”

But life needs to be interesting and edgy, he says, then quotes his favorite line from the 2000 movie Gladiator: “Are you not entertained? Is that not why you are here?” By early 2022, a new ingredient had been added to this combustible cauldron: Musk’s swelling concern with the dangers of the “woke-mind virus” that he believed was infecting America. He disdained Donald Trump, but he felt it was absurd to ban permanently a former president, and he became increasingly riled up by complaints from those on the Right who were being suppressed on Twitter. “He saw the direction Twitter was heading, which was that if you were on the wrong end of the spectrum you were censored,” says Birchall.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The mixture of anxiety, anomie, alienation and anger is creating a ‘perfect storm’, enabling populist politicians to play on fears in order to build support for agendas that have echoes of the ugly aftermath of the First Gilded Age. Unless a new income distribution system can be constructed – or at least the firm beginnings of one – the drift to the far right, which underpinned Brexit and the triumph of Donald Trump in 2016, will only grow stronger. I would argue that, as the anchor of a more egalitarian and more emancipatory system, basic income has become a political imperative, which is one of the reasons for writing this book. About the Book The book is intended to guide the reader through the arguments for and against the introduction of a basic income as a right, paid in cash (or equivalent) to all individuals regardless of age, gender, marital status, work status and work history.

The Political Imperative ‘Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.’ PARAPHRASED FROM VICTOR HUGO, THE HISTORY OF A CRIME Something like a basic income has become a political imperative as never before. It is one policy that could reduce the chronic economic and social insecurity at the heart of the populist revolt behind Brexit, the election of Donald Trump as US President and the rise of nationalist and far-right movements in Europe and elsewhere. It may soon become clear that nativist populism has no attractive answer for these insecurities. Restricting migration and putting up trade barriers will ultimately hurt the very people the populists claim to represent.

For example, defeated Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking before the US presidential election, said she was ‘not ready to go there’ on basic income. By contrast, Bernie Sanders, whom she defeated for the Democratic nomination, said he was ‘absolutely sympathetic’ to the idea. Meanwhile, Donald Trump steamrollered his way to the presidency by promising to bring jobs back to the US and stop American firms from transferring jobs abroad. Yet with the introduction of protectionist measures, production costs will rise, automation will accelerate, and the next scapegoat will be the robots ‘taking American jobs from American workers’.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

The reason a dream is not reality is that when you suddenly wake up from falling from a Chinese skyscraper, life continues, and there is no absorbing barrier, the mathematical name for that irreversible state that we will discuss at length in Chapter 19, along with ergodicity, the most powerful concept I know. Next, let us consider the signaling benefits of overt flaws. THE DONALD I have a tendency to watch television with the sound off. When I saw Donald Trump in the Republican primary standing next to other candidates, I became certain he was going to win that stage of the process, no matter what he said or did. Actually, it was because he had visible deficiencies. Why? Because he was real, and the public—composed of people who usually take risks, not the lifeless non-risk-taking analysts we will present in the next chapter—would vote anytime for someone who actually bled after putting an icepick in his hand rather than someone who did not.

In this chapter, I will propose that what people resent—or should resent—is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, he is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting his income or wealth bracket, and waiting in line outside the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractors of Donald Trump, when he was still a candidate, not only misunderstood the value of scars as risk signaling, but they also failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankruptcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, he removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) people may have had toward him.

It is impossible for anyone to write a perfectly rationally argued document without a segment that, out of context, can be transformed by some dishonest copywriter to appear totally absurd and lend itself to sensationalization, so politicians, charlatans, and, more disturbingly, journalists hunt for these segments. “Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung” goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terror), and a few others. As Donald Trump said, “The facts are true, the news is fake”—ironically at a press conference in which he subsequently suffered the same selective reporting as my RSA event. The great Karl Popper often started a discussion with an unerring representation of his opponent’s positions, often exhaustive, as if he were marketing them as his own ideas, before proceeding to systematically dismantle them.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

., when the library opens, and found fourteen people scattered around the area, some hovering by the door or on the short stone staircase leading up to it, others standing on the asphalt below. There was a young professional couple: he held a paper coffee cup from the gourmet café across the street; she held two DVDs. There was an old Jewish woman, hair wrapped in a kerchief, carrying a small book bag and talking to a gray-haired man in jeans and a parka about Donald Trump. Two heavyset Latinas in their thirties or forties rested against the rail on the stairway, arms folded, occasionally reaching for a phone. An old Chinese man in a gray hat and a tan overcoat sat on the cold bench. A few college-age students with heavy backpacks stood alone, and four ragged-looking men, homeless or maybe coming from a shelter, clustered by the entrance.

The intensity of partisan disdain was visible during the 2016 election, when 55 percent of Democrats said that the Republican Party made them “afraid” and 49 percent of Republicans said the same about the Democratic Party, while more than 40 percent from both parties said their opponents’ policy ideas “threaten the nation’s well-being.” Polarization is even more evident in collective gatherings. During the 2017 California Democratic Party Convention, for instance, the chairman stuck out his middle finger and got the crowd to chant “Fuck Donald Trump!” At the 2016 Republican National Convention, an entire arena chanted “Lock Her Up!” Americans have always disagreed about politics and policy, but today our beliefs have hardened, as have our negative views of the people with whom we disagree. Sixty years ago, the nation was divided. But back then roughly one-quarter of employed Americans worked in factories, one-third of nonagricultural workers belonged to unions, and there were neighborhoods like South Chicago throughout the United States.

“and work together again”: See Cass Sunstein, “The Polarization of Extremes,” Chronicle Review, December 14, 2007. Haidt is quoted in Sean Illing, “Why Social Media Is Terrible for Multiethnic Democracies,” Vox, November 15, 2016, https://www.vox.com/​policy-and-politics/​2016/​11/​15/​13593670/​donald-trump-jonathan-haidt-social-media-polarization-europe-multiculturalism. cannot be entirely to blame: Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro, “Is the Internet Causing Polarization? Evidence from Demographics,” Working Paper, 2014, http://web.stanford.edu/​~gentzkow/​research/​age-polar.pdf.


pages: 288 words: 81,253

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

When the 24% result happened at the final table of the charity tournament, that didn’t reflect inaccuracy about the probabilities as determined before that single outcome. Long shots hit some of the time. Blaming the oddsmakers or the odds themselves assumes that once something happens, it was bound to have happened and anyone who didn’t see it coming was wrong. The same thing happened after Donald Trump won the presidency. There was a huge outcry about the polls being wrong. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, drew a lot of that criticism. But he never said Clinton was a sure thing. Based on his aggregation and weighting of polling data, he had Trump between 30% and 40% to win (approximately between two-to-one and three-to-two against) in the week before the election.

Reaction to the 2016 election provides another strong demonstration of what happens when we lop branches off the tree. Hillary Clinton had been favored going into the election, and her probability of winning, based on an accumulation of the polls, was somewhere between 60% and 70%, according to FiveThirtyEight.com. When Donald Trump won, pollsters got the Pete Carroll treatment, maybe no one more than Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.com and a thoughtful analyzer of polling data. (“Nate Silver was wrong.” “The pollsters missed it.” “Just like Brexit, the bookies blew it.” Etc.) The press spun this as a certain win for Clinton, despite the Trump branch of the tree being no mere twig at 30%–40%.

Politico’s November 9 headline was “How Did Everyone Get It So Wrong?,” http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/how-did-everyone-get-2016-wrong-presidential-election-231036. Gizmodo.com jumped on Silver even before the election, in a November 4 article by Matt Novak titled “Nate Silver’s Very Very Wrong Predictions About Donald Trump Are Terrifying,” http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/nate-silvers-very-very-wrong-predictions-about-donald-t-1788583912, including the declaration, “Silver has no f**king idea.” CHAPTER 2: WANNA BET? Hearing is believing: The quote about baldness is from Susan Scutti, “Going Bald Isn’t Your Mother’s Fault; Maternal Genetics Are Not to Blame,” Medical Daily, May 18, 2015, http://www.medicaldaily.com/going-bald-isnt-your-mothers-fault-maternal-genetics-are-not-blame-333668.


pages: 284 words: 84,169

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

It was when he reached for a stylish and serious rhetorical flourish (as in the repeated structure in “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we…” above) that he lost track of where he was, and came out with something that set the comedy-show writing teams to high-fiving, their night’s work done for them. No discussion of register and American presidents would be complete without a look at Obama’s successor. For many journalists and pundits it was obvious that there was no way Donald Trump would become president. No candidate in the history of the republic, surely, had used the word “rapists” in announcing his bid for the presidency. But Trump, in talking of illegal immigrants from Mexico, threw caution to the wind. Instead of the usual high-flying clichés about America’s greatness, the entire speech was a bizarre series of extemporised, often repetitive riffs.

First, in June, Britain voted for Brexit: to leave the European Union, against the advice of the overwhelming majority of politicians, economists, academics, business leaders and elite journalists. Then, in November, America rejected a former secretary of state and senator, Hillary Clinton, for a political novice and a billionaire with a habit of saying appalling things, Donald Trump. In both cases, the experts misread the sentiment of a part of their country far away from the big cities where journalists tend to live and work. And in both cases, those angry voters, ready to vote for change of almost any kind, were seduced not by “cuttlefish squirting out ink”, but by politicians making it perfectly clear what they wanted and how they planned to get it.

We get our own seat on the bodies that actually run the world. We get back the ability to strike free-trade deals. “Elites” could cavil at the facts implied here. But the pounding, repetitive phrasing was perfectly clear and punishingly effective. Whatever the causes of the narrow victory for Brexit, obfuscating language was not it. That same summer, Donald Trump was shifting into general-election mode in America, having wrapped up the Republican nomination for president. He had swept away more than a dozen Republican rivals who had tried to belittle him as a newcomer out of his depth. Something about his campaign generated an energy among his voters that none of his rivals could match.


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

The plague risked blowing up into a global catastrophe. Hundreds of people had already died, but potentially hundreds of millions of lives were at stake. Initially, WHO won the argument and only local measures were adopted. But Ebola’s fast spread validated MSF’s alarmist view. A global panic ensued, dubbed “Fearbola.” (Donald Trump, then a property developer turned reality-TV star, called President Barack Obama “psycho” for not canceling flights from West Africa—though direct flights didn’t exist—and tweeted “KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!”) Only extraordinary actions from governments were able to control the situation, and in the end, the crisis ebbed.

On July 14, 2020, one of its columnists, Bari Weiss, a journalistic gadfly who leans left on some issues and right on others, resigned in a huff. She had been recruited to the Times from the conservative Wall Street Journal three years earlier in an attempt to broaden the spectrum of views in the Times’s op-ed section. Following the surprise election of Donald Trump—surprising for East Coast media elites most of all—the paper’s leadership felt that it was out of step with the views of the country it covered. Bringing in right-of-center opinion writers was a way to present a diverse range of views to readers. It was inspired by the noblest of intentions from the opinion-page editor, James Bennet, and the paper’s family owner.

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 . . . Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, which knocks it out in a minute.” The effect was stunning. Other comedians have tried to impersonate Trump by imitating him physically, down to his girth, red cap, and comb-over.


pages: 291 words: 85,822

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

The problem is that from riots in China to suicides in New Jersey, Hoaxes are a category of lie that never—by definition—stays on a personal scale. Once enough individual beliefs reach that critical mass I mentioned earlier, they alter everyone’s reality. Take, for example, the 2016 election. According to a recent Ohio State University study, fake news likely swung the presidency to Donald Trump. The study, authored by Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck, and Erik C. Nisbet,32 is one of the first analyses of the effect fake news had on voter turnout and their choices, and it suggests that around 4 percent of Americans who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 were dissuaded from voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 specifically because of the influence of specious news.

According to the published study, 2012 Obama voters who believed one of these hoaxes “were 3.9 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016 than those who believed none of these false claims, after taking into account all of these other factors.”33 That’s provocative, but hardly conclusive. People have lots of reasons for how they vote. Hillary Clinton is inextricably linked with Bill Clinton, and not everyone who voted for Obama in 2012 liked Bill Clinton. Donald Trump is very tall—don’t laugh, that’s been documented to influence voter confidence. He lives in a gold building and has an allegedly sexy wife. Some people feel Hillary Clinton has an irritating voice. And while we’re on it, a lot of people just don’t like the idea of a woman president. You get the idea.

Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino, “Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16 (1977): 107–12. 29.  Seifert, “Continued Influence.” 30.  David Schiffman, “No, Mermaids Do Not Exist,” Slate, May 30, 2013. 31.  Andrew David Thaler, “The Politics of Fake Documentaries,” Slate, August 31, 2016. 32.  Aaron Blake, “A New Study Suggests Fake News Might Have Won Donald Trump the 2016 Election,” Washington Post, April 3, 2018. 33.  Ibid. 34.  Ibid. 35.  Katie Langin, “Fake News Spreads Faster Than True News on Twitter—Thanks to People, Not Bots,” Science, March 8, 2018. 36.  Ibid. 37.  Ibid. 38.  Ibid. 39.  Ibid. 40.  Ibid. 41.  Schwartz, “The Infamous ‘War of the Worlds’ Radio Broadcast.” 42.  


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

Pursuing individual reward logically leads both of the prisoners to betray each other (and accordingly end up with a two-year sentence each), when they would have got a better individual reward (just a one-year sentence) if they had both kept silent. If only they could have trusted each other enough, they would have made a different decision. ‘This was the situation we were facing around the year 2015 or so. Our political and business leaders did not trust each other. The presidential election of Donald Trump, during which Russian AI systems were believed to have influenced public opinion, made matters worse. Everyone wanted more power than the other guy and AI became the new cold war. It was an arms race, with intelligence being the biggest advantage anyone could ever attain. Google needed to beat Facebook, the US needed to beat China and Russia, start-ups needed to beat the big players, and law-enforcement authorities needed to beat the hackers and criminals.

If we become cyborgs, as Elon Musk predicts, and extend our intelligence by connecting it to the intelligence of the machines, would we then value the machines supporting the rich more than those integrated with the poor? How would the poorer machines feel? Would the poor have the resources to integrate with a machine at all? Would it be ethical to create this new form of digital intelligence divide? Can you imagine what the relationship between Donald Trump’s machine and Vladimir Putin’s machine, if those existed, might have been? How about virtual vice? When an AI that works as a romantic sex robot, of which there are surely many primitive examples today, is raped, should we punch the perpetrator? If we don’t, what will we be teaching the robot as a result?

Beyond the algorithms that are initially programmed into the AI, all of its learning – at least, when it comes to dealing with humanity – will come from observing patterns of human behaviour. All this behaviour that is documented on the internet. It is not just about what the rich, the famous and the policymakers are doing. The machines are not only reading the headlines, they have the brain capacities to read it all. The monkey is observing every one of us. Whenever Donald Trump tweeted, his words become just one line of input into the AI pattern recognition neural network. The 30,000 retweets and comments that followed constitute the real observation. The patterns that are to be found in the wisdom of the crowds are what will shape the intelligence of the machines. The machine does not view a comment from a president as any more pattern defining than one from you or me.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

There are only a few best-selling authors on the list, and even they are on the list because of their business ventures. If one searches Amazon.com for Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, or Steven Spielberg, many books come up, with numerous co-authors, but these books appear to be part and parcel of their media and entertainment enterprises. Their wealth appears to be related to large-scale nancial activities, not just artistic creativity. For example, Oprah Winfrey now has her own cable network, the Oprah Winfrey Network or OWN, and her own magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine. Donald Trump is more squarely situated in nance, with his Trump Organization and Trump Entertainment Resorts.

But, though they may run a business with a specialized non nancial product, they do so on such a scale that they are surely involved in finance. Forbes also maintains the Celebrity 100 list, the members of which are selected based not on their wealth but on other factors indicating their public presence, as well as their income.4 Only three of those on this list—Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, and Steven Spielberg—are also on the Forbes 400 list. They are on both lists only because they are leading double lives as managers and entertainers—and big-time, as each manages a massive entertainment empire. Being famous is not at all the same as being rich, and finance is not by itself a route to celebrity.

Family Dynasties Part of the reason for a sense of injustice at the unequal distribution of wealth is that some of the inequality seems to be the result of family dynasties, through which the children of successful businesspeople become rich, whether or not they are deserving. Some of these children, for example Donald Trump, keep working in the family business. But in fact only about a third of family businesses are continued by the children of the founders, and only a tenth of them by the grandchildren.6 Still, the later generations remain rich. Having one’s children and grandchildren become wealthy and perhaps continue the family business is a source of great meaning to many of those who have founded businesses.


pages: 400 words: 121,708

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

Only half the electorate voted, but Reagan had won convincingly, especially in the south and west where new industries from defence to electronics prospered. Moreover, the Republicans won a majority in the Senate for the first time since 1954 and increased their standing in the House of Representatives. Very much like Donald Trump on his arrival at the White House three and a half decades later, Reagan presented himself as an outsider coming in to shake up Washington. Across Defense, State, Intelligence and National Security as well as in the Treasury and many other federal departments, the newcomers swept away old ideologies and brought in new political ideas.

The November 1983 war scare was once again presented as ‘hostile propaganda, which blames the United States for an increased danger of war’ in order to ‘excite opposition to Washington’s policies’ and to ‘undercut the President’s re-election prospects’.26 In reality, the Soviet Union was too weak and leaderless to exert any real influence upon the outcome of the US election. But it certainly did not look like that in Washington. Just as in 2016 with Donald Trump’s campaign, fears began to spread that the Soviets were trying to influence the outcome of an American presidential election. Despite Reagan’s change of tone during the campaign, a private poll in July had revealed that four out of ten Americans imagined a nuclear holocaust would annihilate mankind during their lifetime.

Fears have grown about Russia’s ability to conduct a form of hybrid warfare using cyber attacks against Western systems and deploying fake news against its enemies. This came to a head in the US presidential election in 2016 when accusations were made that Russia had tried to rig the election against Hillary Clinton and in favour of Donald Trump, just as in 1984 there were allegations of Soviet meddling in Reagan’s mid-term election. Russia can still bring hard military power to bear, and not only in conflicts with its neighbours. NATO grew anxious in September 2017 when a military exercise called Zapad 17 seemed to threaten the Baltic states.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

‘Come on, you yellow bellies,’ taunts one of them, brandishing the knives.6 As the boys begin duking it out, Dr Sherif, posing as the camp caretaker, sits off to one side, busily scribbling his notes. He could tell already: this experiment was going to be a goldmine. The story of the Robbers Cave Experiment has made a comeback in recent years, especially since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I can’t tell you how many pundits have pointed to this study as the anecdotal key to understanding our times. Aren’t the Rattlers and the Eagles a symbol for the ubiquitous clashes between left and right, conservative and progressive? Television producers looked at the study’s premise and saw a hit.

‘But perhaps it is not a failing …’30 6 Looking back on the most hopeful shifts in recent decades, we see that trust and contact were instrumental every time. Take the emancipation of gays and lesbians starting from the 1960s. As more and more brave souls came out of the closet, friends and co-workers and mothers and fathers learned that not everybody has the same sexual preference. And that that’s okay. But the opposite also holds true. After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, it became clear that all too often we still live in our own bubbles. Two sociologists even showed that ‘the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support’.31 And also that the further the distance to the border separating the US from Mexico, the higher the support for the man who campaigned on building a giant wall between the two.32 The problem, in other words, was not too much contact between Trump voters and Muslims and refugees, but too little.

We like helping because without each other we’d wither away. Doing good typically feels good because it is good. Sadly, untold companies, schools and other institutions are still organised around a myth: that it’s in our nature to be locked in competition with one another. ‘In a great deal you win – not the other side,’ counsels Donald Trump in his book Think Big and Kick Ass. ‘You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.’5 In truth, this works precisely the other way around. The best deals are those where everybody wins. Those prisons in Norway? They’re better, more humane and less expensive. Jos de Blok’s homecare organisation in Holland?


pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

However, when it comes to Palestine and peacemaking between Palestinians and Israelis that necessarily entails concessions from the latter, there seem to be no major US strategic or economic interests at stake, and no means to counterbalance the sustained opposition from Israel and its supporters, which is inevitably greater on this one issue than any other.42 US presidents, from Truman to Donald Trump, have been reluctant to walk into this buzz saw of antagonism, and have thus by and large allowed Israel to dictate the pace of events and even to determine US positions on issues relating to Palestine and the Palestinians. It could be argued that this permissive American attitude toward Israel’s behavior—occasionally masked by declaratory opposition to specific measures, which rarely changed the situation on the ground—endangers US interests in the Middle East, given the widespread support for the Palestinians by the populations of the Arab world.43 But the Middle East has for years been ruled by the largest concentration of autocratic regimes of any region in the world.

The great powers were committed to Zionism, he continued, “and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”1 One hundred years later, President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying, “We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it anymore.” Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, “You won one point, and you’ll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place. I don’t know that it will ever take place.”2 The center of the Palestinians’ history, identity, culture, and worship was thus summarily disposed of without even the pretense of consulting their wishes.

Reducing the extensive sustained external support for the discriminatory and deeply unequal status quo would certainly smooth the path ahead. * * * HOWEVER, THE WAR on Palestine passed the hundred-year mark with the Palestinians confronting circumstances more daunting than perhaps at any time since 1917. With his election, Donald Trump began pursuit of what he called “the deal of the century,” purportedly aimed at a conclusive resolution of the conflict. Closing the deal has so far involved dispensing with decades of bedrock US policies, outsourcing strategic planning to Israel, and pouring contempt on the Palestinians. Inauspiciously, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman (his bankruptcy lawyer and a longtime financial supporter of the Jewish settler movement), spoke of an “alleged occupation” and demanded that the State Department stop using the term.


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

Sitting around the laminated table with his intelligence chiefs and eating bland processed food – all shipped in from the States – the likes of which I hadn’t had inflicted on me since school dinners, we watched with amusement the alarm on his colleagues’ faces as he said we could have access to all their intelligence on corruption. He evidently got sat on because it never materialized, but it was exciting at the time. That he had some integrity and brains was demonstrated when some years later he resigned as Donald Trump’s national security adviser. Returning to work after a year’s maternity leave, Ellie came up with a strategy in support of our corruption campaign. ‘I’ve identified this gap in our work,’ she told us. ‘Many of the cultural centres where the criminals chose to spend the proceeds of crime are actually on our doorstep in London and Paris, plus the US.

So how is it that these companies, with the blessing of governments across the world who want a slice of the action, keep looking for new reserves? Perhaps you don’t need to look much further than the political donations made by the fossil-fuel industry. In 2020, of the US$110 million of oil-industry donations that flowed to the candidates fighting for seats in Congress or for the presidency itself, just over US$3 million went to Donald Trump, but Biden’s US$1.5 million was not insignificant. The shadow network knows no political boundaries as it leads humanity into a mass greed-fuelled suicide. The power, reach and dogged determination of the shadow network’s army hit painfully home to us when, in February 2017, the newly installed President Trump picked Rex Tillerson to be his new Secretary of State, the second-most powerful office in the most powerful country in the world.

These data-based investigations are now a critical part of Global Witness’s arsenal, and in addition to the tech-based sleuthing by Sam and Louis, in 2020 we formed a new campaign team to tackle a rising new challenge, one of the most insidious forms of corruption: digital threats against democracy. The role of the abuse of social media in manipulating elections became big news with both the Brexit referendum in the UK and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. An unholy alliance between Facebook and a shadowy UK company called Cambridge Analytica was immortalized in the documentary film The Great Hack. Cambridge Analytica had been involved in numerous election campaigns, including in India and Kenya, but the real scandal broke when a whistleblower exposed that, funded by both the pro-Trump and Brexit campaigns, they had harvested the personal information of around 87 million Facebook users in a massive data breach.


pages: 441 words: 124,798

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, centre right, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, fulfillment center, invisible hand, labor-force participation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, single-payer health, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

The federal government spent an estimated $192 billion on disability payments in 2017 alone, more than the combined total for food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies, and unemployment assistance. For people who have not ventured recently into rural America, the jaw-dropping and visible decline of work comes as a shocker, an outgrowth of the nation’s widening political and cultural divide. Before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, that disconnect was maintained by a national media that paid little attention to rural, predominantly white places like St. Charles or Bassett, where the country’s much-hailed economic recovery had definitely not trickled down. At the same time, it had never been within the purview of local papers like the Martinsville Bulletin to investigate what was happening with international trade in Washington or New York, much less the latest push by Big Pharma or global drug cartels.

For decades, black poverty had been concentrated in urban zones, a by-product of earlier inner-city deindustrialization, racial segregation, and urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s that decimated black neighborhoods and made them natural markets for heroin and cocaine. Whites had historically been more likely to live in spread-out settings that were less marred by social problems, but in much of rural America that was clearly no longer the case. These were the same counties where Donald Trump performed best in the 2016 election—the places with the most economic distress and the highest rates of drug, alcohol, and suicide mortality. The national media’s collective jaw-dropping at the enormity of needs displayed at the RAM event underscored the fact that the outside world had zero clue.

“On the other side of the cities”: Author interview, Dr. Art Van Zee, Sept. 24, 2016. For decades, black poverty had been concentrated: Caroline Jean Acker, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 225. same counties where Donald Trump performed: Shannon Monnat, “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Pennsylvania State University, Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education Research Brief, Dec. 4, 2016. (Monnat now works at Syracuse University.) “when one of us makes a mistake”: Author interview, Wendy Welch, May 22, 2017.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

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

Fox News, May 3, 2020. www.foxnews.com/transcript/dr-deborah-birx-on-efforts-to-find-covid-19-treatments-vaccines-and-push-to-reopen-america. Domar, Evsey D. “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis.” Journal of Economic History 30, no. 1 (1970): 18–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2116721. “Donald Trump Ron DeSantis Press Conference Transcript.” Rev, April 28, 2020. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-ron-desantis-press-conference-transcript. Donev, J. M. K. C., et al. “Oil Crisis of the 1970s.” Energy Education (2016). Accessed January 20, 2021. https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_crisis_of_the_1970s. Donthi, Narasimha Reddy.

., “The Targeting and Impact of Paycheck Protection Program Loans to Small Businesses.” Their self-assessed probability: Bartik et al., “The Targeting and Impact.” the overall unemployment: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Unemployment Rate.” The unemployment rate among: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation—July 2020,” 28. “fear sparked by”: “Donald Trump Ron DeSantis Press Conference Transcript.” 33,000 cases and 1,200 deaths: Ross, “Florida Coronavirus Deaths Surpass 1,200, Cases Pass 33,000.” Nearly a third of the state’s: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All Employees: Leisure and Hospitality in Florida.” According to cell-phone data: Glaeser et al., “Learning from Deregulation: The Asymmetric Impact of Lockdown and Reopening on Risky Behavior During COVID-19.”

One striking piece of research: Sheridan et al., “Social Distancing Laws Cause Only Small Losses of Economic Activity during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Scandinavia.” In Brazil, there was also little link: Chauvin, Glaeser, and Kestelman, “Regulation and Mobility in Brazil.” “Florida’s done better”: “Donald Trump Ron DeSantis Press Conference Transcript,” Rev. Ardern and Bloomfield did: Cheng, “Covid 19 Coronavirus: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s D-Day Decision Already Made for Her.” Visits to sit-down restaurants: Glaeser et al., “Learning from Deregulation.” 100,000 COVID-19 cases by June 22: “Florida Coronavirus Map and Case Count,” The New York Times.


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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

The more heads you get in a row, the more you should start to expect heads in the future.* Which brings us to Donald Trump. As the 2016 U.S. presidential election neared, one thing everyone agreed on was that Hillary Clinton was running ahead. But just how much of a chance Donald Trump had was in great dispute. The newsmagazine Vox wrote on November 3: Just last week, Nate Silver’s polls-only forecast gave Hillary Clinton an overwhelming 85 percent chance of winning. But as of Thursday morning, her odds have fallen down to 66.9 percent—suggesting that while Donald Trump is still the underdog, there’s a one-in-three shot he’ll end up the next president.

Van Hollen beat out Kathleen Falk to become Wisconsin’s attorney general; he won fifty-one of the assembly districts. Those are the two circles near the middle of the plot. Republican Ron Johnson, in his 2010 senate race, did better, getting 52.4% of the vote against incumbent Russ Feingold and winning in sixty-three assembly districts. Starting in 2012, things look different. Donald Trump in 2016 and Scott Walker in 2018 were in nearly tied elections, just like Bush and van Hollen; but where those two Republicans came out ahead in fifty-six and fifty-one districts, Trump and Walker both won in sixty-three out of ninety-nine, the same number Ron Johnson got under the court-drawn map while solidly beating his Democratic opponent.

The Purple party got 60% of the vote, and it gets 60% of the seats. But would proportional representation actually be the outcome if maps were drawn fairly? Almost surely not! Take the Wyoming State Senate. Wyoming is by some measures the most strongly Republican state in America. Two-thirds of its voters picked Donald Trump in 2016, and the same proportion voted Republican in the governor’s race in 2018. But the state senate isn’t two-thirds Republican; there are twenty-seven GOP senators and only three Democrats. Should we really see that as unfair? When a state’s population is two-thirds Republican, it’s pretty likely that almost every geographic chunk of the state is pretty Republican.


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

Going forward, we need to cultivate more effective ways to monitor potential hot zones and gather information on these risks. And most especially, it means addressing protracted social challenges that leave many of our most vulnerable communities excessively exposed to the dangers posed by infectious disease. As for the political response, President Donald Trump and his advisers grew increasingly weary of the economic impact of the measures recommended by public health authorities, and they were wrongly convinced that uncontrolled spread was inevitable regardless of what steps were taken. This partly underpinned an ambivalence by the president on how forcefully to embrace mitigation.

.,” Twitter, February 7, 2021, 9:43 a.m. 19.Kate Sheridan, “How Blackouts, Fires, and a Pandemic are Driving Shortages of Pipette Tips—and Hobbling Science,” STAT, April 28, 2021. 20.US Food and Drug Administration, “Medical Device Shortages During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency,” accessed February 26, 2021, https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/medical-device-shortages-during-covid-19-public-health-emergency. 21.Farhad Manjoo, “How the World’s Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask,” New York Times, March 25, 2020. 22.Amanda Watts and Alison Main, “The US Has a Stockpile of Masks, Health Secretary Says,” CNN, February 26, 2020. 23.Lawrence Wright, “The Plague Year,” New Yorker, December 28, 2020. 24.David Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Nicholas Kulish, “A Ventilator Stockpile, with One Hitch: Thousands Do Not Work,” New York Times, April 20, 2020; and Rick Sobey, “Donald Trump: U.S. Has 9,000 Ventilators in Federal Stockpile,” Boston Herald, April 6, 2020. 25.Sanger, Kanno-Youngs, and Kulish, “A Ventilator Stockpile, with One Hitch: Thousands Do Not Work.” 26.Kim Chandler, “Some States Receive Masks with Dry Rot, Broken Ventilators,” Associated Press, April 4, 2020. 27.Lena H.

.,” Washington Post, December 23, 2020. 35.William Wan and Ben Guarino, “Why America Is ‘Flying Blind’ to the Coronavirus Mutations Racing Across the Globe,” Washington Post, January 29, 2021. 36.Caitlin Rivers and Dylan George, “How to Forecast Outbreaks and Pandemics,” Foreign Affairs, June 29, 2020. 37.Adam Rogers, “It’s Time for a National Pandemic Prediction Agency,” WIRED, February 3, 2021. 38.Dan Diamond and Nahal Toosi, “Trump Team Failed to Follow NSC’s Pandemic Playbook,” Politico, March 25, 2020. 39.Scott Gottlieb et al., “National Coronavirus Response: A Roadmap to Reopening,” American Enterprise Institute, March 29, 2020, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-coronavirus-response-a-road-map-to-reopening/. 40.Rev.com, “Donald Trump Coronavirus Task Force Press Conference Transcript March 30,” March 30, 2020. 41.Kathryn Watson, “Trump Announces CDC Recommends Cloth Masks in Public but Says He Won’t Wear One,” CBS News, April 3, 2020. 42.Lynne Peeples, “Face Masks: What the Data Say,” Nature, October 6, 2020. 43.Christopher Leffler et al., “Association of Country-Wide Coronavirus Mortality with Demographics, Testing, Lockdowns, and Public Wearing of Masks,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 103, no. 6 (2020): 2400–11. 44.Wei Lyu and George L.


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The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

hyperbole (high-PERR-buh-lee), noun An over-exaggeration made for effect. “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little HYPERBOLE never hurts.” – Donald Trump, American entrepreneur Hyperborean (high-per-BORE-ee-an), noun A person or animal who lives at or near the North Pole. The polar bear, one of the great HYPERBOREANS, is in danger of extinction as the melting of the polar cap makes the ice floes on which they live disappear. hypercritical (high-purr-KRIT-ih-kuhl), adjective Excessively or meticulously critical.

Natasha incurred OPPROBRIUM when, in a fit of anger, she deliberately smashed her Waterford crystal wine glass at the Smythingtons’ annual Thanksgiving gala. opine (oh-PYNE), verb To give your opinion. The way that Charlotte OPINES about fashion, you’d think she created couture rather than just purchasing it. opulent (AHP-yoo-lent), adjective Reflecting wealth and affluence. Donald Trump showcases his OPULENT lifestyle by wearing designer suits, drinking Cristal champagne, and traveling in private airplanes. opus (OH-puss), noun A major work of music written by a composer. The Breckinridges commissioned the composer’s next OPUS, which will be debuted at the family’s fall ball.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The Tea Party took that and ran with it, and created a sustained social movement . . . bigger perhaps, and not so dependent on a personality like Ron Paul. But, fast-forward to today and you could say the same thing about Bernie Sanders, you could say the same thing about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even Donald Trump in a different way. He is sort of a pop-star character from his television shows. All of these candidates use technology. All of them, in their own way, are sort of authentic. Powell: So, before we jump so far ahead to the socialists and what’s resonating now, what happened to the movement that became the Tea Party?

., with people representing potential votes, and politicians are going to be attracted, sort of like flies to . . . flypaper. You thought I was going to say something else, right? So yeah, like flies to shit. All of a sudden, the community moved away from those principles and started thinking about political wins. Politics divides people, and Donald Trump’s candidacy succeeded in breaking up the once mighty Tea Party once and for all. But you know, politics happens at the margin, and small margins lead to big differences in outcomes. Those liberty-minded activists, at least the ones from the Ron Paul movement and the libertarians and the constitutional conservatives, they are still there, but they no longer represent a cohesive social movement that will impact political decisions in the same way they did in 2010.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

And what happens when our politicians and business leaders can no longer promise “their people” that the next generation will be better off than the last? Do you quickly look for people in another country to blame? Do that and then it becomes hard to maintain a common front. Some businesspeople will turn on their own politicians—turning on Donald Trump, in the case referred to above—to try to explain why their government’s approach is not helping. Although to see that in Tim Cook’s message, you need to read between the lines. That the chief executive officer of Apple, the eleventh-largest company in the world by revenue in 2019 and the fourth largest in America, should be so concerned about U.S. relations with China is telling.

One was a literal “piss-artist.”36 Stram Kurs won only 1.8 percent of the vote, and thus did not get any seats in the Folketing. As the South African political scientist Sithembile Mbete has observed, populism is a kind of theater.37 It is not just South Africa, Brazil, Turkey, and Russia that are today so often put forward as examples of populism rising around the world. With the advent of Donald Trump, the United States usually gets first mention (and of course Trump likes being mentioned). However, as Lührmann and Lindberg point out, populism is generally on the wane. As we try to work out what it is that we, collectively, really believe in, some places tend to be ahead of others in helping individualism, selfishness, bigotry, and populism wane.

We should expect to see even greater participation of women in our politics in the very near future, as women hold more and more senior political offices. That may be something that does not slow down for some time to come. In December 2019 the most unequal countries of the affluent world were ruled by very right-wing men: Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Sebastián Piñera in Chile, and Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom. In contrast, women were increasingly winning power in countries where greater equality was also being won. This was most notable that month in Finland with the appointment of the new prime minister, Sanna Marin of the Social Democratic Party, who then governed in coalition with Li Anderson (Left Alliance), Katri Kulmuni (Centre Party), Maria Ohisalo (Green League), and Anna-Maja Henriksson (Swedish People’s Party of Finland).41 Pause to think of how much has changed in such a short space of time, and it is easy to become more optimistic.


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Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

The article made clear that the choice of a home is part of a delicate balancing of forces in a career-optimization strategy. Hence “Bay Area real-estate agents say their clients are becoming reluctant to buy fancy homes, for fear of spooking investors wary of distracted or high-living founders.”20 The Donald Trump Narrative and Urban Investors Offsetting the modesty narrative was the Donald Trump narrative, which led to his election as president of the United States in 2016. The Trump narrative proved that many people are not at all “spooked” by those who “live large.” On the contrary, as Trump openly states in his various coauthored books, it pays to let people know that one is rich.

The modesty decline is likely related to the rise in inequality, in the share of national income earned by the top 1%, documented by Thomas Piketty in his 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.39 It also is likely related to the long-term decline in managers’ feeling of loyalty to their employees, documented by Louis Uchitelle in his 2006 book The Disposable American.40 A narrative downplaying modesty and compassion was supported by Donald Trump in his 2007 book, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, coauthored with Bill Zanker.41 The frugality narrative was repeated in Japan after 1990, with different stories and personalities. The high-flying Japanese economy of the 1980s had given way to the “lost decades” of the 1990s and beyond and to stories similar to the modesty and compassion stories in the United States.

The gold standard narrative, to which we turn in the next chapter, has a similar moral theme. Chapter 12 The Gold Standard versus Bimetallism Especially prominent among perennial economic narratives, the gold standard narrative dating back over a century remains somewhat active today. For example, President Donald Trump has repeatedly advocated a return to the gold standard in the United States. In a 2017 interview, he said: We used to have a very, very solid country because it was based on a gold standard.… Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but boy, would it be wonderful. We’d have a standard on which to base our money.1 Stated simply, bringing back a gold standard means defining the nation’s currency in terms of a fixed unchanging amount of gold, and the government promising to redeem currency in gold or to do the reverse, on demand, so that the currency is perfectly interchangeable with gold.


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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

Skip Notes *1 Musk would eventually grow so unhappy with the seats that he ordered the company to begin manufacturing its own—a costly and time-intensive process that would eventually lead to a factory down the road. *2 Musk has said their relationship didn’t begin until Heard filed for divorce in May 2016. They were friends before that. *3 Cook told a New York Times podcast in 2021 that he had never spoken to Musk. However, Cook had been photographed sitting next to Musk at a meeting held by Donald Trump in 2016, and both executives served together on a business school advisory board in China. *4 Musk has denied this, including in a May 21, 2018, tweet: “Tesla factory literally has miles of painted yellow lines & tapes.” *5 J.D. Power wouldn’t begin including Tesla in its study publicly until 2020.

The heightened attention changed his life. On the upside, he was dating a fellow celebrity; he seemed to delight in taking her to the office to impress his senior executive team. On occasion, Heard would sit around as Musk conducted meetings; she brought a cake to celebrate this birthday. Newly elected U.S. president Donald Trump was seeking out Musk’s opinions on things, asking him to join high-profile advisory councils. (During one call to Musk, according to a person familiar with the conversation, Trump sought advice on NASA: “I want to make NASA great again.”) CEOs that winter were landing in hot water with customers for their association with Trump; Musk took grief from Heard, who was unhappy with his budding relationship with the Republican president.

It was that kind of no-limits thinking that had gotten him to China to begin with, and that came again as he entertained serious conversations about entering the country without a partner—an idea that a team of lawyers had told him over the years was impossible. By 2017, though, the outlook for such a venture was looking brighter. Late that summer, a deal was reached to allow Tesla to build a factory, and the Chinese asked if they could announce it soon, presumably in the fall, when President Donald Trump was expected to visit the country amid trade tensions, said people familiar with the talks and plans. But Musk said the deal couldn’t go through yet. With Model 3 production snared, Tesla didn’t have the money for the factory. Musk wanted the company to punt the announcement down the road, one of the people said.


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

Through a complex series of transactions, Rich and his companies avoided paying tax on more than $100 million of income, the indictment alleged. The federal prosecutors – first Sandy Weinberg and later Rudy Giuliani, who would later become mayor of New York and then the personal attorney to President Donald Trump – called the indictment the largest tax fraud case in US history. Rich faced up to 300 years in jail if he was convicted on all counts. Rich’s lawyers challenged the indictment, arguing it was a civil tax case rather than a criminal matter. Many other companies had engaged in similar activity and paid hefty fines, but weren’t accused of criminal offences.

For oil, they hired a man who knew how to get it into the market: Murtaza Lakhani, the very same fixer who had been Glencore’s man in Iraq a decade earlier and had played a role in the oil-for-food scandal. Now working as an independent consultant, Lakhani helped the Kurds connect with the commodity traders. 9 Among the other fixers who cropped up in Kurdistan was Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump, who would later be jailed for financial fraud. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Manafort’s role was to help organise an independence referendum. 10 But to convert their new oil into money, the Kurds needed to find a way to sell it. And that was not an easy task: Baghdad had threatened legal action against buyers of the crude, considering it stolen property of the Iraqi state.

For the commodity houses, that meant growing global trade and markets that were more easily connected: in a truly globalised market, a trader can just as easily sell Chilean copper to China or to Germany, and so can direct it to wherever the price is best. The final boost for the traders came in 2015, when the US ended a de facto export ban on American crude oil, opening a new trade flow for the global oil market. Since then, however, the zeitgeist has shifted against globalisation and free trade. Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 on an explicitly anti-free trade platform. And he delivered on it, tearing up free-trade agreements and launching a trade war with China, which led to new tariffs on everything from steel to soybeans. The tariffs caused trade flows to be redirected: US exports of soybeans to China, for example, previously worth $12 billion a year, were for a couple of years displaced by Brazil.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

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

,” City of Cape Town, November 15, 2017, https://www.capetown.gov.za/Media-and-news/Day%20Zero%20when%20is%20it,%20what%20is%20it,%20and%20how%20can%20we%20avoid%20it. 15 Christian Alexander, “Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ Water Crisis, One Year Later,” Bloomberg CityLab, April 12, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/looking-back-on-cape-town-s-drought-and-day-zero. 16 Global statistics gathered and reported by Access Now, as part of its #KeepItOn campaign to raise awareness of, and action against, government communications shutdowns. AccessNow.org, March 21 2021. 17 Tom Wheeler, “Could Donald Trump Claim a National Security Threat to Shut Down the Internet?,” Brookings TechTank, June 25, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/06/25/could-donald-trump-claim-a-national-security-threat-to-shut-down-the-internet/. 18 Berhan Taye, Shattered Dreams and Lost Opportunities: A Year in the Fight to #KeepItOn (New York: Access Now, March 2021), 28, https://www.accessnow.org/cms/assets/uploads/2021/03/KeepItOn-report-on-the-2020-data_Mar-2021_3.pdf. 19 “S. 4646 (116th): Unplug the Internet Kill Switch Act of 2020,” GovTrack, updated November 27, 2020, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s4646/summary. 20 David E.

But surely in the future there will be opportunities for democratic voting beyond national borders—especially when local actions have global consequences. In 2016, an online project called the Global Vote tested out this very idea by inviting citizens of any country to cast their hypothetical votes in both the UK European Union membership referendum (a.k.a. Brexit) and the US presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Over one hundred thousand global voters from 149 countries considered how the results might affect their own lives. Then they cast mock online votes in the weeks leading up to the real elections. In the Global Vote’s alternate reality, the UK remained in the EU, and Clinton became president.18 “The Ten-Year Winter” is perhaps most plausible in the sense that it finds us all living on a fundamentally different planet in ten years and leading entirely different lives as a result.

., “Future of the Human Climate Niche,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 21 (May 2020): 11350–355; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910114117. 8 Eric Kaufmann, “ ‘It’s the Demography, Stupid’: Ethnic Change and Opposition to Immigration,” Political Quarterly 85, no. 3 (October 2014): 267–76, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12090; James Laurence, Katharina Schmid, and Miles Hewstone, “Ethnic Diversity, Ethnic Threat, and Social Cohesion: (Re)-evaluating the Role of Perceived Out-Group Threat and Prejudice in the Relationship between Community Ethnic Diversity and Intra-community Cohesion,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45, no. 3 (2019): 395–418, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1490638; Sjoerdje van Heerden and Didier Ruedin, “How Attitudes towards Immigrants Are Shaped by Residential Context: The Role of Ethnic Diversity Dynamics and Immigrant Visibility,” Urban Studies 56, no. 2 (2019): 317–34, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017732692; Lindsay Pérez Huber, “‘Make America Great Again!’: Donald Trump, Racist Nativism and the Virulent Adherence to White Supremacy amid US Demographic Change,” Charleston Law Review 10 (2016): 215–48; Brandon Hunter-Pazzara, “The Possessive Investment in Guns: Towards a Material, Social, and Racial Analysis of Guns,” Palgrave Communications 6, no. 79 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0464-x. 9 “World Radio Day 2013: Statistics on Youth,” UNESCO, accessed August 27, 2021, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/international-days/world-radio-day-2013/statistics-on-youth/; “United States Demographic Statistics,” Infoplease, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/demographic-statistics. 10 Oxfam International, “Climate Fuelled Disasters Number One Driver of Internal Displacement Globally Forcing More Than 20 Million People a Year from Their Homes,” December 2, 2019, https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/forced-from-home-eng. 11 Alex Wigglesworth, “A Generation of Seabirds Was Wiped Out by a Drone in O.C.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

That is what that means.)72 Uber’s adverse exposure in the media displays a small triumph of information over the power of a $68–70 billion behemoth with a reputation for lawlessness. This exposure is magnified by Uber’s efforts to participate in politics at a national level. Kalanick became an early member of President Donald Trump’s technological advisory council, a move widely derided by anti-Trump liberals. Trump used the vital, embryonic stage of his presidency to impose a travel ban on Muslims and refugees. In reaction, two hundred thousand Uber users deleted their accounts in a #DeleteUber protest against the company’s alliance with a man who contradicted their values.73 Uber banked on irate consumer-citizens to fight its battles with Mayor de Blasio of New York City and with cities across America, but consumers can also turn against the company when Uber undermines their politics on another front.

Uber carried such a reputational debt that it was an easy mark for an outraged consumer base with an appetite for political action and a willingness to believe bad things about Uber. Deleting an app is a low-barrier action. Only a sliver of the same pointed protest was directed at Lyft, Uber’s main competitor, even though its primary investor, Peter Thiel, was the number one technology-industry booster for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Kalanick, under pressure created by consumer upheaval, left the advisory council. In a climate of political discontent, Uber is often treated as a scapegoat for larger frustrations on the political scene. A senior employee at Uber opined to me that all the liberal indignation directed against Uber has to do with the close association between its founder and President Trump as a result of Kalanick joining that council.

Perri Chase, “My Comments on the Unroll.Me/Uber Situation,” Medium, April 25, 2017, https://medium.com/@bethebutterfly/i-need-to-say-something-about-the-freak-out-in-response-to-uber-and-unroll-me-f17c42abaaa1. 73. Lucinda Shen, “200,000 Users Have Left Uber in the #DeleteUber Protest,” Fortune, February 3, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/02/03/uber-lyft-delete-donald-trump-executive-order/. 74. Alison Griswold, “Uber Did Nothing Wrong, but That Couldn’t Stop the Liberal Outrage of #DeleteUber,” Quartz, January 30, 2017, https://qz.com/898159/why-are-people-deleting-uber-a-trump-backlash-the-company-didnt-deserve/. 75. Sherman Alexie quoted in Anne Helen Petersen, “Sherman Alexie on Not Being ‘the Kind of Indian That’s Expected,’” Buzzfeed News, June 25, 2017, www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/sherman-alexie-is-not-the-indian-you-expected. 76.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

It offered a decent summary of changes on the horizon and some commonsense prescriptions for adaptation. But the report—issued by the most powerful political office in the United States—had about the same impact as a wonkish policy paper from an academic think tank. Released the same week as Donald Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood videotape, the White House report barely registered in the American news cycle. It did not spark a national surge in interest about AI. It did not lead to a flood of new VC investments and government funding for AI startups. And it didn’t galvanize mayors or governors to adopt AI-friendly policies.

Its acceptance of risk allows the government to make big bets on game-changing technologies, and its approach to policy will encourage faster adoption of those technologies. With these national strengths and weaknesses in mind, we can construct a timeline for AI deployment and look at how specific AI products and systems are set to change the world around us. 5 ★ THE FOUR WAVES OF AI The year 2017 marked the first time I heard Donald Trump speak fluent Chinese. During the U.S. president’s first trip to China, he showed up on a big screen to welcome attendees at a major tech conference. He began his speech in English and then abruptly switched languages. “AI is changing the world,” he said, speaking in flawless Chinese but with typical Trump bluster.

But AI is indeed changing the world, and Chinese companies like iFlyTek are leading the way. By training its algorithms on large data samples of President Trump’s speeches, iFlyTek created a near-perfect digital model of his voice: intonation, pitch, and pattern of speech. It then recalibrated that vocal model for Mandarin Chinese, showing the world what Donald Trump might sound like if he grew up in a village outside Beijing. The movement of lips wasn’t precisely synced to the Chinese words, but it was close enough to fool a casual viewer at first glance. President Obama got the same treatment from iFlyTek: a video of a real press conference but with his professorial style converted to perfect Mandarin.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

The scientific consensus that carbon dioxide and other gases from human activities are causing global average temperatures to rise is overwhelming; it’s at least as strong as the agreements on glyphosate and GMO safety. In every state in America in 2017, a majority of people supported the country’s participation in the Paris Agreement on climate change. Yet President Donald Trump pulled the United States from that agreement, even though it was nonbinding and allowed its members to set their own goals. Under Trump, the federal government was responsive neither to the best available evidence on climate change nor to the will of its people. It was instead apparently guided by Trump’s belief that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” as he tweeted in 2012.

All four horsemen thus contribute to the recent self-reinforcing cycle of urbanization, and the increasing concentration of human population. The US presidential election of 2016 provided a vivid illustration of concentration—both of the country’s population and its economy. Despite winning almost 3 million more votes than Republican candidate Donald Trump, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won a majority of the vote in fewer than five hundred counties. These counties, however, together generated 64 percent of the country’s economy. The more than twenty-five hundred counties won by Trump were responsible for only a bit more than a third of the American economy.

a majority of people supported the country’s participation in the Paris Agreement: “Majorities of Americans in Every State Support Participation in the Paris Agreement,” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, accessed March 25, 2019, http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/paris_agreement_by_state/. as he tweeted in 2012: Dylan Matthews, “Donald Trump Has Tweeted Climate Change Skepticism 115 Times. Here’s All of It,” Vox, June 1, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/1/15726472/trump-tweets-global-warming-paris-climate-agreement. “the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction”: Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3.


pages: 335 words: 95,549

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

Airbnb, British Empire, cashless society, credit crunch, Donald Trump, fulfillment center, mail merge, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Skype, zero day

I suspect his proposed refit of the hotel will turn the place into a monument to diabolical taste. My old housemate Martin and I used to exchange Christmas presents when he lived here. One year – by total chance – we both gave one another a copy of a book by Peter York called Dictators’ Homes. I have no doubt that Donald Trump uses it for designing interiors like normal people would use Terence Conran’s House Book. Till Total £162.89 17 Customers WEDNESDAY, 8 APRIL Online orders: 6 Orders found: 5 One of the orders was for three books, one of which was brought in by the banana box man yesterday – Outrage, by Ian Nairn, an unusual book.

At 10 a.m. a customer brought three books to the counter: Me: That comes to £24.00 please. Customer: £24.00? What? Those two are £2 each. Me: Yes, but that one is £20. Customer: But it looks just like the other two. Tracy called to say that she’s been offered the job at Turnberry. She starts on Wednesday and tells me there are rumours that Donald Trump plans to visit some time soon. Hopefully there’s more truth in those than the rumours that he’s going to run for the US presidency. In the afternoon, a man brought in three books on Lee Harvey Oswald and asked, ‘Are you buying at the moment?’ I gave him £5 for them, to which he rather depressingly told me, ‘I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m not going to re-read my books.’

His friend prodded him in the back and said, ‘You’ve got some nerve, asking for a discount from this poor bloke while you drive about in your fancy Rolls-Royces.’ He didn’t get a discount. Went for a pint after work to send Tracy off – she starts her new job at Turnberry on Wednesday. She is now an employee of Donald Trump. Till Total £214 18 Customers TUESDAY, 28 APRIL Online orders: 3 Orders found: 3 Callum arrived at 9 a.m. to begin the conversion work on the Garden Room. Two elderly customers came into the shop at 9.30 a.m. and wandered about for a while then – as they were heading towards the door – started saying ‘No, no, no’ to one another.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

But that ended in 2018, when the company finally admitted responsibility—and offered a compensation plan of up to $132,000 to each worker who had contracted cancer or other serious diseases while working at its plants since 1984.8 You see pretty much the same pattern of denial at county, city, and country levels. To take just one example, Johnson County, Indiana, which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump as president, has experienced full force the impact of his rollback of health and environmental regulations. Children there have been hit by a wave of cancers, spread by a carcinogenic plume spreading underground from an old industrial site.9 Even self-declared responsible businesses sometimes lobby against efforts to clean up the planet.

But, at the same time, a profound paradox is at work—we increasingly want to see business leaders, including the CEOs of the FAANG companies, filling the vacuum left by governments. As a result, we now live in the age of the “activist chief executive.” Here is how columnist Rana Foroohar put it: Such industry titans are willing to take an unusually public stand. Think of Merck chief Kenneth Frazier’s resignation from Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council in response to the US leader’s handling of racial violence in Charlottesville. Or Unilever head Paul Polman’s leading a charge on climate change as the US government was pulling out of the Paris accord. Or any number of corporate leaders, from Apple’s Tim Cook to Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, threatening to move business out of US states that do not respect LGBT rights.24 Exciting times, but we should be wary of simply leaving it to companies to handle the great challenges of tomorrow.

Impacts •Often drive breakdowns •Produce net negative impacts across TBL •Corrode social capital, via intensifying cycles of blame and shame •Counterintuitively, can trigger positive unintended consequences, including Green Swan solutions •Spur breakthroughs •Produce net positive impacts across TBL •Generally require robust social capital to achieve—and also help build it •Counterintuitively, can trigger negative unintended consequences, tomorrow’s Gray or Black Swans 3. Carbon examples •Climate weirding, driven by e.g., greenhouse gases, ecosystem destruction, ocean acidification, unpriced externalities, rejection of science, myopia, and selfishness •Icons of Black Swan carbon futures: e.g., Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers7, ExxonMobil, Jair Bolsonaro, and Vladimir Putin •Carbon increasingly brought back into technological, economic, and ecological loops via policy incentives and investment in the circular economy, promoting resilience and regeneration •Icons of Green Swan carbon futures: e.g., James Lovelock, Margrethe Vestager, Tesla, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Greta Thunberg 4.


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

And not just a humble, family-holiday style camp. We’re talking Harry Potter at the Quidditch World Cup-style accommodations, magically expandable tents and all. A much more public example of what I mean is Donald Trump’s obsession with Hillary Clinton and her damn emails. In response to some new allegation or investigation, or maybe even a tweet from the President, in May 2019 Secretary Clinton told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that she was ‘living rent free inside of Donald Trump’s brain’. Which is a helpful way of thinking about how much time, energy and space you’re giving your general workload, or perhaps a difficult manager or maddening colleague in your own mind.

Which, of course, was brilliantly exemplified in the dismissive reception of the film by Gerwig’s male colleagues in the industry – a rejection made even clearer by the lack of nominations for Little Women in both screenwriting and (especially) directing categories during 2020’s award season. A political example of this, however, was US President Donald Trump’s strategic, Gileadesquefn2 attempts to dismantle funds and organizations that were formed to guarantee women’s access to safe, legal abortions, birth control and sex education. This was an attack aimed at stripping women of a basic human right: to be in control of one’s body. Because if we’re not in control of our own bodies, how can we ever expect true equality in society, never mind the workplace?


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

When they agreed to buy there, they did so under the impression that it would be “as fine as Trump Tower.” The one in Chicago. Wireman’s team countered that while the gym might disappoint a professional weight lifter, the expensively outfitted fitness center was sufficient for run-of-the-mill beachgoers. The developer enlisted an appraiser who had been to both the tower in Chicago that carried Donald Trump’s name and Turquoise Place. He testified that Turquoise Place was indeed just as nice as, if not nicer than, Trump’s place on the Chicago River. To a person, the Turquoise Place buyers testified that the collapsing market and their inability to flip the units for a profit had nothing to do with their refusal to honor the purchase contracts they’d signed.

Geoff Jacobs, who launched an early rental operation in Phoenix, partnered with Progress Residential, a multibillion-dollar endeavor started by Donald Mullen, a former Goldman Sachs mortgage chief who had overseen the firm’s lucrative “big short” of mortgage-backed securities. Hotelier Barry Sternlicht, who became a real estate tycoon buying repossessed apartment buildings from the government after the savings and loan crisis, and Donald Trump confidant Tom Barrack, who followed a similar path to moguldom, each built up national home-rental operations. Blackstone’s Invitation Homes was buying as much as $150 million worth of houses a week. These bulk buyers competed for properties mainly with one another. Typical home buyers were sidelined.

Though the employment picture was rosy, affordability was severely strained for aspiring homeowners, particularly in many of the metro areas where big landlords owned houses. Few builders were producing new houses for under $400,000. Meanwhile, not a third of renters could afford the median-priced existing home, which cost about $267,000. Rents were rising and mortgages were difficult to come by for people with spotty credit. President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill eliminated benefits of homeownership for many Americans by lifting the standard deduction above what most homeowners would get if they itemized deductions, such as mortgage interest, and limiting the amount of property taxes that can be written off. The conference got underway the next morning with a panel of A-list landlords, including American Homes 4 Rent’s David Singelyn, Dallas Tanner from Invitation Homes, and Kevin Baldridge, who was president of Tricon American Homes, the rental-home arm of Toronto’s Tricon Capital Group, which was buying houses in partnership with a Singaporean fund and a Texas schoolteachers’ retirement plan.


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

The opposite was the case, partly because of the way the campaign was fought but, now, because of the way that Brexit was being pursued without any attempt at consensus-building. Unsurprisingly, that angered and further alienated remainers but, perversely, leavers seemed as enraged as ever. It was a harbinger of what was to unfold later. Donald Trump and the geopolitical context To this already highly charged atmosphere was added the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016. For Brexiters, this had huge significance for two reasons. First, it seemed to suggest that they had caught the tide of history, given the close connections between the populist politics of the two campaigns, their shared disdain for the international order and the many personal relationships between the camps.

Such figures – Johnson, most obviously, Farage, certainly, even Rees-Mogg, surprisingly – are seen as being, despite that privilege, still in some way ‘ordinary’ or, perhaps more important, as ‘authentic’. Someone ‘you could have a drink with’. There is a parallel with the way that, in the US, the billionaire Donald Trump could appeal to blue-collar voters, but there’s perhaps a distinctively British – or more accurately English – twist of class deference. Political historians have long analysed the phenomenon of ‘working class Toryism’, and the new populist politics of ‘authenticity’ is not so very different in its acquiescence to ‘the natural order of things’.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

The escalating trade dispute between the governments of China and the United States is the most obvious demonstration of the risks. Between 2002 and 2010, voters in congressional districts where many businesses made goods that competed with imports from China elected increasingly extreme representatives—from both the left and the right. Donald Trump, who distinguished himself from other Republicans in part by his hostility to trade and to China in particular, won eighty-nine of the hundred counties most affected by Chinese import competition during the 2016 Republican primaries. Some estimates show that he would have lost the general election had it not been for the trade-induced radicalization of voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.1 As president, Trump has followed through by levying punitive tariffs on most Chinese imports, by officially designating the country a “currency manipulator,” and by blocking Chinese investments into U.S. companies.

It is also difficult to determine the true nationality of people buying financial assets when they use custodial centers to remain anonymous or route their purchases through tax havens. (This is analogous to the problems with bilateral data on trade and profits earned from foreign investments described earlier.) Peter Navarro, the Harvard-trained economics professor and trade adviser to Donald Trump, disagrees with this analysis. Navarro believes that bilateral trade deficits matter, and he also seems to believe that these bilateral trade balances necessarily map onto corresponding bilateral financial flows. In a 2017 column in the Wall Street Journal, for example, he wrote that the problem with China’s bilateral trade surplus with the United States is that it enables China to “[buy] up America’s companies, technologies, farmland, food-supply chain—and ultimately [control] much of the U.S. defense-industrial base.”26 As it happens, the data imply that Americans have invested about $46 billion into China between the beginning of 2015 and the beginning of 2019, while Chinese residents have sold a total of $380 billion of U.S. assets.

Treasury secretary who was a confidant of both Barack Obama and Clinton, was not explicitly opposed to the TPP, but he also thought it was a waste of time compared to reforming the IMF or boosting the funding of the United Nations. To Summers, “more globalization” was unnecessary, and politicians should instead focus on making “sure the globalization we have works for all our citizens.”1 One of Donald Trump’s first actions as president was to pull the United States out of TPP. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—the other major trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration—also seems dead as of this writing. In the years since taking office, Trump has imposed punitive tariffs on everything from Korean washing machines to Canadian steel to almost all of America’s imports from China.


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

“Any real trader knows the Dips are the best sales you can get out there!” it says next to the $24.99 price tag, tax and shipping not included. This was a big dip, to be sure, but the lesson that the young investors had learned so well was reinforced with record speed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average erased all its gains since the election of Donald Trump almost three and a half years earlier in barely a month. The bear market’s brevity was historic too, though. According to Howard Silverblatt, a walking stock market encyclopedia at S&P Dow Jones Indices, it was the fastest-ever return to a bull market by far at 4.9 months. The same recovery following the global financial crisis had taken 131.4 months, and the one after the dot-com crash took 60 months.

“We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.”[7] Minutes later, conservative Texas senator Ted Cruz retweeted her post, adding: “Fully agree.” “On the face of it, it seems to favor a handful of rich, influential players at the expense of ordinary citizens and ordinary traders,” he later said to reporters.[8] Donald Trump Jr. weighed in as well: “It took less than a day for big tech, big government and the corporate media to spring into action and begin colluding to protect their hedge fund buddies on Wall Street. This is what a rigged system looks like, folks!”[9] Back on the left, Bernie Sanders told an ABC morning talk show that weekend that the incident confirmed his dim view of high finance: “I have long believed that the business model of Wall Street is fraud.

. ,” Twitter, January 28, 2021, https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1354830697459032066. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Jordan Fabia, Erik Wasson, and Daniel Flatley, “Ocasio-Cortez Urges Scrutiny of Robinhood Curbs on GameStop,” Bloomberg, January 28, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Kathryn Krawczyk, “Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Agree on This 1 Thing,” The Week, January 28, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Egberto Willies, “Senator Bernie Sanders and Politics Done Right Agrees: The Business Model of Wall Street Is Fraud,” DailyKos, February 1, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Josh Hawley, “Calling Wall Street’s Bluff,” RealClear Politics, February 3, 2021.


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

But the political divide with regard to the COVID-19 vaccine is stark: In August 2021, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 51 percent of unvaccinated individuals were Republican, while 23 percent were Democrats. Of individuals who said they had no intention of ever getting the vaccine, 58 percent were Republican and 15 percent were Democrats. There are several reasons we may have sorted this way. It could be due to President Donald Trump’s downplaying of the severity of the virus itself, or it could be due to Republicans’ more hard-line stance on autonomy. But regardless, there are communities in the United States where admitting you are vaccinated would shock and upset those around you, and communities where the exact opposite is true.

In 2018, psychology professor Kristin Laurin published a study in the journal Psychological Science examining how San Franciscans felt before and after the city introduced a plastic water bottle ban. Before the ban, most people viewed it somewhat unfavorably. Days after the ban, the favorability shot up. She replicated this finding before and after a smoking ban in Ontario, Canada, and before and after the inauguration of Donald Trump in the United States. The theme was clear throughout—we find things more acceptable once they have actually happened than we do when we are anticipating them happening. Changing your mind to adapt to a new situation (over which you have little or no control) is almost certainly a positive thing—it keeps us from falling into despair.

The researchers found that the statements that were repeated were rated more likely to be true when they were seen a second time (regardless of whether they were actually true). Familiarity had bred trust. Illusory truth is used across all domains of society, from advertising, to news, to, of course, politics. Donald Trump, ever a marketing whiz, used this to great effect with his well-documented nicknames for political rivals. From April 2016 to October 2020, his tweets included the phrase “Crooked Hillary” more than 350 times. Social media bombards us with illusory truth because social media algorithms are more likely to surface information similar to information you have interacted with before.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

It organized a large demonstration in Washington DC called the “Deng Demo”. The skirmishes that took place led to several criminal prosecutions, and Bob Avakian, the party leader, fled to France, where he went into hiding. In the late 2010s, the organization has been concentrating its efforts on the “fight against fascism”—that is, opposing Donald Trump’s presidency. Thus Avakian still carries the torch for one of the world’s last remaining Maoist parties. For Deng Xiaoping, his week in the US as Carter’s guest went extremely well, and on the flight home he and Ling toasted their success with champagne. A colour photograph shows the two men positively glowing: the Little Helmsman, as Deng was known, and Ling the “big bear”, puffed up in his blue Mao tunic, large bifocals perched on his nose, lips stretched in a voracious smile.

Depending on the mood of the forecasters, it would be either all good or all bad: some thought that, by 2010, because of massive income disparity, the bubble would burst or at least the country would experience considerable social unrest, while by 2035, it would have overtaken the United States as the biggest economy in the world. world. The CIA confirmed its own prediction in its 2018 “factbook”, and the World Bank, the London School of Economics and the US Treasury are all agreed on this today. This is in spite of the slowdown in China’s growth, the trade war with Donald Trump, and the growing sanctions and regulatory buffers around emerging technologies (as with Huawei’s 5G networks in 2019). The fourth method for economic intelligence is direct commercial acquisition. This is where China buys a few copies of a product for the purpose of dissecting it and then manufacturing its own version.

Moreover, in 2013, the Joint Intelligence Committee, which runs British intelligence operations, warned that in case of cyber-attack, “it would be very difficult to detect or prevent and could enable the Chinese to intercept covertly or disrupt traffic passing through Huawei-supplied networks.”18 In the following years, claims about Huawei’s involvement in shady activities became part of the economic rivalry between Donald Trump’s America and Xi Jinping’s China. In January 2019, Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou—founder Ren Zhengfei’s daughter—was indicted by the US Ministry of Justice, together with Huawei Device US Inc. and SkyCom Tech., a Huawei subsidiary, on charges of money laundering and financial fraud.


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

But both capture something essential: the idea that world order is once again at stake because of unprecedented geopolitical and technological shifts, and that this requires strategic adjustment. For Xi, the origin of these shifts is China’s growing power and what it saw as the West’s apparent self-destruction. On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Then, a little more than three months later, a populist surge catapulted Donald Trump into office as president of the United States. 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.

Accordingly, Part III of this book focuses on China’s third grand strategy of displacement, global expansion, which sought to blunt but especially build global order and to displace the United States from its leadership position. Chapter 11 discusses the dawn of China’s expansion strategy. It argues that the strategy emerged following another trifecta, this time consisting of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the West’s poor initial response to the coronavirus pandemic. In this period, the Chinese Communist Party reached a paradoxical consensus: it concluded that the United States was in retreat globally but at the same time was waking up to the China challenge bilaterally. In Beijing’s mind, “great changes unseen in a century” were underway, and they provided an opportunity to displace the United States as the leading global state by 2049, with the next decade deemed the most critical to this objective.

Beijing quickly published new copyright laws, and eventually an agreement was reached after Washington threatened tariffs on $700 million of goods—or nearly 5 percent of China’s exports.28 A number of additional investigations and sanctions threatened to follow in the future, and Beijing hoped that joining a multilateralized rules-based trading order would reduce US discretion on these issues—an assumption that proved largely accurate until the election of Donald Trump. The fourth concerning development was the immediate blow Tiananmen dealt to China’s science and technology modernization. China’s five-year plans, its four modernizations, and its “863 Program” for high-tech R&D all assumed billions in technology imports from the United States and continued people-to-people scientific exchanges, all buttressed by broader umbrella agreements between the two countries.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Now, almost five years after I originally wrote these essays, it is still, unfortunately, what I know. I did not set out to write a book, and I certainly did not expect this book to become a guide for those struggling to understand what happened to the United States in 2016 and the mass frustration and rifts the election of Donald Trump exposed. I simply wanted to cover what were, at the time, topics very few of my colleagues wanted to discuss: systemic corruption, the breakdown of institutions, and a post-employment economy where you pay to play or you fall through the cracks. As the industries I worked in kept collapsing, I fell through the cracks myself a few times, and the only consolation from that experience is that the view from the cracks is a lot clearer than the view from above.

The years in which I wrote the essays in this book were marked by the erosion of political and economic stability—an erosion that long preceded the Obama administration, a social crime whose perpetrators were as diverse as its victims. Two wars, a recession, extreme partisanship, and antiquated political structures that could not keep pace with rapid technological change left America vulnerable to autocracy. And autocracy arose in the administration of Donald Trump. Americans have become locked in a constant test of checks and balances, in which a government with authoritarian ambitions fights against a citizenry accustomed to fundamental freedoms: the freedom to assemble, to write, to speak. Freedoms that can no longer be taken for granted. The Trump administration has created so many new problems that the difficult era of the mid-2010s seem enviable by comparison.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Politicians have always used similes and metaphors to attract electors. But modern communications and lack of reasoned debate make simple messages more powerful today. A tweet that goes viral can be based on a lie but be powerfully effective. In a single week of campaigning in the primaries to become the Republican nominee for US president, Donald Trump (slogan: ‘Make America Great Again’) averaged one ‘misstatement’ every five minutes, according to calculations by Politico magazine, which chronicled his stump speeches and press conferences.27 British readers may recall Conservative billboards before the 2015 general election showing a miniaturised Ed Miliband, the Labour Party leader, pasted in the jacket pocket of the leader of the Scottish National Party.

In 2010, Axelrod was paid handsomely to advise Yulia Tymoshenko in her unsuccessful bid for the presidency of Ukraine. She ended up in jail after losing to Viktor Yanukovych, a convicted thug, who had languished in the polls until another American, Republican Party strategist Paul Manafort (later to be employed by Donald Trump), was hired by his oligarch backers. Yanukovych was stopped from making speeches or appearing on television. He won, only to be chased out of the country for corruption in 2014. Axelrod subsequently advised Mario Monti in his failed attempt to be elected Prime Minister of Italy; Monti gained 10.5 per cent of the vote with his paid help.

CONCLUSION With the mainstream media controlled by rentiers and their representatives, with political parties unduly influenced by them and with the rife indulgence in what has been called agnotology (the deliberate fostering of ignorance or doubt), the widespread disillusionment with conventional politics should not be surprising. One symptom of the malaise was the political emergence of Donald Trump, a caricature of a 21st-century populist, playing on prejudice, offering superficial analysis and a simplistic set of policies, yet still able to draw the support of millions of Americans. He inherited his plutocratic status, squandered a lot of money in bad business decisions and yet rails against the elite in his pursuit of the American presidency.


pages: 417 words: 103,458

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Not only did the participants get better at what they did; their increased knowledge also helped them to understand their limitations.7 Since Dunning and Kruger first published their study in 1999, the finding has been replicated many times, across many different cultures.8 One survey of thirty-four countries – from Australia to Germany, and Brazil to South Korea – examined the maths skills of fifteen-year-old students; once again, the least able were often the most over-confident.9 Unsurprisingly, the press have been quick to embrace the ‘Dunning?Kruger Effect’, declaring that it is the reason why ‘losers have delusions of grandeur’ and ‘why incompetents think they are awesome’ and citing it as the cause of President Donald Trump’s more egotistical statements.10 The Dunning-Kruger Effect should have an upside, though. Although it may be alarming when someone who is highly incompetent but confident reaches a position of power, it does at least reassure us that education and training work as we would hope, improving not just our knowledge but our metacognition and self-awareness.

This may help to explain why more educated people seem particularly susceptible to medical misinformation: it seems that fears about healthcare, in general, are more common among wealthier, more middle-class people, who may also be more likely to have degrees. Conspiracies about doctors – and beliefs in alternative medicine – may naturally fit into that belief system. The same processes may also explain why politicians’ lies continue to spread long after they have been corrected – including Donald Trump’s theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. As you might expect from the research on motivated reasoning, this was particularly believed by Republicans – but even 14 per cent of Democrats held the view as late as 2017.18 We can also see this mental inertia in the lingering messages of certain advertising campaigns.

Following the discussions of fake news during the 2016 presidential election, he exposed hundreds of participants to a range of headlines – some of which had been independently verified and fact-checked as being true, others as false. The stories were balanced equally between those that were favourable for Democrats and those that were favourable to Republicans. For example, a headline from the New York Times proclaiming that ‘Donald Trump says he “absolutely” requires Muslims to register’ was supported by a real, substantiated news story. The headline ‘Mike Pence: Gay conversion therapy saved my marriage’ failed fact-checking, and came from the site NCSCOOPER.com. Crunching the data, Pennycook found that people with greater cognitive reflection were better able to discern the two, regardless of whether they were told the name of the news source, and whether it supported their own political convictions: they were actually engaging with the words themselves and testing whether they were credible rather than simply using them to reinforce their previous prejudices.27 Pennycook’s research would seem to imply that we could protect ourselves from misinformation by trying to think more reflectively – and a few recent studies demonstrate that even subtle suggestions can have an effect.


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

The center hawked candles with names like Sexual Energy and Dialing God as well as Kabbalah Mountain Spring Water, which the Bergs claimed could cure various ailments. (The water came from a treatment plant in Canada.) They were especially successful at attracting celebrities: Madonna, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, Roseanne Barr, Lucy Liu, the fashion designer Donna Karan, and Marla Maples, Donald Trump’s second wife. Kabbalists were encouraged to wear red string bracelets on their wrists—available for purchase on the center’s website for $26—as protection from various negative energies. The bracelets became status symbols in the 2000s; Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan were spotted wearing them.

That fall, Adam and Rebekah painted their entire bodies white for WeWork’s 2016 Halloween party, which had an appropriately forward-looking theme: “3016.” A few weeks after the party, on the first Tuesday in December, Masa made plans to visit WeWork headquarters while he was in New York on other business. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Masa of SoftBank…one of the great men of industry,” Donald Trump told a bank of cameras in the lobby of Trump Tower. A month after Trump’s surprise electoral victory, Masa was the first in a line of business-world supplicants to visit the president-elect’s building to curry favor. Masa was interested in reviving a proposed merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, which SoftBank owned; the deal had run afoul of Obama administration regulators concerned about a lack of competition in the mobile phone market.

The company rented out Universal Studios Hollywood for a night and brought the Chainsmokers back to perform. During their set, Adam leaped onstage, sweating heavily, and pumped his fist in the air while one of the Chainsmokers yelled, “Everybody fucking jump!” The weekend was a blast for most WeWork employees during an otherwise disorienting time. Donald Trump was set to be inaugurated as president of the United States in a few days, and given that many WeWork employees had been attracted to the company’s public rhetoric of Obama-era inclusivity and togetherness, Trump’s election had been a gut punch. Many of them found solace in believing that their company was building a better world.


pages: 349 words: 102,827

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

If you visited websites tracking their prices, all you would see were numbers colored in green and arrows pointing skyward. All the lines on the graphs were parabolic. It didn’t seem to matter which coin you picked—any one of them would multiply its value several times over. Everyone wanted to be a crypto millionaire. Google searches for Bitcoin surpassed searches for Donald Trump. Celebrities, some of whom were compensated by crypto companies anticipating a big payday, started supporting ICOs in their social media. Paris Hilton tweeted, “Looking forward to participating in the new @LydianCoinLtd Token! #ThisIsNotAnAd #CryptoCurrency #BitCoin #ETH #BlockChain,” and Floyd Mayweather posted on Instagram, “I’m gonna make a $hit t$n of money on August 2nd on the Stox.com ICO.”

This was still before the network had even launched, and the only people using it were core developers and a few other enthusiasts like themselves. They released a test version in 2015, a couple of months before Ethereum’s Frontier mainnet launch. Augur works with its own internal token called Reputation, or REP. Users can place bets on future events—for example, will Donald Trump win the 2020 election?—and receive cryptocurrency-based shares depending on the outcome. To keep the system fully decentralized, the correct outcome needs to be defined by consensus, and that’s where the REP tokens come in. Holders will stake their REP to an outcome, either before or in a brief period after it happens.

Volume also picked up in Egypt and Nigeria, which devalued their currencies as their economies slumped. More broadly, emerging nations were struggling after US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen raised interest rates at the end of 2016 and signaled more hikes would come in 2017, sending the US dollar index to the highest since 2003. Donald Trump had just been elected president on a platform that promised to close off borders from trade and immigration, which didn’t favor developing markets, either. Earlier that year the United Kingdom voted to exit the European Union, another sign that the world was becoming more nationalistic. In a context where walls were coming up and borders were sealing, the appeal for global, digital currencies increased.


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

Ironically, Thigpen’s fellow small business owners would have been protected simply by raising the exemption limit a small amount—but that didn’t suit the families behind the scenes who were paying for change. When the campaign started, the federal version of the tax applied to estates worth over $600,000, with rates starting at 37 percent. In 2001, Congress started phasing out the tax; then in 2010 it raised the exemption to $5 million per individual. After President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill, the individual exemption was boosted again, to $11 million. Today a married couple can accumulate over $23 million before their estate pays even a dollar of tax (and they can hire advisers to help them use specialized trusts and tax planning to cram in millions or tens of millions more under the tax-free limit).

But shared wisdom can change quickly. The recent increase to a $23.4 million estate tax exemption is just one small part of how rich families pass on privilege. We are well on the way to a second Gilded Age. You can now see why Gary Cohn, the former head of Goldman Sachs and chief economic adviser to Donald Trump, memorably said, “Only morons pay the estate tax” or “rich people with really bad tax planning.” Gutting the estate tax is just one step in creating the conditions for the big prize: a perpetual American aristocracy. That step recently happened in, of all places, South Dakota. Yes, the same South Dakota that Laura Ingalls Wilder described in the Little House books.

Before being jailed for felony tax evasion, Helmsley famously uttered what could be the rallying cry for creators of South Dakota trusts: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” To drive home her point, when she died in 2007, Helmsley left $12 million in trust to support Trouble, her Maltese dog, on a diet of Kobe beef and crabcakes. During the uproar that followed the trust’s disclosure, Donald Trump, Helmsley’s longtime rival and ally, came to her defense, saying, “The dog is the only thing that loved her and deserves every penny of it.” Nevertheless a New York court found the trust amount to be contrary to public policy. The trust then relocated to South Dakota, which eagerly welcomed the fees associated with harboring Trouble’s doggy-treats money.


pages: 342 words: 101,370

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Binnie, Rutan, and Melvill, among others, went into the hangar and huddled around a speakerphone. “The sky of Mojave is very big. And you’ve got very big dreams there,” said George W. Bush, calling from Air Force One. “Thank you for dreaming the big dream.” Binnie went on The Late Show with David Letterman, coming on after one of Letterman’s regular guests, Donald Trump. “How about these people that build a rocket and go into outer space?” Letterman asked Trump. “That sounds like something that would’ve gotten your attention.” “I would not do it, personally,” said Trump. “That could be the way of the future—space travel,” said Letterman. “Could be,” said Trump.

The house had a chic lodge aesthetic, with high ceilings, a central stone fireplace, broad views of the lake, and a globe on an end table, though Rutan did not believe the globe was warming. “Biggest science fraud in history,” he told Newt Gingrich in an email. Gingrich had contacted Rutan after Donald Trump became president, to solicit Rutan’s ideas for how Trump could rejuvenate NASA, which Rutan provided, along with some unsolicited ones. As for NASA, Rutan maintained his dim assessment of the agency. He rated its performance poor, not because of any particular program but because of its failure to inspire.

Stucky suggested we go watch First Man, the new movie about Neil Armstrong. “I’ve heard it’s junk,” said Rutan. Fox News hosts had been frothing about how the filmmakers didn’t show Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planting the US flag on the moon. “It’s almost like they’re embarrassed at the achievement coming from America,” Donald Trump said of the film. Still, Rutan agreed. We got popcorn and found our seats. During the opening scene, where Armstrong flies an X-15 to the edge of the atmosphere and loses aerodynamic control and has to make an emergency landing on a dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base, Rutan leaned over and whispered to Stucky, “The joys of suborbital flight.”


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

This movement could have no better avatar than Betsy DeVos, who grew up in a conservative Protestant enclave in Michigan, married the heir to the Amway direct-sales billions, and as a philanthropist and lobbyist backed private, religious, and for-profit schools. She had never taught in, attended, or sent her children to a public school before President Donald Trump named her secretary of education in 2017. During the pandemic, she diverted a disproportionate share of federal relief funds to private schools, until a judge declared her actions illegal. She also declined to direct the Department of Education to track or publish information on school reopening plans or COVID mitigation strategies, abdicating responsibility for helping districts reopen safely even as the Trump administration called for them to reopen at any cost.

“I didn’t even want to look at the results or what the Electoral College did. I remember my very first time I voted and I voted for Al Gore. And then I found out, like, Florida did Florida and he didn’t win. So that’s always been kind of in the back of my head—I hope this doesn’t get Gored up.” November 4, 2020, shortly after 2:00 a.m.: Donald Trump gives a speech in which he falsely claims victory: “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation.” What Julian, at seventeen, in Oklahoma, hated most about the pandemic was how everything seemed to come back to politics.

Now that it was white people yelling about their First Amendment right to protest, maybe people would listen. On the other hand, the political forecast was bleak in her opinion. “The sad part is there’s going to be a smarter racist young white man that’s paying attention that’s going to probably try to replace Trump.” January 13, 2021: The House of Representatives impeaches Donald Trump on a single count: “incitement of insurrection.” He becomes the first president ever to be impeached for the second time. Ten House Republicans vote in favor. January 20, 2021: Joe Biden is inaugurated without incident. The winter dragged on. Heather’s youngest son, the baby king and everyone’s favorite, was walking.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Trump was poised to be elected president of the United States of America. People started talking about a hypothetical Sophie’s choice in which they could sacrifice a Scott Wiener loss for a Hillary Clinton win. By midnight the bar was quiet as hundreds of bewildered people stared into their phones trying to process what it meant that Donald Trump would, like, actually for real be the president. One of Scott Wiener’s friends said that winning his senate race that night would be like having your birthday on 9/11. Eight days after the election, when San Francisco was still in a kind of post-electoral grieving, Sonja and several other YIMBYs arrived at a board of supervisors meeting to urge the city to approve a 157-unit project in the heavily Latino Mission District instead of voting for an appeal.

They settled in South Los Angeles, where Campos’s father, who was a meteorologist in Guatemala, started a new career as a carpenter. David Campos graduated at the top of Jefferson High School, then went to Stanford and Harvard Law, where he became friends with Scott Wiener. So there Campos sat, one week after Donald Trump’s election, the elected representative of San Francisco’s Latino Cultural District, listening to Sonja compare a woman who was complaining about incoming techies to a president-elect who had campaigned on building a wall to keep out Mexican “rapists.” Campos had gone into the hearing intending to vote against the building’s appeal, just as he had voted against various other, similar appeals.

One night Sonja and Laura were sitting on Sonja’s couch looking at their phones when they came across an article about how Palantir Technologies, a big data firm backed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and libertarian Trump supporter, was building surveillance software that tracked phone logs and criminal records to help ICE find and deport people. As it happened, Sonja knew where Thiel lived. A few months earlier, when the idea of Donald Trump being president still seemed preposterous, she’d gone there to have breakfast and talk about a donation (Thiel agreed to give her some money, then recanted). After reading the article, Sonja and Laura decided they’d rustle the growing list of contacts they’d amassed during the election and organize a group protest on Peter Thiel’s doorstep, and invite Campos to come along.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

PART ONE The Here and Now 1 A Bitter Taste of Dystopia The 2016 presidential campaign made everybody angry. Liberal Bernie Sanders supporters were angry at allegedly racist Republicans and a political system they perceived as being for sale, a big beneficiary being Hillary Clinton. Conservative Donald Trump supporters were furious at the decay and decline of America, and at how politicians on both sides of the aisle had abandoned them and left a trail of broken promises. Hillary Clinton supporters fumed at how the mainstream media had failed to hold Trump accountable for lewd behavior verging on sexual assault—and worse.

The private buses were taking cars off the roads, reducing pollution, minimizing traffic, and fighting global warming. Could flinging feces at a Google-bus turn back the clock and reduce prices of housing to affordable levels? The 2016 presidential campaign was the national equivalent of the Google-bus protests. The supporters of Donald Trump, largely white and older, wanted to turn back the clock to a pre-smartphone era when they could be confident that their lives would be more stable and their incomes steadily rising. The Bernie Sanders supporters, more liberal but also mostly white (albeit with great age diversity), wanted to turn back the clock to an era when the people, not the big corporations, controlled the government.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

They had not only caused public debt to rise. They, in fact, caused disillusionment with democracy to set in among the unemployed and impoverished in Europe and the US. Austerity and the collusion between politicians and the finance sector opened up political space for right-wing, populist political parties like Donald Trump and the Tea Party in the US, the National Front in France, and Golden Dawn in Greece. These were among the social and political consequences of democratic politicians enacting policies that enrich the few while impoverishing the majority; policies based on the interests of the robber barons and on the flawed theories of ‘defunct’ economists.

In other words, while governments may provide the backbone to public money, and be beneficiaries of the ‘People’s QE’, they are not in the driving seat. Central bankers are. These proposals place great power in the hands of these technocrats when, to my mind, elected representatives should be masters of this process with the central bank as servant – albeit an independent, open-minded and well-qualified servant. Donald Trump and ‘helicopter money’: the economic, social and political consequences It is also not acceptable, in my view, for central bankers or government representatives to be granted money-printing powers without clear, transparent checks and balances. Like the power private bankers exercise, central bank ‘helicopter drop’ powers are immense.


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

First the richest tycoons of Europe’s sick economies plunged their cash into pads in Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Kensington to escape the eurozone debt crisis. Then the Arab Spring saw an influx of money from Middle Eastern tycoons. Next came the Russians and Ukrainians looking for a safe haven, and now the French and American super-rich are rushing into the capital to escape Hollande’s and Obama’s tax hikes.9 Following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, property investment company London Central Portfolio cheerily sent out an email to subscribers reflecting on the ‘unprecedented turn of events’, and pointing out that while the London property market will clearly not be top of your agenda today … it is London Central Portfolio’s view that there will be a net positive impact on the market … as uncertainty on the political and economic state is heightened once again … Whilst all of this plays out, Prime Central London property, a traditional safe haven, is expected to benefit.10 ‘EXCHANGE VALUE’ I know a lot of people that have second homes in London and I’m so glad they do.

Obstruction and intimidation of opposition campaigns were also commonplace.33 Other examples include holding consultations during holiday periods and dirty tricks used in the forced evictions resulting from New Labour’s Housing Market Renewal Initiative, a programme which ran between 2002 and 2011. The Scottish government’s handling of planning permission for US President Donald Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire was also widely questioned: although Aberdeenshire Council rejected the application in 2007, former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond took the unprecedented decision to ‘call in’ the application, which was subsequently given planning permission. This set Trump on a collision course with local residents living in properties near the course, which he wished to acquire and demolish.34 The bullying, intimidation and harassment faced by residents have been documented in the acclaimed film You’ve Been Trumped, which reveals how residents’ water and electricity were cut off and tonnes of earth piled up next to their homes.35 Today, it feels like this failure of democratic representation for local communities, and the dirty tricks that go with it, is becoming standard practice.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

In China, incentivizing production requires keeping lower wages (relative to the world), tax incentives for production and distribution, and investments in automation to achieve production that allows their exports to win on a world market. Conversely, to support consumer spending at 70 percent of the economy, the United States requires relatively higher wages, high credit creation with low interest rates (debt to finance that increased spending), and lower taxes. Donald Trump’s tax incentives enacted November 2, 2017, had an effect of 1) increasing consumer spending and growth in the economy—in other words, I will give you more money, so you spend it, driving short-term growth in GDP and jobs; this 2) increased the trade deficit with China as consumers bought more imported products, and it also 3) increased the US budget deficit in 2018 to almost $800 billion.

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.7 Changing the rules When governments are unable to substantively change the rules of the game or gain leverage because other countries are forced to devalue in response to keep their jobs, the next step—as foretold by Chen’s parents-in-law—is tariffs and trade wars. Many politicians around the world are gaining power on promises of closing borders, including Donald Trump, who was elected on a protectionist America-first platform. He also promised to erase a trade deficit with China, only to see it continue to rise to its highest level. And a favourite weapon in his arsenal is tariffs. Could tariffs help? The last time tariffs were enacted in a major way in the United States, it didn’t end well.


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

They fire up the tribe for battle and keep everyone in line. Viewed through this lens, the parallels in contemporary global politics become clearer. Current disputes over trade provide a good example. The great French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, said “In order to trade, man must first lay down his spear”. It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump has chosen trade as his antagonism of choice. It is also not a coincidence that the British right-wing, which is intellectually pro-trade, engages in absurd contortions and denials of evidence to justify leaving the most profitable free trading bloc in the world – the European Union – in order to set up new trade deals with other tribes deemed preferable.

The former we can and should do something about, and the policies we shall discuss later are designed to do just that. The latter we should expose and disarm since they are more harmful than the grievances that they are a response to. Okay, so let’s turn to the lessons we can learn from legitimate anger? DIALOGUE 2 The moral mobs and their handlers “I am your voice” DONALD TRUMP The parable of the Spanish family who played by the rules Pedro Garcia graduated in economics from the University of Cadiz in 1998. The Spanish economy was booming, and it didn’t take him long to get a job working for a local bank in the mortgage approval department. Soon after graduating, he married his university girlfriend, Valeria.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

We hope to persuade you not reflexively to agree with us, but to adopt a little bit of our methods and share some part of our hopes and fears, and perhaps by the end, we will really be talking to each other. CHAPTER 2 FROM THE MOUTH OF THE SHARK MIGRATION IS BIG NEWS, big enough to drive the politics of much of Europe and the United States. Between President Donald Trump’s imaginary but enormously consequential hordes of murderous Mexican migrants and the anti-foreigner rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany, the French Rassemblement National, and the Brexit crew, not to mention the ruling parties in Italy, Hungary, and Slovakia, it may be the single most influential political issue in the world’s richest countries.

Young men—and, in particular, young white men—were less likely to graduate from college.57 “Deaths of despair” from drug and alcohol poisoning and suicides skyrocketed.58 These are all symptoms of a deep hopelessness once associated with African American communities in inner cities of the United States but are now replicated in white suburbs and industrial towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard and the eastern Midwest. A lot of this damage is irreversible, at least in the short run. The school dropouts, the drug and alcohol addicts, and the children growing up without a father or a mother have lost a part of their futures. Permanently. IS TRADE WORTH IT? Donald Trump decided the solution to the negative effect of trade was tariffs. He welcomed a trade war. It started in the first few months of 2018, with new tariffs on aluminum and steel. Trump then talked about $50 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods, and then when China retaliated, suggested another $100 billion.

From the United States to Hungary, from Italy to India, leaders who offer little more than racism and/or bigotry as their policy platform are becoming a defining feature of the political landscape, a ground force that shapes elections and policies. In the United States, in 2016, the degree to which a person deeply identified as white was one of the strongest predictors of support for Donald Trump among Republicans, much more than, for example, economic anxiety.1 The vicious vocabulary our leaders employ daily legitimizes the public expression of views some people probably had already, but were rarely spoken or acted upon. In one instance of everyday racism, a white woman in a supermarket in the US called the police on a black woman whom she suspected, on the basis of a phone conversation she was overhearing, was trying to sell food stamps—and in the process rather tellingly exclaimed, “We are going to build this wall.”


pages: 529 words: 150,263

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

., “A Tribute to Sheik Humarr Khan and All the Healthcare Workers in West Africa Who Have Sacrificed in the Fight against Ebola Virus Disease: Mae We Hush,” Antiviral Research 111 (November 2014): 33–35. 301 the tri-border region: Etienne Simon-Loriere et al., “Distinct Lineages of Ebola Virus in Guinea during the 2014 West African Epidemic,” Nature 524, no. 7563 (August 6, 2015): 102–4. 303 “suffer the consequences”: Ed Mazza, “Donald Trump Says Ebola Doctors ‘Must Suffer the Consequences,’ ” Huffington Post, August 4, 2014, sec. Media, accessed May 6, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/03/donald-trump-ebola-doctors_n_5646424.html. 303 “epidemic of mass hysteria”: Belgium Airways in-flight magazine, March 2015. 304 “began to wake up”: MSF, “Ebola,” 11. 305 “play a role,” said Liu: Joanne Liu, Global Health Risks Framework, Wellcome Trust workshop, September 1–2, 2015. 305 “molecular shark”: Preston, The Hot Zone, 81–83. 305 “through the human race”: Preston, The Hot Zone, 289–90. 305 in Honolulu: Garrett, The Coming Plague, 593–95. 307 “a horrific situation”: Tom Frieden, interview with author, October 26, 2015. 307 “into the burning building”: “Statement of Joanne Liu at United Nations Special Briefing on Ebola,” United Nations, New York, September 2, 2014, accessed November 27, 2015, http://association.msf.org/node/162513. 308 “corrected for underreporting”: Martin Meltzer et al., and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Estimating the Future Number of Cases in the Ebola Epidemic—Liberia and Sierra Leone, 2014–2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In response, Liberia’s president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf ordered the country’s borders sealed and banned diplomats from traveling abroad. The United States followed suit, issuing a travel warning advising its citizens to stay away from the former American-freed slave colony. Meanwhile, prompted by the news that the Samaritan’s Purse missionaries had arrived in Atlanta, Donald Trump, then a New York property developer, tweeted, “Stop the EBOLA patients from entering the U.S.” and “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!” As panic spread, several major carriers, including British Airways and Air France, canceled their services to Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, leaving just two operators, Brussels Air and Air Maroc, to continue flying health workers and vital aid in and out of West Africa.

He died ten days later, having infected two nurses. Like the 9/11 attacks, the Duncan case exposed the porosity of American airspace and the United States’ vulnerability to exotic pathogens which, thanks to commercial air travel, could be in any city on the globe within seventy-two hours. Little surprise then that even before Donald Trump began calling for bans on Ebola patients and health workers returning from abroad, the inquests had started. Most people blamed the WHO. There was a clear lack of direction and “vacuum of leadership” at the highest levels of the UN organization, concluded Christopher Stokes, the general director of the Brussels branch of MSF, a year into the epidemic.


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

Either way, we are in uncharted territory, far outside the realm of traditional praise and blame, as now the normative evaluation of human action cannot proceed without “running it through the machines,” without reference to the behavior of artificial systems that are themselves insusceptible to praise and blame. This transformation is shaping the way we understand not only interpersonal relationships, but also political movements. According to the video-game designer Adrian Hon, the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose supporters became a vigorous and multitudinous force backing Donald Trump in the later phase of his presidency, might best be understood as an “ARG” or “alternate reality game.”34 Such a game is not played on a console; instead its strategies and prizes are spread across the internet, built into apps, inserted into newspaper advertisements and even into real-world interpersonal relations.

In this respect the partnership both builds on and contributes to the crude essentialist ethos predominant in the present moment, which takes individuals to belong to cultures absolutely and essentially, and which discourages movement across the always fuzzy borders of cultures as a violation of the imperative to “stay in one’s lane,” and as the new crime of “cultural appropration.” This ethos is a pop-cultural refraction of the disastrous lurch into nationalism and isolationism throughout the world over the past decade, a historical process that has thrust such bigots and trolls as Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Viktor Orbán into power. We are not, yet, accustomed to seeing these different trends—the corporate opportunism of Ancestry and Spotify; the sinister right-wing populism of the aforementioned leaders; and the identitarian campaigns for cultural purity driven mostly by young self-styled “progressives” on social media—as inflections of the same broad historical phenomenon.


pages: 352 words: 107,280

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us by John Hills

Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, credit crunch, Donald Trump, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage debt, pension reform, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, working-age population, World Values Survey

Endnotes, figure sources and figure notes Chapter 1 1 ‘Spending Round 2013’, Speech by Chancellor George Osborne, 26 June 2013 (www.gov.uk/government/speeches/spending-round-2013-speech). 2 Hansard, 2 November 2016, cols. 881-2. 3 Speech by Mitt Romney, May 2012, later published on Mother Jones website (www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video#47percent). 4 See Fullerton and Rao’s (2016) discussion of ‘the life cycle of the 47%’ for a detailed discussion of the way people move in and out of paying taxes (and receiving transfers) over their lives. 5 ‘Exclusive: Donald Trump on what made him run for president on “Hannity”’, Fox News, 17 June 2015 (www.foxnews.com/transcript/2015/06/18/exclusive-donald-trump-on-what-made-him-run-for-president-on-hannity/). 6 ‘Welfare for the 21st century’, Speech by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, 27 May 2010. 7 DWP (2007, foreword). 8 Beveridge Lecture, Toynbee Hall, 18 March 1999. 9 Beveridge (1942, para 22). 10 Beveridge (1942, para 19 [vii]). 11 King (1995). 12 Broadcast by Granada TV on 15 May 1989.

But many of the ‘47 per cent’ were, for instance, retired from jobs where they previously had paid income tax and had made social insurance contributions over their whole careers at work, on the basis of which they were indeed ‘entitled’ to state pensions (‘social security’ in US terms) and healthcare. Misunderstanding this meant that Mr Romney was insulting a far greater proportion of voters than the just under half he identified.4 Unabashed by that risk, his successor as Republican candidate and victor in the 2016 election, Donald Trump, put it similarly, ‘The problem we have right now, we have a society that sits back and says we’re not going to do anything. And eventually the 50 percent cannot carry, and it’s unfair to them, but cannot carry the other 50 percent.’5 Static or active? Even when you look at who benefits from policies narrowly focused on those with low incomes or those without paid work, the difference between what a static snapshot picture shows and a dynamic video is crucial.


pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/political-memes-2016-election-hillary-clinton-donald-trump. Gabriella Lewis. March 20, 2016. “We Asked an Expert If Memes Could Determine the Outcome of the Presidential Election.” Vice. www.vice.com/en_us/article/kwxdqa/we-asked-an-expert-if-memes-could-determine-the-outcome-of-the-presidential-election. a Know Your Meme entry: Mom Rivers. February 22, 2016. “2016 United States Presidential Election.” Know Your Meme. knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/2016-united-states-presidential-election. official HillaryClinton.com meme: Elizabeth Chan. September 12, 2016. “Donald Trump, Pepe the Frog, and White Supremacists: An Explainer.”

“Donald Trump, Pepe the Frog, and White Supremacists: An Explainer.” The Office of Hillary Rodham Clinton. www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/donald-trump-pepe-the-frog-and-white-supremacists-an-explainer/ [inactive]. “By all means, compare”: Mike Godwin. August 13, 2017. twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/896884949634232320. cute doggos and puppers: Brian Feldman. August 10, 2016. “The Next Frontier in Internet Culture Is Wholesome Memes About Loving Your Friends.” New York. nymag.com/selectall/2016/08/the-next-frontier-in-internet-culture-is-wholesome-memes.html knowyourmeme.com/memes/wholesome-memes. “We’re the ones”: Taylor Lorenz. April 27, 2017.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But I was trying out a demonstration version of the technology. With a larger volume of speech examples for training and direct involvement from Lyrebird’s algorithm jockeys, the company can create even more realistic clones. The company did just that in 2017 when it released synthesized examples of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. They were really good, especially the Trump one. They were also frightening. In the near future, fake news will get even more bogus when Facebook and Twitter teem with audio clips of politicians and other public figures uttering things they never actually said. The components of voice AI—speech recognition, natural-language understanding, natural-language generation, and speech synthesis—still have a long way to go.

As a reward signal, user ratings were “noisy and sparse,” Lemon says. A conversation with nineteen great responses from the socialbot followed by one crummy one might result in a one-star rating from the user. The reverse scenario could also happen. A great, coherent conversation could get a low rating just because the socialbot shared a piece of news about Donald Trump that the user didn’t like. Nonetheless, having some empirical signal as a training objective was better than having none at all. “Our ranker steadily learns how to get higher user ratings,” Lemon says. Those ratings, the deeply competitive Lemon was pleased to see, were looking better. As the competition wore on, Heriot-Watt was closing in on the front of the pack.

The other bots in the MILA system, however, were retrieval based and used algorithms to pull content from the web, general fact databases, movie-specific ones, Wikipedia, the Washington Post, Reddit, and Twitter. Some of these content sources were devoted to broad topics such as sports or current news; others focused specifically on the likes of Game of Thrones or Donald Trump. A huge library of informational resources does you no good if you can’t locate things inside it. So the socialbot employed a panoply of statistical and neural-network-based techniques to identify potential responses and assess their appropriateness. Some of these methods judged relevancy only as it pertained to the user’s most recent utterance.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

. ††† Unions can play an important role in protecting workers against capricious and wrongful dismissal, and in identifying when the job dismissals are a part of an important labor restructuring necessary to address issues of competitiveness. Part IV Managing Globalization for Europe and the World Chapter 10 The Future of Europe in a Globalized World Globalization is being rapidly redefined, both by the rise of China and the about-face of the United States under President Donald Trump. Once the champion of globalization, the United States (or at least, Trump) is now among its harshest critics. Within Europe, too, there is disillusionment that the promised benefits of globalization did not materialize for large swaths of the population, leaving them bereft of jobs and, for some, even bereft of hope.

Before we dive into these key messages, however, it is useful to review the key problems facing the world today, which give urgency to the project of developing an international economic policy for the future. THE TWIN CHALLENGES OF THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA The Challenge Posed by Trump The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency has threatened such a large number of the foundations of the liberal global order that it can be hard to keep track of them all. In the United States, hanging over his bigotry and ruinous environmental and economic policies is the shadow of his broader threat to American democracy and its institutions.

See also Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy American model limitations, 12 bank resolution approach of, 181 CEO pay comparisons, 138 climate change role of, 328–29 Community Reinvestment Act, 235, 277–78 competition policy and, 130–31, 327 earned income tax credit in, 267 economy, compared to China, 298 formulaic system of, 198 free-trade agreement with Jordan, 316 GDP growth of, 4, 4–5 GMO disagreement with EU, 299 intellectual property protection in, 145 mission-driven corporations in, 143 NAFTA role with, 316 negative income tax, 253 Permanent Fund, 252–53 political mobilization in, 301 private schools regulation, 229 pro-Wall Street agenda, 159 rule of law defiance, 311–12 Shareholder Capitalism Doctrine, 21 taxation in, 188–89 Trump presidency (see Trump, Donald; Trump administration) universal basic income (UBI), 251–54 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 237 urban economies, 229–30, 231, 232, 236 values, European, 2, 299 vertical integration, 134–35 Vietnam, 321, 322 Volcker, Paul, 86 Volcker rule, 167 wage compression, 257 wage reduction Germany and, 44–45 as internal devaluation, 39–40 trade integration resulting in, 289 wages, minimum, 265–68 wage subsidies, 267–68, 279 wealth allocation and distribution of, 14 creation and distribution of, ECB and, 75 inequality and, 211–12 net wealth tax, 190–91, 200 taxing (see property taxes) Weber, Max, 9 welfare state conclusions about, 237–38 misguided blame for, 214–15 new approach to, 212 overview of, 211, 215 shared abundance, 212–13 social insurance central to, 239–40 strong, combating insecurity, 213–14 welfare state solutions affordable housing, 229–37 investing in education, 224–29 overview of, 223–24 wholesale funding, 169, 171 Wiedeking, Wendelin, 136 worker confidence, improving, 268–73 worker-owned businesses, 142–43 working conditions, adverse, 257–58 World Health Organization, 242 World Intellectual Property Organization, 324 World Trade Organization (WTO) committing to, 296 global rules-based systems of, 290, 310–12 Wu, Tim, 326–27 Xi Jinping, 297–98 Youth Guarantee program, 229, 276, 278–79, 279 zoning, 231 Also by Joseph E.


pages: 353 words: 106,704

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, connected car, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Hyperloop, index card, Indoor air pollution, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, white picket fence

They chewed over, too, the changes that have come to Washington since, as a functioning system of government turned into a scorched-earth battleground: the flood of money that means leaders now spend endless hours schmoozing donors instead of solving problems; the relentlessness of the 24-hour media spotlight; the ideological segregation that turned the once-common categories of conservative Democrat and liberal Republican into extinct species. Our meeting comes just a few months after Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House, and his appointment of top EPA officials bent on eviscerating the agency. The relish with which the administration has begun unraveling decades of environmental protections pains Jorling. Is it upsetting, I ask, to see the party of senators like Howard Baker and John Sherman Cooper led by those determined to undo so much of their work?

Chinese steel, of course, is a hot-button issue in both the countries I call home. This industry once brought steady paychecks, and the pride and social stability they engender—along with steelmaking’s thick smoke—to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, to northern England and southern Wales. China’s cheap production was blamed by Donald Trump for the collapse of employment in the deindustrialized midwestern states that propelled him to power, and by the forces that brought about Britain’s wrenching decision to leave the European Union. It turns out to be a little touchy here too. When Xiao Jin bought our Tangshan train tickets, she indicated a destination one stop short of the city, worried someone might question why I’d wander so far off the usual tourist trail.

Today, China knows moving away from coal and toward renewables is not only in its own interest, but essential to both its people’s health and its long-term stability. This is what put President Xi Jinping in a position to promise, in a 2014 deal with President Obama that paved the way for the Paris climate agreement, that his country would put carbon emissions on a downward curve by 2030. And it is what will keep China moving forward even as America, under Donald Trump, heads the other way. Regardless of climate or carbon or international politics, Ma Jun tells me, “we have to do this.” It’s hard to overstate the importance of that dynamic. For years, advocates of climate action pleaded with China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, to join the fight.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Yet it proved irresistible to Reagan the perennial optimist, who essentially overruled his expert advisers, convinced that the ‘entrepreneurial spirit unleashed by the new tax cuts would surely bring in more revenue than his experts imagined’.34 (If this potent brew of populist optimism and impatience with economic experts seems familiar forty years later, Laffer was also a campaign adviser to Donald Trump.)35 For income tax cuts to raise tax revenue, the prospect of higher after-tax pay must motivate people to work more. The resulting increase in GDP and income may be enough to generate higher tax revenues, even though the tax rate itself has fallen. Although the effects of the big Reagan tax cuts are still disputed (mainly because of disagreement over how the US economy would have performed without the cuts), even those sympathetic to trickle-down economics conceded that the cuts had negligible impact on GDP – and certainly not enough to outweigh the negative effect of the cuts on tax revenues.

… The people who say, ‘I did it all myself’ … believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh.42 REVENGE OF THE LUMPENPROLETARIAT The Lumpenproletariat was Karl Marx’s term for the underclass, the poorest, marginalized members of society, usually with little if any secure work or income, and vulnerable to being conned into supporting political leaders who claim to want to help them, but don’t. (In the US after the election of Donald Trump, the word Trumpenproletariat went viral online.) Yet the Lumpen/Trumpenproletariat have more power than it seems. Around the world, employers large and small assume that an easy way to boost profits is to pay unskilled workers as little as possible – just enough to prevent them walking away. This strategy has the blessing of traditional economic theory, which treats labour as just another input to the production process, as if workers were just another kind of machine.

Compared to 1979, the rates are lower in every country in 2002. 32 Quoted in L. Mcquaig and N. Brooks (2013), The Trouble with Billionaires (London: Oneworld), 204. 33 Laffer, A., The Laffer Curve: Past, Present, and Future, Heritage Foundation Report, 1 June 2004. 34 Quoted in Rodgers, 73. 35 http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/15/donald-trump-fake-news-238379. 36 An excellent overview is provided by Atkinson, 183–7. 37 Piketty, T., Saez, E., and Stantcheva, S. (2014), ‘Optimal Taxation of Top Incomes’, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 6, 230–71. 38 Quoted in Mcquaig and Brooks, 40. 39 Surowiecki, James, ‘Moaning Moguls’, New Yorker, 7 July 2014. 40 For related development of these ideas, see L.


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

As his army of Gamergaters and alt-rightists flooded other websites with memes featuring kawaii anime girls in “Make America Great Again” hats, major news outlets were forced to rush out explainers with titles like “How Anime Avatars on Twitter Help Explain Politics Online in 2015.” Not every conservative was on board: “The screamers and the crazy people on the alt-right, as they call it, who love Donald Trump, who have plenty of Hitler iconography in their Twitter icons…are childless single men who masturbate to anime,” declared GOP strategist Rick Wilson on MSNBC in 2016. Richard Spencer, founder of the alt-right, riposted on Twitter that “Anime—indeed, even anime porn—has done more to advance European civilization than the Republican Party.”

In 2019, it was visited by forty to sixty million: “4chan.org: Web Analysis and Traffic History for 11 Years,” Traffic and Alexa Rank History, https://www.rank2traffic.com/​4chan.org (accessed January 3, 2020). Hiroyuki Nishimura was once a lonely man, too: This section was based on reporting from a number of sources, including: Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Memed Donald Trump into Office (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2019). Norimitsu Onishi, “Japanese Find a Forum to Vent Most-Secret Feelings,” The New York Times, May 9, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/​2004/​05/​09/​world/​japanese-find-a-forum-to-vent-most-secret-feelings.html. Shii, “2channel,” Everything Shii Knows, August 2004, http://shii.bibanon.org/​shii.org/​knows/​2channel.html.

“Japanese culture enjoyed unique purchase”: Milo Yiannopoulos, “The Lost Franchise: Why Digimon Deserves a Glorious Renaissance,” Breitbart, November 20, 2014, https://www.breitbart.com/​europe/​2014/​11/​20/​the-lost-franchise-why-digimon-deserves-a-glorious-renaissance/​. “Rootless white males”: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (New York: Penguin, 2017), 145. A Pew study: Richard Fry, “For First Time in Modern Era, Living with Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds,” Pew Research Center, May 24, 2016, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/​2016/​05/​24/​for-first-time-in-modern-era-living-with-parents-edges-out-other-living-arrangements-for-18-to-34-year-olds/​.


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

As recently as the early 1990s: Christopher Ingraham, “A Stunning Visualization of Our Divided Congress,” Washington Post, April 23, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stunning-visualization-of-our-divided-congress/. both parties have become more evenly matched: Ezra Klein, “The Political Scientist Donald Trump Should Read,” Vox, January 24, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/24/18193523/donald-trump-wall-shutdown-congress-polarization-frances-lee. Republicans used their control to enact: David Rogers, “Politico Analysis: At $2.3 Trillion Cost, Trump Tax Cuts Leave Big Gap,” Politico, February 28, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/28/tax-cuts-trump-gop-analysis-430781.

Had Maria hit the mainland: “Google Trends Data for the US: Which Hurricane Received the Most Attention?,” Puerto Rico Data Lab, October 27, 2017, https://prdatalab.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/google-trends-data-for-the-us-which-hurricane-received-the-most-attention/; Danny Vinik, “How Trump Favored Texas over Puerto Rico,” Politico, March 27, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/27/donald-trump-fema-hurricane-maria-response-480557. Beginning in the 1950s: John Schoen, “Here’s How an Obscure Tax Change Sank Puerto Rico’s Economy,” CNBC, September 26, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/26/heres-how-an-obscure-tax-change-sank-puerto-ricos-economy.html. after the tax break was repealed: Laura Sullivan, “How Puerto Rico’s Debt Created a Perfect Storm before the Storm,” NPR, May 2, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/05/02/607032585/how-puerto-ricos-debt-created-a-perfect-storm-before-the-storm.


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

To most of us, the idea that the government must tax more to spend more probably sounds reasonable. And our politicians know it. They also know that most of us don’t want to see our taxes go up, so they twist themselves into knots, trying to figure out how to win votes by vowing to do big things without asking the majority of us to pay more. For example, Donald Trump promised the American people that Mexico would pay for his border wall, while Democrats have insisted that billionaires and Wall Street banks can foot the bill for many of their ambitious programs. The money has to come from somewhere, right? Actually, we’ve got it backward. But before we get to that, let’s walk through the conventional understanding so it will be easier to contrast this backward thinking with the way things actually work.

As Nobel Prize–winning economist William Vickrey put it, well-targeted deficits “will generate added disposable income, enhance the demand for the products of industry, and make private investment more profitable.”38 In other words, well-designed fiscal policies, including those that increase fiscal deficits, can catalyze private investment, sparking a virtuous cycle that leads to the crowding in of private investment, rather than crowding it out. 5 “Winning” at Trade MYTH #5: The trade deficit means America is losing. REALITY: America’s trade deficit is its “stuff” surplus. I remember watching Donald Trump battle his way through the Republican primary debates with my son, Bradley, who was just nine years old at the time. It was 2015, and Trump was blustering on about trade, complaining that countries like Mexico, China, and Japan were ripping us off and vowing to bring an end to the thievery if voters would put him in the White House.

The gold standard system was suspended during World War I and World War II, as the US (and other nations) needed expanded policy space to run big deficits (creating lots of “green dollars”) in order to fight the wars. It was reestablished during the “interwar” years, placing considerable stress on the global economy during the Great Depression. If we still had this kind of a system today, then Donald Trump’s desire to wipe out the US trade deficit would make far more sense. After World War II, a new international monetary system was born. The new system restored convertibility by replacing the old gold standard with a new gold exchange standard. Instead of directly pegging currencies to a fixed price of gold, the system was replaced by convertibility into the US dollar, reflecting the dominance of the US in world trade (and the fact that the Allies won the war!).


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

It turned out that the vaccine worked pretty well fighting off RSV’s most severe symptoms, but an unusually tame RSV season had undermined the trial, reducing the “attack rate,” or number of new cases that could be used to test the shots. The next day, Novavax shares plunged. Yes, a mild virus season had made it hard to know if the vaccine provided protection, but the investors were betting it would be a while, if ever, before Novavax could afford a new RSV trial. Less than two months later, on the morning after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election, Novavax’s employees stumbled into the office. Many were Democratic voters who were still trying to come to grips with the surprise result. They were greeted with another shock: emails saying they were being laid off. That day, a third of Novavax’s staffers lost their jobs.

She and her colleagues at the hospital were limited to one N95 mask each day, even as they came into close contact with hundreds of infected patients. American authorities barely attempted measures that seemed to be helping elsewhere, such as test-and-trace strategies employed in countries in East Asia. Coordination from federal officials was almost nonexistent as President Donald Trump and members of his administration sought to downplay the virus’s danger. On March 11, global confirmed cases reached 124,663, with more than 4,500 people dead. That day, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the first since HIV/AIDS, saying the novel coronavirus had reached 112 countries and regions.

He looked exhausted, sometimes joining the calls after getting three hours of sleep the previous night. He didn’t want sessions to end, though, as if he were clinging to the fleeting moments of calm amid the building tensions. * * * • • • During the first weekend of November, just after Americans voted in a contested presidential election between Donald Trump and Joseph Biden, Pfizer and BioNTech executives were informed that early results from their vaccine’s phase 3 trial were ready to be revealed. The study had been designed to deliver an interim analysis after a significant number of its 44,000 subjects had become infected with SARS-CoV-2. By early November, 94 subjects had developed Covid-19 symptoms, a figure deemed large enough to deliver an early determination of the vaccine’s efficacy.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

In February 2016, the United States reached an agreement with Asian countries in negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would lower trade barriers with participating countries. For months before and after, the clothing factory owners in Lesotho could talk about little else. Later in the year, the election of Donald Trump, a strong trade protectionist, effectively killed the deal. But it remains the case that Lesotho’s viability as a manufacturing locale depends in part on trade policy set half a world away. As mentioned in the previous chapter, there had been a trade-policy-oriented scare several years earlier, when it looked like the US Congress might not extend Lesotho’s tariff-free access to the American market under the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

In late 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road strategy, which seeks to rebuild the old Silk Road across Asia, Europe, and Africa into a modern trade superhighway. The initiative is breathtaking in its ambition: to connect more than half the world’s population and a third of global GDP. In January 2017, a mere two months after US voters elected Donald Trump on a platform of “America First” and six months after British voters opted to leave the European Union, Xi gave a rousing defense of globalization at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Responding implicitly to Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from pursuing major trade deals with Asia and Europe, Xi asserted, “No one would emerge as a winner in a global trade war.


pages: 200 words: 64,329

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

[This] converts pain to meaning, and then meaning back into more pain.’15 This definition illuminates much of what is going on in Brexit, but it also highlights the project’s short-term problems and long-term contradictions. The most obvious short-term problem is the ‘leader of choice’. Snyder is thinking of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and their various imitators in Europe and elsewhere. Brexit did have a leader of choice – but he was too incompetent to actually effect the transfer of power that this revolutionary moment needed. It is hard to overstate the degree to which Boris Johnson was the single greatest asset for the Leave side in the referendum.

This matters, not because of the ludicrous personality politics of the Tory Party’s succession crisis, but because it exposed the fundamental problem of Brexit as a popular revolt – the problem of taking power. In order – in Snyder’s terms – to convert pain into meaning, there had to be a leader who could compensate for the self-harm inflicted by the people on themselves by inflicting even greater harm on others. Donald Trump, for all his monstrosities, fulfils this need for his working-class supporters – objectively they hurt themselves in voting for him but he actually took power and is serious about inflicting pain on their perceived enemies. Without a transfer of power, Brexit confronts an insoluble problem: who is to inflict the pain and who is to feel it most?


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

We’ve been cooped up inside, and I’m entertaining my aunt with internet memes and pictures of my life in the United States. She’s especially amused by photos of me camping and hiking, activities that are just starting to become popular in China, where the “pleasures of wild nature” are brazenly acknowledged as a made-up concept that requires marketing. My typically easygoing aunt is rankled by the murmurings of a Donald Trump–led trade war. For her, the trade war is personal. “Good riddance!” she says. “I say it’s good that we have this trade war. We used to export all the good things to the United States and kept all the defective stuff to sell here! And look at how we’ve damaged our environment, just for you Americans!

If previous decades in the United States were defined by feelings of progress, ours is defined by a feeling of conspiracy, the last refuge of personal agency. And what about Fitzpatrick and Reynolds’s warning in their 1997 book, about people finding something worse than an MLM? In the mid-2000s, Donald Trump was the well-known spokesperson and promoter of the Trump Network and ACN, two large MLMs that no longer exist because of a number of lawsuits and fraud cases. ACN sold telecom equipment, including videophones and internet service. The Trump Network sold a series of vitamins. Trump explicitly viewed the Trump Network as a “rescue” program for those suffering from the 2008 recession.


Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies (Academic Edition) by Bo Bennett

Black Swan, book value, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, side project, statistical model, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method

Even if Phil were human, the form of the argument would still commit the fallacy. In formal logic, the truth of the premises guarantee the truth of the conclusion. The bottom line: never insist that an informal argument is definitely fallacious, and be prepared to defend your arguments against claims of fallacy. Tip: In 2004, I wrote the book, Year To Success, a book Donald Trump called, “an inspiration to anyone who reads it.” (Yes, I’ll drop the names when I can!) In that book, I explain how success is like a game of chance where you control the odds by continually replacing behaviors that pull you away from success with behaviors that bring you closer to success. When appropriate, I include a tip that is relevant to the fallacy, that will bring you closer to success – most of which are serious, but some... not so much (you will know the difference).

Rich people are rich and poor people are poor – which members of those groups have wisdom does not depend on their financial status. Exception: If one’s wealth, or lack thereof, is directly related to the truth value of an argument, then it is not a fallacy. Mike: Did you know that the author of this book, who does extremely well financially in business, also wrote the book, “Year To Success” – that was endorsed by Donald Trump? Jon: I did not know that. Mike: That means that his book on success is probably worth looking into! Jon: I agree. And I am sure Bo will thank you for the cheap plug. Tip: There is nothing wrong with a little self-promotion. Base Rate Fallacy (also known as: neglecting base rates, base rate neglect, base rate bias [form of], prosecutor's fallacy [form of]) Description: Ignoring statistical information in favor of using irrelevant information, that one incorrectly believes to be relevant, to make a judgement.


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

However, although the CMV was designed in response to the risk retention rule, it turned out to be a highly efficient way to raise capital and invest equity. After the elimination of the rule and my leadership at Canyon, the CMV is still the vehicle that Canyon uses to raise capital. It proved resilient, profitable, and truly innovative. The Trump Bump…to Sexism The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in November 2016 caused me a great deal of discomfort. I mention this not coincidentally. I became more acutely aware of how out of place I was. There were more instances of sexism after the Trump election, as if men had been granted a license. Some were harmless but rather annoyingly petulant, like one heated conversation I recall with a portfolio manager, about a trade we disagreed on, which went like this: Me: “This trade is bad; you should have discussed with me ahead of time.”

Many people in the hedge fund world are traditional Republicans who want less government, fewer taxes, and are generally fiscally conservative. Few, like George Soros and Tom Steyer, are notorious Democrats—very few. But this was different. For one thing, all extreme-right politicians look the same these days. Namely, they have a turkey neck. Lindsey Graham: turkey neck. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump: turkey necks. And watch, it is going global: Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro? Turkey necks. Understandably, part of it is the natural upshot of being old and fat, but I still find it somewhat uncanny. Do they screen for it? If they do, no wonder Macron, Trudeau, and Obama had to be on the left.


pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

A variety of assertions underlie this nearly automatic conclusion: “Curiosity is in our DNA.”1 “­Humans have evolved to explore.”2 “If we cease our exploration, we s­ hall cease to be truly h ­ uman.”3 ­Humans working in space “demonstrate American military superiority” 4 (a theme that President Donald Trump repeatedly simplified by asserting that “Amer­i­ca ­w ill land the first ­woman on the moon—­a nd the United States w ­ ill be the first nation to plant its flag on Mars”).5 “As pioneers, we seek to blaze the trail for ­others, establishing a presence that leads to economic pro­g ress and broad societal benefit.” 6 “We must inspire young p ­ eople and f­ uture gen7 erations, which only astronauts can do.”

Derrick Pitts, “The ­Future of Space Exploration,” Franklin Institute, July 17, 2019, https://­www​.­fi​.­edu​/ ­blog​/­future​-­of​-s­ pace​-­exploration. 5. “Read, Watch President Trump’s Full Republican Nomination Ac­cep­ tance Speech,” WQAD, August 27, 2020, https://­www​.­wqad​.­com​/­article​ /­news​/­nation​-­world​/­president​-­donald​-­trump​-­rnc​-­speech​-­text​/­507​ -­e8cd51c1​-­203a​-­488e​-­b782​-­4df532ab527e. 6. NASA’s Journey to Mars: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration https://­w ww​.­n asa​ .­g ov​/­s ites​ /­d efault​ /­f iles​ /­a toms​ /­f iles​ /­j ourney​ -­t o​ -­mars​-­next​-­steps​-­20151008​_­508​.­pdf. 7.


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

As the underlying logic, technology, messaging, and remote control of The Mindset is palpable everywhere—school, work, healthcare, warfare, the environment—it’s no wonder so many people are frightened and angry. But instead of pushing for an alternative to the dehumanized, misogynist, antisocial, and catastrophic biases of The Mindset, the resistance is a mirror image of The Mindset itself. In fact, the seeds of today’s most virulent resistance movements were spawned long before Donald Trump’s Twitter-fueled victory over establishment candidate Hillary Clinton, on subgroups of internet forums and image boards like 4chan and Reddit. Feeling blamed for society’s ills , hopelessly unemployed, sexually frustrated, yet armed with laptops and The Mindset’s propensity for remote attacks, this disparate network has always been ready to rumble and came to prominence during Gamergate , a series of highly coordinated online harassments against female game designers and journalists.

While these young men may have been inscrutable to the establishment, the leaders of the emergent alt-right saw its members as the foot soldiers in their digital infowar against politics as usual. Steve Bannon, the media executive and political strategist who eventually served as an advisor to Donald Trump, welcomed the new population of discontents. Already skilled at meme creation, trolling, and pranking, the frustrated and shunned young men under Bannon’s thrall would be encouraged to experience themselves as a new clan of revolutionary tech bros, righting the wrongs of the castrating, politically correct left—as well the woman at their helm.


pages: 520 words: 164,834

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire by Dale van Atta

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, book value, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate raider, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, financial innovation, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, index card, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, profit motive, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, stock buybacks, three-martini lunch, urban renewal

The second coming of Steve Bollenbach to the Marriott corporation was not seen as the arrival of a savior. Nevertheless, it was he who devised the idea that would change the company forever, and for the better. His résumé included a stint as CFO of the struggling Holiday Corp. The first day he reported to work there, he discovered that Donald Trump “had decided to take over the company and fire all of the management because he felt they were a bunch of idiots,” Bollenbach recalled.6 He fended off the takeover by adding so many loans to the Holiday Corp.’s debt that it was no longer a tempting target for Trump. To float the sinking Holiday Inn ship, he sold the majority of the company to Bass PLC, the British brewing giant, for $2.2 billion.

He spun off the rest of the company—the lucrative casino hotels under the Harrah’s name, and its newer hotel brands, Embassy Suites, Hampton Inn, and Homewood Suites—into a new company named Promus. Considering that Bollenbach was once a business adversary, it was more than a little ironic that in 1990 the nearly bankrupt Donald Trump was forced by his creditors to beg Bollenbach to come to work for him and rescue the Trump organization. Always up for a new challenge, Bollenbach agreed. Over the next two years, through debt-for-equity swaps and the sale of Trump’s flagging real-estate and casino assets, Bollenbach saved the future U.S. president from bankruptcy.7 Bill Shaw, who had kept in close touch with Bollenbach over the years, asked him if he would leave Trump for Marriott, and he did.

But in Bollenbach’s eyes, they were overreacting, probably because of the stagnant value of their own stock options. Sure, the stock was on life support, but Bollenbach felt that the company had begun a significant turnaround, and the problems were fixable. In retrospect, he observed that his optimism may have come from the lifesaving mission he had completed at his last job. “I’d been working on Donald Trump’s problems and knew what real financial problems were about.” A month into the job, Bollenbach gave Bill a list of objectives. In hindsight, the most important item was #7: “Revise Marriott story.” “We had a short-term story, which was that we had to sell the real estate that was holding back our earnings,” Bill explained.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

They’re reduced from the so-called manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), which is usually very high. Being aware of the MSRP anchors you so that you feel you are getting a good deal at 40 percent off. Often, that reduction just brings the price to a reasonable level. Anchoring isn’t just for numbers. Donald Trump uses this mental model, anchoring others to his extreme positions, so that what seem like compromises are actually agreements in his favor. He wrote about this in his 1987 book Trump: The Art of the Deal: My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.

Many big companies operate similar prediction markets internally, where employees can predict the outcome of things like sales forecasts and marketing campaigns. Several larger public prediction markets also exist, such as PredictIt, which focuses on political predictions in the manner described above. While this market has successfully predicted many election outcomes across the world, in 2016 it failed to correctly predict both the election of Donald Trump and the UK’s Brexit vote. Retrospective analysis showed that diversity of opinion seemed lacking and that participants in the prediction market likely didn’t have enough direct contact with Trump or Brexit supporters. In addition, predictors were not operating fully independently, instead being influenced by the initial outsized odds against Trump and Brexit.

As we explored in Chapter 8, a person in just the right role can produce amazing results, and an organizational strategy attuned perfectly to its culture can be a quick and resounding success. Similarly, a message can strike just the right tone for a specific audience such that it will deeply resonate. You see this phenomenon repeatedly in politics when certain candidates hit a nerve with a segment of the population, as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump did in the U.S. 2016 presidential election cycle. A model that captures these phenomena is resonant frequency. This model comes from physics and explains why glass can break if you play just the right note: Each object has a different frequency at which it naturally oscillates. When you play that frequency, such as the right tone for a wineglass, the energy of the wave causes the glass to vibrate more and more until it breaks.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Officers from the 8th Police District, which occupies the largest new building in Chicago Lawn, were responsible for the notorious murder of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014. At the same time, Ann spent most of her life with black people who worked, owned homes, and went to church, and she often saw politicians and commentators on television—in particular President Donald Trump, who had a special preoccupation with violence on the South Side of Chicago—speaking about black America as if the tragedies in her neighborhood were the norm and people like her were the exception. They talked as if, to their minds, black people hadn’t had to fight against anything, hadn’t achieved anything.

Then came a long series of spin-offs and other transactions, each producing bountiful fees for investment bankers, executives, investment funds, and private equity firms, and then another merger in 2000 and another spin-off in 2011. After that the Nabisco plant was the Mondelez plant, operating only one production line, which the company planned to move to Mexico. During the 2016 presidential campaign, both major party nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, made stops at the plant, promising to keep the remaining jobs in Chicago; after that the company kept producing cookies there at a modest level. Talman Savings, the rock on which rested Chicago Lawn’s status as a stable residential working-class neighborhood for first-time homeowners, was a casualty of the savings and loan crisis.

They’re my constituency, she said, and I support them, the same way you would support an entrepreneur. That wasn’t the answer Hoffman was looking for, because he didn’t think politics should be about constituencies. Hoffman’s grand passion of the campaign year, equivalent to his enthusiasm for Obama in 2012, was his dislike of Donald Trump, who could hardly have repelled Hoffman more if he had been an avatar designed specifically for that purpose. As Hoffman put it, “More or less all the things Donald stands for, I abhor.” Trump’s flamboyantly nostalgic slogan, “Make America Great Again,” conjured up the opposite of Hoffman’s futuristic vision of the good; Trump’s constant militant invocations of the dream of an authority-worshipping, unapologetically white America dominating its rivals stood in total contrast to Silicon Valley’s idea of a unified, multicultural global market that was good for everyone.


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

He was going to meet with Hillary Clinton that evening at a fundraiser for her presidential campaign. Jackson Colaço was troubled by Systrom’s ask. She was a Clinton supporter herself, but Systrom was the CEO, representing Instagram in public. She wished she’d had more warning, because this would need to be handled carefully. Was he going to meet with the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, too? The world was watching—and gauging Facebook’s impartiality in the coming election. Earlier that year, as Instagram was building Stories, the online technology news site Gizmodo had written about a team of Facebook contractors who curated news into a “trending topics” module on the right side of the news feed.

But as Facebook became a destination for political conversations, the human curation in “Trending Topics” wasn’t the actual problem. It was how human nature was manipulated by Facebook’s algorithm, and how Facebook looked away, that got the company in trouble. * * * Few at Facebook expected that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. At the Menlo Park campus the day after the vote, the mood was dark, employees whispering in corners and checking their phones. Some of them stayed home, too emotional to face the reality of the erratic new leader of the United States. The media generated several handy narratives for How It Happened.

On Friday, March 17, 2018, the New York Times and the Observer simultaneously broke the news that years earlier, Facebook had allowed the developer of a personality quiz app to obtain data on tens of millions of users, which that developer then shared with a firm called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica retained the data and used it to help build its political consultancy. The company aggregated information from several sources to build personality profiles on people who might be receptive to ads that would help conservatives win elections. Donald Trump’s campaign was a client. The story hit all of Facebook’s weak spots: shoddy data practices. Negligence. Lack of transparency with users. And a role in Trump’s win. It stoked distrust among politicians the world over. The worst part was that Facebook had known of the data leak for years, and hadn’t properly enforced its policies, or let users know when their information was compromised.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Greenberg, ‘It’s been 20 years since this man declared cyberspace independence’, Wired, 8 February 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-man-declared-cyberspace-independence/ 30Donald Trump, in typically iconoclastic fashion, is the first US leader in decades to be openly sceptical of the internet, suggesting it be ‘closed up’ in some way to prevent terrorist attacks. D. Goldman, ‘Donald Trump wants to “close up” the internet’, CNN, 8 December 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/08/technology/donald-trump-internet/index.html 31L. Hornby, ‘China paper slams US for cyber role in Iran unrest’, Reuters, 24 January 2010, https://www.reuters.com/article/china-us-internet/rpt-china-paper-slams-us-for-cyber-role-in-iran-unrest-idUSTOE60N00T20100124 Chapter 22 1‘Executive order on measures to make state media more effective’, Kremlin.ru, 9 December 2013, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/19805 2S.

As the image of shadowy hackers undermining American institutions shifted from Beijing to Moscow, less attention was paid to the role of the Chinese government in future attacks, especially compared with the endless coverage of the actions of Kremlin-linked or Putin-adjacent figures in the run-up to Donald Trump’s election. For those who continued to be targeted by China’s elite hackers, other solutions would have to be found. Part 4: War Chapter 17 Caught The death of the Uyghur internet “So, do you ever want to go to America again?” Ilham Tohti asked his daughter Jewher, one day in January 2013.


pages: 397 words: 114,841

High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline by Jim Rasenberger

AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, East Village, Ford Model T, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, MITM: man-in-the-middle, scientific management, strikebreaker, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, young professional

This conclusion happens to benefit Silverstein, for the more like other buildings the Twin Towers behaved, the less liable Silverstein will be to legal claims made by victims’ families. In the end, whatever the reason for the towers’ collapse, one thing seems certain: it was a body blow to the reputation of steel. A few weeks after the disaster, in a television interview, Barbara Walters asked Donald Trump what lessons builders of the future might learn from the Trade Center. “More concrete,” said Trump. Concrete would not have melted as the steel did; it is more heat resistant than steel. Trump’s view was echoed widely in the months after the attack. “It’s better to build in reinforced concrete,” Dr.

Who wants to work or live in a potential terrorist target? A USA Today Gallup poll taken soon after the attack found that while 70 percent of Americans still favored construction of skyscrapers, 35 percent admitted they were less likely to enter one. A 900-foot skyscraper planned in downtown New York was quickly scrapped, as were Donald Trump’s plans to build the world’s tallest building in Chicago. If very tall buildings were to remain a part of the urban landscape, they would exist under different circumstances, composed, probably, of different ingredients. The symbolic power of the skyscraper—the Great American Steel Skyscraper, anyway—was defunct.

See Ernst & Young building Time Warner Center Christmas fight at design of hole of ironworker dangers at ironworker frustrations at ironworkers from, at World Trade Center disaster ironworker skills at lack of steel at Monday mornings for ironworkers at raising gangs of safety at status of ironworkers after finishing superintendent job at topping out of walking bosses at winter weather at work at, after destruction of World Trade Center topping out, Time Warner Center Tower Building tower cranes Tracy, Jack Tracy, Mickey Treahy, Frank “Red,” Triborough Bridge Trinity Building Trinity Church Trump, Donald Trump World Tower truss bridges trusses Time Warner building World Trade Center trust tuberculosis tubes, framed tying off unions attempts to break Bloody Friday hard-hat riots and Chicago Chicago Local cleanup of World Trade Center disaster and Davis-Bacon Act and Wagner Act decline of dynamite conspiracy of history of, for ironworkers Los Angeles and Mohawk Indians and Newfoundlanders and New York City Local New York City Local New York City Local New York City membership book steel industry and strikes (see strikes) violence and, (see also violence) walking delegate Sam Parks and (see Parks, Sam) United Building Trades United Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Union of New York and Vicinity U.S.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

A goofy-looking tan dog bumbles around underfoot, looking as if someone sewed the head of a beagle onto the body of a much larger Labrador. “You’ll be in my brother’s room,” Katie says, beckoning me down the stairs to the basement den, where her boyfriend is holding sleeping baby Kaylee—tiny, adorable, and also red-haired—while watching Fox News on very low volume. He carefully mutes the TV to say hello; onscreen, Donald Trump silently flails above a banner reading TRUMP ACCUSED OF MOCKING NY TIMES REPORTER’S DISABILITY. As he gingerly hands Kaylee back to her mother, I give a whispered explanation of who I am and what I’m doing here. “Man, my uncle used to work at Amazon—he hated that place,” the boyfriend whispers when I’m done.

All three women are blue badges, and all three like working at SDF8. I drink a beer and watch the news on the TV behind the bar as I wait. I haven’t really been following the election—keeping up with the news lately feels even more like work than my shame-pile of unread books. It’s on mute, but Republican front-runner Donald Trump appears to have issued a Christmas tweet demanding credit for an Obama initiative to deport hundreds of families who’d fled violence in Central America. In other news, Bernie Sanders called Trump vulgar for saying Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in the 2008 primaries. God, 2016 is really going to suck, I think.

.* My classmates are a much easier sell than I suspect real customers will be—they’ll be calling in for service, so they probably will be pissed off at AT&T. But we still have to try. It’s mandatory. To entertain myself and occasionally my partners, I’ve started role-playing various characters when it’s my turn to be the customer—Batman,* Donald Trump, a woman who’s obviously keeping someone prisoner in her basement, President Obama. We spend at least half our classroom time on sales—doing memory drills on the many permutations of DirecTV packages, learning the systems that process sales, memorizing verbiage that will supposedly “overcome objections.”


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

The first occasion was during negotiations for the 1992 UN climate change framework convention. That attempt was rebuffed by George H. W. Bush. The second was in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, signed by the Clinton Administration, effectively vetoed by the Senate, and then repudiated by George W. Bush. In many respects Donald Trump’s rejection was the cruelest of all. The agreement’s entire architecture had been designed to circumvent the Constitution’s requirement for the Senate’s advice and consent, a compromise the Europeans reluctantly accepted in return for the certainty of American participation. In fact, Trump offered the Europeans an olive branch in renegotiating the Paris Agreement or negotiating a new agreement.

In October 2007, its stock market valuation hit €5.36 billion. It was downhill from there. Profits peaked in 2008 and sales followed two years later, falling 66 percent by 2013. A flood of Chinese imports and too much debt saw the company rack up over a billion euros of losses in three years. Rather like Donald Trump, the secret of his success was not going bankrupt, he once told a journalist.15 A February 2014 debt-for-equity swap, involving a €1.3 billion creditor haircut, left shareholders with five percent of the company. Although Asbeck kept his job and was bullish about prospects for expansion, around half the 20,000 solar jobs in Germany have disappeared since 2011.16 By autumn 2015, the company stock was valued at €320 million, little more than four percent of its valuation eight years earlier.17 After the European Council’s 2007 decision to impose renewables targets, it became pointless for experts and industry participants to question the costs and consequences of large-scale deployment of wind and solar.

As heirs of the Enlightenment, Bruckner, a philosopher from the left who condemns the left for what it has become, argues that European left-wing movements are thrice guilty of betraying the ideals of the Enlightenment: first, by confusing education with entertainment and for its part in the collapse of schooling; second, by abandoning the battle for equality in favor of identity politics and letting the proletariat drift toward the nationalist right; and third, by deserting the idea of progress, thereby robbing the left of its raison d’être.20 The American left’s championing of identity politics and its capitulation to environmentalism has seen it forsake its historic role of promoting the interests of working people, fueling the rise of Donald Trump. From being the voice of working people, the Democratic Party has become the political arm of the Climate Industrial Complex, tasked with monetizing environmentalism through a raft of government interventions of one kind or another paid for by working people, and aided by a GOP Congress when it approved generous extensions of the two main subsidies for renewables in the December 2015 budget deal.


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

“Authorities invest enormous resources into dividing people into hierarchical categories that become important political building blocks. And drug users are like little meteors shooting right through those categories, and it freaks people out.” It’s an indication of how advantageous systemic racism is that so few politicians can resist exploiting it, Herzberg said. When Donald Trump became president in 2016, the United States was the world’s most prolific jailer. More than 6.4 million citizens were under correctional supervision—more than were enslaved in antebellum America. Overdose deaths were now the No. 1 cause of accidental death for people under fifty-five, claiming more lives than all the wars since World War II combined.

If I can do that at fourteen, how are we letting them fall through the cracks?” To see the immiseration for myself, she suggested in her mountain accent that we meet in Letcher County, Kentucky—at her papaw’s body shop in “Wattsburg,” as I wrote in my notes. It’s spelled Whitesburg. (The number of pain pills per person per year there? A whopping eighty-five.) Donald Trump had just been elected, and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy topped the nonfiction bestseller list. When I brought up either of those things, Nikki’s cheerful demeanor turned in an instant, her accent thickened, and she spoke at a rapid-fire pace that most non-Appalachians—and Internet transcription services—find difficult to process.

To inspire him in the Cleveland-based Multidistrict Litigation and for use as props, Hanly displayed several Purdue marketing items in his Manhattan office—an OxyContin plush gorilla, a small calculator flogging Purdue’s record-breaking sales figures, and Maureen Sara’s Employee of the Year award—for her diligent work at Purdue on Y2K preparedness. He also held on to the memory of deposing Richard Sackler. “I’ve taken 500 depositions in my career, and I have never deposed a person whose ability to exhibit empathy is zero,” Hanly told me. “Compared to Sackler, Donald Trump looks like Jesus Christ.” When the Sackler family finalized its first offering to Mike Moore and his co-counsel in the fall of 2019, it pledged $3 billion to 4.5 billion of their cash to the settlement and agreed to relinquish Purdue to a creditor trust—an offer estimated at roughly $10 billion over several years, the bulk of it from future sales of both OxyContin and anti-addiction drugs.


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

We were looking at him five years ago. Give us everything you’ve got and we’ll go from there.’ That was their MO,” Mark said. It left him wondering: “You haven’t touched that case in five years, why are you asking me for my case file?” Grantz led an investigation into a ransomware attack in January 2017, eight days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The strike disabled computers linked to 126 street cameras in a video surveillance system monitoring public spaces across Washington, D.C., including along the presidential parade route. Instead of paying the five-figure ransom, the district scrambled to wipe and restart the cameras, which were back online three days before the swearing-in.

Quoting Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, he wrote, “There is no pandemic exception to the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights.” He shared an article from WND—formerly WorldNetDaily, a far-right news and opinion website known for promoting conspiracy theories—with the headline “Coronavirus Could Be ‘Exterminated’ If Lockdowns Lifted.” He supported President Donald Trump’s decision to keep houses of worship open during the pandemic and defended him against critics. “How are the same people who say Trump oversteps his bounds and authorities by sending feds to help stop violence in cities say that Trump didn’t do enough to ‘stop COVID’?” he wrote. He also echoed Trump’s false argument that voting by mail fosters voter fraud.

During federal budget markups, Ruppersberger added a $10 million appropriation for state and local CISA personnel. The money helped the agency hire state-level advisers for elections and cybersecurity. Opposed to Krebs’s vision for CISA and lured by a higher-paying job, Manfra left DHS for Google. For his part, Krebs was unceremoniously fired by Donald Trump after he rejected the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. After leaving CISA, Krebs was more sympathetic to Manfra’s viewpoint. She raised a “legitimate question of whether we could actually do anything,” he said. “We didn’t have the personnel, or the resources, nor the mandate to get out there and fix people’s networks for them.


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

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 2012 Eurovision event will have one other tie to the first family besides the new showcase auditorium: The president’s son-in-law, singer Emin Agalarov, was chosen to entertain the crowds between acts.” (Emin did a pretty good job after that of keeping his name out of other political stories until he made the mistake of calling Donald Trump Jr. in 2016 to offer him dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign, courtesy of the Kremlin.) The entire blackmail episode appeared to have backfired on the Aliyev family when Khadija was invited to New York to receive the International Women’s Media Foundation’s 2012 Courage in Journalism Award. She took the opportunity to call out the Aliyev government and others.

See cybersurveillance software Stahl, Lesley Stark, Holger State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) Stuxnet Sudan Süddeutsche Zeitung Sullivan, Drew the Sun Sunray, Shmuel Susumo Azano SwissLeaks scandal Switzerland Symbian cell phones Syria Szabó, András Tahrir Square, occupation of Tajikistan Tehelka Tel Aviv, Israel terrorism Thakurta, Paranjoy Guha Timberg, Craig Time magazine Togo Tolfi, Lahcen Tor Travère, Audrey Truecaller Trump, Donald Trump, Donald, Jr. Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Twitter Tzachi Uganda Ukraine Unit 8200 alumni of United Arab Emirates DarkMatter and Israel and NSO and United Kingdom United Nations Guiding Principles of Human Rights Security Council United States (see also specific states) aid to Mexico against drug cartels Azerbaijan and blacklisting of NSO by CIA Department of Defense Department of Homeland Security Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) FBI Israel and lack of action on Radi’s case Morocco and National Security Agency (NSA) presidential inauguration of 2021 State Department University of Michigan, Knight-Wallace Fellowship program University of Toronto, Citizen Lab peer review by prepublication reports to NSO Untersinger, Martin “US-Azerbaijan: Vision for the Future” conference Vanity Fair Varadarajan, Siddharth Venu, M.


pages: 1,123 words: 328,357

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

Tristan Landry ‘The Colour Revolutions in the Rear-view Mirror: Closer Than They Appear’ Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 53, 1 (March 2011) pp. 1–24; Melinda Haring & Michael Cecire ‘Why the Colour Revolutions Failed’ Foreign Policy (18 March 2013) online Back to text 41. Cf. Brian Grodsky ‘Trump, Clinton and the Future of Global Democracy’ The Conversation (25 September 2016) online Back to text 42. Glenn Plaskin ‘The 1990 Playboy Interview with Donald Trump’ Playboy 1.3.1990 Back to text 43. ‘Transcript: Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Speech’ NYT 27.4.2016 Back to text 44. Michael H. Fuchs ‘Donald Trump’s doctrine of Unpredictability has the World on Edge’ Guardian 13.2.2017 Back to text 45. Nicole Gaouette ‘Russia, China Use UN Stage to Push Back on a US-led World Order’ CNN 21.9.2017; Joel Gehrke ‘Russia: “We Are in the post-West World Order”’ Washington Examiner 29.6.2018; idem ‘Russia Calls for “post-West World Order”’ Washington Examiner 18.2.2017; ‘Vladimir Putin Says Liberalism Has “Become Obsolete”’ FT 27.6.2019; ‘“Liberalism Is Obsolete,” Russian President Vladimir Putin Says Amid G20 Summit’ TIME 28.6.2019 Back to text 46.

Caught out, Trump assured journalists he had seen through the stunt, declaring ‘I looked into the back of his limo and saw four attractive women. I knew that his society had not come that far yet in terms of capitalist decadence.’ Mikhail Gorbachev certainly did not share Donald Trump’s ideal of decadence. Nevertheless, he was clearly fascinated by the market economy. Bystander Joe Peters reckoned that Gorbachev was ‘going to learn all our tricks of capitalism and become the Donald Trump-ski of the Soviet Union’.[2] The sense of anticipation was palpable. That very morning Gorbachev achieved perhaps his greatest international triumph so far. At the United Nations he had delivered a truly astounding address, one that would become pivotal for future Soviet foreign policy and for the course of world politics.

This represented a linear reading of the post-Wall future, extrapolating the peaceful unification of Germany onto the European plane. But the plausibility of this eirenic dream has been called into question by the rise in the 2010s of populism, nationalism and illiberalism – with ‘Brexit’ shaking the core belief that the European integration project is irreversible and US President Donald Trump undermining the presumed indestructibility of the transatlantic alliance. The American vision of a ‘global community of nations’[30] – an order based on international law, liberal values, the limited use of force and a legitimate international arbitrating authority – now looks utopian.[31] The old great power rivalry is back with a vengeance and the traditional Western verities of democracy and free trade are being challenged around the world – especially by Russia and China, but also by America itself.


pages: 219 words: 67,173

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America by Sam Roberts

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, New Urbanism, the High Line, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, Y2K

Commercially it stood as one of America’s first multi-use buildings, incorporating shops, restaurants, stores and offices—in short, all the diversity of a city within the confines of one building. In 1967, Grand Central was designated as a New York City landmark. A decade later, modernization of the old Commodore Hotel, the first project in Midtown by Donald Trump, ignited a revival of 42nd Street. And 30 years later, a major renovation restored the station as an architectural gem and a destination not merely for train travelers, but also for shoppers, restaurant-goers, and other visitors. Grand Central anchored the revival of Midtown Manhattan, a revival that would spread west to Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, and Times Square and become emblematic of urban renewal at its best.

(Its building, three-and-a-half stories higher after the company acquired 75,000 square feet of air rights from Grand Central, would help doom the classic image of the Main Concourse bathed in shafts of sunlight streaming from most of its southern lunette windows.) The railroad had profitably sold off the Barclay, Biltmore, and Roosevelt hotels. Penn Central also dumped the adjacent Commodore Hotel in a complex deal involving tax breaks, leasebacks, and other investment arcana among the city, the state Urban Development Corporation, Donald Trump, and the Hyatt Hotel Corporation. In addition to restoring the hotel inside and out, the deal was intended to generate $2 million to clean Grand Central’s exterior. “As an investment,” Ada Louis Huxtable wrote presciently, “this could well be seed money for far greater returns in the start of a revitalized 42nd Street.”


pages: 250 words: 64,011

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day by John H. Johnson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, Black Swan, business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, obamacare, p-value, PageRank, pattern recognition, publication bias, QR code, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, statistical model, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons, Yogi Berra

Fienberg, “Randomization and Social Affairs: The 1970 Draft Lottery,” Science 171 (1971): 255, http://conallboyle.com/lottery/05USmil_draft1970.pdf. 6. We might also be able to learn something about the process by studying the variance—the amount by which values vary—within each month. 7. John McCormick, “Donald Trump Dominates Republican Field in Pre-Debate Bloomberg Poll,” Bloomberg, August 4, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-08-04/donald-trump-dominates-republican-field-in-pre-debate-bloomberg-poll. 8. With a margin of error of ±4.4 percent, the researchers would expect that Jeb would not be more than 4.4 percent higher or lower than 10 percent (approximately 6 to 14 percent), and that Walker would not be more than 4.4 percent higher or lower than 8 percent (roughly 4 to 12 percent). 9.


pages: 281 words: 69,107

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order by Bruno Maçães

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Admiral Zheng, autonomous vehicles, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, cloud computing, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, global value chain, high-speed rail, industrial cluster, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, one-China policy, Pearl River Delta, public intellectual, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, trade liberalization, trade route, zero-sum game

The list of products covered by the proposed tariffs was obtained from those benefiting from Chinese industrial policies, including Made in China 2025. China responded the next day with its own plans for 25 per cent tariffs on 106 American products, including soybeans, automobiles and aircraft, that would also impact about $50 billion of imports from America. In the April 5 statement threatening more tariffs, President Donald Trump stressed that “the United States is still prepared to have discussions” with China. Neither country said when the duties would kick in, but Chinese government officials commented privately that Beijing would be unwilling to negotiate with the United States on any curbs on Made in China 2025. Unsurprisingly, China perceives the American demands as an attempt to stop China’s economic development and technological progress.

Further revealing comments on the initiative came from Secretary of Defense James Mattis during a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in October 2017: “Regarding ‘One Belt, One Road,’ I think in a globalized world, there are many belts and many roads, and no one nation should put itself into a position of dictating ‘One Belt, One Road.’ That said, the ‘One Belt, One Road’ also goes through disputed territory, and I think that in itself shows the vulnerability of trying to establish that sort of a dictate.” And in August 2018, we finally found out what President Donald Trump personally thinks of the Belt and Road. According to one person sitting in the room, he told a group of business executives gathered at his Bedminster golf club that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “One Belt One Road Initiative,” was “insulting” and that he did not want it. Trump said he had told Xi as much to his face.6 A pivotal consequence of the Belt and Road has been to force the United States to adopt a similar concept of geographic space.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

We’ve always had the best infrastructure.3 —Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States We need once and for all to have a very big infrastructure program.4 —Hillary Clinton, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Infrastructure – we’re going to start spending on infrastructure big. Not like we have a choice.5 —Donald Trump, President of the United States The last thing that our cities need is more infrastructure. Yet, at a time noted for political polarization and bitter divisiveness, the only thing our politicians, professionals, and the working class all seem to agree on is spending for infrastructure. Support for infrastructure investments continually poll higher than any other policy item under consideration.6 Voters have even demonstrated a willingness to accept modest tax increases if the money is dedicated to infrastructure.

In the modern political landscape, I go back and forth between Red America and Blue America, enjoying aspects of both but not feeling fully comfortable in either. Prior to November of 2016, ignorance of the other was accompanied with a level of suspicion, even curiosity. Following the election of Donald Trump as president, suspicion has turned to contempt, derision, and sometimes outright hatred. One of the common questions I find myself answering in both Americas is “Do they really believe . . . ,” as if the complex, multi-faceted “us” stands across the abyss from the monolithic “them,” geographic separation being the only thing keeping us from being debased, or worse, by the moral vacuousness of the other.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

It was our task to help organize supporters in all the states that would not be staffed until much later in the primary campaign cycle. Of course, Bernie didn’t win the primary, and that was heartbreaking for so many of us. As Zack and I finish up the writing of this book, we are watching the polls tighten in the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A race that all polls have indicated would have been a cakewalk for Bernie. Meanwhile, the police continue to murder unarmed black people seemingly with impunity, and Native American tribes are leading an epic human rights protest blocking the route of a new oil pipeline from breaking sacred ground in North Dakota.

The biggest single expenditure by far of the Bernie campaign, as it is in nearly every electoral campaign at the federal or statewide level, was advertising. Bernie spent more money on advertising than any other presidential candidate in the 2016 primaries. He spent more money than Hillary Clinton, more money than the Republican candidates, and certainly more money than Donald Trump, who could count the mainstream media as a virtual SuperPAC that kept him on the air practically 24/7. Meanwhile, Clinton spent more than twice as much money on staff than our campaign did. What the volunteers knew all along was that the gold standard in any campaign for changing hearts and minds is a personal conversation between a volunteer and a voter at the door or on the phone.


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

After Davos, I was sure this was turning into a global pandemic. I discussed with Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the UK government’s chief scientific and medical advisers, how the country should prepare and that we should try to start vaccine clinical trials as soon as possible in case US President Donald Trump refused to share future American-made vaccines. I harboured reservations about the lacklustre reaction in the UK. There was a notable lack of public communication on what was unfolding abroad and intensive care units across the UK were already running at full capacity, which has, unfortunately, become the norm.

Reuters, 20 May 2021. www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-work-with-who-pandemic-radar-track-diseases-2021-05-20/ p. 216 UNAIDS, ‘COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic’, press statement, 12 May 2021. www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/pressreleaseandstatementarchive/2021/may/20210512_independent-panel-pandemic-preparedness-response p. 221 ‘One of the most striking outcomes of the pandemic …’ Amy Maxmen and Jeff Tollefson, ‘Two Decades of Pandemic War Games Failed to Account for Donald Trump’. Nature, 4 August 2020. www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02277-6 Glossary ACT-Accelerator Access to Covid Tools-Accelerator asymptomatic A person is asymptomatic when they are infected with a disease, and can transmit it, but show no symptoms. avian influenza, bird flu A type of influenza caused by viruses adapted to birds.


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

Patsy and I go to countries where people can still smoke in shops and restaurants and hotel lobbies; where cigarettes are cheap, but the packs have pictures on them of lungs that look barbecued, or of a little girl laying flowers on her mother’s grave; where the group of eight at the breakfast table beside you all have lit Marlboros in their hands, or maybe six have Marlboros and two are sucking on cigars; places where, at the end of our short visits, all of our stuff smells like stale smoke—not just our coats and sweaters but even our keys and glasses. Our eyebrows probably stink as well. And the breakfast rooms! In Odessa, beside the head cheese on the buffet there stood a bottle of vodka with glasses beside it. Eight a.m., and people were taking shots. The room looked like it had been decorated by Donald Trump. Curtains the shade and texture of pantyhose hung in limp swags over the windows. Chairs were high-backed and velvet, some gold and others the same pea green as the wallpaper. There were garish chandeliers overhead and, at our feet, a mosaic-tiled floor. Beside us, a man took cheesecake photos of the woman he was with.

What if my grandparents hadn’t emigrated from their village in Greece, had been turned away because they didn’t have health insurance or a college education, or enough money to meet some arbitrary new standard? Greece is just south of Albania, an easy trek for kidnappers. Would I still have my kidneys? My liver? Certainly, had my grandparents not immigrated, their only child—my father—could not have voted for Donald Trump. In America, the talk now is all about white privilege, but regardless of your race, there’s American privilege as well, or at least Western privilege. It means that when you’re in Dakar or Minsk your embassy is open and staffed, and you don’t need to hand out bribes in order to get what you need.


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

AUTHOR’S NOTE IN 2017, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. changed its name to Walmart Inc. I use “Walmart” throughout the text for continuity, even in references preceding the switchover. The endnotes use both spellings. CHAPTER 1 Mr. 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.

In 2016, as Walmart raised its starting wage to $10 an hour, Fortune named the company to its annual “Change the World” list. “No issue is more central to this year’s contentious US presidential election than the anxiety of the average American worker about stagnating wages,” the magazine said. “But while Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump attempt to woo voters with their plans, Walmart is taking action.” It is tempting to cling to the belief that companies like Walmart can change the world, especially at a time when government is so polarized and dysfunctional. “When the government is absent,” the PR firm Edelman has said, “people clearly expect business to step in and fill the void, and the high expectations of business to address and solve today’s challenges has never been more apparent.”


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

It felt, to them, like their soulmates had all had an affair with Nigel Farage. Ugh! Similarly in the US, a 2017 poll found that 11 per cent of Americans ended a serious relationship due to political tensions in the wake of Donald Trump’s election over Hillary Clinton. Forty-one per cent said that they argued with their partner over politics more than ever. Newspaper articles ran with headlines such as ‘Donald Trump is Destroying my Marriage’, ‘If You Are Married to a Trump Supporter, Divorce Them’ and ‘I Might Still Be Married if Trump Wasn’t President’. According to matchmakers and dating agencies, late 2016 was the first time that politics became one of the major criteria in people’s searches.


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

Eike let slip that one of China’s state oil companies would make an offer. But in the end no one bit, at least not at the price Eike wanted. This made some investors nervous—what had the French and the Norwegians and the Chinese seen that they didn’t like? For every investor who said Eike had “the Midas touch,” there was another who compared him with Donald Trump, more talk than substance. You could see this dynamic at play in April 2011, when Eike made a grand announcement: According to a report from De-Golyer & MacNaughton, a top Houston oil consultancy, OGX’s fields held nearly eleven billion barrels of oil, more than double previous estimates. This sounded like cause for celebration.

Ever superlative, he seemed proud now even of the scale of his rise and fall. “It was the craziest, fastest wealth creation ever, and it was the fastest to disappear, but it’s also the fastest anyone ever zeroed their debts,” he said, smiling wide as he thrust his hands up and down to illustrate his points. Godoy suggested a parallel with Donald Trump—who went through four corporate bankruptcies. “Don’t compare me to him, please,” Eike replied. “All he does is buildings.” Eike preferred to think of himself as an innovator like Elon Musk, the founder of the electric car company Tesla. Eike was willing now to admit mistakes—“I expanded too fast”—but he complained bitterly about his treatment in the press.

He said this in an interview with Forbes in 2010, according to Keren Blankfeld, “Brazilian Whacks: Eike Batista and Brazil’s Unfulfilled Potential,” Forbes, March 3, 2015. 152“the Midas touch.” A portfolio manager named Stacy Steimel said this to me for my first big story on Eike, “Batista’s $7.6 Billion Stock Tumble.” 152compared him with Donald Trump. A portfolio manager named Ed Kuczma said this to me for Alex Cuadros, Juan Carlo Spinetto, and Cristiane Lucchesi, “Eike Batista, the Man Who Lost $25 Billion in One Year,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 28, 2013. 152Diogo Mainardi. This interaction is from Manhattan Connection, March 13, 2011. 153spent fifteen million dollars of his own money.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

., others,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/iran-hackers/iranian-hackers-use-fake-facebook-accounts-to-spy-on-u-s-others-idUSL1N0OE2CU20140529. 45The 2015 hacktivist who broke into: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (15 Apr 2016), “The vigilante who hacked Hacking Team explains how he did it,” Vice Motherboard, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3dad3n/the-vigilante-who-hacked-hacking-team-explains-how-he-did-it. 45And the 2016 Russian attacks against: David E. Sanger and Nick Corasanti (14 Jun 2016), “D.N.C. says Russian hackers penetrated its files, including dossier on Donald Trump,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/us/politics/russian-hackers-dnc-trump.html. 45One survey found that 80% of breaches: Andras Cser (8 Jul 2016), “The Forrester Wave: Privileged identity management, Q3 2016,” Forrester, https://www.beyondtrust.com/wp-content/uploads/forrester-wave-for-privilege-identity-management-2016.pdf. 45Google looked at Gmail users: Kurt Thomas and Angelika Moscicki (9 Nov 2017), “New research: Understanding the root cause of account takeover,” Google Security Blog, https://security.googleblog.com/2017/11/new-research-understanding-root-cause.html. 46They guess the answers to the “secret questions”: Bruce Schneier (9 Feb 2005), “The curse of the secret question,” Schneier on Security, https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/02/the_curse_of_the_sec.html. 46After receiving bad advice: Eric Lipton, David E.

Jason Healey (1 Nov 2016), “The U.S. government and zero-day vulnerabilities: From pre-Heartbleed to the Shadow Brokers,” Columbia Journal of International Affairs, https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/healey_vulnerability_equities_process. 166Instead, it’s making us much less secure: Oren J. Falkowitz (10 Jan 2017), “U.S. cyber policy makes Americans vulnerable to our own government,” Time, http://time.com/4625798/donald-trump-cyber-policy. 167The NSA participated in the process: John Gilmore (6 Sep 2013), “Re: [Cryptography] opening discussion: Speculation on ‘BULLRUN,’” Mail Archive, https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html. 167“devastating effect” on security: Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier (Dec 2003), “A cryptographic evaluation of IPsec,” Counterpane Internet Security, https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-ipsec.pdf. 167A second example: in the secret: Elad Barkan, Eli Biham, and Nathan Keller (17 Sep 2003), “Instant ciphertext-only cryptanalysis of GSM encrypted communication,” http://cryptome.org/gsm-crack-bbk.pdf. 167Both of these were probably part: Nicole Perlroth, Jeff Larson, and Scott Shane (5 Sep 2013), “Secret documents reveal N.S.A. campaign against encryption,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html.

Under GDPR it would be $420M,” Digital Guardian, https://digitalguardian.com/blog/hilton-was-fined-700k-data-breach-under-gdpr-it-would-be-420m. 186“The EU is already the world’s”: Eireann Leverett, Richard Clayton, and Ross Anderson (6 Jun 2017), “Standardization and certification of the ‘Internet of Things,’” Institute for Consumer Policy, https://www.conpolicy.de/en/news-detail/standardization-and-certification-of-the-internet-of-things. 186If European regulations force minimum: In this way, software is similar to textbooks in the US market, where a few states effectively control what is available nationally because of their very onerous demands. 186In April 2018, Facebook announced: Cyrus Farivar (4 Apr 2018), “CEO says Facebook will impose new privacy rules ‘everywhere,’” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/ceo-says-facebook-will-impose-new-eu-privacy-rules-everywhere. 186Singapore has the Personal Data Protection Act: Kennedy’s Law LLP (20 Apr 2016), “Personal data privacy principles in Asia Pacific,” http://www.kennedyslaw.com/dataprivacyapacguide2016. 186In 2017, India’s Supreme Court: Wire Staff (24 Aug 2017), “Right to privacy a fundamental right, says Supreme Court in unanimous verdict,” Wire, https://thewire.in/170303/supreme-court-aadhaar-right-to-privacy. 187Singapore passed a new Cybersecurity Act: Bryan Tan (9 Feb 2018), “Singapore finalises new Cybersecurity Act,” Out-Law, https://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2018/february/singapore-finalises-new-cybersecurity-act. 187New Israeli security regulations: Omer Tene (22 Mar 2017), “Israel enacts landmark data security notification regulations,” Privacy Tracker, https://iapp.org/news/a/israel-enacts-landmark-data-security-notification-regulations. 187In 2016, New York fined Trump Hotels: Steve Eder (24 Sep 2016), “Donald Trump’s hotel chain to pay penalty over data breaches,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/us/politics/trump-hotel-data.html. 187California investigated companies: Adolfo Guzman-Lopez (2 Nov 2016), “California attorney general warns tech companies about mining student data for profit,” Southern California Public Radio, https://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/02/65908/attorney-general-warns-tech-companies-to-follow-ne. 187In 2017, Massachusetts sued Equifax: Francine McKenna (15 Sep 2017), “Equifax faces its biggest litigation threat from state attorneys general,” MarketWatch, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/equifax-faces-its-biggest-litigation-threat-from-state-attorneys-general-2017-09-15/print. 187Missouri began investigating Google’s: Nitasha Tiku (14 Nov 2017), “State attorneys general are Google’s next headache,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/story/state-attorneys-general-are-googles-next-headache. 187Thirty-two state attorneys general: Maria Armental (6 Sep 2017), “Lenovo reaches $3.5 million settlement over preinstalled adware,” MarketWatch, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lenovo-reaches-35-million-settlement-with-ftc-over-preinstalled-adware-2017-09-05. 187Even the city of San Diego: Brian Krebs (18 Mar 2018), “San Diego sues Experian over ID theft service,” Krebs on Security, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/san-diego-sues-experian-over-id-theft-service. 187In 2019, these standards will also apply: Michael Krimminger (25 Mar 2017), “New York cybersecurity regulations for financial institutions enter into effect,” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/03/25/new-york-cybersecurity-regulations-for-financial-institutions-enter-into-effect. 187In 2017, California temporarily tabled: Karl D.


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The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, Clive Stafford Smith, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal world order, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs

It is almost impossible to stop a liberal state, when it first gains unipolar status, from embracing that extraordinarily ambitious policy. It promises great benefits and its costs are not yet apparent. But once the strategy has been tried and its flaws become clear, derailing it becomes possible. The 2016 presidential election shows that liberal hegemony is vulnerable. Donald Trump challenged almost every aspect of the strategy, reminding voters time after time that it had been bad for America. Most importantly, he promised that if he were elected president, the United States would get out of the business of spreading democracy around the world. He emphasized that his administration would have friendly relations with authoritarian leaders, including Vladimir Putin, the current bête noire of the liberal foreign policy establishment.

Indeed, there is already some evidence that efforts by the foreign policy establishment to tame Trump have at least partly succeeded and that his initial policies show considerable continuity with his predecessors’ policies.25 To help ensure that the United States does not go back to liberal hegemony, should neither China nor Russia prove a sufficient rival, it is essential to come up with a game plan that is independent of Donald Trump or any particular successor. For starters, the best way to undermine liberal hegemony is to build a counter-elite that can make the case for a realist-based foreign policy.26 The good news is that there is already a small and vocal core of restrainers that can serve as the foundation for that select group.27 Still it is essential to win over others in the foreign policy establishment.

A Model of Democratization in the Middle East,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 24, no. 1 (January 2012): 110–46; Paul Pillar, “One Person, One Vote, One Time,” National Interest Blog, October 3, 2017, http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/one-person-one-vote-one-time-22583. 123. There is worrisome evidence that the various cleavages in the American public are beginning to line up. Alan Abramowitz, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation and the Rise of Donald Trump (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). Not surprisingly, there is good reason to worry about the authoritarian temptation in the United States today. See Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018). 124. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964). 125.


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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

Companies closed factories in high-wage countries and moved them to places where they could pay a fraction of the rates workers commanded in the United States or the United Kingdom. Working hours began to creep upward, and incomes down; more families relied on two incomes, and with two working parents, no one had time to do the housework. 8 By 2016, the United States had hemorrhaged enough industrial jobs that Donald Trump made them a focus of his pitch to “Make America Great Again.” In 2017, after he became president, I went to Indianapolis to visit the Carrier plant. The factory, which had been slated to shut down in 2016, had been a campaign focal point for Trump’s promise to bring good jobs back. When he won, he returned to Carrier to declare “Mission Accomplished,” telling the workers that he’d cut a deal to keep their plant open.

The system allows rich philanthropists to reap the tax benefits of their charitable giving while maintaining control over their fortunes. But nonprofits are so deeply embedded in the capitalist system that even grassroots donors—such as the hundreds of thousands who gave to Planned Parenthood after the 2016 election of Donald Trump—can feel a sense of entitlement. Backlash ensued on social media when the Minnesota Freedom Fund—previously a tiny organization—could not spend all of the $30 million in donations it received after the uprising in Minnesota immediately. The impulse to demand deliverables had spread from big philanthropy through to the rest of us. 53 This kind of short-termism, whether from wealthy donors or Twitter backlash, is antithetical to actually making real changes—racism or even cash bail will not be eliminated in a matter of weeks.

A nurse practitioner told reporters of the struggles she faced when she was part of a union campaign at Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina: “There’s so much focus on the mission and the cause and people become, like at many nonprofits, very vulnerable to being manipulated into lower pay and less benefits for the cause.” 56 The organization’s pleas of poverty frustrated employees and observers during the union drive because donations to Planned Parenthood had skyrocketed following the election of Donald Trump, as did donations to other liberal-identified nonprofits, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. One calculation said that Planned Parenthood’s donations had gone up 1,000 percent after the election; according to the Times , the organization brought in $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2016. Brink noted that after the 2015 shooting in Colorado Springs, donations had increased specifically to PPRM.


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Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It was quickly bought by Twitter, which understood that it offered a kind of video version of live tweeting. Periscope became popular so fast by creating a platform on which users could employ their smartphones to share with anyone in the world the live video of whatever event they were participating in or watching, be it a hurricane, earthquake, or flood, a Donald Trump rally, a thrill ride at Disney World, a confrontation with a cop, or a sit-in by Democratic lawmakers on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Beykpour describes Periscope’s mission as enabling everyone “to explore the world through someone else’s eyes” and in doing so build “empathy and truth”—empathy by putting people into vivid contact with one another and their circumstances, and truth because live video doesn’t easily lie.

Which way it tips depends on the values and tools that we all bring to these flows. In the face of more and more uncontrolled immigration, globalization today feels under threat more than ever. We saw that in the vote by Great Britain to withdraw from the European Union and in the candidacy of Donald Trump. But disconnecting from a world that is only getting more digitally connected, from a world in which these digital flows will be a vital source of fresh and challenging ideas, innovation, and commercial energy, is not a strategy for economic growth. That said, people have bodies and souls, and when you feed one and not the other you always get in trouble.

So no one was giving people the right diagnosis of what was happening in the world around them, and most established political parties were offering catechisms that were simply not relevant to the age of accelerations. Into this vacuum, this empty room, stepped populists with easy answers—the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders promised to make it all right by taking down “the Man,” and Donald Trump promised to make it all right by personally holding back the hurricane of change because he was “the Man.” Neither the center-left nor the center-right in America or Europe had the self-confidence required for the level of radical rethinking and political innovating demanded by the age of accelerations.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

That people might choose to cash 191 T h e R i s e , T r i u m p h a n d Fa l l of K e y n e s in their higher post-tax incomes in the form of leisure, or work harder to maintain their accustomed living standards if their taxes went up, was alien to the mentality of the supply-side enthusiasts. Their simplistic story, devoid of any empirical evidence, fed the illusion that tax cuts would be self-financing.40 We see the same story being reenacted under Donald Trump. The British Treasury never bought into Laffer-type arguments; additionally, British anti-inflationary policy was much more closely linked to public spending cuts. Geoffrey Howe’s 1981 budget marked the arrival in Britain of what later became known as ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’. This claims that fiscal consolidation, while bearing down on inflation, will produce recovery by lowering interest rates and improving the profit expectations of the private sector.

A bank can be illiquid but solvent if it owns more in assets than it owes, but has a cash-flow problem where it cannot borrow cash or sell its assets in time to meet its payment obligations. A liquidity crisis * The systemic under-estimation of risk continues. The latest bank doomsday shock scenarios seriously under-estimated the exchange rate swings caused by the real-life events of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. 316 w h at wa s w rong w i t h t h e b a n k s? is much less serious than a solvency crisis; temporary funds from the central bank can alleviate a liquidity crisis, but are of no use if the bank is insolvent. Still, the two are somewhat related. In the period 2007–8, confusion over who was solvent and who was not meant that banks stopped lending to each other, drying up their principal source of liquidity; this led to the bank run on the UK’s Northern Rock in 2007.

Vague though these criteria are, economic policy must have some reference to what the public considers reasonable and fair if it is to escape from statistical culs-de-sac. The narrative of ‘the deficit’ still dominates popular discussion. Deficits are what you always get, the orthodox story goes, when you allow politicians to ‘monkey around’ with money. President Donald Trump’s tax cuts have been attacked by academic macroeconomists, not just for worsening inequality – a reasonable reaction – but also for increasing the deficit. Philip Hammond, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, cannot invest in the social housing Britain desperately needs because it will risk his self-imposed borrowing limits.


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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

The main reason for this effect appears to be that Fox News was giving a slanted presentation of some facts and concealing others, pushing users in a more right-wing direction. There is growing evidence that these effects are even stronger on social media. Although there were hearings and media reaction to Facebook’s role in the 2016 election, not much had changed by 2020. Misinformation multiplied on the platform, some of it propagated by President Donald Trump, who frequently claimed that mail-in ballots were fraudulent and that noncitizen immigrants were voting in droves. He repeatedly used social media to call a stop to the vote count. In the run-up to the election, Facebook was also mired in controversy because of a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, giving the impression that she was drunk or ill, slurring her words and sounding unwell in general.

In the week following the election, Facebook introduced an emergency measure, altering its algorithms to stop the spread of right-wing conspiracy theories claiming that the election was in reality won by Trump but stolen because of illegal votes and irregularities at ballot boxes. By the end of December, however, Facebook’s algorithm was back to its usual self, and the “tennis court” was open for a rematch of the 2016 fiasco. Several extremist right-wing groups as well as Donald Trump continued to propagate falsehoods, and we now know that the January 6, 2021, insurrection was partly organized using Facebook and other social media sites. For example, members of the far-right militia group Oath Keepers used Facebook to discuss how and where they would meet, and several other extremist groups live-messaged each other over the platform on January 6.

Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets were widely disseminated and subsequently caused not just more anti-Muslim and xenophobic posts on the platform but also actual hate crimes against Muslims, especially in states where the president had more followers. Some of the worst language and consistent hate speech were propagated on other platforms, such as 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit, including its various sub-Reddits such as The_Donald (where conspiracy theories and misinformation related to Donald Trump originate and circulate), Physical_Removal (advocating the elimination of liberals), and several others with explicitly racist names that we prefer not to print here. In 2015 the Southern Poverty Law Center named Reddit as the platform hosting “the most violent racist” content on the internet.


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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

7 The plague was, in the end, to kill more than one million Americans, spreading across the country during the last year of his presidency in 2020 and concentrated in regions where local election-winning politicians pledged allegiance to Donald Trump thereafter. It killed only one-fourth as large a fraction of the population in Canada. With the 2016 presidential election, even as Americans divided into two opposing camps that agreed on virtually nothing, nearly everyone shared a sense that the nation was in big trouble. Depending on who you asked, Donald Trump was either a symptom of this decline or its only potential “Flight 93” cure.8 Either case saw a transformation to a very different America.

History after the confluence of these events looks notably distinct from history before, as if it requires a new and different grand narrative to make sense of it. That the long twentieth century was over by 2010 and would not be revivified was confirmed by the rupture that came next, on November 8, 2016, when Donald Trump won that year’s presidential election. In that moment, it became clear that each of the four defining developments of the long twentieth century could not be restored. Economic growth in the North Atlantic had slipped substantially—if not all the way to the pre-1870 slower pace, a substantial part of the way.

Perhaps even in 2016 the dry bones of the long twentieth century’s pattern of rapid productivity growth, governments that could manage the creative-destruction transformations that such growth brought to the world, and American exceptionalism could have been made to live again. But it turned out that post-2010 America would instead elect Donald Trump, and Western Europe would do little better, ending possibilities of revivification. A new story, which needs a new grand narrative that we do not yet know, has begun. Acknowledgments My debts in writing this book are vast: my wife, Ann Marie Marciarille, and children, Michael and Gianna, have made the long process of writing it a very joyous one.


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

In 1948, Jordan warned that: Our economy, and much of the world’s, has been floated upward on an iridescent, ever-swelling bubble of money manufactured by government to stimulate, sustain, speed and subsidize individual and collective consumption … The business outlook today depends here and everywhere more upon the future movements and dimensions of the American money bubble than anything else … Money-bubble economies have always burst, ultimately, and this one must, too, though no one can say with certainty when.43 It is no coincidence that this warning came at a time when US interest rates were being artificially suppressed by the Truman administration. If Jordan’s forebodings turned out to be misplaced, it was because after 1945 Americans had robust savings, few debts, no financial bubbles and little financial engineering. None of these stabilizing conditions held in 2016. Later that year, Donald Trump accused the Federal Reserve of creating a ‘false economy’ and inflating a ‘big, fat, ugly bubble’.44 Trump added: ‘The only thing that is strong is the artificial stock market.’ It was incongruous for a New York property developer, whose fortune depended on elevated property prices and cheap finance, to express such thoughts; but, in essence, the future US president was correct.

Economists at the BIS suggested that the rapid expansion of world trade at the turn of the century might have been ‘a bubble, made possible by ample global liquidity’.38 Like all bubbles, the global trade ‘bubble’ was inherently fragile. Over-extended supply chains require accommodative monetary conditions. Political support is equally important, although often overlooked. In the United States, the loss of manufacturing jobs to China eventually provoked a backlash against globalization.fn5 Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to bring manufacturing jobs home helped to take him to the White House. The collapse of international trade in the 1930s is commonly attributed to the protectionist US tariffs imposed by the Smoot–Hawley Act of 1930. But tariffs were only part of the story. The financial side deserves greater emphasis.

If it’s true that democracy abhors economic stagnation, as Hayek maintained, then democracy itself is threatened.42 It is no great surprise that support for democracy among the younger generation has weakened in recent years.43 Unconventional monetary policies also contributed to the rise of populism. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble blamed the rise of the German nationalist party AfD on the ECB’s negative interest rates.44 On the 2016 presidential campaign trail, Donald Trump denounced Wall Street and the Fed’s suppression of interest rates. The system was rigged, he told supporters. (In the White House, however, President Trump stuffed his Cabinet with Goldman alumni and browbeat the Fed to cut rates.) In the 1930s, the German economist Wilhelm Röpke considered the American public’s growing discontent with capitalism.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

We need a revitalized, dynamic government to rise to the challenge posed by the largest economic transformation in the history of mankind. The above may sound like science fiction to you. But you’re reading this with a supercomputer in your pocket (or reading it on the supercomputer itself) and Donald Trump was elected president. Doctors can fix your eyes with lasers, but your local mall just closed. We are living in unprecedented times. The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max. Unless there is a dramatic course correction, I fear we are heading toward the latter.

It was the culmination of my life’s work. But it needed to be much, much bigger to stem the tide. I started digging into research about trends in the labor market and talking to friends to better understand the long-term shifts happening in the American economy. I wanted to know what the challenges were. Donald Trump’s election in late 2016 heightened my sense of urgency; it felt like a cry for help. What I found shocked me and verified my experiences on the road. America is starting 100,000 fewer businesses per year than it was only 12 years ago, and is in the midst of shedding millions of jobs due primarily to technological advances.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

Desperate to preserve their status in the face of the collapse of the working class below them, the grotesque expansion of wealth above them, and the increasing demographic diversity of the country, Ehrenreich writes, the white professional middle class has largely abandoned ideals of justice, equity, and fairness.3 Until the election of Donald Trump, their increasing illiberalism was somewhat moderated in public. It was a kind of “dog whistle” cruelty: turning fire hoses on Black schoolchildren would not be tolerated, but the fatal encounters of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Natasha McKenna, Ezell Ford, and Sandra Bland with law enforcement wouldn’t be condemned.

The digital poorhouse also limits equity as equal value by freezing its targets in time, portraying them as aggregates of their most difficult choices. Equity requires the ability to develop and evolve. But as Cathy O’Neil has written, “Mathematical models, by their nature, are based on the past, and on the assumption that patterns will repeat.”9 The political pollsters and their models failed to anticipate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory because voters did not act in the ways statistical analysis of past voter behavior predicted. People change. Movements rise. Societies shift. Justice demands the ability to evolve, but the digital poorhouse locks us into patterns of the past. * * * Finally, Americans generally agree on a third national value of political and social inclusion.


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

The second step in preparing to memorize a deck of cards is to associate a memorable person or thing with each of the fifty-two possible cards. To make this process easier, try to maintain some logical association between the card and the corresponding image. White provides the example of associating Donald Trump with the King of Diamonds, as diamonds signify wealth. Practice these associations until you can pull a card randomly from the deck and immediately recall the associated image. As before, the use of memorable visual images and associations will simplify the task of forming these connections. The two steps mentioned previously are advance steps—things you do just once and can then leverage again and again in memorizing specific decks.

As you encounter each item, look at the next card from the shuffled deck, and imagine the corresponding memorable person or thing doing something memorable near that item. For example, if the first item and location is the mat in your front entry, and the first card is the King of Diamonds, you might picture Donald Trump wiping mud off of his expensive loafers on the entry mat in your front hallway. Proceed carefully through the rooms, associating the proper mental images with objects in the proper order. After you complete a room, you might want to walk through it a few times in a row to lock in the imagery.


pages: 254 words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

This anticipation of the intangible value of items is, in some respects, the ultimate embodiment of commercial lust. Luxury brands work hard to create lust and direct it toward purchase of their items. Just owning the item is marketed as sufficient to improve our standing in the world and thus our self-esteem. Greed The point is, you can't be too greedy. Donald Trump Greed is the desire to get or keep more stuff than you need, either accumulating money or possessions (“whoever has the most toys wins”) or just to feel better than someone else does. Because greed prevents other people from having access to a thing that they could use more than the greedy individual could, it’s seen as selfish or spiteful.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54.2 (1988): 203. Materialistic customers: Marsha L. Richins. “When Wanting Is Better Than Having: Materialism, Transformation Expectations, and Product-Evoked Emotions in the Purchase Process.” Journal of Consumer Research. 40.3 (2013): 1-18. Greed Trump quote: Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz. Trump: The Art of the Deal. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987. Higher social classes are less ethical: Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltnera. “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.” PNAS 109.11 (2012): 4086–4091.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Between 1960 and 2008, over 40 million immigrants made the United States their home, more than half of them from countries in Latin America, with the largest group of newcomers coming from our neighbor to the south, Mexico.59 The large influx of Latino immigrants has engendered vehement backlash and awakened racial insecurity, particularly among English-speaking whites. Today’s Latino population, both documented and undocumented, is the new scapegoat used to apportion blame for all manner of social and economic problems. “They” are stealing our jobs, pushing down our wages, straining our schools, and bringing crime to our neighborhoods. In 2015, Donald Trump became the Republican front-runner during the primary season by developing an incendiary anti-immigrant platform, with widespread deportation as his central plank. Even President Obama, who has been a vocal and ardent supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, has succumbed to the political pressure to increase deportations.

This enormous migration of people is the new beating heart of today’s working class, and the key to its revival as a political and cultural force in America. Which is why the Republican Party has returned to its playbook of division, exploiting the economic anxiety of the white working class by making Latino immigrants the villains. The fact that Donald Trump, who profits immensely from an empire created by cheap labor and unrestricted global capital, is running for president by stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment is both a farce and a tragedy—and yet another reminder that the latent power of the new working class is threatening to America’s elites and will remain politically contested.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

CHAPTER 2 USA ‘Show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.’ – Janet Napolitano, former US Secretary of Homeland Security Part of the existing border barrier along the US–Mexico border, separating Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from Sunland Park, New Mexico. ON THE DAY AFTER DONALD TRUMP WAS ELECTED AS THE 45th President of the United States the uber-arch, neoconservative commentator Ann Coulter published a meticulously planned ‘detailed schedule’ of the priorities for the first 100 days in office. She began with: ‘Day 1: start building the wall.’ Then progressed to: ‘Day 2: continue building the wall.’

Different ethnicities have been encouraged to retain an overt sense of identity; instead of leading to an acceptance of diversity, this approach seems in some cases to result in the separation of certain groups from the rest of society, to a degree, leaving them increasingly open to discrimination. We saw this during the 2016 presidential election campaign when Donald Trump criticized the parents of Humayun Khan, a decorated Muslim American officer killed in Iraq, after Humayun’s father spoke up against his call to ban Muslim immigration. Khizr and Ghazala Khan are what the Americans call ‘Gold Star parents’. The term dates back to the First World War, when families with loved ones fighting abroad flew flags with a blue star for each immediate family member.


pages: 224 words: 73,737

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass by Darren McGarvey

basic income, British Empire, carbon footprint, deindustrialization, do what you love, Donald Trump, gentrification, imposter syndrome, impulse control, means of production, side project, Social Justice Warrior, universal basic income, urban decay, wage slave

In fact, talk of Trump and Brexit is viewed here as a distraction. At a recent screening of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, the award winning drama about the UK sanctions regime, Glasgow poet and activist Robert Fullertone – who writes the sort of poetry you won’t find in a school curriculum – clipped me around the proverbial ear for mentioning Donald Trump during a panel discussion. ‘Are you out there, Trump?’ he joked, his gesture towards the door perhaps alluding to the perma-tanned egotist’s role as a bogeyman for radical socialists and left-wing groups. Such groups, in recent years, have struggled to find their voice as nationalist folds have emerged across the fabric of society.

In the instance of those young boys in the additional needs school, condemning them as racist would have been about as useful as reading a newspaper to a piece of fruit. I believe that whatever the context, a nuanced approach to anti-immigration is required and that every person requires a different approach before they are tossed into the bucket of deplorables. Sometimes people are drawn to right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage because they feel they are finally being listened to; they feel they are striking back at the people they feel abandoned and excluded by. Sometimes that urge to retaliate takes precedence over all other concerns. Yet in the western world, the fact that immigration is a mainstream issue has had little impact in some quarters.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

These proindividual, anticommunity ideologies have been central to the antidemocratic, anti-affirmative-action, antiwelfare, antichoice, and antirace discourses that place culpability for individual failure on moral failings of the individual, not policy decisions and social systems.48 Discussions of institutional discrimination and systemic marginalization of whole classes and sectors of society have been shunted from public discourse for remediation and have given rise to viable presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, someone with a history of misogynistic violence toward women and anti-immigrant schemes. Despite resistance to this kind of vitriol in the national electoral body politic, society is also moving toward greater acceptance of technological processes that are seemingly benign and decontextualized, as if these projects are wholly apolitical and without consequence too.

Figure C.2. My last Google search on “black girls,” June 23, 2016. Epilogue Between the time I wrote this book and the day it went into production, the landscape of U.S. politics was radically altered with the presidential defeat on November 8, 2016, of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump. Within days, media pundits and pollsters were trying to make sense of the upset, the surprise win by Trump, particularly since Clinton won the popular vote by close to three million votes. Immediately, there were claims that “fake news” circulating online was responsible for the outcome. Indeed, as I gave talks about this book in the weeks after the election, I could only note in my many public talks that “as I’ve argued for years about the harm toward women and girls through commercial information bias circulating through platforms like Google, no one has seemed to care until it threw a presidential election.”


pages: 243 words: 76,686

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

, can’t help with the overarching issue of economic precarity that awaits the student—and indeed has already reached less privileged students who must work in addition to studying. It does nothing about the specter of student debt, nor about the fear of ending up outside a shrinking pool of security. Indeed, many of the pages’ most cutting jokes attest to the students’ awareness of this. One Stanford meme uses a photo of Donald Trump talking to Mike Pence while gesturing toward a large empty space in front of them; Trump is tagged “my college,” Pence is tagged “me, after graduating college,” and the empty space is tagged “job prospects.”56 Another is a screenshot, mostly of a ceiling and part of someone’s head, with the Stanford University Snapchat geofilter and the caption: “I am surrounded by massive amounts of wealth in this pressure cooker of entrepreneurship and tech that satellites the rest of this endless suburbia where the middle class can’t find a one bedroom apartment.”57 On UC Berkeley’s meme page, someone has posted the “sold pupper dance video,” in which a small dog in a pet store paws adorably at a glass cage labeled “I am sold.”

Mella Robinson, “An island nation that told a libertarian ‘seasteading’ group it could build a floating city has pulled out of the deal,” Business Insider, March 14, 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/french-polynesia-ends-agreement-with-peter-thiel-seasteading-institute-2018-3. 45. Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. 46. Arendt, 227. 47. Susan X Day, “Walden Two at Fifty,” Michigan Quarterly Review XXXVIII (Spring 1999), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0038.211. 48. B. F. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 330 (as cited in “Walden Two at Fifty”). 49.


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

A New York Times article published on October 2, 2018, that uncovered the vast amounts of alleged fraud and quasi-legal and illegal activities my family had engaged in over the course of several decades included this paragraph: Fred Trump and his companies also began extending large loans and lines of credit to Donald Trump. Those loans dwarfed what the other Trumps got, the flow so constant at times that it was as if Donald Trump had his own Money Store. Consider 1979, when he borrowed $1.5 million in January, $65,000 in February, $122,000 in March, $150,000 in April, $192,000 in May, $226,000 in June, $2.4 million in July and $40,000 in August, according to records filed with New Jersey casino regulators.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

IP Theft and Counterfeiting What could go wrong and derail China’s dream to ascend in tech? Plenty. Trade wars and tech power battles. Friction over American companies being forced to play by the Chinese government’s rules, turn over key technologies, and compete with homegrown companies that are nationally subsidized. President Donald Trump’s deepening push to get tough on China. Increased US tariffs on Chinese goods to deflate a US-China trade imbalance. Stepped-up US export controls of advanced technologies to China. Stricter reviews and blocks by Washington DC, on foreign investment in high-tech American companies. Crackdowns on cybertheft and disregard for intellectual property, such as the recent US criminal charges against Huawei.

A colorful character, he’s dressed up in a Michael Jackson rock-star outfit and sung and danced to The Lion King theme song at past AliFest galas I’ve attended in Hangzhou. Certainly, Alibaba and its master know how to make a promotional splash. Alibaba’s high-profile Ma—never one to be shy—made headlines as one of the first global business executives to visit Donald Trump post-election at Trump Tower, promising to help create American jobs by helping small businesses sell to China on Alibaba e-commerce sites. I listened as he promoted Alibaba from the stage of a packed Waldorf Astoria ballroom before members of the elite Economic Club of New York. He’s rubbed shoulders with who’s who at the World Economic Forum at Davos—and hosted Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and basketball star Kobe Bryant at previous AliFests where I’ve been one of thousands in the audience.


pages: 224 words: 74,019

Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology by Jess Zimmerman

coronavirus, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Joan Didion, multilevel marketing, Social Justice Warrior

One should give the Daily Mail negative credit in areas like factual accuracy or moral compass; it is nakedly devoted to creating emotional responses at the expense of anything approaching reliable journalism, and is consistently anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, dismissive towards women, and pro-fascist (as in, literally supported the Fascists in World War II). But for these same reasons, it can be an effective barometer of conservative beliefs—or at least what powerful conservatives think The Common Man should believe. All of the same can be said of another Rapinoe detractor, Donald Trump. (Well, he wasn’t yet born during WWII, but all the rest.) Trump took a dislike to Rapinoe after she said that she wouldn’t go to “the fucking White House” if invited. In an error-laden but otherwise fairly mild (for him) string of tweets, Trump scolded, “Megan should WIN first before she TALKS!”

The possibility of justice, the possibility (never realistic, but once perhaps aspirational) that the law of the land could actually be just, slipped from our sweaty hands. The Isla Vista shooter became a hero to disaffected young men online, inspiring copycat murders. Bill Cosby was sentenced to three to ten years, but money and power have never protected black men like they do white men. Brock Turner, sentenced to six months, served three. Donald Trump not only grabbed the presidency after bragging on tape about sexual assault but parlayed it into a profitable golf vacation with interludes of cultish praise—despite more accusations of rape coming in during his term. Roy Moore, accused of sexually harassing teenage girls, lost his Senate seat but ran again with no shame.


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

In hindsight, the phone-hacking scandal had a lasting impact, deepening an existing stereotype of journalists as a sleazy elite, both corrupt and corrupting. This reputation, which fails to distinguish between the ruthless reporters and the responsible, has been exploited by politicians (most notoriously President Donald Trump), with convenient dismissals of facts as ‘fake news’. As for Brown Moses, the phone-hacking scandal stood as a vital first stop, one that helped shape the Bellingcat method. I knew with absolute clarity that our work must stand in opposition to the worst traditional journalism. Our sourcing would remain as open to public scrutiny as possible.

After that, they can access your account and do anything from leaking private emails, to planting incriminating evidence, to publishing personal photos. Aric, VP and I had been subjected to such attacks before, and took these messages for commonplace phishing, not a coordinated campaign by a foreign state. But in June 2016, months before the presidential election pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, news reports emerged that a Russian military intelligence cyber-espionage unit, nicknamed Fancy Bear by security experts, had sought to derail Clinton’s election bid. Wikileaks took stolen emails from ‘Guccifer 2.0’ – purportedly a Romanian hacker but actually Russians1 – and counselled this Kremlin front operation on how to have the greatest impact on American voters, according to a US indictment.2 In July 2016, WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of emails before the Democratic National Convention, stirring dissent in the party and undermining Clinton.


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

Many medical workers move into hotels to avoid infecting their families. Imperial College London advises the WHO that ‘human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 (previously termed 2019-nCoV) is the only plausible explanation of the scale of the outbreak in Wuhan’. The next day, US President Donald Trump tweets: ‘China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!’ At 2 am on 23 January, the Wuhan government orders a lockdown of the city.

On 7 March, a report to an internal CCP propaganda meeting refers to the ‘gratitude education’ incident, saying it prompted ‘raging public opinion’ comparable to the uproar that followed the death of Dr Li Wenliang. Party media are told to delete all reference to it, and the newspaper that first carried Wang’s remarks, Changjiang Daily, is reprimanded. On 7 March, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson meets privately with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The conversation seems finally to ‘puncture Trump’s bubble’ of denial about the seriousness of the situation. On 9 March, a new study estimates that in the two weeks prior to Wuhan’s lockdown on 23 January, 834 air travellers carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus flew out of the city to airports all over the world.


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Instead, it points us beyond the headlines and regime rhetoric to recognize the tectonic structural stress that Beijing and Washington must master to construct a peaceful relationship. If Hollywood were making a movie pitting China against the United States on the path to war, central casting could not find two better leading actors than Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. Each personifies his country’s deep aspirations of national greatness. Much as Xi’s appointment as leader of China in 2012 accentuated the role of the rising power, America’s election of Donald Trump in a campaign that vilified China promises a more vigorous response from the ruling power. As personalities, Trump and Xi could not be more different. As protagonists in a struggle to be number one, however, they share portentous similarities.

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney announced, “On day one of my presidency I will designate China a currency manipulator and take appropriate counteraction.”64 The political and economic establishment rejected his threat as reckless rhetoric that risked a catastrophic trade war. The establishment likewise rejected similar threats by President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. But if there are no circumstances in which Washington is willing to risk a trade confrontation with China, why would Chinese leaders stop “playing the US like a fiddle and smiling all the way to the bank” (to use Romney’s mixed metaphor)65 or “raping our country” (as Trump put it)66 by undervaluing their currency, subsidizing domestic producers, protecting their own market, and stealing intellectual property?


pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

‘Nazis, schmatzis, Mies would have built for anyone,’ the architectural historian Elaine Hochman reports Johnson telling her. It is a remark that can certainly be seen as a case of Johnson projecting his own attitudes on others. It is hard to think of Mies, who was so cool with Jacqueline Kennedy about designing JFK’s presidential library that she assumed he didn’t want the job, cultivating Donald Trump with the unseemly eagerness adopted by Johnson when he was pursuing the chance of erecting a wall of high-rise apartments for the most lumpen of New York’s property developers. Johnson’s flattery persuaded Trump to see him as a useful marketing tool, for just long enough to call him ‘the greatest architect in the world’, but the relationship left Johnson diminished by its transparent opportunism.

There was an executive at RCA he knew who, on the strength of a lunch with Harrison, signed up as an anchor tenant for the Rockefeller Center. And there was Robert Moses, New York’s fatally flawed answer to Paris’s Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who involved Harrison in planning both of New York’s two World’s Fairs. William Zeckendorf, Donald Trump’s rather more engaging predecessor as the most flamboyant developer in New York, also developed a close relationship with Harrison before I. M. Pei became his in-house architect. But above all there was Nelson Rockefeller. Fresh from college, the most pharaonic Rockefeller of them all walked into the marketing suite at the Rockefeller Center one morning and questioned Harrison about every detail of the project his father had initiated, fascinated by the process of building, as much as by its financial and engineering aspects.

And they provide a bigger pool of donors to build bigger churches. The Crystal Cathedral is the church that says it has the fifth-largest organ in the world and claims to have the biggest cross and the longest stone wall in architectural history – unaccountably, the well-travelled pastor who could teach Donald Trump a thing or two about self-promotion seems not yet to have encountered the Great Wall of China. The view of the cathedral from the freeway is a critical part of Schuller’s strategy for attracting the larger and larger congregations that are needed to fill his steadily increasing numbers of seats and parking places.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Mallya denied it, but some industry observers wondered wryly if the tycoon had actually launched his airline as the ultimate form of brand extension, using his planes merely as expensive product placement opportunities through which to promote beer sales. Others compared the brash tycoon to another celebrated self-promoter: “Mallya is more like an Indian version of Donald Trump,” his biographer wrote. “He not only lives as The King of Good Times, but he is working overtime to persuade others to live the high life too.”17 With his shoulder-length hair, earrings and taste for bling, Mallya honed an image as the most piratical of entrepreneurs, striding into his own parties late in the evening, often many hours after his guests had arrived.

As American author Robert Kaplan once wrote: “The spirit of India has undergone an uneasy shift in this new era of rampant capitalism and of deadly ethnic and religious tensions, which arise partly as violent reactions against exactly the social homogenization that globalization engenders.”40 Modi was part of a wider pattern, taking his place alongside a wave of conservative, nationalist leaders from Vladimir Putin in Russia and Shinzo Abe in Japan to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and ultimately, in America, Donald Trump. “I always say that to me secularism means ‘India first,’ ” Modi said in 2012.41 Yet for all of his popularity, Modi’s vision still left many in India deeply uneasy. I headed back to Ahmedabad just before the sun set on election results day in May 2014. On the road south, young men on motorcycles weaved through the traffic, their pillion passengers brandishing BJP flags.

The narrowness of domestic media seemed to irk him, with its scant global coverage and particular local obsessions: international politicians of vaguely Indian descent, desi Indians abroad who have done well in their particular fields, or the predicaments of Indian tourists or students in foreign countries; all genres Goswami himself had done much to popularize. “Why is it that when I seek an interview with Donald Trump, I’m only going to ask, ‘Mr. Trump, what message do you have for Indians?’ ” he said. “An Indian journalist, interviewing an American statesman, does not have to be about what you’re going to do for India. It’s wrong, James. What we have done to Indian media is wrong.” There was something captivating about this global vision.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

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

In addition, the firm serves “leading retail pharmacies, ancillary service providers, industry associations, private equity firms and many of the largest U.S. employers.” With elite clients across the health-care landscape and a lofty reputation, it is easy to imagine how McKinsey could pull government agencies into its orbit. * * * — When President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, it was uncertain how receptive his administration would be to McKinsey’s style of solving problems. McKinsey believed most issues, no matter how complex, could be defined one way or another through numbers. Trump believed the best solutions to problems came from loyal friends, especially when they coincided with his own political or financial interests.

“Kevin Sneader is based in Hong Kong,” the consultant said. “In one instance he can speak passionately about racial justice, but aren’t there folks outside his front door who could also benefit from the same forthrightness?” As relations between China and the United States spiraled downward during the four years Donald Trump was president, McKinsey’s work in China attracted bipartisan scrutiny. In a June 2020 letter to Sneader, Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, asked the firm to identify its work with the state, the Communist Party, and any companies in China in “areas of critical national interest to the United States,” which he defined as covering a broad range of industries, including health care, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and military or civil defense.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The article reverberated outside the firm: Michael Forsythe, “When Pete Buttigieg Was One of McKinsey’s ‘Whiz Kids,’ ” New York Times, Dec. 6, 2019. Andy Slavitt, in a Dec. 4, 2019, Twitter post, said, “@McKinsey recommendations to cut food, supervision, and medical care to immigrants in custody were so cruel they made the staff at ICE uncomfortable.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “When Mexico sends its people”: Donald Trump Presidential Campaign Announcement Full Speech (C-SPAN), June 16, 2015, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=apjNfkysjbM. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Five days into his presidency: Executive Order: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, Jan. 25, 2017, www.whitehouse.gov.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

He boasted to the Times that he’d been grabbing up foreclosed sites and planned to “get rid of about a third” of Surf Avenue. The days of “mechanical gadgets” and “catch-penny devices,” he announced, were over. He wanted to rezone the amusement area for residential development. While he did not succeed in killing off honky-tonk Coney, he took a bite. In 1965, Donald Trump’s father, Fred, bought Steeplechase Park with plans to demolish and build “a modern Miami Beach high-rise apartment dwelling.” City Hall resisted. Steeplechase had been an amusement park since 1897 and Mayor Lindsay wanted it to remain so, envisioning, said a spokesman for the parks commissioner, “a combination Disney and Tivoli Gardens.”

Let me highlight that: The just city does not favor those who are already better off. Since Koch, New York has been shaped by a pro-growth regime that strongly favors the already better-off. I’ve given many examples, but if you need another, consider one prominent New York real estate developer: Donald Trump. In 2016, the Times reported that, over the course of his career, starting in the 1970s, Trump “reaped at least $885 million in tax breaks, grants, and other subsidies for luxury apartments, hotels, and office buildings in New York.” That infusion of public financial support enabled him to turn his powerful father’s seed money into a real estate empire—and a shocking political movement that put Trump in the White House.

This is not only bad for the city; it’s bad for the nation—and the world. We need rebel cities, those open spaces of agitation and art. We especially need them now, as an extreme right-wing nationalist movement rises across the globe. In the immediate wake of the 2016 presidential election that catapulted billionaire real estate developer Donald Trump into the White House, New York was awash in swastikas. Hate crimes spiked as nativism again reared its head in the city. New Yorkers attacked New Yorkers on the subways and streets, targeting Jews, Muslims, queers, and people of color. At the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, where our New York story began, visitors confronted guides with hostile remarks about immigrants.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

The marriage of profits and politics was destined to alienate the people eventually; corporate interests have for too long overwhelmed, or, worse, acted in direct opposition to the needs of society. And the election of Donald Trump signals that the process is complete. The only real shock is that the inevitable somehow managed to sneak up on the Establishment and its MBAs. Or perhaps it’s not so shocking—Hillary Clinton thought that a crystal ball built out of spreadsheets could see the future, and she ended up as disconnected from the electorate as the modern MBA is from the people they oversee. What’s crystal clear today is that society is sick, with the victory of Donald Trump simply the most visible symptom. If there is a silver lining to all the ugliness, it’s that it’s now more obvious than ever that it’s time to get back to the things that really matter, which is not money or metrics, but people.

The Golden Passport charts the rise of one of America’s most influential institutions over the course of a century—highlighting both its positive and negative contributions to society—and then postulates on its future. Why is it important to do so now? Because modern corporate society is broken. Shareholder capitalism wasn’t the answer; it led to the exploitation of the many for the obscene enrichment of the few. The election of businessman Donald Trump was not an endorsement of business-as-usual, but its opposite: the howl of an electorate deprived of economic opportunity. Business has lost sight of its true function in society, which is to provide a mechanism by which we can work together and with our environment to achieve our common goals.

Not only that, he feared what effect he might have for even trying. In early 2016, Bloomberg revealed that he’d decided against running, in part due to the challenge of winning as an independent and in part due to the possibility that by doing so, he might inadvertently facilitate the election of Donald Trump or Senator Ted Cruz. “That,” he said in March 2016, “is not a risk I can take in good conscience.”15 For a school so successful at placing its graduates at the top of pretty much every hierarchy there is, its record with the U.S. presidency is as follows: a two-term failure as a president, a two-time loser as a presidential candidate, and a man who might have been a good one but waited until it was too late to run. 55 The Shame: Jeff Skilling In his 1969 book about consultants, The Business Healers, Hal Higdon observed, “There are those within the business community who might consider ‘a highly articulate con man’ to be a rather effective definition of a management consultant.”1 Some thirty years later, a man who fit that bill precisely—Jeff Skilling (’79)—closed the loop.


pages: 69 words: 18,758

Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work by Steven Pressfield

barriers to entry, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Guggenheim Bilbao

If Class One narcotics are the culprit, the tale often includes troubles with the law, crime, prison time, violence, even death. Of course, you and I can be addicted to any number of things—to love, to sex, to worship of our children or our parents, to dominance, to submission. We can even be addicted to ourselves (see Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump). Such individuals can be absolutely fascinating at the same time that they’re boring as hell. What, then, is the connection between addiction and Resistance? ART AND ADDICTION For the past several years, I’ve written a weekly post on my website (www.stevenpressfield.com) called “Writing Wednesdays.”


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

An interpretation of the functions of the frontal lobe: Based upon observations in forty-eight cases of prefrontal lobotomy. The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 11(5), 527–539, p. 527. high-profile failures as successes Rolling Stone. (n.d.). The many business failures of Donald Trump. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com Trump Mortgage, four bankruptcies Donald Trump’s companies filed for bankruptcy 4 times [Video file]. (2011, April 21). ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-filed-bankruptcy-times/story?id=13419250 full-scale psychological disorders Ronningstam, E. F. (2005). Identifying and understanding the narcissistic personality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Few thought that Richard Nixon would recover from his embarrassing defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. (“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”) Thomas Edison had more than one thousand inventions that were unsuccessful, compared to only a small number that were successful. But the successful ones were wildly influential: the lightbulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera. Billionaire Donald Trump has had as many high-profile failures as successes: dead-end business ventures like Trump Vodka, Trump magazine, Trump Airlines, and Trump Mortgage, four bankruptcies, and a failed presidential bid. He is a controversial figure, but he has demonstrated resilience and has never let business failures reduce his self-confidence.


pages: 290 words: 84,375

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

While the United States has unquestionably benefited from being able to buy cheaper televisions and Nikes, according to economists from MIT, between 1999 and 2011, the country lost as many as 2.4 million jobs to China. The losses were unevenly spread, concentrating in places like Lancaster County. Rising popular hostility toward China was perhaps best articulated by Donald Trump, who, during his 2016 presidential campaign, resurrected Congress’s threats to impose a blanket tariff on Chinese imports as punishment for cheating on trade. Yet, on the world stage, China casts itself as a champion of global free trade. “Pursuing protectionism is like locking oneself in a dark room,” President Xi said in a speech at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, soon after Trump assumed the U.S. presidency.

Sirkin, Michael Zinser, and Justin Rose, “The Shifting Economics of Global Manufacturing,” BCG Perspectives, August 19, 2014, https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/lean_manufacturing_globalization_shifting_economics_global_manufacturing/. because of rising costs: Michael Schuman, “Is China Stealing Jobs? It May Be Losing Them, Instead,” New York Times, July 22, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/business/international/china-jobs-donald-trump.html?referer=https://www.google.com/. half as expensive: Ibid. 3 million people: Liyan Qi, “China’s Working Age Population Fell Again in 2013,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2014, https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/01/21/chinas-working-population-fell-again-in-2013/. in the United States: “The Rising Cost of Manufacturing,” New York Times, August 2, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/31/business/international/rising-cost-of-manufacturing.html.


pages: 309 words: 85,584

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit by William Keegan

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, congestion charging, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, gig economy, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, Just-in-time delivery, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, transaction costs, tulip mania, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

MacShane focused on the way the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), whose main raison d’être was to take Britain ‘out of Europe’, was gaining ground: ‘The votes UKIP candidates won in the European and local elections in 2014 as well as in parliamentary by-elections point the direction of travel of British public opinion and voting intentions.’ Of course, the objective of Mr Nigel Farage and his cronies was not, literally, to take us out of Europe, but out of the EU. But the way some of the more evangelical Brexiters talk – not least Michael Gove with his nauseating early ‘exclusive’ interview with Donald Trump, accompanied by Rupert Murdoch – they give the impression they would be happy to see these islands towed across the Atlantic and joined umbilically with the US. Incidentally, use of the word Brexit – sometimes pronounced Bregsit, but I prefer Brexit with an ‘x’ – has been increasingly common currency for six years.

In this instance, however, so much uncertainty has been created by the referendum that businesses have been holding back on investment plans and even the post-referendum devaluation has not improved the country’s overseas trade position. There are two overriding reasons for my concern. One is geopolitical rather than economic: it seems unwise, to put it mildly, to try to unhook ourselves from the rest of Europe when the United States, under Donald Trump, has declared a trade war on the rest of the world and Europe is very concerned about a threat from President Putin’s Russia. The second concern is obviously economic: we have spent forty-five years being integrated into the wider European economy and in effect we have become an economic region of the EU.


pages: 267 words: 81,144

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

butterfly effect, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, rolodex, sharing economy, Skype, TED Talk

‘Yes, you did,’ she said with the slight smile she reserved for when she was pleased I had got there before she did. ‘It’s putting other people down so you could feel big.’ ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ ‘Do you know who else does that?’ There was a pause. ‘Donald Trump.’ I burst out laughing. ‘Eleanor. I have come to really appreciate your brand of tough love,’ I told her. ‘But even for you, that’s a bit of a stretch.’ ‘Fine, a Nigel Farage then,’ she said, shrugging slightly as if I was being pedantic. ‘My therapist compared me to Donald Trump today,’ I texted Farly as I walked out on to Regent Street. ‘I think I’m making real progress.’ Then around five months into therapy, I suddenly felt like we’d hit a brick wall.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

That warfare has metastasized in the past decade, encompassing the US-led Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear program, Russia’s blackouts of electrical systems in Ukraine, and China’s methodical pillaging of Western trade secrets. The unstoppable, semiautomated propaganda that helped propel the 2016 election of Donald Trump was just the latest, most complicated, and most effective twist. Such information operations and sabotage threaten to continue indefinitely around the world with little oversight. Most Cult of the Dead Cow members have remained anonymous, although sixteen have agreed to be named for the first time in these pages, including all of the previously cloaked core participants.

“Beto told National Public Radio”: Wade Goodwyn, “Texas Democrat’s Underdog Bid to Unseat Ted Cruz Picks Up Momentum,” All Things Considered, NPR, March 5, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/03/05/590709857/texas-democrats-underdog-bid-to-unseat-ted-cruz-picks-up-momentum. “sons of bitches”: Adam Edelman, “Trump Rips NFL Players After Anthem Protests During Preseason Games,” NBC News, August 10, 2018, www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-rips-nfl-players-after-protests-during-preseason-games-n899551. “Beto, who had never been asked the question before”: Daniel Kreps, “Watch Beto O’Rourke Talk Trump’s Texas Visit, NFL Kneeling Viral Video on ‘Ellen,’” Rolling Stone, September 5, 2018, www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/watch-beto-orourke-talk-trumps-texas-visit-nfl-kneeling-viral-video-on-ellen-719245/.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

I wondered how much a populist anti–Wall Street animus motivated the new protests. The answer was, not much at all. At the San Francisco Tea Party, I met my first real-live “birther,” the forlorn souls who insisted Obama wasn’t born here and was thus ineligible to be president (a group that would come to include the ridiculous Donald Trump). My first birther carried an “Obama=Imposter” sign and handed me a flyer demanding that Nancy Pelosi begin impeachment proceedings because Obama, he told me, “is not a natural-born citizen.” I saw signs denouncing Obama’s stimulus bill as socialism and lots of hammers and sickles from the old Soviet flag.

Certainly they abetted the birther movement, right up through the 2012 GOP primaries. House Speaker John Boehner refused to chide birthers in his caucus or the GOP base, insisting, “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think” about whether Obama was born here. Then the ludicrous Donald Trump took up the bullying, pretending he was mulling a run for president, and Obama finally had to tell the state of Hawaii to release his long-form birth certificate, a sad ritual of humiliation for the most powerful man in the world, having to show his papers to GOP bullies. Even after that, Texas governor Rick Perry played the birther card when his presidential run began to stumble, and primary finalist Rick Santorum, an ultraright former Pennsylvania senator, took the Boehner line when a Florida voter told him Obama was a Muslim who is ineligible to be president.


pages: 312 words: 83,998

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine

"World Economic Forum" Davos, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, confounding variable, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental economics, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeremy Corbyn, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, publication bias, risk tolerance, seminal paper

When does a difference make a difference? Examples from situated neuroscience. Neurogenderings III. University of Lausanne, Switzerland, May 8–10, 2014. Podcast available at http://wp.unil.ch/neurogenderings3/podcasts/. 40. Yan, H. (August 8, 2015). Donald Trump’s “blood” comment about Megyn Kelly draws outrage. CNN. Retrieved from edition.cnn.com/2015/08/08/politics/donald-trump-cnn-megyn-kelly-comment/ on December 31, 2015. 41. Schwartz, D., Romans, S., Meiyappan, S., De Souza, M., & Einstein, G. (2012). The role of ovarian steriod hormones in mood. Hormones and Behavior, 62(4), 448–454. See also Romans, S.


pages: 285 words: 83,682

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah

affirmative action, assortative mating, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, four colour theorem, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Parler "social media", precariat, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Suez canal 1869, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Still, as these results remind us, the fact that Americans don’t talk very much about class doesn’t mean there isn’t a good deal of class consciousness. Twenty-first-century systems of social standing, in the country where I now live, look very similar to the patterns that shaped the worlds I grew up in. One (but, yes, only one) strand of the populist explosion that tipped Donald Trump into power was an expression of resentment against a class defined by its education and its values: the cosmopolitan, degree-laden people who dominate the media, the public culture, and the professions in our country. Populists think that liberal elites look down on ordinary Americans, ignore their concerns, and use their power to advantage themselves.

In Markovits’s view, “Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy, one might even say, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.”48 These problems received some attention in the United States after the election in 2016 of Donald Trump; some people think the alienation of poorer whites from the “coastal elites” is in part a result of the former’s recognition that the latter have fixed the game to the advantage of their families. But the problem is not particularly American. In China, too, wealth and status is 80 percent determined, using one measure, by the wealth and status of your parents.


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

* * * — NAV ARRIVED at Heathrow Airport uncharacteristically early on Monday, November 7, 2016, where he and Burlingame were met by two FBI agents. During the flight to Chicago, Nav grilled them on what it was like to work for the Bureau and whether they’d ever hunted a serial killer. It was the week of the presidential election, and, touching down in the United States, images of Donald Trump were ubiquitous. Nav was taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a notorious high-rise lockup in downtown Chicago a block from the CME. Buffeted by noise and activity, he couldn’t sleep. The next morning, he was escorted to the Dirksen Federal Building, a blacked-out thirty-story monolith nearby that houses both the federal courthouse and the U.S.

By now, Nav had been awake for more than forty-eight hours, and as another sleepless night in jail loomed, Burlingame pressed the DOJ to show some compassion and let his client spend the night in a conference room while an FBI agent stood guard. The prosecutors and agents considered the request, but in the end they concluded that the security risk was too high and sent Nav back to the lockup. The following day, November 9, 2016, the plea hearing began at 2 p.m. News of Donald Trump’s election as president cast a surreal pall over proceedings. The gallery at the back of the vast, windowless courtroom was little more than half full: a handful of government attorneys, a smattering of tired-looking journalists engrossed by their phones, some futures industry hawkers. Jessica Harris, who had recently left the CFTC, made the trip from Washington.


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

When developing countries at the United Nations called for a “New International Economic Order” in the 1970s, with the aim of rebalancing global power and wealth between the developed and the developing countries, the U.S. attitude turned hostile, insisting that the developing world get in line behind U.S. leadership—or else. With the presidency of Donald Trump, the U.S. position had become “America First,” a stark declaration of U.S. self-interest over internationalist objectives. Many American strategists began to see convergence, especially China’s convergence, as a direct threat to U.S. interests rather than an objective of U.S. policy. Some Lessons from the Industrial Age The Industrial Age marks a distinct and remarkable phase in the history of globalization.

The SDG rankings are available in the UN report by Jeffrey Sachs, Guido Schmidt-Traub, Christian Kroll, Guillaume Lafortune, and Grayson Fuller, Sustainable Development Report 2019: Transformations to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (New York: Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network [SDSN], 2019). 3. The life satisfaction rankings can be cound in the 2019 world happiness report: John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey D. Sachs, The UN World Happiness Report 2019. (New York: SDSN, 2019). 4. In 2019, President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement but not from the UNFCCC. 5. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2013). 6. Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2015), sec. 23. 7.


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

“FOCUS FUSION: emPOWERtheWORLD,” IndieGoGo (2014), https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowertheworld--3\#. 12. J. Tirone, “Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg (2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/nuclear-fusion/2019/06/20/c6bd5682-938d-11e9-956a-88c291ab5c38_story.html. 13. “PayPal Billionaire Peter Thiel ‘Becoming Key Donald Trump Adviser,’ ” Independent (2017), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/peter-thiel-donald-trump-key-adviser-technology-science-paypal-david-gelertner-steve-bannon-a7600471.html; “Peter Thiel’s Other Hobby Is Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg (2016), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-22/peter-thiel-s-other-hobby-is-nuclear-fusion. 14.


pages: 318 words: 82,452

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

The Arizona Daily Star uncovered massive overtime payments to officers, sometimes in excess of their base salaries, leaving local taxpayers to come up with dramatically higher pensions as officers retire and collect based on these inflated salaries.40 A growing chorus of right-wing politicians has championed high- and low-tech ways of closing the border. We are familiar with Donald Trump’s exhortations to “build a wall,” but this is not new. The US government has been trying to build a wall along the southern border for many decades and has little to show for it, other than massive fiscal profligacy and the deaths of migrants pushed into ever harsher and more remote terrains. There is no logistical way to build an effective wall between the US and Mexico.

Additionally, the US is using large numbers of planes, helicopters, and drones to patrol the border and has experimented with balloons to search for unauthorized aircraft crossings, though occasionally some break free from their tethers and cause extensive damage. Reforms While the inauguration of President Donald Trump withered much of the will to reform border policing, there are still efforts to rethink how we manage the need for migrant workers, who have become central to several parts of the American economy. Some argue for a return to a system of foreign worker authorization similar to the Bracero Program.


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

“I tried to use that attention as leverage in order to talk about something I cared about, which was my platform,” she says, using the term to designate the kinds of issues a beauty queen will seek to highlight during her year of rule. The platform she chose was “immigration and citizenship education,” a particularly sensitive and important topic at the time. This was just months before the US presidential elections, during which time soon-to-be-elected Donald Trump, a former pageant mogul himself, reiterated plans for the building of a physical wall on the country’s southern border with Mexico and laid out more explicit plans for a so-called Muslim ban. Ari led voter registration drives and advocated for immigration reform, but people seemed more interested in the spectacle of her theoretical downfall.

None of the actions are laudable, but all of the ways in which the comedian deploys the justification are painfully realistic. In recent memory, this kind of excuse was even deployed to brush off the responsibility of a soon-to-be-elected United States president. In October 2016, The Washington Post released a tape of then presidential candidate Donald Trump back in 2005 talking to an entertainment host, bragging about his ability to sexually thrust himself on women without their consent, which is sexual assault. On the recording, he can be heard saying: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it.


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

Employee protests eventually led Google to take itself out of the running, and the company withdrew just three days before bids on the JEDI contract were due.9 Eventually, the Pentagon awarded the project to Microsoft Azure, but Amazon, which because of its leadership in the sector was seen as the most likely winner, immediately claimed the decision was politically motivated. Amazon filed a lawsuit in December 2019 claiming the decision was improperly biased because of President Donald Trump’s overt animosity toward Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which has been highly critical of the Trump Administration. In February 2020, a federal judge issued an injunction temporarily blocking award of the contract to Microsoft.10 A month later, the Department of Defense said it would reconsider its decision.11 All this offers a pretty vivid illustration of just how ferocious, and in some cases politically fraught, the battle for the cloud computing market is certain to be going forward.

The transformations that have occurred over just the past decade or two have arguably played an important role in unimaginable political upheaval and have rended the very fabric of society. Studies, for example, have shown a direct correlation between regions in the United States most vulnerable to job automation and voters who strongly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.2 Before the coronavirus pandemic upended our lives, there was more focus on another health crisis that has been devastating the United States, and areas that experienced substantial middle class job loss also tended to be on the front lines of the opioid epidemic.3 If the changes we’ve seen so far pale in comparison with what might come, there is a real risk of future social and economic disruption on an unprecedented scale—as well as the rise of even more dangerous political demagogues who will thrive on the fear that is certain to accompany such a rapidly shifting landscape.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

CEOs, wary of what shareholders may think of their purchases, try to downplay the aircraft and treat them like they are simply necessary pieces of office equipment—like very large BlackBerrys that happen also to fly and offer filet mignon. Besides, for most of the world’s top executives and richest people, there are practical and security reasons not to draw too much attention to themselves. The flamboyant American real estate mogul Donald Trump’s plane has his name painted on the side of it, but he is an anomaly, and perhaps not a very surprising one at that. Moss notes that the Gulfstream’s reputation as the ne plus ultra of global leadership accessories is increasingly an international one. Whereas traditionally only about a quarter of the planes were sold overseas, today the number is approaching 40 percent and rising fast.

-Mexican border, have access to more cash and as a consequence to better technology, they can outplay legitimate forces in those countries and buy or intimidate political leaders as suits their objectives. Among the superclass of the arms dealer community, Naím cites Viktor Bout, called by some “the Bill Gates or Donald Trump of modern gunrunning.” In the chaos of the early post-Soviet period, Bout bought a number of outdated Soviet aircraft and, under a complex front of fake businesses and subsidiaries, began a chartered weapons-transport service. In the 1980s and ’90s he ferried arms (as well as diamonds, frozen fish, and even UN peacekeepers) all over Asia and Africa.

Lynn Lunsford, “Wide-Flying Moguls: Google Duo’s New Jet Is a Boeing 767-200,” Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2005. 25 Now Boeing has begun booking orders Eugenia Levenson, “Pimp My Jet,” Fortune, April 16, 2007. 26 the custom versions of the double-decker “Airbus Superjumbo for Private Use,” BBC News, June 19, 2007, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6768237.stm. 27 real estate mogul Donald Trump’s plane Stephen McGinty, “Any Rows and You’re Fired, Scotland!” The Scotsman, April 29, 2006. 29 Stephen Kaplan and Joshua Rauh Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua D. Rauh, “Wall Street and Main Street: What Contributes to the Rise in Highest Incomes?” University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, and National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 13270, July 2007, 32. 30 Sherwin Rosen wrote a landmark paper Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars,” American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (December 1981): 845-58. 30 Lawrence Summers explained it Lawrence Summers, interview with the author, October 2006. 33 more than fifteen hundred with annual sales Scott DeCarlo, “The World’s 2,000 Largest Public Companies,” Forbes, March 29, 2007. 33 In 2007, for example, global GDP “The World Factbook—World,” Central Intelligence Agency, www. cia. gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html#Econ. 33 the top 250 companies in the world DeCarlo, “World’s 2,000 Largest Public Companies.” 34 of this group—166 in total This comparison and a similar conclusion were the basis of a report by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, “Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power,” Institute for Policy Studies, December 2000, i. 35 The world’s two thousand largest corporations DeCarlo, “World’s 2,000 Largest Public Companies.” 35 the total market value of the assets traded McKinsey & Company, “Mapping the Global Capital Markets Third Annual Report,” McKinsey Global Institute, January 2007, 7. 35 In 1983, the top five hundred companies Jeffrey Kentor, “The Growth of Transnational Corporate Networks: 1962-1998,” Journal of World Systems Research (December 2005): 267. 35 In 1962, the one hundred largest corporations Ibid., 266. 36 Siemens, a German engineering conglomerate From company websites, www.siemens.com and www.hp.com. 36 Not only do markets like the United States McKinsey & Company, “Mapping the Global Capital Markets Third Annual Report,” 8. 36 According to Forbes, there were twenty-one banks DeCarlo, “World’s 2,000 Largest Public Companies.” 36 the richest 10 percent of Americans Edward N.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

The Dating Game Candid Camera (becomes) Punk’d (Ashton Kutcher) MORE RECENTLY Hulk The Surreal Life (seven celebrities live in house) The Osbournes The Anna Nicole [Smith] Show Big Brother 6 (eight strangers in fake house studio, get kicked off by spectators) I Want to Be a Hilton Celebrity Fit Club The Apprentice (Donald Trump) Fire Me, Please Dancing with the Stars American Idol Kill Reality (reality stars make movie The Scorn) Extreme Makeover Made True Life Diary I Want a Famous Face The Swan Date My Mom Room Raiders (dating) The Real World (seven strangers taped living together, originally from Dutch version) Fear Factor The Bachelor The Bachelorette Survivor The Amazing Race Reality television purveys an identity sweepstakes in which everyone is looking to be transformed into somebody else at least in the gaze of those watching television. Most shows permit a kind of metaphoric transformation as on The Apprentice, where by winning the Donald Trump sweepstakes and avoiding being “fired” you end up not only as a Trump employee but as a kind of junior Donald Trump sharing in the many celebrity perks of being Trump; or where by competing for the affection of a made-for-TV bachelor or bachelorette you have a chance yourself to become if not happily married at least “famous,” as in famously rejected.

The Dating Game Candid Camera (becomes) Punk’d (Ashton Kutcher) MORE RECENTLY Hulk The Surreal Life (seven celebrities live in house) The Osbournes The Anna Nicole [Smith] Show Big Brother 6 (eight strangers in fake house studio, get kicked off by spectators) I Want to Be a Hilton Celebrity Fit Club The Apprentice (Donald Trump) Fire Me, Please Dancing with the Stars American Idol Kill Reality (reality stars make movie The Scorn) Extreme Makeover Made True Life Diary I Want a Famous Face The Swan Date My Mom Room Raiders (dating) The Real World (seven strangers taped living together, originally from Dutch version) Fear Factor The Bachelor The Bachelorette Survivor The Amazing Race Reality television purveys an identity sweepstakes in which everyone is looking to be transformed into somebody else at least in the gaze of those watching television.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Entitlements are rising inexorably, and by crowding out capital investment, are reducing productivity and economic growth in the process. And America’s defenses against populism are weakening every day as professional politicians sell their votes to the highest bidder and voters demand unfiltered democracy to discipline a corrupt system. Donald Trump is the closest thing that America has produced to a Latin American–style populist, promising to keep out foreign competition and forcing companies to offer their workers a “fair” deal. RESTORING AMERICA’S LOST DYNAMISM This book will conclude by suggesting some policies that can restore America’s fading dynamism.

Bush paid a heavy price for his embrace of what he called “the new world order”: Patrick Buchanan and his pitchfork army defeated him in the New Hampshire primary (forcing him to give Buchanan a slot at the Republican Convention), and Ross Perot led a protectionist third party that split the Republican vote and put Bill Clinton in the White House. The bulk of Democrats in Congress voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada. The resentment against globalization continued to mount and eventually burst forth in the form of Donald Trump’s populism. But for three decades after 1980, it was the globalizers who were making the weather. Rather than simply railing against their foreign rivals, U.S. companies began to learn from their management methods. In particular they studied Japanese companies in order to solve their biggest management problems—their overreliance on standardized production, their poor quality control, and their general addiction to producing large quantities of fairly mediocre stuff.

ENTER TRUMP Stagnation inevitably soured America’s mood and roiled its politics. In almost every survey since the 2008 financial crisis, a majority of voters have told pollsters that the country is on the wrong track. Maverick political movements such as the Tea Party came from nowhere and seized the public imagination. In 2016, Donald Trump, a real estate mogul who had never stood for public office, shocked the country, the world, and probably himself by beating Hillary Clinton, one of the most experienced politicians in the country, for the presidency, with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Trump is unique among a long line of presidents.


pages: 517 words: 155,209

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

With their Palestinian passports and their American visas, they flew to New York. I was heading to Washington, DC, in November, and asked them if they wanted to meet in the capitol. They agreed, and we planned to meet on a Wednesday at the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture. It happened to be the Wednesday after the election of Donald Trump, who had proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. They had either come just in time, or at the very worst time. Sumud Emily Raboteau 1. Tel Aviv I expected trouble getting through border inspection when I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport. In part this was because I’d had difficulty the first time I traveled to Israel, in the run-up to the second intifada.

They passed out stickers that said kahane was right, in reference to the late, infamous orthodox rabbi Meir Kahane, a member of the Knesset who endorsed annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip while expelling the Palestinians, along with a lot of other anti-Arab ideas that brought Israel to outlaw his political groups. In spirit, he reminded me of Donald Trump, who was scapegoating immigrants and agitating for a wall in an effort to “make America great again” back home. Although Kahane fell from grace thirty years ago, his writings have carried on as foundational texts for most of today’s militant and extreme-right political groups in Israel. Some of Kahane’s manifestos were on sale at the parade, including They Must Go, a screed whose title pretty much speaks for itself.

This passage, with its careful register referencing “unity,” and “countryman,” and “brother,” captures the nationalist and populist ideology behind the building of security walls. There is nothing new or original about walls; they have always been there, from the Wall of Jericho to Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall to Donald Trump’s imaginary wall on the Mexican border. There is something visceral and primeval in us that yearns for the protective presence of a wall. But walls aren’t always solely for the protection of citizens; they serve a variety of other functions. They have been used as militaristic symbols of impregnability, and permanence.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Instead of becoming this sexist, which he could have been on day one, he became the straight talker. “Now, I know you follow the headlines so you know what happened next. Roger Ailes of Fox News weighed in to say, ‘We need to make peace with Donald Trump because this is getting out of hand,’ and Donald Trump made peace with him. How do you interpret that? I’ll tell you how I interpret it. I interpret it as Donald Trump just bought Fox News without paying a freaking penny. Because if they want him to appear on [their] show, that’s up to him, and he proved he doesn’t need them.” TF: At this point, I asked Scott about a clever line Trump often uses to shut down journalists, which is a quick interjection of “Check your facts, [insert journalist name].”

Of those half dozen, most of them will not make it after a year or two, so it’s very rare. In fact, Dilbert was probably the biggest breakout, or one of the biggest, in 20 years.” Predicting Trump—What You Can Learn On September 22, 2015, Scott Adams correctly predicted on my podcast that 10 months later, Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee. At the time, this was considered laughable. Scott based this on what he considered Trump’s hypnosis abilities and media savvy, not his policies. This might seem like old news, but there are actionable lessons in what Scott noticed: “Take the debate where he [Trump] came in as the under-prepared buffoon who was going to blow himself up.


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

According to historian Jerry White, while ‘Londoner’ had become a ‘slur’ in the 1930s, the ‘staunch and stead-fast’ response of the capital’s residents in the face of the Blitz ‘revalorized “the Londoner” into a title of honour’.51 Yet recent decades have seen the Londoner recast as an unpatriotic, ignorant ‘citizen of nowhere’ living within a bubble that speaks only to itself and is unaware of ‘real’ life in the rest of the country. When BritainThinks set up a ‘citizens’ jury’ in the former ‘red wall’ in the north of England, tasked with creating its ideal political party, it proposed building a Donald Trump-style wall around the capital: ‘They could not have been clearer: keeping Londoners in their place would be a very desirable outcome indeed.’52 Some critique of Londoners is light-hearted. The ‘Islington dinner party’ is often sent up; Private Eye’s ‘It’s Grim Up North London’ comic strip has been lampooning out-of-touch Islingtonians since the 1990s.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

As middle-class people fell farther behind, discontent manifested in the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left of the political spectrum, but also in the Tea Party movement on the right and the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement about class and opportunity as well as about race. During the 2016 presidential race, the Republican candidate Donald Trump advocated policies he claimed would promote prosperity for American workers, like immigration restriction and protectionism. Given the long history of inequality in the United States, and the polarization of legislative politics at every level, the prospect for reform seems dim, but proposals have included criminal justice reform, a basic income guarantee, free college education, or the government as the employer of last resort.

By co-opting the name “Tea Party,” the members of this movement linked themselves to an invented historical tradition, in which “real Americans” rejected statism to the greatest degree possible in favor of liberty from government intervention.46 Tea Partiers called for small government (although not the elimination of programs like Medicare or Social Security that benefited many of them directly) and characterized recipients of government aid as undeserving.47 At first officially a grassroots movement, the Tea Party was quickly captured by large conservative funding organizations like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, and its focus shifted to the election of Republican candidates and away from symbolic protests. The 2010 midterm elections were disastrous for Democrats as a result.48 After the 2010 midterm elections, the Tea Party remained significant as a Congressional caucus. By 2016, the Tea Party had moved the entire Republican Party to the right.49 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addressed economic inequality through anti-immigrant stances, including the notion of a border wall to keep out migrant workers, and flirted with the idea of rejecting free trade. As previous chapters have shown, a political appeal to working people that exploits racial and ethnic divisions has been a tried-and-true American political strategy.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Instead we are given this obscene Gehenna, a place of such tawdry, tacky, tinselly, tasteless and trumpery tat that the desire to run away clutching my hand to my mouth is overwhelming. But no, I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all…The Trump Taj Mahal. For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions along the boardwalk. It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. I am not an enemy of developers, per se; I know that people must make money from construction and development projects, I know that there is a demand and that casinos will be built.

* * * The automatic doors of the black smoked-glass entrance hiss open and I am inside. I see at once that the exterior, boardwalk side of Atlantic City is deliberately kept as unappealing as possible, just to make sure people stay inside. All you need is within, mini-streets complete with Starbucks and burger outlets, there is even a shop devoted entirely to the personality of Donald Trump himself, with quotes from the great man all over the walls: ‘You’ve got to think anyway, so why not think big?’ and similar comforting and illuminating insights that enrich and nourish the hungry human soul. Everything sold here is in the ‘executive’ style, like bad eighties Pierre Cardin: slimy thin belts of glossy leather, notepads, cufflinks, unspeakable objects made of brass and mahogany.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Winston Churchill Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness. Oprah Winfrey Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. Henry Ford Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war. Donald Trump Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity. Nancy Pearcey I've been up against tough competition my whole life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it. Walt Disney Strength does not come from winning.

And now they all know that a failure is progress And the new town motto is "Try it, say yes!" I will explore the world with gusto and enthusiasm. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill We have to straighten out our country; we have to make our country great again, and we need energy and enthusiasm. Donald Trump Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice. Arnold J. Toynbee Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.


pages: 287 words: 95,152

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Globalization as defined and led by the West may well have seen better days, but Yiwu is a striking example of a city, small by Chinese standards, so intimately connected to the rest of the world that every disturbance produced a continent away is immediately registered here, the central nervous system integrating information from endless locations everywhere. There is a third example, also much discussed when I visited, less than a week after Donald Trump had been elected President in the United States. In interviews with Chinese television and websites, a number of flag manufacturers and sellers in Yiwu had commented that orders coming from the United States for Trump flags far exceeded those for Hillary Clinton. Some were so confident in a Trump victory that they started to manufacture only Trump flags, and since Yiwu handles a very large portion of the world’s flag orders, the fact seemed to many subtle Chinese political observers to be of decisive importance.

Many simply refused to believe Brexit would ultimately take place. Others, such as the Financial Times, seemed to announce the imminent collapse of the British political and economic system. If the unthinkable had taken place, surely unthinkable consequences would then follow. The shock and surprise was even greater when, a few months later, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. On the one hand, the polls had been even more definitive that such an outcome was out of the question. On the other, it was much more difficult to argue that the global order would remain unaffected when the most powerful country in the world decided to elect a candidate outside every political tradition, than to play down the importance of the United Kingdom and its occasionally eccentric decisions.


pages: 257 words: 90,857

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson

23andMe, Airbnb, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, feminist movement, Firefox, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, retail therapy, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft

IDK about anyone else, but I am, at this particular moment, extremely confused and emotionally conflicted about the state of womanhood and feminism in America. While I was always low-key suspicious about feminism thanks to reading about the history of this country as well as being a black woman living in it, the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States, thanks in part to the 53 percent of white women who voted for him, proved to me that we aren’t living in a feminist country. And ever since the night that number 45 was elected, feminism has seemed to be in a bit of a state of emergency. Except that’s not entirely true.

.”* She then stated that statistically speaking, black women are twice as likely to identify as feminist than their white counterparts. Gloria also brought up the national poll Ms. magazine conducted in 1970, in which 60 percent of black women identified as feminist and supported the movement while only 30 percent of white women did. Then she continued by saying that considering that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump during the 2016 election (91 percent of black women voted for Clinton), this was an example of how white women were still behind. What was notable about that moment was not Gloria presenting the receipts, although that was appreciated, but how the audience reacted. The women of color clapped loudly and proudly as did a few white women, but this truth bomb was not met with the rapturous applause that frequented earlier parts of our talk.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Much the same is true of the long-term unemployed, many of them older men without much education, who drift around, often drinking to pass the day, lacking much, if any, connection to society at large. For an awful lot of people, work has become a less certain and often less remunerative contributor to material security. It is a development that makes political forces of populist outsiders, such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, and bestsellers of wonky economics books, such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,10 an analysis of global inequality published in 2014 that flew off the shelves. Work is not just the means by which we obtain the resources needed to put food on the table.

We are already seeing a rise in the appeal of extreme populist candidates blaming immigrant populations. In France, the anti-immigrant, euro-sceptic National Front of Marine Le Pen is creeping dangerously close to the French presidency. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has maintained popularity despite his authoritarian tendencies by playing to Hungarian nationalism. And, in America, Donald Trump has mounted an insurgent campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency on a platform of virulent anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The nationalist right is ascendant around the rich world. So, too, is a more radical left. This new left, however, has not yet enjoyed as much electoral success as the radical right.


pages: 288 words: 89,781

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

This book seeks to put them in their proper perspective, as the time-bound and fallible originators of ideas that still speak to us today. 1 JEAN-BAPTISTE COLBERT (1619–1683) The whipping boy Mercantilism is never, ever a good word in the world of economics. The word has connotations of ideas that are pre-modern, irrational and innumerate. Economists who deride President Donald Trump’s trade policy, which is almost all of them, dismiss it as “mercantilist”. And in the 18th and 19th centuries most political economists explicitly defined themselves in opposition to mercantilism. Adam Smith coined the term “mercantile system”, which in his Wealth of Nations (1776) was target practice.1 From Smith onwards you could be respectable only if you were “against” the mercantile system.

Having a trade surplus would mean that more specie would be flowing in to the country than out. As the stock of specie grew, the country would get richer. Simple. The global trading system, by this logic, was fundamentally zero-sum. For every “winner” country with a trade surplus, there must be a “loser” country with a trade deficit. Today, President Donald Trump thinks in much the same way. Hume does not agree with the bullionist theory of money–nor with the conclusions that flow from it. He sees the wealth of a country and the amount of money in a country as entirely separate things. The wealth of a country consists in what its inhabitants can consume–food, clothes and luxuries.


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

There would be diversity, but all within a rational framework. As people got richer, because liberal markets worked, they would lend their support to the liberal model. They would not, it was easily assumed, act parochially and nationalistically, as the old nationalisms of the past withered away. There would be no Donald Trumps, Vladimir Putins and Xi Jinpings, and no Marine Le Pens or Viktor Orbáns. Behind this end-of-history thesis lay a deeper intellectual idea, one that was instrumental in the very creation of the UN. It was that rationalism would prevail, with a universal appreciation of the rights of all people, wherever and whenever they lived.

The shock of a sudden net zero transition would, according to this view, tip us all into a severe recession. Keynesians believe that borrowing for spending is generally a ‘good thing’, and that we should not overly worry about passing on the debt to the next generation because the extra spending will create growth and hence pay for itself. It is the logic behind Donald Trump’s tax cuts and spending increases, and Boris Johnson’s new-fangled ‘boosterism’. Perhaps it could better be called ‘cakeism’: the Johnsonian approach to having the spending and greater prosperity and decarbonising. A critical distinction comes into play here. Aggregate demand is made up of both consumption and investment.


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

Nowhere does this seem to be better illustrated than in the case of the Indian diamond tycoon, Nirav Modi, and Punjab National Bank (PNB). The Wharton-educated and Hollywood-loving jeweller-to-the-stars was a denizen of the Forbes Indian billionaire list and the owner of a New York store opened by none other than Donald Trump. But Modi’s passion for publicity backfired badly in 2018, when an explosive story gained him more brand recognition than his promotional budget could ever have achieved. It began with the revelation that PNB, India’s second-largest state lender, had uncovered a $1.8 billion fraud. PNB issued a criminal complaint, subsequently published by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, stating that the main beneficiaries of the alleged fraud were the jet-setting jeweller and his uncle, diamond trader Mehul Choksi, as well as their respective companies.

Rules and regulators In late 2020, the Chinese government torpedoed what would have been the world’s largest-ever IPO. Beijing put a halt to Ant Group’s planned share offering just days before Alipay’s parent was to list because of ‘material matters’ relating to a regulatory interview that had been held with the company’s founder. Two months later, then US President Donald Trump stormed into the payments arena for altogether different reasons. He issued an executive order banning transactions with eight Chinese apps, including Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay, describing the companies as threats to US national security. Payments matter, and governments care about them for a host of reasons.


The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Today svd and similar approaches are not just used to recommend movies or match consumers with product ads. Reporting by the author has revealed that techniques pioneered by the Netflix Prize have been adapted for online political targeting.45 Cambridge Analytica is a British political consulting firm best known for its role in the 2016 Donald Trump campaign and the 2015 Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom. For years Cambridge Analytica courted controversy—and garnered skepticism—by claiming that it used “psychographic” models that supposedly targeted voters based on personality traits. In March 2018 the Guardian reported that Cambridge Analytica had downloaded tens of millions of Facebook profiles using a personality test app, as part of a partnership with Cambridge University researchers Aleksandr Kogan and Joseph Chancellor.46 The revelation of this “data breach” sparked regulatory investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.

The fcc order prohibited internet providers from blocking lawful content, throttling sites or types of usage, and charging for traffic prioritization. And unlike previous fcc efforts, the 2015 decision reclassified internet traffic under Title II, the core part of its mandate under the Communications Act of 1934. The 2015 net neutrality order, though, provided only a fleeting victory. With the election of Donald Trump, and the elevation of Ajait Pai from commissioner to chairman, the fcc repealed net neutrality protections in December 2017. Evolutionary models of digital audiences help explain why the end of net neutrality enforcement is such a dire threat to content producers, and especially smaller content producers.


pages: 278 words: 91,332

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

So as long as there remains a market for big, powerful vehicles that consume enormous amounts of gasoline, electric cars will do little to reduce overall fuel consumption. For that, we need the fuel efficiency standards to improve—and that will take action by the government. And if Republicans are in office, good luck with that. When Donald Trump came to power in 2016, he quickly started on plans to roll back the emissions standards for cars imposed by Barack Obama, and began a war on California, which imposes its own standards above the federal level, to stop it. Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary, said as a result of the move, “more jobs would be created.”

As driving became harder, the Dutch, like the Danes, got out their bikes. In both cases, what it took was a leadership that decided enough was enough. The Dutch have now so enthusiastically embraced cycling that their prime minister makes a point of traveling to meetings by bicycle. So too do many of its ambassadors overseas. In 2022, Donald Trump’s former ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands, tweeted that in Denmark, people are so poor that they cannot afford to drive, citing her diplomatic driver’s daily cycle to work. Danes responded by noting that if money were the problem, then their royals must be poor as well, as the Crown Prince routinely cycles his children around in a cargo bike.


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

These efforts tend to be labeled as “virtue signaling,” and while there is some of that, there are equally as many, if not more, people who genuinely want to contribute to the collective, but might not know how to get started. While some of that wariness is because we’re an “iNation,” I believe that much of that is because of the trauma all of us have lived through. #MeToo. The Donald Trump presidency. The rise of technology and social media that makes it possible for us to see global atrocities in real time. The lives lost to the coronavirus. We are inundated with toxic behavior, violence, death, and fear, so self-preservation is understandably at an all-time high, which means that yes, a face mask does feel like taking care of oneself.

Can you imagine a translator wasting their time and education attempting to figure out the Sanskrit equivalent of “peen”? * Look, the nineties were a much more innocent time, so I will not allow y’all to judge me for this because no one could have predicted that Geraldo would devolve into taking naked selfies and claiming Donald Trump as a friend. * Wait, can you do that? Someone get Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay on the phone and see if their educated selves are out here multiplying hences. * I spent more time on this than I care to admit trying to come up with the alliteraysh. #MuffMishaps was a contender, but it’s a bit too playful for discussing the patriarchy, and #PussyPickles sounds like the cousin of the yoni egg, and is also ignorant AF.


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

According to UNITE HERE Local 737 president Jeremy Haicken, “We never broke ranks once.”21 Disney’s initial offer—a dollar-an-hour raise over two years, coupled with a $200 signing bonus—was rejected by 93 percent of rank-and-file members. In the meantime, the company landed a $1.6 billion windfall from Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts and offered a $1,000 bonus to all of its 125,000 full-time and part-time employees in the US. But management also threatened to withhold these one-time bonuses from the 43,000 union workers unless they accepted the initial deal. This effort to extort members backfired. The unions filed an unfair labor practices complaint for discriminating against cast members engaged in bargaining and decided to take the campaign public.

Low-income home buyers who had been obliged to take out subprime loans had little protection, and again they were disproportionately African American and Hispanic. Renters were even worse off. In August 2020, it was estimated that thirty to forty million tenants, or about a third of all renter households in the country, were at risk of eviction.2 In Florida, as many as half of the state’s renters were at risk.3 At the end of the summer, Donald Trump temporarily banned the eviction of renters for nonpayment, using his broad authority through the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The ostensible reason was to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a backhanded acknowledgment that housing is a form of healthcare. But only those who could demonstrate that they faced homelessness as a result of COVID-19 financial hardship were covered, and the adjudication of their cases was left in the hands of local courts.


pages: 98 words: 27,609

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) by Michael R. Strain

Bernie Sanders, business cycle, centre right, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, job automation, labor-force participation, market clearing, market fundamentalism, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, working poor

This book is dedicated to them. Notes 1.New York Times (@nytimes). “We covered the whole history of lawns.” Twitter, August 9, 2019. 2.Samuel J. Abrams, et al., “AEI Survey on Community and Society: Social Capital, Civic Health, and Quality of Life in the United States,” American Enterprise Institute, February 2019.. 3.Donald Trump, “Presidential Campaign Announcement.” Campaign speech, Trump Tower, New York, NY, June 15, 2015. 4.Senator Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders). “American workers are some of the most overworked yet our standard of living has fallen. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.” Twitter, May 17, 2016, 12:46pm. 5.Senator Marco Rubio, “America Needs to Restore Dignity of Work,” Atlantic.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Freeman hoped they would enrich themselves through ambitious undertakings, mainly in commercial real estate; he discovered that Salem was averse to stocks and other intangible assets.11 Freeman introduced Salem to Donald Trump. The Bin Ladens owned a vacant tract of land near a royal palace in Riyadh, and Freeman thought the property offered “an excellent opportunity for Donald Trump to build one of his signature buildings, like the Trump Tower in New York.” When they met in Trump’s office, the developer told Salem that he was intrigued, but he would require $25,000 in cash plus two first-class tickets to Riyadh for himself and a colleague.

Until Osama announced himself as an international terrorist, his family was much more heavily invested in the United States than has generally been understood—his brothers and sisters owned American shopping centers, apartment complexes, condominiums, luxury estates, privatized prisons in Massachusetts, corporate stocks, an airport, and much else. They attended American universities, maintained friendships and business partnerships with Americans, and sought American passports for their children. They financed Hollywood movies, traded Thoroughbred horses with country singer Kenny Rogers, and negotiated real estate deals with Donald Trump. They regarded George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Prince Charles as friends of their family. In both a literal and a cultural sense, the Bin Laden family owned an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war, and yet, as was true of the relationship between the Saudi and American governments, their involvement in the United States also proved to be narrow and brittle.

Tickle, Charles Time Titan Top 1000 Saudi Companies Tora Bora Toraifi, Adel Toyland Toys “R” Us trade training camps, for Arab volunteers Trans World Airlines (TWA) Treasury bonds, U.S. Treasury Department, U.S.; Bin Laden disclosures to; Office of Foreign Assets Control of Trinford Investments S.A. Truman, Harry Trump, Donald Trump, Ivana Tufts University Turabi, Hassan Al- Turkey; see also Ottoman Empire Turki Al-Faisal, prince of Saudi Arabia; jihad in Yemen and Tuttle, F. Thomas “UBL Finances Sub-Group,” ulema ultralights ummah (community of believers) Unger, Craig United Arab Emirates United Medical Group United Nations United Press International (UPI) United States; automobiles in; Bin Laden family investments in; education in; Faisal’s visit to; Mohamed’s business with; Nicaraguan Contras and; oil and; Osama in; Osama’s war against; Salem’s business operations in; Saudi corporate business of; Saud’s visits to; stock market in; Sudan’s relations with; telephone industry of; see also specific countries University of San Francisco University of Southern California (USC) Upper Metn Secondary School Urowsky, Richard J.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

For example, during the Cold War, proponents of realism viewed Teddy Roosevelt’s—and even Alexander Hamilton’s—appreciation of power politics through the prism of mid-twentieth-century challenges.22 Our own time period is an unstable one, both for the direction of American diplomacy and because of shifts in world order. President Donald Trump has promised sharp breaks with the past. He proclaims that past policies have failed. Readers who are struggling to understand what lies ahead might reasonably ask why they should turn to a book about the past. Kissinger’s wonderful response is that, “History is the memory of states.”23 Thirty years ago, Ernest May, an esteemed historian of U.S. foreign policy, and Richard Neustadt, a respected scholar of the presidency, wrote a book for policy makers about the uses of history.

In Clinton’s second term, he added the idea that America is “the indispensable nation.”1 After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “Global War on Terror,” which he complemented in his second term with a “Freedom Agenda.” President Barack Obama, reflecting a mood of retrenchment, turned to “don’t do stupid stuff” and a reliance on the “arc of history.” President Donald Trump revived “America First.” Scholars took up the post–Cold War challenge by launching new studies of “grand strategies.”2 They debated concepts such as hegemony, primacy, offshore balancing, realism (including classical, neo, and democratic variants), liberal internationalism, multilateralism, and many others.

President Obama always treated me graciously, and I watched him handle subsequent international economic issues tactfully and effectively. He was popular overseas, but his natural reserve contributed to a perception of diffidence—in contrast with the leadership styles of the Bushes and Clinton, even recognizing their considerable differences. Historians may eventually view Obama’s diplomatic reticence as a precursor to Donald Trump’s blunt reversal. Trump stresses his breaks with the past—including with the American-led order of alliances, trade, and economic networks. Trump favors transactional dealmaking over the diplomacy of ongoing partnerships. I will close with a quick look at U.S. policy over the past decades through the lens of the five traditions.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

In answer to Randy Kendrick, who had questioned his pro-Medicaid position, Kasich retorted, “I don’t know about you, lady. But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.” He added, “I know this is going to upset a lot of you guys, but we have to use government to reach out to people living in the shadows.” The Kochs never invited Kasich back again. Donald Trump, the New York real estate and casino magnate whose unorthodox bid for the Republican nomination flummoxed party regulars, was also left off the Kochs’ invitation list. In August 2015, as his rivals flocked to meet the Koch donors, he tweeted, “I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers.

State records show these were reduced to $1 million when the company failed to meet its full job-creation requirements.) According to a 2007 profile: See Mary Van de Kamp Nohl, “Big Money,” Milwaukee Magazine, April 30, 2007. One employee described: Ibid. That case was followed: See Bruce Murphy, “The Strange Life of John Menard,” UrbanMilwaukee.com, June 20, 2013. Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, also filed a separate $50 million suit against John Menard, claiming damages from his cancellation of a promotional deal with her line of skin care products. Menard’s lawyers described the Trump deal as void. Soon after the governor: Diane Hendricks donated $10,000, the maximum allowable amount, to Walker’s campaign in 2011, while her company donated $25,000 to the Republican Governors Association.

“It’s extraordinary”: Rob Stein, interview with author. “There are few policy victories”: Brian Doherty, interview with author. “actors playing out”: Ibid. Even though Americans: Just 6 percent of Americans wanted Social Security cut, according to Lee Drutman, and a slight majority wanted the program’s benefits increased; see Drutman, “What Donald Trump Gets About the Electorate,” Vox, Aug. 18, 2015. “false prophets”: John Boehner’s interview with John Dickerson on Face the Nation, CBS News, Sept. 27, 2015. “Giving back”: Peter Buffett, “The Charitable-Industrial Complex,” New York Times, July 26, 2013. Anyone paying attention: Confessore, “Outside Groups with Deep Pockets Lift G.O.P.”


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

While nobody can question Ryanair’s incredible financial success (last time I checked the low-cost carrier had built a market cap of over $13 billion), being voted Europe’s ‘least liked’ airline by TripAdvisor subscribers is something that would not sit well with me no matter how good the bottom line looks. American property magnate Donald Trump is another controversial character who seems to be either loved or hated by the consumer and is perhaps most famous for his ‘You’re fired’ line, something he seems to delight in telling people on his TV show The Apprentice. Unlike both these very successful gentlemen I have always believed there are tremendous upsides to a more conciliatory approach to life and business – an attitude that even Michael O’Leary is now publicly proclaiming he wants his much-maligned airline to assume, although it remains to be seen whether or not this particular Celtic Tiger can change his stripes.

What Sara achieved with no outside funding and nothing except a great idea and grim determination and perseverance to getting it done is truly textbook entrepreneurship! Chapter 11 HIRING ’EM AND KEEPING ’EM Engagement in a digital world Shakespeare’s Richard lll proclaimed ‘off with his head’ with casual abandon and Donald Trump expanded his brand awareness via his TV show The Apprentice with his almost joyful proclamations of ‘You’re fired.’ For my own part, letting people go has never made me anything but extremely sad. I almost always feel that firings are much more of an indictment on the company’s failure than that of the employee – no matter what the circumstances behind it might be.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

People don’t seem to believe the serial entrepreneur when he says his companies are intended for the betterment of humanity. Despite investing his personal fortune into renewable energy products, he was pilloried by the left for joining a White House advisory council in an attempt to push President Donald Trump toward smarter climate policy, even after he resigned in protest of Trump’s decision to abandon an international climate accord. Meanwhile, he has suffered political attacks from the right because of his willingness to take advantage of government support for new technologies. Some investors see his companies as boondoggles; one hedge fund operator told me that Musk “has created some of the most brilliant schemes to destroy shareholder value in the history of American finance . . .

Most of all, producing propellant on the moon could make longer journeys among the planets more feasible, for the same reasons it makes schemes for space industry cheaper: you don’t have to bring all of your propellant with you from earth. “To me the moon makes sense no matter where you’re going,” Sowers says. “Cutting the cost of a Mars mission by a factor of three using lunar-mined propellant could be the difference between having a mission and not having it.” After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, his administration pointed NASA back toward the moon. The space agency plans to use the Boeing-built SLS to send Lockheed’s Orion space capsule on a manned lunar orbit in 2019, to begin assessing the feasibility of an outpost in lunar orbit. That could provide a stepping-stone to Mars, and beyond.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

By the end of 2015 the establishment was expressing considerable dismay and desperation over its inability to do so, as the Republican base and its choices fell out of control. Republican elected officials and contenders for the next presidential election expressed open contempt for the Paris deliberations, refusing to even attend the proceedings. The three candidates who led in the polls at the time—Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson—adopted the stand of the largely evangelical base: humans have no impact on global warming, if it is happening at all. The other candidates reject government action to deal with the matter. Immediately after Obama spoke in Paris, pledging that the United States would be in the vanguard seeking global action, the Republican-dominated Congress voted to scuttle his recent Environmental Protection Agency rules to cut carbon emissions.

Polls there show that of likely Republican voters, “nearly six in 10 say climate change is a hoax. More than half want mass deportations of illegal immigrants. Six in 10 would abolish the Internal Revenue Service” (thereby providing a huge gift to the superrich and corporate sector). Trip Gabriel, “Ted Cruz Surges Past Donald Trump to Lead in Iowa Poll,” New York Times, 12 December 2015.   7. Sociologists Rory McVeigh and David Cunningham found that a significant predictor of current Republican voting patterns in the South is the prior existence of a strong chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. Bill Schaller, “Ku Klux Klan’s Lasting Legacy on the U.S.


Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

Arrow and his classmates struggled to understand Tarski's idiosyncratic English. One of the words Tarski taught them was as obscure as his pronunciation; intransitivity. This idea would become the heart of Arrow's impossibility theorem. The best way to explain intransitivity is to start with its opposite, transitivity. If Bill Gates is richer than Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is richer than you, then it follows that Bill Gates is richer than you. Any relationship that permits such a conclusion is said to be transitive. Many other types of comparisons qualify-"heavier than," "taller than," "is the sister of." Many mathematical relationships are transitive, too.


One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

air freight, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Boeing 747, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, fixed income, index fund, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, large denomination, money market fund, prediction markets, random walk, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Teledyne, vertical integration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

With so many raiders around, it’s harder for the amateur to find a good asset stock, but it’s a cinch to know when to sell. You don’t sell until the Bass brothers show up, and if it’s not the Bass brothers, then it’s certain to be Steinberg, Icahn, the Belzbergs, the Pritzkers, Irwin Jacobs, Sir James Goldsmith, Donald Trump, Boone Pickens, or maybe even Merv Griffin. After that, there could be a takeover, a bidding war, or a leveraged buyout to double, triple or quadruple the stock price. Other sell signs: • Although the shares sell at a discount to real market value, management has announced it will issue 10 percent more shares to help finance a diversification program

Between the domestic buyout groups (Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts; Kelso; Coniston Partners; Odyssey Partners; and Wesray), the European firms and buyout groups (Hanson Trust, Imperial Chemical, Electrolux, Unilever, Nestlé, etc.), and the individual corporate raiders with sizable bankrolls (David Murdock, Donald Trump, Sam Hyman, Paul Bilzerian, the Bass brothers, the Reichmanns, the Hafts, Rupert Murdoch, Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Asher Edelman, et al.) any company, large or small, is up for grabs. The popularity of the leveraged buyout, or LBO, through which entire companies or divisions are “taken private”—purchased by outsiders or by current management with money that’s borrowed from banks or raised via junk bonds.


pages: 337 words: 103,522

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think by Marcus Du Sautoy

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Automated Insights, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, John Conway, Kickstarter, Loebner Prize, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, move 37, music of the spheres, Mustafa Suleyman, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons

The link will help increase the external website’s rank and, it is hoped, make it appear on the first page of a Google search, the ultimate holy grail for any website. But the algorithm isn’t immune to clever attacks by those who understand how the mathematics works. For a short period in the summer of 2018, if you googled ‘idiot’ the first image that appeared was that of Donald Trump. Activists had understood how to exploit the powerful position that the website Reddit has on the internet. By getting people to vote for a post on the site containing the words ‘idiot’ and an image of Trump, the connection between the two shot to the top of the Google ranking. The spike was smoothed out over time by the algorithm rather than by manual intervention.

It turned out that they much preferred interacting with the chatbot to listening to his music. In the 2017 competition, which he won, Mitsuku offered some very insightful responses to the judges’ questions: Judge: What do you think of Trump? Mitsuku: I read that over 50 per cent were either concerned or scared about Donald Trump being President. If that’s the case, why did they vote for him? Judge: Anything else? Mitsuku: That is all I have for right now. However, other responses quickly revealed strange computing glitches: Judge: What is the answer to ‘Add 34957 to 70764’? Mitsuku: 34957 to 70764 = Ah yes, 34957 is a type of cheese that is made from sheep’s milk.


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

Alexander Gabuev, “Crouching Bear, Hidden Dragon: ‘One Belt One Road’ and Chinese-Russian Jostling for Power in Central Asia,” Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies 5, no. 2 (2016): 61–78. 19. For an inside account of how these sanctions came into place, see Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). 20. Alexander Gabuev, “Donald Trump’s Plan to Play Russia against China Is a Fool’s Errand,” Carnegie Moscow Center, May 24, 2017, https://carnegie.ru/2017/05/24/donald-trump-s-plan-to-play-russia-against-china-is-fool-s-errand-pub-70067; Gabuev, “A ‘Soft Alliance’? Russia-China Relations after the Ukraine Crisis” (policy brief, European Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin, 2015), https://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR126_-_A_Soft_Alliance_Russia-China_Relations_After_the_Ukraine_Crisis.pdf. 21.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

See Frederick Daso, “Bill Gates and Elon Musk Are Worried for Automation—But This Robotics Company Founder Embraces It,” Forbes, December 18, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2017/12/18/bill-gates-elon-musk-are-worried-about-automation-but-this-robotics-company-founder-embraces-it/; Jasper Hamill, “Elon Musk’s Fears of AI Destroying Humanity Are ‘Speciesist’, Said Google Boss,” Metro (blog), May 2, 2018, https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/elon-musks-fears-artificial-intelligence-will-destroy-humanity-speciesist-according-google-founder-larry-page-7515207/; “Stephen Hawking: ‘I fear AI may replace humans altogether’ The theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author talks Donald Trump, tech monopolies and humanity’s future,” Wired, November 28, 2017, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interview-alien-life-climate-change-donald-trump. [back] 12. See, for example, “Robots? Is Your Job at Risk?,” CNN, September 15, 2017; “When the Robots Take Over, Will There Be Jobs Left for Us?,” CBS News, April 9, 2017; “More Robots, Fewer Jobs,” Bloomberg, May 8, 2017.


pages: 319 words: 101,673

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan

cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, epigenetics, meta-analysis, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, social contagion, traumatic brain injury

Thomas came from German, English, black Caribbean and indigenous heritage. Everybody around that table was a different mix of white European, black African and Native American ancestry. My visit took place in January 2019, just as thousands of migrants were travelling northwards through Central America, hoping to seek asylum in the US. Every news broadcast featured Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall at the Mexican border. It was an interesting time to be with these people. Their native culture had been subsumed centuries before, and their religious beliefs and national language had changed irrevocably. The Miskito identity was very important to them, but they had incorporated new influences into it and I could detect no bitterness on that account.

Some Communist Party members, including Fidel Castro himself, made cautionary, anti-imperialist statements after Obama’s visit. As exciting as it must have been to be the first to occupy the old building after half a century, it undoubtedly caused some trepidation, too. Its success was also short-lived. Following Fidel Castro’s death in November 2016, the newly elected US president, Donald Trump, issued a statement threatening to cancel Obama’s deal with Cuba as soon as he took up office. In June 2017, he followed through on this threat and rolled back many of the Obama administration’s efforts to normalize relations between the two countries. The embassy had barely had time to dust off the cobwebs.


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

“As of next meeting, the role of the RAC is going to be limited even more,” Lee continued. “If you are just doing the same thing over and over again, we don’t need to review that.” As we walked toward a waiting taxi, Lee pulling his rolling luggage, he intimated that the days of the RAC might be numbered. After Donald Trump took office seven months later, this oversight committee was formally shuttered amidst broader initiatives to sweep away government regulation. An era of transparency and oversight came to an end. The FDA began reviewing proposals for new CRISPR experiments behind closed doors. By 2019 the FDA had approved more than 800 active cell and gene therapy experiments with human volunteers.4 Then the policymakers jumped into a time warp.

Now the tropical islands of Indonesia attract many white tourists from Europe, Australia, and the United States who lie on beaches in hopes of getting darker skin.9 Tamara Pertamina sees an interesting irony: even as elite white travelers aspire to darken their skin, many black and brown people aspire to have lighter skin. One of the most powerful people in the world, an occupant of the White House, is apparently very sensitive about the color of his skin. Officially the source of Donald Trump’s orange glow is “good genes,” according to the New York Times. Investigative reporters have failed to find a secret ultraviolent tanning bed, spray tan booth, or even self-tanning creams in “a hidden nook of the residence, a cranny of the East Wing or a closet on Air Force One.”10 * * * By painting her brown skin black, Tamara wanted to show that color has an arbitrary value and meaning.


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

The authors of the first book to refer to identity politics (in 1973) claimed that ‘identity politics swallowed itself’.715 Writing in 1995, Ross Posnock, a Professor of Literature, wrote that ‘after twenty-five years of identity politics’ a ‘renascent cosmopolitanism is currently gaining ground on the left; indeed, belief that the prestige of identity politics is fading in the academy is fast becoming the received wisdom’.716 ‘After identity, politics: the return of universalism’ is the title of an essay in New Literary History, in 2000.717 Eight years later, Nicholson, in her history of identity, observed that ‘identity politics seems now to be largely dead, or at minimum, no longer able to command the kind of public attention that it did from the late 1960s through the late 1980s’.718 In the wake of the Brexit Referendum and the election of Donald Trump, the British journalist Janet Daley declared that ‘Identity politics is dead’.719 The failure to grasp the ever-growing influence of identity politics was in part due to the inability of traditional political categories to make sense of this phenomenon. It was, and continues to be identified as a species of radical left-wing politics.

At a 2016 conference organised by the London School of Economics, the OECD and the Paris School of Economics, Gus O’Donnell, the former UK Head of civil service, argued that embedding happiness in public policy would reduce the electoral appeal of populism. O’Donnell stated that both the victory for Brexit in Britain’s EU referendum and Donald Trump’s success in the US Presidential elections could be ‘explained by an analysis of people’s wellbeing’: the implication being that if people had felt happier they would have voted to stay in the EU and elected Hillary Clinton as President.752 Within the parameter of technocratic governance, social engineering has acquired unprecedented significance.


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

Stagecoach buses running between Ayr and Girvan stop outside the gates, from where it's a 1-mile walk to the castle itself. Turnberry Turnberry basically consists of one of Scotland's great golf links and a massive, super-luxurious resort and self-catering complex opposite it. The whole thing was bought by Donald Trump in 2015 and has had a recent facelift. TurnberryGOLF (%01655-331991; www.turnberry.co.uk; Maidens Rd, Turnberry) Now owned by Donald Trump, Turnberry’s Ailsa is one of Scotland’s most prestigious links courses, with spectacular views of Ailsa Craig offshore. You don’t need a handicap certificate to play, just plenty of pounds – the summer weekend green fee is £275.

TEN OF THE BEST GOLF COURSES St Andrews The public Old Course is the game's spiritual home and you can’t help but be awed by the history and atmosphere here. The 17th – the Road Hole – is famous for its blind drive, nasty bunker and seriously sloping green. Several other courses for all abilities make this Scotland’s premium golfing destination. Turnberry Now owned by Donald Trump, Turnberry’s Ailsa is one of Scotland’s most prestigious links courses, with spectacular views of Ailsa Craig offshore. Pack a spare ball for the nasty 9th on the Ailsa course, where your ball will sleep with the fishes unless you manage the 200-yard carry off the tee. Luckily there’s the renowned Halfway Hut to drown your sorrows before taking on the 10th.

Forvie National Nature Reserve has wildlife hides and waymarked trails through the dunes to an abandoned medieval village where only the ruins of the church survive. The dunes form an important nesting and feeding area for birds – don't wander off the trails during the nesting season (April to August). American tycoon and now president Donald Trump sparked off a major controversy when he opened Trump International Golf Links in 2012, amid a 'protected' area of sand dunes just four miles south of Forvie. The development has split the community between those who welcome the potential economic benefits, and those worried about the environmental damage.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

DECENTRALIZED PLATFORMS TO PREDICT THE FUTURE One of the more interesting dApps in development uses Ethereum’s blockchain to facilitate prediction markets. The company Augur seeks to provide a platform that allows users to wager on the results of any event, creating a market for people to test their predictions.34 Hence the term “prediction market.” For instance, if someone had sought to predict whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he or she could have used Augur to create a prediction market and wager against others on the outcome (if the service had been up and running at the time). Augur uses a cryptotoken, which it calls Reputation (REP), to incentivize people to report on the outcomes of events truthfully.

Peter Kirby, the cofounder of Factom, points out that his platform can protect policyholders from fraud and identity theft, or at least provide them with the ability to track down the perpetrators of fraud and identity theft through the immutability provided by the blockchain technology that his platform is built on.19 Cutting down on fraud and identity theft would help the bottom line of many insurance companies tremendously. Furthermore, operating in the transparency of public networks would do much to bolster trust in their operations, which could draw more customers. DON’T REARRANGE THE DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC In the days immediately after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, the stocks of companies in the financial sector rallied in expectation of the new president’s potential policy shifts from that of the prior administration.20 During that time, investors benefited from having financial stocks in their portfolio, and perhaps, many more put these stocks into their portfolio after the election, either on the advice of advisors or as a reaction to the financial media claiming financial stocks were bound to benefit in the “age of Trump.”


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

Lucas, the aging venture capitalist whose backing and connections enabled her to keep raising money. Dr. J and Wade Miquelon at Walgreens and Safeway CEO Steve Burd were next, followed by James Mattis, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger (Mattis’s entanglement with Theranos proved no obstacle to his being confirmed as President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense). David Boies and Rupert Murdoch complete the list, though I’ve left out many others who were bewitched by Holmes’s mixture of charm, intelligence, and charisma. A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew.

She had recently appeared: Holmes’s interviews on CBS This Morning (April 16, 2015), CNBC’s Mad Money (April 27, 2015), CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS (May 18, 2015), and PBS’s Charlie Rose (June 3, 2015) can all be viewed on YouTube. 21. TRADE SECRETS Rounding out the group: Fritsch’s firm, Fusion GPS, would later gain notoriety for commissioning the infamous dossier on President Donald Trump from a former British spy alleging that Trump was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. The tone was set from the start: I also recorded the meeting. The quotes are transcribed verbatim from that recording. At Traub’s request, I had sent: Email with the subject line “list of questions for Theranos” sent by John Carreyrou to Matthew Traub at 6:33 p.m.


pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

‘Whether serving as a steward of the proper functioning of global financial markets in the role of auditor, or solving client or societal challenges, we ask our professionals to think big about the impact they make through their work at Deloitte,’ say the firm’s leaders in their ‘Global Impact Report’.34 The appreciation of the profound importance of their core auditing role does not, alas, translate into a sharp focus on the task. EY worldwide boss, Mark Weinberger, personifies how the top bean counters see their place in the world. He co-chairs a Russian investment committee with prime minister and Putin placeman Dmitry Medvedev; does something similar in Shanghai; sat on Donald Trump’s strategy forum until it disbanded in 2017 when the US president went fully toxic by appeasing neo-Nazis; and revels in the status of ‘Global Agenda Trustee’ for the World Economic Forum. The latter is the annual convention of political and business leaders in Davos that Financial Times columnist Edward Luce calls a ‘gathering of the world’s wealthiest recyclers of conventional wisdom’, something that a ‘steward of the proper functioning of global financial markets’ should be challenging, not recycling.35 All the other Big Four firms also send platoons of senior partners to the Swiss mountain resort to get ‘connected with global stakeholders’, as Deloitte puts it.

Notes of a meeting between KPMG and the US Department of Justice shortly before the 2005 settlement revealed how critical this was. ‘If we go under, that will disrupt not only KPMG clients but also the national economy,’ KPMG’s lead lawyer Robert Bennett told US Deputy Attorney General James Comey (who would be sacked as FBI director by Donald Trump in 2017).21 The comments confirmed what a whistleblowing ex-KPMG lawyer named Mike Hamersley had told senators two years before: ‘There was a “too few to fail” attitude, that all of the firms, the Big Four and Big Five accounting firms, are doing this and they cannot shut down all of us.’22 Indeed, KPMG hadn’t been first with the new style of tax products.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The United States experienced an extreme version of this during the Civil War, over 150 years ago. I saw a milder version in the 1960s, when young people, antiwar activists, and so-called hippies rejected the values of the establishment to the point that, for a while, the country really did feel like it was fragmenting into separate communities. The election of Donald Trump as US president highlighted a similar kind of fragmentation, in this case between those who voted for Trump and those who didn’t. Information technology can play an important role in both bringing communities together and splitting them apart. On the one hand, IT has the potential to increase shared information and norms across larger groups.

For instance, even in a large hierarchical company like Apple—where you can ask key decision makers why they made choices like what size screens to use in the new iPhones—it may be hard to figure out exactly why a specific decision was made. And in large markets, democracies, or ecosystems, where the key decisions result from interactions among vast numbers of individuals, it can be harder still to understand why these choices are made. Why, for instance, did Donald Trump win the US presidential election in 2016? Of course, we can come up with theories. By the time you read this book, there may be one or two simple theories that most people accept as “explanations” for the result. But those theories will, necessarily, be simplifications of a much more complex reality.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

Over the past three decades, these seminars have proliferated, fueled by the double trouble dot-com and real estate bubbles, not to mention the promotional opportunities opened up by the ever-burgeoning number of cable outlets willing to sell half-hour blocks of advertising time. They combine the appeal of Think and Grow Rich with specific, hands-on advice. Napoleon Hill simply told you the path to wealth started in your head, and left it at that. Latter-day wealth gurus come with recommended investment strategies. Donald Trump talks business success. T. Harv Eker, author of the bestselling Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, whose flagship organization Peak Potentials offers fifteen different classes including “The Millionaire Mind Intensive,” “Mastering Wealth Bootcamp,” “Freedom Trader Intensive,” “Guerilla Business School,” and “Never Work Again,” has been sued over failed foreclosure-investment schemes he is alleged to have pitched to those who attended his seminars.

There are more than 28 million copies of his books in print, and they’ve been translated into at least fifty languages. Titles include Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant, Rich Dad’s Before You Quit Your Job, Why We Want You to Be Rich, and Midas Touch: Why Some Entrepreneurs Get Rich—and Why Most Don’t (the latter two cowritten with Donald Trump). More than one million people have registered on Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Web site, where they can purchase everything from online coaching sessions to advanced courses. The subjects range from “Asset Protection and Tax Relief” to options trading. Kiyosaki has partnered with numerous people and organizations to offer classes everywhere from the Learning Annex’s bygone Real Estate & Wealth Expo (“One Weekend Can Make You a Millionaire!”)


pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

This is especially true since they can indirectly lead to sanctioning or firing by submitting bias reports to administrators such as heads of department, deans, and university presidents with recommendations for action. But what constitutes “bias” in these cases? Since the slights students have complained of include support for President Donald Trump, “phallic snow objects,” and expressions of antiracism such as “I don’t see color,” and bias is operationally defined as a “state of mind,” it appears that sensitivity detectors might be set rather high.15 Although students who have been reported retain the right not to submit themselves for education, it is probable that many will not want to risk the accompanying opprobrium and will simply self-censor any problematic ideas.

Kimmel, The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement (and the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer) (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). 46.Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Vancouver: Langara College, 2018). 47.Terry A. Kupers, “Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 61, no. 6 (2005). 48.It should be noted that the election of Donald Trump to the office of President of the United States is treated from within Theory as the best possible confirmation of Theory’s insistences that society is secretly inherently racist, sexist, and all other manners of bigoted and that the need to expose this through more Theory is more important and pressing than ever.


pages: 404 words: 110,290

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain by Ed Husain

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Jeremy Corbyn, Khyber Pass, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Shamima Begum

Several hands shoot up. A girl asks the first question, and after that they come thick and fast. ‘How many countries have you visited?’ ‘Which is your favourite?’ ‘How do you write a book? ‘Which shop sells your book? ‘Who’s the most famous person you’ve met?’ – to which I answer: ‘The Pope.’ ‘Have you met Donald Trump?’ ‘Where are you going next?’ One by one, I answer their questions. The imam then reads out a letter from his phone that he’s pulled up while I’ve been speaking. ‘As our brother was speaking, I was reminded of these words from just this week. Who is Sajid Javid?’ he asks the children. ‘The home secretary and a member of parliament!’

But it is paradoxically among the loyalist paramilitaries and evangelical Protestants that Muslims feel most threatened, as I realised in my discussions with Grace and Mumina at the mosque earlier. As we approach the wall I say to Oliver, perhaps unwisely, ‘So we protest the war between Palestinians and Israel, and oppose Donald Trump’s wall with Mexico, but here, in our own country, we have a wall between communities.’ He is silent for a moment. Then he says, ‘This wall keeps us alive and safe. I’m sure Trump wants Americans to be safe from the Mexicans.’ On my right is a mural with the Palestinian flag on one side and the Irish flag on the other that reads ‘Free All Political Prisoners.


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

Neither right-wing versions – that price-responsive markets will progressively solve current problems – nor left-wing versions – that justice-responsive governments will progressively solve current problems and fairly distribute the economic surplus – show any vital signs, yet they still dominate the political scene. The desire to turn the clock back on the undead politics that generated the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States and similar figures elsewhere is understandable, but it’s more productive to acknowledge that the zombie can never be revived and to search for other sources of renewal. The alternative farming movement generally responds to political shortcomings with bottom-up local transformation.

Barely a century later, as global commercial capital exhausts both itself and planetary capacities, we’ve arrived at a second populist moment with similar economic stakes, and much higher ecological ones. Part of the battle in the United States is to reclaim populism from its bogeyman status in ‘progressive’ liberal politics, which is exacerbated when figures such as Donald Trump clothe themselves in the mantle of pro-working class, reformist populism with little genuine commitment to that cause. Like all political labels, ‘populism’ has acquired so much baggage that it’s hard to form a clear politics around it, but I’d argue against seeing it merely as a demagogic appeal to the base instincts of ‘the people’.


pages: 359 words: 105,248

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing by Rachel Plotnick

augmented reality, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, invisible hand, means of production, Milgram experiment, Oculus Rift, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, software studies, Steve Jobs

If someone asks you to install a button under their desk, just nod and then report it to the police.”62 As it turned out, General Electric (NBC’s former parent company) had installed these buttons years earlier in some offices for executives to make private phone calls or in case of emergency—but the potency of Lauer’s push-button actions remained the same.63 The incident served to add more fuel to a broader societal discussion about harassment, privilege, and workplace gender politics already underway in Hollywood, highlighting how prominent men could “abuse” buttons and the people made to heed their call. The second instance, in January 2018, occurred when US President Donald Trump posted a message on Twitter regarding his capacity to engage in nuclear war with North Korea. Trump wrote: North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

This concern about whose hands should have access to the button likewise followed Trump on the campaign trail before his election, with some deeming him unfit to lead for this very reason.66 His comments on Twitter further inflamed these fears, leading to press accounts with questions such as “Can Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un simply reach across their desks and bring on Armageddon?”67 Although reporters debunked the myth of the nuclear button following the tweet, it is remarkable that these imaginary buttons continue to play a prominent role not only in the public imagination but also in global matters with real political stakes.


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

The family had a farm where they grew corn, soybeans, and alfalfa, and raised livestock including cattle and pigs. Dennis, one of four siblings, milked the cows in the morning as one of his daily chores. This part of northwest Iowa was and is one of the most conservative in the country; in 1980, Ronald Reagan won 76 percent of the Sioux County vote, and in 2020, Donald Trump won 81 percent. It was at Sioux Center’s Dordt University, where Dennis’s brother Harlan was the grounds supervisor, that Trump, speaking to fifteen hundred people during his first presidential campaign, mused, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

milked the cows: “Dennis A. Muilenburg, President, Chairman, and CEO, the Boeing Company, Discusses Boeing’s Success, Leadership, and Bicycling” (Q&A transcript), Economic Club of Washington, D.C., May 9, 2018, https://www.economicclub.org. Sioux Center’s Dordt University: Jenna Johnson, “Donald Trump: ‘They Say I Could ‘Shoot Somebody’ and Still Have Support,” Washington Post, January 23, 2016. He was one of the best: Author interview with Ted De Hoogh, June 2020. In college at Iowa State: Author interview with Steve Haveman, June 2020. He played pickup basketball: Dominic Gates, “Boeing’s Budget Ax Falls on Popular Gym for Employees,” Seattle Times, April 26, 2017.


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

Tehran knew that agreeing to the nuclear deal would open the door to discreet co-operation with the Americans; President Obama desperately wanted a foreign-policy success – and the nuclear deal could provide it. So Iran agreed to give up 98 per cent of its highly enriched uranium. It was an example of how a marriage of convenience to solve a short-term problem can override deeper differences – temporarily. ISIS was on the back foot, but tensions quickly returned, especially after Donald Trump came to power amid fears of war. He took the USA out of the nuclear deal, reimposed sanctions and bullied European companies so that they were too wary to do deals with Iran. There followed a series of incidents that raised the temperature. Two oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz were mined and suspicion quickly fell on Tehran.

This is why the US Department of Defense has a mantra: ‘Space is a war-fighting domain.’ In the previous century the possibility of nuclear war threatened to destroy our way of life; now the weaponization of space looks as if it will pose a similar danger. War in space could be earth-shattering. Hence Space Force. At its inauguration then US President Donald Trump said: ‘American superiority in space is absolutely vital . . . The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground.’ The Chinese and Russians view space in the same way, as do a range of less powerful nations. However, it’s the ‘Big Three’ who are at the cutting edge of both space travel and its military dimensions.


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

The Russians had cleverly disguised their malware as a tax software update from the company’s systems, and now all its mom-and-pop operators could do was half cry, half laugh at the role they had played in nation-state cyberwar. I spoke with the head of Ukraine’s cyber police force and with any Ukrainian minister who would have me. I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos.

Others were more forthcoming, in part, they told me, because they had started to question the wisdom of poking holes in the world’s computer systems, smartphones, and infrastructure, baking them into slick spy tools, and throwing them “over the fence” to government agencies, with no clue as to how they would be used. This sort of second-guessing had taken on a new dimension with the election of Donald Trump. With Trump’s strange affinity for dictators, his inability to hold Russia’s feet to the fire for its 2016 election interference, his abandonment of the Kurds, one of America’s closest allies, and his refusal to clearly condemn the Saudis’ gruesome killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, America was losing its moral authority.

That July, as the convention wound down, I wrote a piece with David Sanger challenging readers to remember: “An unusual question is capturing the attention of cyber specialists, Russia experts and Democratic Party leaders in Philadelphia: ‘Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election?’ ” Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, insisted that the Russians were leaking data “for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” but without any evidence to back up his claims, the Clinton campaign was left twisting in the wind. Back in Russia, Putin’s hackers and trolls went into overdrive. Unsatisfied with the traction the DNC’s purloined emails were getting on WikiLeaks, Russia’s hackers started pushing out Democrats’ stolen emails on their own channels.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, “Bold Promises Fade to Doubts for a Trump-Linked Data Firm,” New York Times, March 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html; Mary-Ann Russon, “Political Revolution: How Big Data Won the US Presidency for Donald Trump,” International Business Times UK, January 20, 2017, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/political-revolution-how-big-data-won-us-presidency-donald-trump-1602269; Grassegger and Krogerus, “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down”; Carole Cadwalladr, “Revealed: How US Billionaire Helped to Back Brexit,” Guardian, February 25, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit; Paul-Olivier Dehaye, “The (Dis)Information Mercenaries Now Controlling Trump’s Databases,” Medium, January 3, 2017, https://medium.com/personaldata-io/the-dis-information-mercenaries-now-controlling-trumps-databases-4f6a20d4f3e7; Harry Davies, “Ted Cruz Using Firm That Harvested Data on Millions of Unwitting Facebook Users,” Guardian, December 11, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data. 75.

This process begins with business plans and marketing messages, new products and services, and journalistic representations that appear to accept the new facts as given.73 Among this new cohort of mercenaries was Cambridge Analytica, the UK consulting firm owned by the reclusive billionaire and Donald Trump backer Robert Mercer. The firm’s CEO, Alexander Nix, boasted of its application of personality-based “micro-behavioral targeting” in support of the “Leave” and the Trump campaigns during the ramp-up to the 2016 Brexit vote and the US presidential election.74 Nix claimed to have data resolved “to an individual level where we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every adult in the United States.”75 While scholars and journalists tried to determine the truth of these assertions and the role that these techniques might have played in both 2016 election upsets, the firm’s new chief revenue officer quietly announced the firm’s less glamorous but more lucrative postelection strategy: “After this election, it’ll be full-tilt into the commercial business.”

Shannon Bond, “Trade Group Warns on Google Ad Backlash ‘Crisis,’” Financial Times, March 24, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/0936a49e-b521-369e-9d22-c194ed1c0d48; Matthew Garrahan, “AT&T Pulls Some Ads from Google After YouTube Controversy,” Financial Times, March 22, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/254d330d-f3d1-3ac2-ab8d-761083d6976a; Sapna Maheshwari and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “AT&T and Johnson & Johnson Pull Ads from YouTube,” New York Times, March 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/business/atampt-and-johnson-amp-johnson-pull-ads-from-youtube-amid-hate-speech-concerns.html; Rob Davies, “Google Braces for Questions as More Big-Name Firms Pull Adverts,” Guardian, March 19, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/19/google-braces-for-questions-as-more-big-name-firms-pull-adverts. 42. Olivia Solon, “Facebook’s Fake News: Mark Zuckerberg Rejects ‘Crazy Idea’ That It Swayed Voters,” Guardian, November 11, 2016,, https://www.the guardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-us-election-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 43. Guy Chazan, “Berlin Looks at Fines for Facebook with Fake News Law,” Financial Times, December 16, 2016; Guy Chazan, “Germany Cracks Down on Social Media Over Fake News,” Financial Times, March 14, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/c10aa4f8-08a5-11e7-97d1-5e720a26771b; Jim Pickard, “Amber Rudd Urges Action from Internet Groups on Extremist Content,” Financial Times, March 26, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/f652c9bc-120d-11e7-80f4-13e067d5072c; Alexandra Topping, Mark Sweney, and Jamie Grierson, “Google Is ‘Profiting from Hatred’ Say MPs in Row Over Adverts,” Guardian, March 17, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/17/google-is-profiting-from-hatred-say-mps-in-row-over-adverts; Sabrina Siddiqui, “‘From Heroes to Villains’: Tech Industry Faces Bipartisan Backlash in Washington,” Guardian, September 26, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/26/tech-industry-washington-google-amazon-apple-facebook; Nancy Scola and Josh Meyer, “Google, Facebook May Have to Reveal Deepest Secrets,” Politico, October 1, 2017, http://politi.co/2yBtppQ; Paul Lewis, “Senator Warns YouTube Algorithm May Be Open to Manipulation by ‘Bad Actors,’” Guardian, February 5, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/05/senator-warns-youtube-algorithm-may-be-open-to-manipulation-by-bad-actors. 44.


Care to Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars?: A Believer Book of Advice by The Believer, Judd Apatow, Patton Oswalt

Albert Einstein, carbon tax, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Saturday Night Live, side project, telemarketer

Julie Klausner is a comedy writer and performer whose first book, I Don’t Care About Your Band, was released in 2010. Her website, predictably, is julieklausner.com. Lisa Lampanelli, comedy’s “Queen of Mean,” skyrocketed to comedy fame thanks to her showstopping performances on the Comedy Central roasts of Jeff Foxworthy, Pamela Anderson, Larry the Cable Guy, Flavor Flav, and Donald Trump. Her CD/DVD Dirty Girl was nominated for a Grammy for Best Comedy Album in 2007. She just released her autobiography, Chocolate, Please: My Adventures in Food, Fat, and Freaks. Sam Lipsyte is a novelist and short story writer. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, GQ, Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, and Playboy, among other places.


pages: 128 words: 38,847

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

That $116 million was, to be sure, a major investment. However, the enactment of the negotiation ban has benefited the industry (and cost consumers) an estimated $90 billion per year. As an investment, it returns some 77,500 percent, and is a gift that keeps on giving. In recent years, when President Donald Trump, in a populist mood, proposed changing the law and forcing negotiations, the money began to flow, and lo and behold, the proposal went away. Everyone knows that lobbying works. But a key and neglected point is that the relative consolidation of industry has an important influence on it. That follows because the fewer members of the industry, the fewer among whom the gains are split.


The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Further proof that this idea is a delusion is that even some people who run the gambling industry believe that it is possible to get something for noth­ ing, and in their fantastic avarice, they have found themselves in the laughable position of not being able to operate their casinos profitably. The Trump Taj Mahal opened in April of 1990 and was technically bankrupt before the year was out. It drained business from every other casino in town while failing to attract enough business to cover its own debt payments. 3 Donald Trump, the New York-based real estate devel­ oper who built it and owns two other casinos in Atlantic City, financed the Taj largely with junk bonds-the junk bond being Wall Street's way of profiting off business people who think it is possible to get something for nothing. Standing on the Boardwalk this mild October day, one beheld the Trump Taj Mahal with that odd mixture of fascination and nausea reserved for the great blunders of human endeavor.

The design of their lighting must be something of an exact science, for in every casino in Atlantic City you see thousands of incandescent bulbs, neon tubes, lasers, illuminated panels, and glittering things, and yet the huge rooms remain so murky that you seem to be walking around with sunglasses in a grotto. The casino at Trump's Taj was plastered with mirrors. It might be safe to say that mirrors are Donald Trump's favorite building material, and one could see why. They make any room seem bigger, even a large room. They make it look as though twice as many lights are blazing without actually adding any illumination to the murk or jacking up the utility bill. They hold up to wear and tear much better than paint, wallpaper, or any other wall covering, especially to the most destructive force in the casino : cigarette smoke.


pages: 385 words: 118,901

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball

All that was left was for Cohen to spend his billions and to plan for his return. Now Cohen is making more money than ever. In 2014, trading only his own fortune, he earned $2.5 billion in profit, more than paying back the fines he was ordered to hand over to the U.S. government. Then, on November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, vowing to usher in a new era of financial deregulation. The general counsel for Point72, Cohen’s private investment firm, was appointed, briefly, by the incoming Trump administration to recruit candidates for the new Justice Department during the tumultuous transition. In the meantime, Cohen is making plans to reopen his hedge fund as soon as possible.

raised his bid to $14.8 million, and bought the house with cash: Looking back on the incident, Steinberg said in an interview: “The property was magnificent—it was just a big beautiful home. I thought it was perfect the way it was, and he tore it apart.” Steinberg ended up buying another Greenwich mansion, which had previously been owned by Donald Trump, for $15 million. They built a nine-foot stone wall: Marcia Vickers, “The Most Powerful Trader on Wall Street You’ve Never Heard Of,” BusinessWeek, July 20, 2003. It took 283 dump-truck loads: Matthew Purdy, “Our Towns: In Greenwich, More Is Just Too Much,” The New York Times, December 5, 1999.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

In 1980, the top 1 percent of families took home about 10 percent of all income earned in the United States. By 2007, these lucky families—with incomes higher than $398,900—took home 24 percent.8 It’s hard to open a glossy magazine without reading something about the rich, and this group has been ubiquitous in the second Gilded Age. Yet although we know all about Donald Trump’s love life or Warren Buffett’s stock picks, surprisingly little is known about the political and social beliefs of the upper class. Many books probe inequality and corporate excess or profile titans of business. Few explore ideology at the very pinnacle of the income ladder, and there are good reasons for this void.

Corporate values shifted sharply in the 1980s, the “greed is good” era in which vast pay inequities and frequent downsizing became normalized. Conspicuous consumption by corporate chieftains and Wall Street big shots—frowned on in the early postwar decades—returned on a grand and gaudy scale. The new business stars of the moment were brash figures unembarrassed by their mean streaks, such as Donald Trump and Carl Icahn. Milton Friedman’s argument—that profit was the overriding goal of corporate leaders—was taken to its logical extreme in a wave of leveraged buyouts in which entire companies were dismantled and communities devastated for the sake of short-term shareholder gains. The notion that business had a wider set of responsibilities was increasingly seen as quaint, if not grounds for a hostile takeover by raiders purporting to act on behalf of shareholders.


pages: 341 words: 116,854

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Anton Chekhov, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, gentrification, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, price mechanism, rent control, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Ziegfeld’s own life was a very conscious work of theater, intended to be consumed by the public through the medium of the newspapers, and to keep a gorgeous sense of luxury, romance, and inspired recklessness washing back and forth between the life and the stage. Ziegfeld was a handsome, dark-eyed man who dressed impeccably; and he understood how to stage-manage his serial romances in a way that Donald Trump could only envy. He fell in love with Anna, and then with an endless succession of beauties; these liaisons ensured that both he and they remained in the spotlight. Ziegfeld plied his beloved, whoever she was, with an endless stream of sable coats and diamond pins and hotel suites and private railroad cars; everything in their lives was the best, the biggest, the shiniest.

And yet, until the new age of massive redevelopment, Times Square held very little appeal for the great clans that have dominated New York real estate for close to a century. The buildings were too small, and thus the stakes too low. What’s more, the old clans tend to be extremely conventional and painfully respectable, Donald Trump notwithstanding. The culture of Times Square was just too raffish for the Rudins and the Tishmans and the other titans of development. Times Square real estate has instead been controlled largely by theater families, including the Shuberts and the Nederlanders. The only real exception to that rule has been the one real estate family eccentric enough to feel at home in Times Square: the Dursts.


pages: 390 words: 115,769

Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples by John Robbins

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, Donald Trump, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, land reform, life extension, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

More than two hundred million Monopoly sets have been sold, and the game is currently produced in twenty-six languages. We are complex people, we human beings. There is a little bit of Donald Trump in each of us, and that part of ourselves is often rewarded and reinforced in a society that measures success primarily in material terms. But there is also a little bit of Mother Teresa in us. Each of us—including, I’m sure, Donald Trump himself—has a place that understands the greater importance of our relationships with other people, with our own spirits, and with life itself. I wonder what would happen if instead of glorifying those who excel at getting, we gave our applause and esteem to those who excel at giving?


pages: 386 words: 116,233

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

Because you are providing housing for 400 families, you are making an impact of magnitude, not scale. Shelter has magnitude. Activities of magnitude have higher profit potential with smaller scales. Magnitude is always reflected by an item's price. High value = high price = high magnitude. If you can combine both scale and magnitude, we won't be discussing millions but billions. Donald Trump makes an impact on both magnitude and scale and therefore is worth billions. Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scale and magnitude creates billionaires. Follow the Money! Unfortunately, the word “law” is loosely tossed around to represent concepts that aren't really laws.

I never meta 22-year-old multimillionaire real estate investor simply because it is a slower Fastlane with asset values that cannot be manipulated as easily as your own self created business. Asset value is limited by magnitude, which is why the richest real estate investors are not only older, but they focus on high-dollar properties. You don't see Donald Trump building single-family homes, but high-rises. Magnitude. Real estate possesses an excellent time detachment component that survives time. Only you can determine if real estate is a Fastlane road that you want to travel. MJ, are you saying I can't get wealthy working four hours a week? Sure you can, because you define freedom within your wealth trinity.


pages: 425 words: 112,220

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

Despite the drama of a particular piece of data, you can’t make decisions until you understand how the data was collected and its full context. Data-driven arguments can make us jump to potentially catastrophic conclusions. I recall a widely distributed statistic during the 2016 U.S. presidential election that claimed 25 percent of Muslims living in the U.S. supported jihad. Supporters of then Republican candidate Donald Trump cited this stat as a reason to support travel restrictions associated with what would come to be called the “Muslim Ban.” Very few people and organizations, such as PolitiFact, took the time to question the source of the data itself. It turns out that this statistic was extrapolated from an opt-in online survey of a few hundred people who claimed to be Muslim, and one of the early questions in the survey asked respondents to describe how they defined jihad.

Muslims Reveals Ominous Levels of Support for Islamic Supremacists’ Doctrine of Shariah, Jihad,” Center for Security Policy, June 23, 2015, www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2015/06/23/nationwide-poll-of-us-muslims-shows-thousands-support-shariah-jihad. opt-in online survey: Lauren Carroll and Louis Jacobson, “Trump Cites Shaky Survey in Call to Ban Muslims from Entering US,” PolitiFact, December 9, 2015, www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/09/donald-trump/trump-cites-shaky-survey-call-ban-muslims-entering. STRESS-TEST YOUR OPINIONS WITH RADICAL TRUTHFULNESS. “I wanted to make”: Ray Dalio, “How to Build a Company Where the Best Ideas Win,” TED talk, April 2017, www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win/transcript?


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 basis of the legal complaint was that the merger would harm both consumers and competitors. By owning DirecTV and other cable and internet distribution outlets, as well as major programming entities like HBO, Warner Bros., and Turner Broadcasting, the government argued, AT&T could manipulate pricing and saddle both rivals and customers with higher fees. President Donald Trump’s very public loathing of CNN, a key Time Warner asset, clearly played a role in the decision by Trump appointee Makan Delrahim, the DOJ’s antitrust chief, to try to block the deal in court. The lawsuit came a full year after the merger was first proposed and after a host of other regulatory agencies around the world had given it their blessing.

He then added a string of follow-up questions, trying to pack as much as possible into his limited time allotment. “We’ve adopted the White House question standards here, so there’s no follow-up questions,” Stankey intoned in that way of his that left a question about whether he was kidding. The line was a nod at Donald Trump’s press-conference squelching of CNN reporter Jim Acosta in the East Room of the White House a few weeks before the analyst day. “Hold that microphone away from him,” Stephenson half-joked. “There goes another lawsuit.” After his attempt to be lighthearted, Stankey grew serious, his sonorous baritone as deep as ever.


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

In fact, as we show in the chapters that follow, much of what is routinely categorised as ‘merit’ in elite occupations is actually impossible to separate from the ‘following wind’ of privilege. 27 ONE Getting in Social mobility has become one of the central political issues of our times; certainly across the Western world, it has emerged as the rhetorical weapon of choice for a generation of political leaders.1 Impassioned speeches abound. “The American Dream is dead,” Donald Trump declared throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, “But I will bring it back.”2 In France, Emmanuel Macron has made similar promises.3 It is in the UK, however, that mobility is most explicitly centre-stage. As Theresa May proclaimed in her maiden speech as Prime Minister: “We won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few; we will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”4 The bellwether for how nations are doing on social mobility, as we explained in the Introduction, is very often access to the top – who gets into elite occupations and how this relates to their class background.

Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.R. (2009) Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness, New York: Penguin Books. Thrift, N. and Williams, P. (2014) Class and space (RLE social theory): The making of urban society, London: Routledge. Tilly, C. (1999) Durable inequality, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Time (2016) ‘Here’s Donald Trump’s presidential announcement speech’, 16 June (http://time.com/3923128/donald-trumpannouncement-speech/). Toft, M. (2018) ‘Mobility closure in the upper class: Assessing time and forms of capital’, The British Journal of Sociology (https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12362). Tokarczyk, M.M. and Fay, E.E.


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

For a substantial portion of the population, Gove's comment rang true. In the referendum most experts were duly ignored by a populace comfortable with Gove's description. Across the Atlantic, the message, and the impact, was the same: ‘The experts are terrible,’ said then presidential candidate Donald Trump. Just as we had reached new peaks of complexity and difficulty and required expertise more than ever, the very notion had become toxic, the emblem of a self-interested and pompous elite; the problem, not the solution.74 This was hardly the best preparation for a global pandemic. A barrage of populisms means that ideas are adversely re-politicised.

., Boldon, H. et al. (2012), ‘Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency’, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Vol. 11, pp. 191–200 Scharf, Caleb (2015), The Copernicus Complex: The Quest for Our Cosmic (In)Significance, London: Penguin Scheu, René (2019), ‘PayPal founder and philosopher Peter Thiel: “The heads in Silicon Valley have aligned themselves”’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, accessed 9 April 2019, available at https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/peter-thiel-donald-trump-handelt-fuer-mich-zu-wenig-disruptiv-ld.1471818?reduced=true Schwab, Klaus (2017), The Fourth Industrial Revolution, London: Portfolio Penguin Schwartz, Peter (1991), The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, Chichester: John Wiley Senior, Andrew, Jumper, John, Hassabis, Demis, and Kohli, Pushmeet (2020), ‘AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery’, DeepMind, accessed 5 February 2020, available at https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-scientific-discovery Shambaugh, Jay, Nunn, Ryan, Breitwieser, Audrey, and Liu, Patrick (2018), The State of Competition and Dynamism: Facts about Concentration, Start-Ups, and Related Policies, Washington DC: The Hamilton Project Shaxson, Nicholas (2018), The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer, London: The Bodley Head Sheldrake, Rupert (2013), The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, London: Coronet Shi, Feng, and Evans, James (2019), ‘Science and Technology Advance through Surprise’, arXiv, 1910.09370 Simonite, Tom (2014), ‘Technology Stalled in 1970’, MIT Technology Review, accessed 14 July 2019, available at https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/09/18/171322/technology-stalled-in-1970/ Singh, Jasjit, and Fleming, Lee (2010), ‘Lone Inventors as Sources of Breakthroughs: ‘Myth or Reality?’


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

How can I say I believe in something as radical as the gospel and not be living a life of all things in common? It took no time at all for me to feel this urgently, for my own life to feel quite pale and un-thought-through in comparison to what was going on here, despite how foreign and alienating it felt to me. Laura and Dorothy started to talk vaguely about politics: they were devastated by Donald Trump’s election, but skeptical that Bernie Sanders would be able to successfully campaign against him in 2020 or that there was anyone else who might run in his place. “And we just couldn’t support Hillary,” Dorothy clucked, but didn’t say why. The only media they referred to having recently read, though, were books published by Plough, and Plough magazine.

I’d slept on the couch because every room in the Adjunct Flophouse was unexpectedly booked. I listened to the birds begin to chirp at the dawn, and then to the other “floppers” wake up and make their coffee in the kitchen, while I hovered in and out of sleep from a flickering dream where I made out with my friend Gabriel in every bedroom, Donald Trump following us around the apartment talking about Iran. When I was finally fully awake, Jen sat down on the edge of the couch in her bathrobe. “You look pretty,” she said in this quiet, astonished way. My makeup was smeared under my eyes and I was wearing the same beige leotard I’d worn the night before, smelling of cigarettes.


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

*3 As I wrote back then: “Here in Ljubljana Haider might be in his element,” referring to Jörg Haider, the late leader of the populist and vaguely neo-Nazi Austrian Freedom Party, who hailed from the province of Carinthia just over the border, and whose support was ultimately circumscribed by Austria’s own middle-class prosperity. *4 In the years following my visit, a far-right prime minister rose to power in Slovenia, Janez Janša, a devotee of the former American president Donald Trump and the right-wing populist leader in neighboring Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Janša traded in disinformation and with Orbán’s help built a propaganda network that garnered many followers. It was an example that we are truly at the end of the modern world and into the postmodern one, in which absurdity combines with globalization to produce unimaginable outcomes.

The pre-Dayton dilemmas are returning. Serbia and Kosovo are the same. [North] Macedonia is deadlocked, though improving a bit. So we had war, lost opportunities, and now a third stage: a faltering vision of a United Europe, while the United States was increasingly absent. We saw the United States [under Donald Trump] question the European-Atlantic alliance in the face of a newly refreshed Russia. Russia does not consider the Balkans a priority. It has its sights set on destabilizing Europe as a whole. Yet we are fragile because of our own particularities. You see, there is a strong pro-Russian sentiment here.


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

The notion that the phrase “death tax” is euphemistic or Orwellian does not withstand scrutiny. For one thing, it supposes that “estate tax” and “inheritance tax” are purely neutral terms. But that’s ridiculous. “Estate” conjures up images of rolling green hills and vast real estate holdings, of J. R. Ewing and Donald Trump rubbing their hands together and cackling like corporate villains or toasting with champagne glasses—not a mom-and-pop hardware store that may have to close its doors or a family farm that may have to liquidate the very land upon which it depends to pay a tax of nearly half its value. “Inheritance” evokes images of celebrity debutantes like Paris Hilton squandering the fruits of their parents’ labor while the huddled, deserving poor tremble in the shadows—not a small business owner hoping to pass on to his children the savings he has wrung from a lifetime of toil.

Not coincidentally, they fared poorly at the polls. *During my death tax language research, I would ask middle-class and working-class Americans whether people like Gates should be taxed more. The answer: No! For all of his accomplishments and all he has done to modernize American life, American’s don’t begrudge his many billions. Donald Trump? That’s a different story. *There is a subculture in America that does in fact care about process. They are the people who pay extra for organic groceries from Whole Foods and pay more for their Prius because they care about the environment. But they are still a very small minority. *While the Alice character liked to refer to herself as a housekeeper, if you Google “Brady Bunch Alice maid,” you get more than 76,000 hits.


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

The program’s principal benefactor is David Rubenstein, a white male billionaire who made his fortune as the cofounder and CEO of Carlyle Group, the private equity giant. Rubenstein is known for his charitable giving but also for his fierce resistance to closing the carried interest loophole, which enables Rubenstein and other finance moguls to avoid $180 billion in taxes every decade. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump all campaigned against the loophole, but efforts to close it were defeated by the American Investment Council, a lobbying organization that was chaired at the time by one of Rubenstein’s lieutenants.1 The measure died three votes short of the majority it needed in 2010—and the loophole advantage hasn’t been seriously challenged since then.

If we choose as a society to structure our interpersonal and institutional relationships to meet everyone’s needs and are intentional about constraining and—when need be—repairing abuses of power, we can build a healthy society where everyone feels valued, supported, and able to be their true selves. Collective liberation is the idea that we are all part of one human project. It acknowledges that our struggles are interconnected, that we must work together to create the kind of world we know is possible. Someday, we can all be free. CONCLUSION My whole life is about winning. —DONALD TRUMP, FORTY-FIFTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MYTH: Plutocracy is good, and forever. The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds. —DALAI LAMA, TIBETAN BUDDHIST LEADER REALITY: Each generation gets to decide how it will govern itself.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The second development came when Michael Milken, the undisputed champion of junk bonds, was indicted for conspiracy and fraud in connection with his securities work. His investment bank, Drexel Burnham Lambert, pleaded guilty to mail and securities fraud and would eventually go bankrupt. Milken ultimately spent just twenty-two months in jail. President Donald Trump pardoned him in 2020. But Drexel Burnham’s disappearance from the scene led to a hiccup in the junk bond markets that, at least for a while, slowed private equity’s buyout spree. Today, however, private equity has returned with a vengeance. Other private equity shops, like Blackstone, emerged and grew even bigger than KKR; one, Bain Capital, gained a measure of fame when a former executive, Mitt Romney, was named the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2012.

More importantly, now that the world had arrived at a place where billions of people were interacting and getting news from a single technology company, it seemed as if there was no way out of this conundrum. All of these problems came to a head in the US elections of 2016. The 2016 presidential contest between the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, and the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, was the most vitriolic and divisive campaign in recent memory (only outdone by the sequel between Trump and Joseph Biden in 2020). Both campaigns used social media in a major way, amplifying their messages through Facebook and Twitter. But it was hard to deny that Trump and his campaign were better at this game than Clinton.


pages: 601 words: 193,225

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, it's over 9,000, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, junk bonds, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, short selling, strikebreaker, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Indeed, after an hour of reminiscing about 740, promising all sorts of juicy stories, Hughes demanded payment to continue. But some of his subsequent career is a matter of public record and sheds light on his character. Hughes left 740 after a dispute with members of the board and the management at Douglas Elliman and went to work for the developer Donald Trump. But in the mid-1980s, he returned to Elliman and, briefly, to 740 as the building’s executive manager. In 1988, Elliman’s whole management team left en masse to join an aggressive rival, Brown Harris Stevens, controlled by the real estate operator Harry Helmsley, because it was a more modern operation that wasn’t mired in carriage-trade traditions like Elliman was.

Along with their new neighbors Henry Kravis and Carolyne Roehm, the Steinbergs were leading lights of what W magazine dubbed Nouvelle Society. In April 1987, W crowned her Queen Gayfryd after her social debut, her first big gala for PEN, two years after she’d decided to make it her cause. Photos of Donald Trump, Arnold Scaasi, Georgette Mosbacher, and Brooke Astor at the Metropolitan Club party illustrated a story in which Gayfryd earnestly set about positioning herself. “I find it difficult to walk a block in New York without being passionate about something, without seeing a homeless person,” she said.

Gayfryd had obsessed over every detail of the $3 million French Directoire-themed dinner for five hundred that followed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rented for the evening for $30,000. There were a hundred French roses for every guest and twelve thousand white tulips besides. Arnold Scaasi, Nouvelle Society’s dressmaker, whipped up the wedding gown and nine bridesmaids’ dresses, and the Kravises, the Mahoneys, Lord Weidenfeld, Norman Mailer, Barbara Walters, Donald Trump, and Vernon Jordan toasted the newlyweds with 1982 Roederer Cristal and 1973 Chateau Latour and dined on poached coho salmon with champagne aspic and a trio of veal, lamb, and chicken. Gayfryd called it “very much a family party.” There was another PEN gala in April 1989, and that August, Gayfryd gave Saul a $1 million fiftieth birthday party at his beach house in Quogue that featured tableaux vivants of his favorite old masters—one of them, a living nude in an oversized frame.


pages: 169 words: 43,906

The Website Investor: The Guide to Buying an Online Website Business for Passive Income by Jeff Hunt

buy low sell high, content marketing, deal flow, Donald Trump, drop ship, frictionless, frictionless market, intangible asset, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Skype, software as a service

These videos can also be faked, but it is much more difficult. A common technique is to ask the seller to share his screen with you over Skype or Teamviewer and show you exactly what you want to see, in real time, on the seller’s PC. “Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.” —Donald Trump Some kinds of accounts, like Google Analytics, will allow for the creation of a “read only” guest account. Most honest sellers are happy to add your gmail account to their Analytics accounts so that you can browse the historical and current statistics at your leisure. Another technique is to ask the seller to add your Amazon, Analytics, or Adsense code to his website for a period of time and then watch the actual sales and traffic metrics in your own account.


pages: 151 words: 39,757

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

The characteristic personality change is hard to perceive or acknowledge in oneself, but easier to see in others, especially if you don’t like them. When conservative BUMMER addicts dislike liberal college students with BUMMER addictions, they sometimes use the insult “poor little snowflake.” The poorest snowflake of them all, however, is Donald Trump, who exhibits the same behavior. I met him a few times over several decades, and I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t a BUMMER addict back then. He was a New York City character, a manipulator, an actor, a master at working the calculus of chums and outcasts. But as a character he was in on his own joke.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Things beyond the bounds of what even the most progressive elements in mainstream politics have been willing to contemplate, even on their best days, over the past thirty years. The less bad news, he went on, is that a lot of things have happened over the past decade that weren’t meant to be possible. He listed the banking crash, the Arab Spring, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the election of Donald Trump. The point is not whether we would welcome these developments, whether they represent a move in the right direction, but what they tell us about the nature of the times in which we are living: these are times in which impossible things happen, things which all the sensible voices whose job it is to tell us how the world works were busy telling us couldn’t happen until they did, and in this there lies a dark vein of hope.


Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now by Guy Standing

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, decarbonisation, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Extinction Rebellion, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, labour market flexibility, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open economy, pension reform, precariat, quantitative easing, rent control, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, universal basic income, Y Combinator

But Britain could go further than the good Canadian example, by recycling revenue not only from a carbon tax but from levies on all forms of pollution and intrusions into the commons. (8) Populism and neo-fascism The final giant is the rise of right-wing populism, epitomized by the election of Donald Trump as US president in November 2016, and by the spread of populist parties across Europe, where over a quarter of the electorate now support populist politicians, according to recent research. The definition of populism is vague, but most populists support aggressive nationalism, anti-migration posturing, hostility to mainstream politics of the centre left and centre right and a willingness to tolerate or openly support authoritarianism and antidemocratic policies.


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

Corbyn’s leadership saw Labour membership grow to over 500,000, bringing back many lapsed members, as well as resonating with younger first-time voters and with those who considered themselves disenfranchised by mainstream politics.4 As Bernie Sanders failed to secure his party’s nomination as a presidential candidate, it is impossible to say how well he would have fared against Donald Trump. But, like Corbyn, what was remarkable about Sanders was his unapologetic democratic socialism — something unprecedented in recent history for mainstream US politics — even though in contexts outside the US his radicalism would be regarded as mild. Sanders drew support from the same neglected and struggling working-class demographic that was frequently claimed to have delivered Trump’s victory, but he did so without attempting to appeal to them on the basis of white supremacy, racial anxiety, Christian fundamentalism, or social conservative backlash against the gains of the 1960s.


pages: 149 words: 41,934

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown

Black Lives Matter, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, false flag, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, place-making, Sheryl Sandberg, TED Talk

According to Bishop, in 1976 less than 25 percent of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. In other words, we lived next door to, and attended school and worshiped with, people who held different beliefs than ours. We were ideologically diverse. In contrast, in 2016, 80 percent of U.S. counties gave either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton a landslide victory. Most of us no longer even live near people who are all that different from us in terms of political and social beliefs. Now let’s compare these numbers to what’s happening in the realm of loneliness. In 1980 approximately 20 percent of Americans reported feeling lonely.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Today, the West is all too often anxious about the world, fearful of the future, and nostalgic about the past. Populist parties on the left and the right have grown in almost every Western country. Left-wing populism in countries like Greece and Spain builds mainly on the frustrations of the young and the unemployed. In most other countries, populism rather comes from the right and the old. Donald Trump, for instance, has exploited the growing antiestablishment sentiments of older voters, including the boomer generation. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the campaign to take the country out of the European Union drew strong support from the gray-haired. Whatever the political color of the revolts, Western politics has expanded from redistribution to retribution, and those supporting that shift typically blame foreigners, multinationals, politicians, or simply “the establishment,” for having changed society beyond recognition.

They generally have a not-in-my-backyard (nimby) attitude. It is also older generations that hold most of the stock (directly or indirectly) in the incumbent firms that want to shield themselves from new competition. Not surprisingly, older voters represent the dominant share of the support for Donald Trump in the US and Front National’s Marine Le Pen in France. If the West’s populist revolt has a color, it is gray. Younger generations will no longer be better off than their parents, if you believe the prevailing opinion. In countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, according to a YouGov poll, the dominant opinion is that the next generation is less likely to be richer, safer, or healthier than the last.23 In Western families, bambinos all too often stay bambinos, and then become what Italians call bamboccioni (big babies), as they cannot afford to leave the nest.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

Now, one could certainly make the argument that there’s a deep structural affinity between wasteful extravagance and bullshit, and theorists of economic psychology from Thorstein Veblen, to Sigmund Freud, to Georges Bataille have pointed out that at the very pinnacle of the wealth pyramid—think here of Donald Trump’s gilded elevators—there is a very thin line between extreme luxury and total crap. (There’s a reason why in dreams, gold is often symbolized by excrement, and vice versa.) What’s more, there is indeed a long literary tradition—starting with the French writer Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight) (in 1883) and running through innumerable British comedy routines—celebrating the profound feelings of contempt and loathing that merchants and sales staff in retail outlets often feel for both their clients and the products they sell them.

It seems to me there are two perceptions that lie behind this resentment: (1) the perception that members of this elite see ordinary working people as a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, and (2) the perception that these elites constitute an increasingly closed caste; one which the children of the working class would actually have far more difficulty breaking into than the class of actual capitalists. It also seems to me that both these perceptions are largely accurate. The first is pretty much self-evidently true if reactions to the 2016 election of Donald Trump are anything to go by. The white working class in particular is the one identity group in America toward which statements that might otherwise be immediately denounced as bigoted (for instance, that a certain class of people are ugly, violent, or stupid) are accepted without remark in polite society.


pages: 428 words: 126,013

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

It would be grotesque to compare what has happened to workers in the West to what has happened to the Native peoples of the Americas, who have survived a genocide and more than a century of persecution. But while I researched this book, I spent some time in the Rust Belt. A few weeks before the U.S. presidential election in 2016, I went to Cleveland to try to get the vote out to stop Donald Trump from being elected. One afternoon I walked down a street in the southwest of the city where a third of the houses had been demolished by the authorities, a third were abandoned, and a third still had people living in them, cowering, with steel guards on their windows. I knocked on a door, and a woman answered who, from looking at her, I would have guessed was fifty-five.

It’d be a democratic tribe that you are part of, and that you control as much as anyone else. One of the most popular political slogans of the past few years has been “Take Back Control.” People are right to connect with this slogan—they have lost control, and they long to regain it—but that slogan has been used by political forces, like those backing Brexit or Donald Trump, that will give them even less control. This, I came to think, is a way to reclaim that slogan, and help people to gain what they are rightly hungering for. Before I left her for the last time, Meredith told me that she believes this longing for meaningful work—to have a say over what you spend most of your life doing—is there, just below the surface, in everyone.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Imagine the heirs of the Carnegies and Rockefellers being so powerful and revered that The New York Times would self-censor its coverage out of deference. Imagine a White House pardoning the heirs of Sam Walton or Ray Kroc, as they ran the operations of Walmart or McDonald’s from their prison cells. Or seasoned journalists turning their eyes away when confronted with Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest between his presidential duties and his businesses. Because of the outsized privileges of Samsung and the Lee family, South Koreans tell me Samsung has grown too big to fail. But Sangin Park, an economics professor at Seoul National University, puts that “too big to fail” label in perspective.

“As this is going to another company”: Nilay Patel, “Samsung Is Sending Incomprehensible Emails to Note 7 Owners Looking for a Refund,” The Verge, October 10, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/​2016/​10/​10/​13227058/​samsung-galaxy-note-7-refund-support-email-incomprehensible. “Does anyone here have”: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, “Donald Trump Asks the Terminally Ill for a Huge Favor,” posted by YouTube user The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on October 7, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/​watch?time_continue=396&v=f_Flwq_zUVY. “Hey @sprint, what if”: Sapna Maheshwari, “Samsung’s Response to Galaxy Note 7 Crisis Draws Criticism,” The New York Times, October 11, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/​2016/​10/​12/​business/​media/​samsungs-passive-response-to-note-7s-overheating-problem-draws-criticism.html.


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

Sensing the deluge of phony products, the FDA tried to stem the tide by releasing an open letter on March 6, 2020, warning the public, “There currently are no vaccines, pills, potions, lotions, lozenges, or other prescription or over-the-counter products available to treat or cure coronavirus disease.”82 But a lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. And anyway, Donald Trump once again undermined the government’s message. During an astonishing news conference on April 23, 2020, he speculated that bleach administered topically or even internally or via injection could help and that blasting people with ultraviolet light might cure the disease.83 The manufacturers of Clorox and Lysol had to issue statements pleading with Americans not to inject or ingest their products, since that could kill them.

The controversy over what to call SARS-2 was another example of humans assigning arbitrary meaning to a seemingly factual issue. Calling it the “Chinese virus” highlighted the already fraught relationship between China and the United States and imbued this topic with ambient concerns about racism. Donald Trump and others exploited this when they called it the “Wuhan flu” and “Kung flu.”51 Yet, as we have seen, many pathogens used to be named for their origins. And the impact of symbolic meaning could even be found in a survey of American beer drinkers, 38 percent of whom would not buy Corona beer “under any circumstances” after the pandemic hit.52 We generate narratives of what is happening during a pandemic that are partially true and partially false, reflecting our hopes and fears.


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

Though Corbynism emerged out of a fractured British political landscape, it was also part of a global phenomenon. Around the world, the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crash had had many impacts. One was the global growth of the far right, who typically blamed Muslims, migrants, refugees and other oppressed and marginalized minorities for growing social trauma. This helped to spawn Donald Trump in America; the resurgence of France’s National Front (now, National Rally); the German AfD; Britain’s UKIP and Brexit Party; Spain’s Vox party; Italy’s Lega Nord; Austria’s Freedom Party. This era also saw the ascendancy of left movements which, rather than blaming social crises on the most vulnerable, realized that responsibility lay instead with elite vested interests, and championed a radical redistribution of wealth and power.

-It-wont-end-well.html CHAPTER 3 1. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/heres-what-jeremy-corbyn-really-6438877 2. https://pressgazette.co.uk/sun-and-mail-online-both-take-down-stories-claiming-jeremy-corbyn-was-dancing-a-jig-on-way-to-cenotaph/ 3. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ridiculous-ways-the-media-misrepresents-jeremy-corbyn-2015-12 4. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/corbyn/Cobyn-Report.pdf 5. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/12/bbc-bias-labour-sir-michael-lyons 6. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/were-labours-antisemitism-failures-really-corbyns-fault/ 7. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-abuse-female-mps-trolling-racism-sexism-almost-half-total-amnesty-poll-a7931126.html 8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11764159/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-coup-plot-if-he-wins-Labour-leadership.html 9. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/plot-to-oust-corbyn-on-day-one-2jk7cw8rrkn 10. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/20/jeremy-corbyns-honeymoon-period-will-last-until-local-elections 11. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/owen-jones-right-are-mocking-jeremy-corbyn-because-secretly-they-fear-him 12. https://twitter.com/shamindernahal/status/644214378296905728 13. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/temporary-nationalisation-of-threatened-tata-steel-plants-is-an-option-minister-confirms-a6959201.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/23/poll-junior-doctors-support 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12021973/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-humiliation-as-more-than-100-Labour-MPs-plan-to-defy-leader-over-Syria-air-strikes.html 16. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/saudi-arabia-yemen-labour-mps-debate-bombing-intervention-woodcock-a7382706.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/30/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-takes-theresa-may-as-conservatives-edge-towards/ 18. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/06/30/labour-members-corbyn-post-brexit 19. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-parliamentary-labour-party-plp-meeting-told-to-quit-margaret-hodge-alan-johnson_uk_5771819ee4b08d2c5639bfc0 20. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/29/labour-mps-vs-corbyn-war-party-members-tories-brexit 21. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/thousands-of-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-march-on-parliament-against-labour-party-leadership-challenge-a7106511.html 22. https://twitter.com/aliceperryuk/status/753663563546451969 23. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/20/owen-smith-i-have-never-advocated-privatisation-of-the-nhs 24. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/listen-moment-owen-smith-made-8759470 25. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/0cpa7iw5l7/TimesResults_160830_LabourSelectorate.pdf CHAPTER 4 1. https://news.sky.com/story/corbyns-cabinet-chaos-the-inside-story-10346377 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/29/counterweight-us-power-global-necessity-conflicts-spread 3. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/14/labour-and-tories-level-corbyn-popularity-wanes-poll 4. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/john-mcdonnell-defends-jeremy-corbyn-russia-response-nerve-agent-a8261946.html 5. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/11/labour-mps-should-not-appear-on-russia-today-says-john-mcdonnell 6. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2017/jan/18/theresa-mays-brexit-speech-what-the-national-newspapers-say 7. https://medium.com/@OwenJones84/questions-all-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-need-to-answer-b3e82ace7ed3 8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/01/corbyn-staying-not-good-enough 9. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/09/clive-lewis-sounds-support-challenge-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leader/ 10. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/69w7np/glastonbury-dispatches-tom-watson-mp CHAPTER 5 1. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tories-open-up-24-point-10259681 2. http://www.politico.eu/article/jeremy-corbyn-less-popular-than-donald-trump-poll/?utm_content=bufferd8e5c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer 3. https://www.li.com/activities/publications/public-opinion-in-the-post-brexit-era-economic-attitudes-in-modern-britain 4. https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2018-05/global_advisor_socialism_survey.pdf 5. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475 6. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/20/election-result-not-a-foregone-conclusion-insists-jeremy-corbyn 7. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/25/jeremy-corbyn-power-labour-brexit 8. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/local-election-2017-latest-analysis-john-curtice-tory-landslide-general-election-a7720801.html 9. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/08/tim-farron-margaret-thatcher-poster-childhood-bedroom-itv-interview 10. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39761746 11. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/16/tim-farron-says-hes-pro-choice-after-2007-interview-emerges 12. https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2015 13. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-uk-turnout-voters-registration-labour-tories-record-numbers-a7777931.html 14. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/nowcastinghouseholdincomeintheuk/financialyearending2017 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/11/labour-mps-reject-jeremy-corbyns-manifesto-theresa-may-warns/ 16. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/poll-shows-people-love-labours-10404216 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/24/conservative-donors-handed-theresa-may-record-25-million-fight/ 18. https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/872158950896144385 19. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/constituency-visits-impact-on-ge2017/ 20. http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/cgi-bin/seatdetails.py?


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

It was the first of a series of measures passed over the next two decades that gradually reduced the consequences for using, and then for dealing, hard drugs.52 14 “Legalize Crime” Christopher Young is a Seattle Police Department detective and twenty-five-year veteran of the police force who describes himself as a “progressive who wants to decriminalize drugs and advance the welfare state” and as sympathetic to the goals of Black Lives Matter.1 But Young was so disturbed by Seattle’s ceding of the Capitol Hill neighborhood to anarchists that he, like Vickie Beach and former police chief Carmen Best, has started speaking out publicly about the episode. “The anarchists had always been a cosplay clown joke,” he told me in early 2021. “On May Day they would come and fight the police and break some windows. We’d be like, ‘Okay guys, go back to your mother’s basement.’”2 Then, after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, the anarchists rebranded themselves as anti-fascists, said Young, and that increased their legitimacy in the eyes of Seattle’s progressive voters. “They said, ‘We’re here to fight the racists and fascists.’” Over the years, anti-police rhetoric and policies became increasingly mainstream in progressive cities.

And 74 percent of voters said the state should re-criminalize the serial thefts that Proposition 47 in 2014 decriminalized.18 Over the last two years we have seen a disturbing rise in politically motivated disorder, from the anarchist takeovers of autonomous zones in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis to the storming of the US Capitol by supporters of former president Donald Trump. In each case, elected officials not only failed to respond swiftly and decisively, they contributed to the undermining of law and order. In every case I felt an anxiety I had never felt before, which was the fear of losing my country. I began to genuinely worry that America could become like one of the undemocratic and unfree nations I have visited over the decades.


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

The company argued they had been unfairly maligned, telling the New York Times that although they were using hundreds of thousands of litres of water per day, this had little impact on the city’s water supply, noting that its wells are far deeper than the surface springs that supply local residents and pointing to other factors such as rapid urbanisation and lack of government investment.13 By speedballing different tastes and sensations, UPF can force far more calories into us than we could otherwise handle, creating enormous neurological rewards that keep us coming back for more. This is bad, but it’s far from the only problem. There are zero-calorie artificial sweeteners to worry about too. What happens when the taste in our mouths doesn’t match the calories at all? On 14 October 2012, future US president, Donald Trump, tweeted an observation about Diet Coke: ‘I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.’ The next day, he followed it up with what appeared to be a question: ‘The more Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, etc. you drink, the more weight you gain?’ By 16 October, he seemed to be resolved in his view of the matter: ‘The Coca-Cola company is not happy with me – that’s okay, I’ll still keep drinking that garbage.’

When it comes to food chemicals, it might make no difference if the FDA sent everyone home and shut the department down. A more honest system might be for the FDA to do exactly that, and simply say that industry is going to look after itself, and we can all just take our chances with however it decides to self-police. This was, to some extent, the approach of Donald Trump’s government. 16. UPF destroys traditional diets In early 2020, I went to Brazil. I was working on a (still ongoing) investigation of the baby formula industry for the British Medical Journal and the BBC. Part of the project was to examine the effects of the most ambitious industrial food marketing strategy in history, conducted by Nestlé.


pages: 726 words: 210,048

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

This was the precise midpoint of the 1980s, when the takeover epidemic was intensifying. A low stock price on even the biggest corporations was like a blue light twirling in the ceiling of a dime store, an advertisement to the likes of Carl Icahn or Boone Pickens or Sir James Goldsmith or Ivan Boesky or Donald Trump or for that matter, Frank Lorenzo. United was an inviting target in another respect. Unlike Pan Am, which had been raiding its pension plans to keep afloat, United had been overfunding its pension accounts—or so Dick Ferris was told by his advisors on Wall Street. Ferris, they thought, would be wise to deplete the retirement funds of excess cash so that a raider did not try to seize the company and use United’s own cash to help pay for the deal.

Ferris’s design consultants explained that they had cobbled together Allegis from the root word for “allegiance” and from the Greek aegis, meaning protection. Never was a corporate name change so ridiculed, and among those who were already skeptical of Ferris’s strategy the stupidity of the name only reinforced their views. Donald Trump, cruising on a wave of borrowed money and having just purchased a big chunk of UAL stock, said that Allegis sounded like “a world-class disease.” Just as the airline was planting the flag in the Far East on the old Pan Am routes, Asian people had a particularly difficult time with the word (Arregis?).

Jennings, “Union-Management Tumult at Eastern Air Lines: From Borman to Lorenzo,” Transportation Journal, Summer 1989. 73. “full investigation”: House Concurrent Resolution 262, 100th Congress, Mar. 10, 1988. 74. extremely favorable terms: A new unit of Texas Air proposed to buy the shuttle for $125 million in cash and a note of $100 million. By contrast, when Eastern ultimately did sell the shuttle to Donald Trump, the price was $365 million. 75. into a stupor: “Airline Backfire: Texas Air Triggered Investigation of Itself with Shuttle Gambit,” by Paulette Thomas, Bob Davis, and John E. Yang, WSJ, Apr. 15, 1988. 76. “noise level”: Frank Lorenzo, Remarks to International Aviation Club, Washington, D.C., May 4, 1988. 77.


pages: 158 words: 45,927

Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: The Facts About Britain's Bitter Divorce From Europe 2016 by Ian Dunt

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy security, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, Silicon Valley, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Germany’s decision to welcome a million refugees was an act of extraordinary political bravery, but it prompted resentment from countries on the migration trail and destabilised the domestic political base of its Chancellor, Angela Merkel. These twin crises – debt and refugees – have created a surge of euroscepticism on the Continent. More than ever before, people are questioning the European project. It is a component, perhaps, of a broader global trend, finding its most grotesque expression in Donald Trump in the US. Populists – typically of the right but occasionally of the left – have proved adept at channelling anger over stagnating wages, economic insecurity and globalisation into an attack on the status quo and an affirmation of national, religious or cultural identity. This has been a long time coming.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Officials at the NSA claimed that he had caused irreparable harm to the security of the country, and every intelligence agency and contractor went on to invest in costly “insider threat” programs designed to spy on employees and make sure that another Edward Snowden would never pop up again. Some called for bringing him back in a black-ops kidnapping; others, like Donald Trump, called for him to be assassinated.112 Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s Russian lawyer, claimed that the leaker’s life was in danger. “There are real threats to his life out there that actually do exist,” he told one reporter. Indeed, a lot of hate and malice was pointed in Snowden’s direction, but to those running the Internet Freedom wing of the US military intelligence apparatus, his embrace of Tor and crypto culture could not have come at a better moment.

Use Signal,” he tweeted out.129 With endorsements like these, Signal quickly became the go-to app for political activists around the world. Egypt, Russia, Syria, and even the United States—millions downloaded Signal, and it became the communication app of choice for those who hoped to avoid police surveillance. Feminist collectives, anti–President Donald Trump protesters, communists, anarchists, radical animal rights organizations, Black Lives Matter activists—all flocked to Signal. Many were heeding Snowden’s advice: “Organize. Compartmentalize to limit compromise. Encrypt everything, from calls to texts (use Signal as a first step).”130 Silicon Valley cashed in on OTF’s Internet Freedom spending as well.


pages: 432 words: 127,985

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

(The SEC’s chief accountant listened to the new auditor’s lengthy pitch for recognizing income from a particular transaction. His decision: “No recognition.” End of meeting, end of Keating’s control over Lincoln Savings.) Similarly, Peat, Marwick explained the accounting scam underlying the proposed acquisition of Lincoln Savings. The buyer (the Trump Group—not related to Donald Trump) and Lincoln Savings would both overpay (by over $40 million) to purchase a subsidiary from each other. Lincoln Savings would pay cash; the Trump Group would give a note (an IOU). In short, Lincoln Savings was financing the entire “purchase.” Peat, Marwick then issued the most unusual accounting opinion any of us had ever seen.

“TAX SHARING” AGREEMENT. Agreement among affiliated companies to file a consolidated tax return and to allocate the tax liability among the affiliates. TAYLOR, MARY ELLEN. Edwin Gray’s principal aide for congressional relations. TRUMP GROUP, THE. Proposed acquirer of Lincoln Savings (not affiliated with Donald Trump). TUTTLE, ROBERT. White House personnel director under Ronald Reagan. VERMIN. Term regulators used for Vernon Savings. VERNON SAVINGS. Texas control fraud run by Don Dixon. VINCENT, JANET. AY auditor who replaced Jack Atchison at Lincoln. VOLCKER, PAUL. Chairman of the Fed. WALL, M. DANNY.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

Source: American Bankruptcy Institute, 2005 As Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren has noted, that was more Americans than were diagnosed with cancer. More people went bankrupt in America in 2005 than graduated from college. And this is as the economy has been growing. Now we’re not talking here about those innocuous, “reorganizing” corporate bankruptcies, like even Donald Trump does from time to time. Personal bankruptcy is, quite simply, the breaking point at which your credit card bills, mortgage payments, and medical debts so outpace your income that you just can’t function anymore without the intervention of a court. In some parts of the country, bankruptcy is practically a way of life.

In addition, new tools like multi-currency mortgages, which let you get a mortgage abroad in your home currency, but then switch if interest rates in the host country get more favorable, are easing the way for foreign home-buyers. And several U.S. banks are adjusting their policies to make it easier for foreign nationals who pay U.S. taxes to get home loans. In New York, Donald Trump was a major factor in opening up the city to foreigners. Most buildings in New York City had been co-ops, and since co-ops can reject anyone for just about any reason, they looked very carefully at absentee foreign purchasers. But Trump opened condos, and sales of condos are largely unregulated because they offer single apartments, not shares in a corporation.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Fossil-Funded Denial In summer 2019, a think tank hosted a fundraising gala typical of Washington, DC–based research and advocacy organizations. The theme was Game of Thrones, after the hugely popular HBO series. The organization, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), is viewed by many people as the most influential climate denial organization in Washington. After he was elected, President Donald Trump picked CEI director Myron Ebell to oversee the transition of staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. President Trump had called climate change a hoax in 2015, and the next year he told The Washington Post, “I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change.”1 In 1998, Ebell helped start the “Cooler Heads Coalition,” funded by fossil fuel companies, which described its mission as “dispelling the myths of global warming.”

Dem candidates’ bold proposals to tackle the crisis continue to illustrate the divide between a field of candidates listening to the people vs. Trump who’s endangering them,” Twitter, July 9, 2019, 8:54 a.m., https://twitter.com/bruneski/status/1148621407233937408. A few weeks after that, McKibben tweeted praise to Steyer for opposing the Keystone pipeline and for investing millions to impeach Donald Trump. Bill McKibben (@billmckibben), “Worth noting that @TomSteyer was outpokenly opposed to #KXL pretty much from the jump,” Twitter, August 20, 2019, 2:22 p.m., https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1163924331577184259; Bill McKibben (@billmckibben), “Credit where due: @TomSteyer worked long and hard to build the baseline support for impeachment,” Twitter, September 24, 2019, 3:34 p.m., https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1176626062559760384. 13.


First Time Ever: A Memoir by Peggy Seeger

belling the cat, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Easter island, index card, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, place-making, pre–internet, Skype, the market place

Sometimes, at the humungous pop concerts, they applaud so loudly that they cannot even hear the music they’ve paid good money to enjoy. It’s cathartic, understandable. We need to get out of our own skins and participate in someone else’s world for a while even if it does resemble a controlled riot. But I love you all feels false to me, an easy get-out. It’s a bit like left-wingers who declare, I love people. Hitler? Donald Trump? Jihadi John? Irma Grese, who flayed Belsen inmates and had their skins made into lampshades? The audience seeks love too and the applause increases with each I LOVE YOU ALL! I have never said this, by the way, nor has any performer I respect. What we really love is the adulation. What we really want is for someone to tell us that we’ve done well even if deep down we know that we haven’t.

What do you know about it, children? My grandchick holds his hand up and says, My grandma is a lesbian. That must have earned him Brownie points with his mates. The 1990s. Thatcher exits for the last time from Number 10, waving and smiling. Not a glimmer of shame for taking the country back a hundred years. That’s what Donald Trump will do when he leaves – if there’s still anyone around to wave at. The Iron Lady is succeeded by John Major, who is decidedly minor. You feel a tad ashamed to go on the offensive. I only write squibs for him, one of which refers to him as A slow, slow, slow, slow velociraptor. Ewan would have felt out of place in this decade.


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

Only the most fleeting glimpses of its capabilities have been seen. There’s the Boeing X-37, aka the ‘secret space shuttle’, which has spent almost eight years in space over multiple missions, doing who knows what. There are occasional images, like the startlingly clear photo of an Iranian missile site tweeted by Donald Trump in 2019, which appeared to be two or three times sharper than commercially available imagery. (It probably came from one of the NRO’s Keyhole satellites.28) It seems likely that the telescopes donated to NASA were either surplus parts of this programme – a long-running line of reconnaissance satellites in service since the Cold War – or a remnant of another cancelled programme, the sci-fi-sounding Future Imagery Architecture project.

(This is essentially the same manner in which the country’s social democracy maintains its networks of national parks and communal camping lodges for humans, managed by the volunteer-led Norwegian Trekking Association, which has a quarter of a million members.) The arrangement of such more-than-human infrastructures reflects the human social and political systems on which they are founded, without being subservient to them.8 Of course, political ideologies cut both ways. On the opposite border from that criss-crossed by Y2Y, ex-President Donald Trump’s infamous wall separating the US and Mexico carves through and across wildlife refuges, UNESCO heritage sites, sovereign tribal lands, national monuments and pristine wilderness. These mostly open lands are now blockaded by hundreds of kilometres of concrete and steel pipe, with devastating effects on animal as well as human mobility.


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

All are in the family real estate business). By 1990, he controlled more than ten million square feet of space. The development exuberance of the 1980s, however, exacted a financial toll, and Silverstein’s “empire shrank as he wrestled with high debt and falling rents that bedeviled other real estate giants like Donald Trump and Olympia & York’s Paul Reichmann.” Though “a bruised combatant in the Manhattan real estate slump” forced to relinquish properties to his creditors, Silverstein emerged a survivor.17 He fought hard to keep his buildings out of default, not wanting to lose them to his creditors, and his success in holding on to 7 World Trade Center during a period of severe market distress, in retrospect, enabled him to bid on the World Trade Center complex in 2001.

“When it comes to the kind of messy New York fights that are likely to make their way not only into the business pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, but also the tabloids and onto the nightly television newscasts,” Brill wrote, “it was hard to match Howard Rubenstein’s PR firm.”21 Brooklyn-born and bred, the lawyer turned PR expert started his eponymous firm in 1954, and over the subsequent decades built a client roster that included many of New York’s iconic organizations (including Bloomberg LP, Columbia University, the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, and the Whitney Museum), many of its notables (including Leonard Lauder, George Steinbrenner, and Donald Trump), many of its politicians (as of 2001, the last six mayors and last three governors), and a good fraction of the city’s real estate industry. It was apropos to say he had “served as a spokesman for nearly half the city, running interference for the likes of Ron Perelman and Leona Helmsley, sometimes by turning potentially toxic publicity to his clients’ advantage,” as the New York Post did on the celebratory occasion of his fifty years of spin.

And just before returning to the Port Authority as its executive director, he had been a senior policy advisor to the Spitzer-Paterson 2006 campaign, and then in the governor-elect’s transition office. His view of the timetable issue was being filtered through the lens of the lesson he drew from the public fiasco surrounding the city’s botched renovation of the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park. The high-profile delay embarrassed Mayor Koch, especially after Donald Trump took over the job and completed the interminably stalled renovation job below budget and in record time.57 Shorris did not believe that going public with Pataki’s timetable deceit would be good for the city, the governor, or the Port Authority. He was being loyal to the institution, perhaps too loyal.


pages: 237 words: 50,758

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

I cannot honestly recommend that you read Bill Gates’s accounts of his career, but if you do you will be left with a clear sense that the man’s primary interest is in computers rather than cash, in building businesses rather than building monuments. Like Carnegie and Rockefeller, Gates has become a substantial philanthropist and has thrown himself with enthusiasm into the application of business methods to charitable purposes. Even the egregious Donald Trump begins his autobiography, The Art of the Deal, with: “I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more money than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.”4 No doubt unconsciously, Trump echoes John Stuart Mill: He engages in “some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.”5 Building a large and successful business, as did Rockefeller and Carnegie, Walton and Gates, requires exceptional talent and hard work, a devotion to business and to the detail of business.


Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

“America is respected for the contributions it has made in learning to sail upon this new ocean,” he said, and he warned: “If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered. I do not believe that this would be in our best interest.” Fast-forward to the next presidential administration, which yet again changed NASA’s crewed space exploration goals. In June 2017, President Donald Trump reconstituted the National Space Council, an advisory group that had existed in years past, created in August 1958 by the National Aeronautics and Space Act that also established NASA. The reinvigorated council was tasked to review current U.S. space policy and long-range goals and to coordinate national space activities, from security to commerce to exploration and beyond.


pages: 171 words: 51,276

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

If there are only a finite number of histories but an infinite number of places for those histories to be played out, then every history is played out not once but an infinite number of times. Consequently, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there are an infinite number of the places in the universe that contain copies of you who are reading this same book—and, in fact, concentrating on this very line. And there are an infinite number of regions where Donald Trump did not become President of the United States. And an infinite number of places in the universe where the dinosaurs were not wiped out by an asteroid sixty-six million years ago but went on to develop intelligence and build motor cars. Such endless repetition may be hard to stomach. But cosmologists such as Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University in Massachusetts are philosophical.


pages: 162 words: 50,108

The Little Book of Hedge Funds by Anthony Scaramucci

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business process, carried interest, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, follow your passion, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, managed futures, margin call, mass immigration, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

One last note—not every manager will perform well with every market movement, but what is important is that they are doing what they say they are going to do. It is during monitoring that one must be ruthless. If the manager is off thesis or investment discipline, or his strategy just isn’t right for the current market environment, then it’s time to don your Donald Trump toupee and announce, “You’re fired.” It is very important to stay on this. Like gardens, relationships need to be pruned or they can get out of hand. If all of this sounds way too complicated for you to do on your own, the next chapter will provide you with an alternative investment vehicle that will help you navigate the hedge fund world.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Once we hit critical thresholds, the damage to the environment, and consequently to our future on this planet, will be irreparable. Over the years, public reactions to climate change have run the gamut. At one extreme are the climate deniers who say they don’t “believe” in climate change. President Donald Trump is the most prominent example. Denying climate change is tantamount to saying you don’t believe in gravity. The science of climate change is not a belief, a religion, or a political ideology. It presents facts that are measurable and verifiable. Just as gravity exerts its force on all of us whether we believe in it or not, climate change is already affecting us all no matter where we were born or where we live.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Silly tough-guy postures and blind monotheories can be found on the Right as well. Does the incendiary sage David Stockman, President Reagan’s budget director, really mean it when he describes the country as “the Great China Ponzi” or as “an entire nation of 1.3 billion . . . gone mad building, borrowing, speculating, scheming, cheating, lying and stealing”?1 And what does Donald Trump have in mind when he bellows, “You have to do something to rein in China. They’re making it absolutely impossible for the U.S. to compete”? He cites as a devastating instrument of unfair trade a yuan devaluation of 3 to 4 percent. As the economist John Mauldin points out, “The simple fact is that [before this recent minor devaluation] the Chinese currency rose by 20 percent over the last five years.”


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Even 9/11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001. At the height of the television media era, an American president Ronald Reagan, “Tear Down This Wall!” speech, June 12, 1987. demand the construction of walls Donald Trump, speech, Phoenix, August 31, 2016. 41. In 1945, when Vannevar Bush imagined the “memex,” on which computers were based Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1945. Similar tensions are rising in India, Malaysia, and Sudan Kevin Roose, “Forget Washington. Facebook’s Problems Ahead Are Far More Disturbing,” Washington Post, October 29, 2017. 42.


pages: 168 words: 56,211

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Abraham Maslow, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spice trade, supply-chain management, Vilfredo Pareto

The boss of the tuna plant, when he finally arrives, is an unexpected phenomenon. In temperament, Yasir Waheed combines the phlegmatic romanticism of a late-nineteenth-century French poet with the carnivorous aggression of a contemporary Anglo-American capitalist. His favourite book, by Bill Zanker and Donald Trump, is Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life. He is just back from an electronics conference in Dubai, where he picked up a Bluetooth wireless mouse for his Apple Cinema. The plant’s fish handlers know how to fillet a tuna with machetes in three minutes. All were once fishermen. The sound of one of their knives cutting flesh away from a spine recalls that of a fingernail strumming the teeth of a comb.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

Part of the reason these expectations have stuck around for 35 years after they shifted away from reality is because they felt so good for so many people when they were valid. Something that good—or at least the impression that it was that good—isn’t easy to let go of. So people haven’t let go of it. They want it back. 10. The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, and Donald Trump each represents a group shouting, “Stop the ride, I want off.” The details of their shouting are different, but they’re all shouting—at least in part—because stuff isn’t working for them within the context of the post-war expectation that stuff should work roughly the same for roughly everyone.


pages: 205 words: 55,435

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing by Niels Jensen

Alan Greenspan, Basel III, Bear Stearns, declining real wages, deglobalization, disruptive innovation, diversification, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, fixed income, full employment, Greenspan put, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, inflation targeting, job automation, John Nash: game theory, liquidity trap, low interest rates, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, passive investing, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, South China Sea, total factor productivity, working-age population, zero-sum game

The first will grow massively in the years to come due to the ageing of society but, sadly, it will have little impact on overall economic growth. In fact, the net effect is most likely going to be negative due to rising indebtedness, which will hold back productivity growth. By contrast, infrastructure spending is usually good for productivity, and should therefore be encouraged. Since assuming office, Donald Trump and his cabinet have repeatedly used the figure of $1 trillion over 10 years to demonstrate the scale of their vision regarding US infrastructure spending, which has created a bit of a stir in financial markets. That is all good, but what looks like significant infrastructure spending is in fact dwarfed by the cost of rising transfer payments in the years to come (exhibit 9.1).


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

“Native advertising” means embedding an ad message in other content. The idea itself isn’t new. It’s been around for a long time. Magazines refer to it as “advertorials.” In television, it’s called “product placement” or “branded entertainment”—recently exemplified by huge Coke cups on American Idol and by the Donald Trump–anchored Celebrity Apprentice, where challenges included creating a new ice cream flavor for Walgreen’s store brand or producing a ninety-second video for LG’s home entertainment system. It’s one thing for entertainment programs to augment ad revenues this way. It’s another thing when news outlets start doing the same.

Eight years later the trend toward “connected campaigns” would continue on both sides of the political spectrum. One presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, raised more money per month and in total through $27 donations from people connected through social media than rivals who took in the $2,700 maximum per-person donation. Donald Trump didn’t wait for news outlets to cover him—he called them, and tweeted at a prodigious rate. Sanders’s donations exceeded $200 million; Trump’s earned-media coverage exceeded $4 billion. Both candidates relied exclusively on connected media as the trigger. This book has described changes in the worlds of information goods.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

There is no bureaucratic net or tax web that can catch the fleeting thoughts of Eric Schmidt of Google or Chris Cooper of Seldon Technologies. Warren Buffett’s conglomerations of Coke and commercial paper, Nathan Myrvold’s patent trove, John Paulson’s hedges, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook mille-feuille mansions, Intel’s waferfabs, the Crow family’s Dallas realms, the gilded towers of Donald Trump—all could become shattered monuments of Ozymandias tomorrow. “Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!” Shelley wrote in the voice of the king whose empires became mere mounds in the desert sands. Like the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the railroad grid of New England, the thousand mile Erie Canal, the commercial real estate of Detroit, the giant nuclear plants and great printing presses of yesteryear, Kodak’s ruling photography patent portfolio of a decade ago, the HP computers of a year ago, or the sartorial rage of last week, the physical base of the one percent of the one percent can be a trap of wealth, not an enduring fount of liquid treasure.

This was also the great mistake of the Bush and Obama administrations’ response to the crisis of 2008. Value depends on dedicated ownership. In the United States, until recent socialist slippage, the Constitution guarantees only the right to property, not the worth of it. The reason for the huge wealth gap between Larry Page and Suzie Saintly, between Donald Trump and Harry Homeless, between Oprah and Obama, or between Eric Schmidt and inventor Dan Bricklin, or the one percent and any number of other worthy men and women, is entrepreneurial knowledge and commitment. Most of the richest individuals are bound to the masts of their fortunes. They are allowed to keep their wealth only as long as they invest it in others.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

.^^ As a result, you almost never see a "sell" recommendation; the nastiest thing most analysts will say about a stock is to call it a "hold" rather than a "buy." The most famous example of the pressures at work was when Marvin Roffman, a gambling analyst then in the employ of Janney Montgomery Scott, dared tell the Wall Street Journal in 1990 that Donald Trump's frightening Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was a debt-heavy house of cards that "won't make it." Trump threatened to sue Janney, and the firm quickly fired Roffman (who turned out, as of 1996, to be wrong, alas). That's an extreme case. The more normal pressures were described by John Keefe, formerly a banking analyst with Drexel Burnham Lambert who now runs his own research shop in New York.

And with the growth of professional managers working for distant shareholders, "the capitalist vanishes from the production process as someone superfluous." Cooperatives show, Marx said, that workers could hire managers as easily as do the owners of capital (Marx 1981, pp. 511-512). The growth of credit allowed entrepreneurs with no capital, whether skilled, unskilled, or felonious, to use the capital of others. Previsioning Donald Trump, whose net worth was held together in the 1980s in part by slick, publicist-generated magazine articles about how rich and successful he was, Marx wrote: "The actual capital that someone possesses, or is taken to possess by public opinion, now becomes simply the basis for a superstructure of credit."


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Rights for AI in this sense (and legal protections for those rights) are a means to an end rather than end in themselves. 3.6.4 Social Dislocation and Disenfranchisement In recent years, various commentators have observed that in addition to the traditional “right/left” economic and political divide (pursuant to which people and groups are seen as being, broadly, against or in favour of government intervention), a new gulf has emerged particularly in developed economies between groups who are “anywhere/somewhere”, “open/closed”69 or “drawbridge down/drawbridge up”.70 These categories refer to the difference in attitudes between people who favour globalisation and multiculturalism versus people who value their own local culture and economy and may be more resistant to what they perceive to be a loss of identity. Various “shock” results in elections or polls, in particular the UK’s decision to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump in the USA are often cited as examples of this trend, whereby new coalitions across the old political spectrum formed in order to reject the established social, economic and political order—rejecting the advice of “elites” in both cases.71 A major critique of liberal social and economic policies in the past 30–40 years is that whilst they have been seen to benefit some members of society, large parts have come to feel increasingly disenfranchised as both economic inequality and social rifts grow.

Far more likely is that, as the tech-savvy do better than ever, many truckers or taxi drivers without the necessary skills will drift off to more precarious, piecemeal, low-paid work. Does anyone seriously think that drivers will passively let this happen, consoled that their great-grandchildren may be richer and less likely to die in a car crash? And what about when Donald Trump’s promised jobs don’t rematerialise, because of automation rather than offshoring and immigration? Given the endless articles outlining how “robots are coming for your jobs”, it would be extremely odd if people didn’t blame the robots, and take it out on them, too.74 Striking this balance is an ongoing challenge.


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Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, classic study, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, impulse control, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, overview effect, Paradox of Choice, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

Personalizing politics: A congruency model of political preference. American Psychologist, 59(7), 581–594; Valkenburg, P. M., & Jochen, P. (2013). The differential susceptibility to media effects model. Journal of Communication, 63(2), 221–243; Kaufman, S. B. (2016). Donald Trump’s real ambition. Scientific American Blogs. Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/donald-trump-s-real-ambition. 35. Dunn, K. (2013). Preference for radical right-wing populist parties among exclusive-nationalists and authoritarians. Party Politics, 21(3), 367–380; Kaufman, S. B. (2018). The personality trait that is ripping America (and the world) apart.


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

It was the primary author of the rules-based international system. It was the country, out of all the liberal states, which defined itself by immigration. If it fell to nationalism, it would signal that we were entering a new era. And then a man emerged who could achieve precisely that. His name was Donald Trump. Many people associated Trump and Johnson closely together. They both took leadership positions in their respective nationalist movements. They both lied incessantly. They both lacked intellectual consistency. And on a personal level they seemed to recognise that their projects were complementary to each other.

In doing so it created a situation in which tens of thousands of Europeans could fall off the conveyor belt into the Hostile Environment, just like the Windrush generation had before them. Across the Atlantic, the new US president was pursuing an agenda so extreme it overshadowed any of the initiatives in Europe. Donald Trump began his anti-immigration operation from the moment he took office. It was planned as an onslaught, a machine gun fire of draconian policies which would come so rapidly that no-one would know what hit them. A working group was appointed, headed by Jeff Sessions’ chief legal adviser, Gene Hamilton, and composed of rabidly anti-immigration figures.


pages: 532 words: 141,574

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

Picking up the phone, “Yes Lupita mi amor, could you cut us a check, please, for . . . uh,” raising his eyebrows at Maxine, who shrugs and holds up five fingers, “five thousand U.S., payable to—” “Hundred,” sighs Maxine, “Five hundred, jeez all right I’m impressed, but it’s only enough so I can start a ticket. Next invoice you can be Donald Trump or whatever, OK?” “Just tryin to help, not my fault I’m a giving generous type of guy, is it? Lemme at least buy yiz lunch?” She risks a look at his face, and sure enough—the Cary Grant beam, the Interested Smile. Aahh! What would Ingrid Bergman do, Grace Kelly? “I don’t know . . .” Actually, she does know, because she has this built-in fast-forward feature in her brain that can locate herself, a day or two from now, glaring into the mirror going, “What, in the fuck, were you thinking?”

“I owe all over the place now, four-figure showerheads as big as pizzas, marble for the bathtubs special-ordered from Carrara, Italy, custom glaziers for gold-streaked mirror glass.” Everybody in the room chimes in with a story like this. As if at some point having had a fateful encounter with tabloid figure Donald Trump’s cost accountants, Ice is now applying the guiding principle of the moneyed everywhere—pay the major contractors, blow off the small ones. Ice has few fans in these parts—to be expected, Maxine supposes, but it’s a shock to find opinion in the room unanimous that he also likely had a hand in torching Bruno and Shae’s place.


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

A sharp decline in stock value in late July, resulting in the largest one-day value loss—a jaw-dropping $119 billion—to date in the history of Wall Street, left analysts and industry watchers searching for answers as to what might be happening at the firm.5 While some contended that market saturation in North America and Europe were behind the poor second-quarter performance leading to the sell-off, there were likely deeper problems afoot that pushed investor lack of confidence, including major scandals related to election influence, fake political accounts and Astroturf campaigns, and a seeming inability for the platform to gain control of the user-generated content (UGC) disseminated via its properties, some of it with deadly consequences.6 It is worth noting that Facebook was not alone in seeing loss of value due to flagging consumer confidence; the much more volatile Twitter (having its own moment, of sorts, due to being the favorite bully pulpit of President Donald Trump) has also seen a bumpy ride in its share price as it has worked to purge fake and bot accounts many suspect of unduly influencing electoral politics, thereby vastly reducing its user numbers.7 More recently, YouTube has (finally?) received increased ire due to its recommendation algorithms, favoritism toward high-visibility accounts, and bizarre content involving children.8 Throughout the many episodes of criticism that major, mainstream social media tech firms have faced in recent years, there has been one interesting, if not always noticed, constant: a twofold response of firms—from Alphabet (Google) to Facebook—to their gaffes, scandals, and disasters has been to invoke new AI-based tools at the same time they commit to increasing the number of humans who serve as the primary gatekeepers to guard against bad user behavior in the form of UGC-based abuse.

See also Accent, bias; Voice technologies Stalin, Joseph, 78 Standard Oil, 31 Stanford University, 200, 209, 257 Star Wars: The Old Republic, 243–244 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), 4, 7–8, 257 Stephenson, Neal, 102–104, 106–107, 110 Stevens, Ted, 97–98, 101 Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, 118 Streaming, 5, 118 Strife, 237 Subaltern, 304, 306 Surveillance, 74–75 carceral state, 208 corporate, 4, 19 data, 206 global, 86–87, 119 mass network, 85 network, 72, 85 National Security Agency, 99, 103 state, 78, 86–88, 86t, 130 technology, 126–127, 129, 308 Swift, 275 Switchboard, 191 Syria, 216, 219 Tajikistan, 227 Tanzania, 188, 189t, 330 Tata, 103 TCP/IP (Transmission control protocol/internet protocol), 317, 323 IP (internet protocol) blocking, 57 Technocrat, 21, 79, 142, 151 Technologists, 4, 85, 345, 365, 368, 373 diverse users, 154 history, 369, 371 and language, 338–339 women, 144 Technology bias, 214, 218, 232 Cold War, 17–18, 94, 137 Digital, 40, 64, 123–124, 200, 382 and dying well, 378 emergent, 199 and empire, 19, 187 environment and, 44–46, 76, 321, 339 Euro-American, 100, 221 fire and, 13, 111, 313 gender inequality in design, 370 inequality and, 152–154, 227, 309 information, 15, 30, 32, 40, 110, 291, 298, 308 large technical systems, 316–317 and modernity, 98 and oppression, 179, 200, 202, 204, 372–373 progress, 19–20, 65, 98 and racism (see Racism) small, 219–220 speech (see Voice technologies) surveillance, 126–127, 129, 308 technocolonialism, 103–104 technocrats, 21, 79, 142, 151 technologists (see Technologists) technoneutrality, 4 technophobia, 3, 363, 365 techno-utopia, 4, 365 training, 253–254, 265 Technoneutrality, 4 Technophobia, 3, 363, 365 Techno-utopia, 4, 365 Telecommunication companies, 13, 35, 87, 93, 155 cable-laying, 101, 103–104 India, 330 network, 315, 325 Telecom Regulatory Authority, 330–331 Telepresence, 5 Terms of usage, 4 Tesla, 45 Tetris, 234–236 Thailand (Thai), 102, 342, 354 Thompson, Ken, 273–275, 277, 286–289, 291–292 “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” 273–274, 278 Thompson hack bootstrapping, 281–284 in real life, 289–291 replication, 278–281 Trojan horse, 284–286 Tiltfactor Lab, 235 T9, 7 Toyota, 175 Train, 234 Transgender people, 136, 141 Transportation, 30–31, 37, 319 Travel narratives, 101 Treadmill of reforms, 78 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 22 Trinidad, 184–185, 193, 367 Trojan Horse, 273, 284–292 Trucking, 30, 46, 313 Trump, Donald J., 20, 23, 54, 207 Trust, problem of, 36, 38 Tumblr, 224 Turing, Alan, 18 Turing Award, 273 Turkopticon, 370 Turkey, 62–63, 214, 216, 218–219 Twitter, 12, 17, 54, 322, 379 and diversity, 254, 260–261 and Donald Trump, 20, 54 and language, 214, 227 as news media, 23 and policing, 120 2K Games, 237 Typeface, 216–218, 225 Typewriter (typing), 41, 337 Arabic, 213–221 Arabic language and software, 221, 223, 227–228 Chinese, 346, 350 electric, 220–221 mechanical typesetting, 339–340, 357 Mingkwai, 346–349, 347f, 353 orthographies, 341–344, 346, 350, 353–354, 356 QWERTY, 342–343, 349–350, 354 Siamese, 343 typing as obstacle, 356 typographic imperialism, 226 Underwood Typewriter Company, 218 Uber, 23–24, 31, 35, 254, 261, 267 and systems, 313, 319, 332 Uber Eats, 210 UGC (user-generated content), 54–56, 61–62, 66 Uighur, 227 Underrepresented, 253–255, 258–260, 264–267 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), 304, 309 Unions, 23–24, 159–160, 368, 373 IBM in Germany, 170–172 IBM in the United States, 161, 166–167, 173–175 India, 301, 308 United Arab Emirates, 226 United Kingdom, 83 accent bias, 180–183, 182t, 185–186, 188, 190t Anglocentrism, 344 civil service, 138–139, 141, 144, 150 classism, 138–139 early computing leader, 138 empire, 381 industrial technology, 221, 327 Ministry of Technology, 150 NGO (nongovernmental organization) networks, 324 Shirley, Stephanie “Steve,” 143–147, 146f Submarine cable networks, 93 United Kingdom (cont.)


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If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Newton Minow, after serving in the Kennedy administration as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, returned to law practice in Chicago at Sidley Austin. In 1988, Minow hired as a summer intern a young law school student named Barack Obama. Bill Clinton awarded Arthur Schlesinger Jr. the National Humanities Medal in 1998; Schlesinger died in 2007. Barack Obama awarded Newton Minow the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the month that Donald Trump, following a campaign aided by Facebook News and Cambridge Analytica, defeated Hillary Clinton to become the forty-fifth president of the United States. After Patty Greenfield’s death in 1968, her children went to friends’ houses and boarding schools in western Massachusetts. Their father mailed them packages, fancy boxes of opulent gifts.

It’s like a boomerang: you send your data out, it gets analyzed, and it comes back at you as targeted messaging to change your behavior.”17 Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook “likes”? That was Ithiel de Sola Pool’s “cross-cutting pressures.” Cambridge Analytica’s boomerang model? That was Bill McPhee’s “three-stage model of communication.” Faster, better, fancier, pricier, but the same hucksterism, and as for the claims of its daunting efficacy, the same flimflam. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign didn’t need Cambridge Analytica. Facebook, alone, could target specific voters with custom-made messages. Commentators accused the Trump campaign of using a “weaponized AI propaganda machine,” describing a new and “nearly impenetrable voter manipulation machine.”18 New?


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

Often they kill the guys in the white hats, and everybody must know at least one family friend and a good business person who was dragged under by a bad creditor. Readers of The Solid Ground of March last year might even remember the catalogue of Malaysian ‘entrepreneurs’ who apparently self-destructed in the mid-1980s crash. By the early 1990s they were back in charge, making the same bets all over again. Not very just, but that’s the way it is. Donald Trump is still at the table and still playing. Jim Slater is an investment guru. Philosophers may crave the allocation of guilt, but investors should accept the operation of market forces. So why the sudden belief that the promised government/IMF programmes are the only legitimacy? If there is any lesson from the events of the past year in Asia, it is that the will of government is of secondary importance to the power of market forces.

Such cynics ignore the fact that the BIS banks increased their lending to Latin America by US$8bn from 1995 to 1996 and by US$22bn the next year, despite the losses associated with the tequila crisis. Such cynics ignore the fact that bankers are practised at lending to newly capitalised physical assets. Donald Trump still has bankers and some of the physical assets of Adsteam are now recapitalised and considered blue-chip clients by Aussie bankers. Anyway, next time around, bankers will not be lending to AYZ Co of Thailand or even to the Thai government, but to a subsidiary or associate of ABC Multinational Corporation.


pages: 484 words: 155,401

Solitary by Albert Woodfox

airport security, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, full employment, income inequality, index card, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, means of production, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, side project

As his protest spread throughout the NFL, critics subverted the message of the players, ignoring the reason for the protest—to call attention to the very real problem of police violence against black people—and severely criticizing Kaepernick and the other players who took a knee during the national anthem for “not respecting the military” and “not respecting the flag.” Kaepernick was slandered by presidential candidate Donald Trump. He was abandoned by the NFL, exiled from the game he loved. Although he was considered one of the most gifted quarterbacks in the league, no team would hire him the next year. He put his career on the line to use his platform to speak for those who aren’t being heard. His efforts weren’t in vain.

A 2016 Justice Department report issued by the Obama administration found that there is more violence at privately run prisons and less medical care than at government-run facilities. In 2016 President Obama directed the Justice Department to reduce the use of private prisons. The following year, under President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded Obama’s order within three weeks of being sworn in. The private prison industry is booming. If there is something you can do, even one thing, to ensure humanity exists behind bars, do it. If you don’t know where to start, follow Solitary Watch and Prison Legal News on social media to find out what’s going on.


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

At the entrance where the steel worker stood, we passed gigantic concrete tetrapods adorned with colorful paintings of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, and traditional Ukrainian folk art. There were dozens of other journalists, too. But they were less interested in Mariupol and Zelensky’s ambitious domestic agenda. They wanted to corner the president to get him to comment on the deepening political scandal that he had been sucked into involving then President Donald Trump half a world away. In a phone call that July, Trump had seemed to pressure Zelensky into opening investigations into the Ukraine dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of his political rival Joe Biden. Trump had ordered $391 million worth of crucial military aid to Ukraine just three days before the call.

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.


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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

This relentless and authoritative-sounding presentation of mass automation as our technological destiny is one reason that so many people remain susceptible to this fear. And it’s a fear that employers can and do use as leverage against workers. While fast-food workers were organizing for $15 an hour, Andrew Puzder, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Labor Secretary, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “The Minumum Wage Should Be Called the Robot Employment Act.” Ed Rensi, a former CEO of McDonald’s, agreed. If fast-food workers won a living wage, it would lead to “job loss like you can’t believe,” he said, because the industry would accelerate automation.

None of this necessarily means that American workers will suddenly start smashing the machines that are executing their exploitation, though it does mean they will sometimes channel that anger at the politicians, or direct it at “others” and outsiders: immigrants, minorities, political opponents. A Brookings Institution study found that in regions where populations experienced a higher rate of automation, voters turned out in higher numbers for Donald Trump in 2016. Trump’s rhetoric was tailored to stoking resentments over all of the above into anger, as he promised to restore America to its former, preautomated industrial glories. “Automation perpetuates the red-blue divide,” the Brookings survey concluded. Opaque and circuitous supply chains, decades of offshoring, and other hallmarks of a globalized economy have consipired to cloud the precise causes of any given worker’s sense of exploitation.


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

SIX OF THE BEST GOLF COURSES St Andrews The public Old Course is the game’s spiritual home, and you can’t help but be awed by the history and atmosphere here. The 17th – the Road Hole – is famous for its blind drive, nasty bunker and seriously sloping green. Several other courses for all abilities make this Scotland’s premium golfing destination. Turnberry Now owned by Donald Trump, Turnberry’s Ailsa is one of Scotland’s most prestigious links courses, with spectacular views of Ailsa Craig offshore. Royal Dornoch Up north, the sumptuous championship course rewards the journey with picture-perfect links scenery and a quieter pace to things. Machrihanish Dunes On the Kintyre peninsula, this Old Tom Morris–designed course is one of Scotland’s most scenic.

Inside, if you have the place to yourself, you’ll hear only the whistling wind – an apt reflection of the abbey’s long-deceased monastic tradition. Don’t miss the echo in the chilly sacristy. Turnberry Turnberry basically consists of one of Scotland’s great golf links and a massive, superluxurious resort and self-catering complex opposite it. The whole thing was bought by Donald Trump in 2015 and has had a recent facelift. Turnberry’s Ailsa (%01655-334060; www.turnberry.co.uk; Maidens Rd) is one of Scotland’s most prestigious links courses, with spectacular views of Ailsa Craig offshore. You don’t need a handicap certificate to play, just plenty of pounds – the summer weekend green fee is £375.

Forvie National Nature Reserve (www.nnr.scot; p) has wildlife hides and waymarked trails through the dunes to an abandoned medieval village where only the ruins of the church survive. The dunes form an important nesting and feeding area for birds – don’t wander off the trails during the nesting season (April to August). Donald Trump sparked a major controversy when he opened Trump International Golf Links in 2012, amid a ‘protected’ area of sand dunes just 4 miles south of Forvie. The development has split the community between those who welcome the potential economic benefits, and those worried about the environmental damage.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

The rather sombre (despite recent renovations over the past five years) mansion contains mostly original furnishings: a brilliant chandelier in the parlour, obelisks from a family trip to Egypt, young “Teedie’s” crib and more. A room at the top of the house holds some of TR’s hunting trophies; a gallery on the ground floor (there’s an upper gallery as well) displays photos and documents from the life of the 26th president – before Donald Trump, the only one born in New York City. The Flatiron Building Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd St • Subway R, W to 23rd St The lofty, elegant and decidedly anorexic Flatiron Building (originally the Fuller Construction Company, later renamed in honour of its distinctive shape) is set on a narrow, triangular plot of land at a manic intersection.

Meanwhile, the raucous nightlife scene that started in the mid-1970s was best exemplified by hotspot Studio 54, where drugs and illicit sex were the main events off the dancefloor. The real-estate and stock markets boomed during the 1980s, ushering in another era of Big Money. A spate of construction gave the city more eye-catching, though not necessarily well-loved, architecture, notably Battery Park City, and master builder Donald Trump provided glitzy housing for the super-wealthy. The stock market dip in 1987 started yet another downturn, and Koch’s popularity waned. In 1989, he lost the Democratic mayoral nomination to David Dinkins, a 61-year-old black ex-marine who went on to beat Republican Rudolph Giuliani, a hard-nosed US attorney, in a tightly contested election.

Despite this, the city seems on an upward swing, with the opening of One World Trade Center and its sky-high observatory, the relocation of the Whitney Museum at the foot of the High Line and the continued reclamation of the city’s waterfront. The mayor looks set to win another term, despite many folks being dissatisfied with his performance (and that of various public services, like the MTA). To almost everyone’s astonishment, reality TV star – and New Yorker – Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections. Since then, the city has become a site for frequent protests, with the area around Midtown’s Trump Tower always buzzing with security. < Back to Contexts Books Since the number of books about or set in New York is so vast, what follows is necessarily selective – use it as a place to begin further sleuthing.


pages: 174 words: 58,894

London Review of Books by London Review of Books

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Piers Corbyn, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tulip mania, Wolfgang Streeck

Kindle Edition, 2017 © London Review of Books * * * Letters, Volume 39 Number 24 1861 words The Hunter-Gatherers Were Right Steven Mithen writes that ‘the perfectly formed city-state is the ideal, deeply ingrained in the Western psyche, on which our notion of the nation-state is founded, ultimately inspiring Donald Trump’s notion of a “city” wall to keep out the barbarian Mexican horde’ ( LRB , 30 November ). In the Politics, a text that really was ingrained in the psyche of Western undergraduates from the late 13th century until very recently, Aristotle says that a city-state isn’t achieved merely by a group living in the same place, and ‘certainly not because it is enclosed by walls, since a single wall could be built around the Peloponnese’.


pages: 193 words: 56,895

The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, Robert M. Pressman

delayed gratification, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, impulse control

Even in the face of this and myriad other horror stories, jenny continues to characterize her mother as "my best friend." Now, as an adult, jenny says, "I let people walk all over me. I can't do anything about it. Even if I said something, no one would listen to me. I don't have any close friends. I always do something to push people away.... To say that I have an inferiority complex is like saying that Donald Trump's earnings are above the poverty line-it doesn't even come close to describing the enormity of the situation." After two months of therapy, jenny came into a session visibly upset. She said that her husband had wanted to make love with her, and she had made an excuse-again. Although he had been hurt and angry, she said that he told her that he was trying to be patient because he knew "that I'm coming in here [to therapy] to get this straightened out, and he knows I'm trying very hard in my therapy and he's sure it'll be better soon.


pages: 176 words: 55,819

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you—as entrepreneurs do. The most brilliant business idea is often the one that builds on the founders’ existing assets in the most brilliant way. There are reasons Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google and Donald Trump started a real estate firm. Page and Brin were in a computer science doctoral program. Trump’s father was a wealthy real estate developer, and he had apprenticed in his father’s firm for five years. Their business goals emerged from their strengths, interests, and network of contacts. You have two types of career assets to keep track of: soft and hard.


pages: 330 words: 59,335

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, this breed of high-profile chief executive has been understandably vilified. They are commonly viewed as being greedy (possibly fraudulent) and heartless as they fly around in corporate planes, laying off workers, and making large deals that often destroy value for stockholders. In short, they’re seen as being a lot like Donald Trump on The Apprentice. On that reality television show, Trump makes no pretense about being avaricious, arrogant, and promotional. Not exactly a catalog of Franklinian values. The residents of Singletonville, however, represent a refreshing rejoinder to this stereotype. All were first-time CEOs, most with very little prior management experience.


pages: 394 words: 57,287

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Jeff Beer, “How Patagonia Grows Every Time It Amplifies Its Social Mission,” Fast Company, February 21, 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com/40525452/how-patagonia-grows-every-time-it-amplifies-its-social-mission. 8. Rose Marcario, “Patagonia CEO: This Is Why We’re Suing President Trump,” Time, December 6, 2017, https://time.com/5052617/patagonia-ceo-suing-donald-trump/. 9. Alana Semuels, “ ‘Rampant Consumerism Is Not Attractive.’ Patagonia Is Climbing to the Top—and Reimagining Capitalism Along the Way,” Time, September 23, 2019, https://time.com/5684011/patagonia/. 10. Michael Corkery, “Walmart Says It Will Pay for Its Workers to Earn College Degrees,” New York Times, May 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/business/walmart-college-tuition.html. 11.


The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

In effect, the countries of the West are now in many senses ‘post-political spaces’ that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds. For many, this creates a haunting sense of loss that manifests itself in an ever-more-desperate yearning to recoup a genuinely participatory politics. This is in no small part the driving force behind such disparate figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other. But the collapse of political alternatives, the accompanying disempowerment, and the ever-growing intrusion of the market have also produced responses of another kind—nihilistic forms of extremism that employ methods of spectacular violence. This too has taken on a life of its own. 3 The public politics of climate change is itself an illustration of the ways in which the moral-political can produce paralysis.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Macron’s election victory came less than a year after “Brexit,” Britain’s decision in June 2016 to leave the EU, and just six months after Donald Trump’s election as US president. Brexit and Trump challenged the postwar institutional framework of international trade and governance. Macron gave hope that he would save the old European and world order and that he would strengthen it. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal pronounced Macron “Globalism’s Great Hope.” Ip wrote, “For global elites left dispirited by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s presidency, France has provided a shot of adrenaline.”38 The Handelsblatt said, “There is renewed hope for the European project, owing to Emmanuel Macron’s election as president of France.”39 The Guardian described the result of the French election as “a win for Macron and for hope.”40 Not to be outdone, the Economist showed a montage of Macron walking on water and asked if he would be the savior Europe had been waiting for.41 Again, the parallel with Renzi was remarkable.

Linguist George Lakoff, longtime professor of cognitive science at the University of California at Berkeley, has highlighted the decisive political advantage gained from political framing and messaging. A politician who aggressively describes opponents in offensive language wins the debate; indeed, if opponents fight back by denying the accusations, they keep alive the words and thus reinforce the suspicion of truth in the original charges. Lakoff’s most recent example is US President Donald Trump’s characterization of the media as the “enemy.”91 Those who protested that the media was “not the enemy” fell into the framing trap: by repeating the phrase, they gave plausibility to the idea that, in fact, the media could be the enemy. Similarly, those accused by Kohl of being nationalistic or anti-​European had no easy defense.


pages: 251 words: 63,630

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein

business climate, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, glass ceiling, high net worth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income per capita, indoor plumbing, job-hopping, Maui Hawaii, middle-income trap, price stability, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional, zero-sum game

Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Senator Charles Schumer from New York, feed the flames of fear and anger by arguing that China is stealing American jobs by keeping its currency low, and that America should take an aggressive approach with it. Celebrity businessman, entertainer, and billionaire Donald Trump agrees, and thinks America should slap a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese imports. President George W. Bush’s former counterterrorism and cybersecurity advisor Richard Clarke argues that America needs to beef up its cyber warfare capabilities, because it is under daily attack by Chinese assaults that could threaten America’s security just as much as conventional weapons.


pages: 215 words: 61,435

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

William Galston, “The Growing Threat of Illiberal Democracy,” Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2017, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-growing-threat-of-illiberal-democracy-1483488245. 3. Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). In the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Brennan wrote in a Washington Post article, “Most voters are systematically misinformed about the basic facts relevant to elections, and many advocate policies they would reject if they were better informed. We get low-quality government because voters have little idea what they are doing”; “The Problem with Our Government Is Democracy.” 4.


pages: 169 words: 61,064

Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl From Somewhere Else by Maeve Higgins

Black Lives Matter, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, imposter syndrome, Jon Ronson, Lyft, place-making, quantum entanglement, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat

“Okay, but immigration is so important right now, Trump was elected on an anti-immigrant ticket and I really feel that if you could just promote it more or—” He interrupted, “Absolutely, and I completely hear you. But the issue here is that the show is just not working.” Our show began to air the same week Donald Trump was elected as our next President, and I had a rising sense of panic that we weren’t doing enough to amplify the voices of my immigrant guests. I worried that my producers didn’t share my urgency, and had said as much in a late-night email the previous evening. “Don’t you adore late-night emails?”


pages: 215 words: 64,460

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

The vast majority of the world's leading software, biotechnology, and aerospace firms are concentrated in English-speaking countries.’17 But advocates of the free market Anglosphere also found themselves concerned at the direction taken by the UK government, which, under Theresa May, signalled an interest in returning to the Chamberlainite formula of industrial support and social reform and pivoting away from the liberal political economy favoured by most proponents of the Anglosphere. The growing divergence between a powerful current of economic liberalism and a more nationalistic conservatism has emerged as one of the most entrenched fault lines in Western politics. It surfaced powerfully in the USA and helped propel Donald Trump to victory in the presidential election of 2016. Trump also looks like a considerable potential obstacle to the liberal Anglosphere, not least because of his isolationist rhetoric and tilt towards protectionist policies. Having risen to greater prominence than it has enjoyed for a century, the Anglosphere is once more faced with formidable, and perhaps insurmountable, political obstacles.


pages: 243 words: 59,662

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lock screen, microdosing, Parkinson's law, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

That’s Toxic,” The Daily Beast, August 11, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/ceos-like-pepsicos-indra-nooyi-brag-they-get-4-hours-of-sleep-thats-toxic. Katie Pisa, “Why Missing a Night of Sleep Can Damage Your IQ,” CNN, April 20, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/01/business/sleep-and-leadership. Geoff Colvin, “Do Successful CEOs Sleep Less Than Everyone Else?” Fortune, November 18, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/11/18/sleep-habits-donald-trump. According to one study, 42 percent of leaders get six hours of sleep or less each night. Christopher M. Barnes, “Sleep Well, Lead Better,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 2018. 10. Nick van Dam and Els van der Helm, “The Organizational Cost of Insufficient Sleep,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2016, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organizational-cost-of-insufficient-sleep. 11.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Until very recently, conversations like this were on the fringes of society. But in recent years they’ve become more mainstream. In 2019, Fox News host Tucker Carlson sharply questioned financial maximization during a fifteen-minute monologue on his prime-time show. He said: At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter. The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America was more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods.


pages: 199 words: 61,648

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Landlord’s Game, means of production, moral hazard, new economy, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, precariat, Robert Shiller, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, wages for housework

He couldn’t teach, but he recovered sufficiently to write a book in which he asks why, if greed is as old as time, did modern capitalism emerge in northern Europe during the seventeenth century? He wasn’t the first to ask this question, Elizabeth Kolbert notes, and he wouldn’t be the last. “But,” she writes, “the answer he came up with—in effect, that Donald Trump is the spiritual heir of Martin Luther—probably still ranks as the most perverse.” Weber proposed that early Protestants believed they must work to accumulate wealth as proof that they were in God’s favor. This was a departure from the Catholic notion of good works—service done for others to earn salvation.


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

In this book, I have chosen to mimic the vocabulary we tend to use colloquially in the hospital –‘coronavirus’ and ‘Covid’. The WHO’s linguistic intervention matters. Earlier informal names for the new disease – Wuhan virus, Chinese flu – trigger a wave of ugliness and overt xenophobia towards East Asian individuals and communities. Despite this, the US president, Donald Trump, will persist in using the inflammatory moniker ‘Chinese flu’ all the way into the autumn of the 2020 presidential elections. In early February, police forces in London, Newcastle, Sheffield, Manchester, York, Portsmouth and Southampton report investigating multiple incidents of verbal and physical abuse towards members of the Chinese community.


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

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. India was TikTok’s largest market accounting for roughly one-third of the app’s users globally. Donald Trump, I imagine, had never even heard of TikTok when I started writing in the summer of 2019. It’s hard to imagine how the app’s fortunes in the U.S. could have become more dramatic in the past few months as TikTok finds itself entangled in global geopolitical rivalries and U.S. election campaigns.


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

It also means that when the Fed is acting purely within its domestic mandate and adjusts monetary policy to optimize US economic conditions, it unwittingly delivers collateral damage to other countries, setting off waves of ‘hot money’ flows into and out of foreign currencies with every quarter-point cut or hike in US interest rates. This fosters exchange rate mismatches that fuel risks of a race-to-the-bottom currency war akin to that of the 1930s. In the age of Donald Trump, these tensions have grown more acute as the United States has pursued a more mercantilist, America-first trade policy, and as the president’s persistent criticism of the Fed’s monetary policy has raised questions about its independence. The second trend pointing to a monetary paradigm shift is technological in nature.


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

Now that I’ve spent longer teaching there is another reason I try not to put ability labels on students: the word is too narrow. Last year I had a student called Desiree who, no matter how hard I tried to explain it, could not comprehend that the demand curve slopes downwards. One day I decided to stage a fake World Economic Forum press conference at Davos, and got my class to play Prince Charles, Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg. With some misgivings I gave Desiree the part of Trump, and found that although the simplest academic tasks defeated her, being President of the United States was well within her reach. Desiree electrified the class with a Trump-like contortion of her bottom lip and the way she pointed and shouted ‘Fake news!’


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

In democratic countries, the love of equality was a deeper and more abiding passion than the love of liberty. Freedom could be had without democracy, but equality was the uniquely defining characteristic of democratic ages, and for that reason people clung to it more tenaciously. The excesses of freedom—the arrogant display of a Leona Helmsley or a Donald Trump, the crimes committed by an Ivan Boesky or Michael Milken, the damage done by the Exxon Valdez to Prudhoe Bay—are much more visible than the evils of extreme equality like creeping mediocrity or the tyranny of the majority. And while political freedom bestows exalted pleasures on a small number of citizens, equality provides the great mass of people with small enjoyments.9 Thus while the liberal project has been largely successful over the past four hundred years in excluding the more visible forms of megalothymia from political life, our society will continue to remain preoccupied with questions of equalizing dignity.

It is reasonable to wonder whether all people will believe that the kinds of struggles and sacrifices possible in a self-satisfied and prosperous liberal democracy are sufficient to call forth what is highest in man. For are there not reservoirs of idealism that cannot be exhausted—indeed, that are not even touched—if one becomes a developer like Donald Trump, or a mountain climber like Reinhold Meissner, or politician like George Bush? Difficult as it is, in many ways, to be these individuals, and for all the recognition they receive, their lives are not the most difficult, and the causes they serve are not the most serious or the most just. And as long as they are not, the horizon of human possibilities that they define will not be ultimately satisfying for the most thymotic natures.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

The perception gap is even wider in France and the United States, with polls indicating that people think the immigrant population is three times bigger than it really is: American respondents estimated that immigrants account for 32 percent of the population, when the actual figure is 13 percent. This misperception reflects fear of outsiders and skews political debate toward limiting immigration rather than welcoming a healthy mix. In 2015, a front-running candidate for U.S. president, Donald Trump, promised to force Mexico to pay for an impregnable wall on the border. But with the working-age population in Mexico poised to fall as well, Mexicans will have less reason to seek work in the United States. Trump and his supporters didn’t realize it, but in the four years before 2015, net migration from Mexico had fallen to zero, in part because construction jobs in the United States had been harder to find.

In other post-crisis environments, the electorate may demand something more like retribution, rather than reform, if they are angry over rising inequality or fearful of foreign threats. That is the mood in many countries now, the United States included. To an extent not seen in many decades, the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign has been dominated by populists, led on the right by the real estate billionaire Donald Trump and on the left by Bernie Sanders, who is calling for a political revolution against the “billionaire class.” The language of class warfare rarely bodes well for an economy, especially if it pushes mainstream candidates to adopt more radical positions. Many of the Republican presidential candidates are vying with Trump to stake out the most hard-line positions on issues such as immigration, which could undermine the advantage the United States enjoys as a magnet for foreign talent.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

When Obama told a cheering crowd that “the auto industry is back on top” at a campaign rally in Madison in 2012, the citizens of Janesville who happened to see him on the news must have wondered what he was talking about. To paraphrase Amy Goldstein, those words would have been hard to repeat in Janesville.37 Populism and identity politics have been fueled by diminishing economic opportunity for the unskilled and the lack of a political response to their concerns. During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump infuriated just about every conceivable group except perhaps one: the white working class. It has been argued that the election outcome was a result of anxiety about the future status of white Americans as the dominant group rather than about the consequence of economic hardships. As the political scientist Diana C.

Social media undoubtedly became an important channel that allowed the Trump campaign to tap into people’s discontents, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal bears witness, but it was not in itself the cause of people’s concerns. The New Luddites Globalization has moved to center stage of the political debate. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both made blistering assaults on trade agreements a main theme of their campaigns. Trump’s win was in part attributable to the adverse impacts of trade on parts of the labor market, and it stands to reason that his campaign promises to renegotiate trade deals, which he claimed had benefited other countries at the expense of American workers, appealed to those who felt that they had lost out to globalization.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Jacobson, “Partisan Polarization in Presidential Support: The Electoral Connection,” Congress & the Presidency 30, no. 1 (2003): 1–36, doi:10.1080/07343460309507855. We’ve extended this analysis back to the late 1930s by drawing on previously unanalyzed polls from the Gallup archives and forward to 2019 by using the latest data from https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx. 63 The spikes of bipartisan approval of the president in 1989 and 2002 represent the immediate “rally round the flag” effect of the starts of the two Gulf Wars, but those quickly disappeared in intense partisan debates about those wars. 64 Joseph Bafumi and Robert Y. Shapiro, “A New Partisan Voter,” The Journal of Politics 71, no. 1 (January 2009): 1–24, doi:10.1017/S0022381608090014. 65 Larry Bartels, “Partisanship and Voting Behavior, 1952–1996,” American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 1 (January 2000): 35–50, doi:10.2307/2669291; Bafumi and Shapiro, “A New Partisan Voter.” 66 For a thoughtful analysis of this methodologically complicated issue, see Fiorina, Unstable Majorities, chap. 6.

Uslaner and Mitchell Brown, “Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement,” American Politics Research 33, no. 6 (2005): 868–894, doi:10.1177/1532673X04271903; and Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (New York: Viking, 2017). 23 David Morris Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 24 See Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); and John L. Campbell, American Discontent: The Rise of Donald Trump and Decline of the Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For a sophisticated and thoroughly documented argument about the effects of technological innovation and productivity (1920–1970), see Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 25 Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2013).


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

Companies in a global economy can locate anywhere, and face tougher competition.” I squirmed a little in my chair. In a few words, the president had expressed some of the anxiety we all feel about technology and its impact on jobs—anxiety that would later play out in the election of President Donald Trump. In fact, just after the election, I joined my colleagues from the tech sector for a roundtable discussion with President-elect Trump who, like his predecessor, wanted to explore how we continue to innovate while also creating new jobs. Ultimately, we need technological breakthroughs to drive growth beyond what we’re seeing, and I believe mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum are the type of innovations that will serve as accelerants.


pages: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

Having funny and honest conversations with like-minded people I didn’t know got me through hard times that were unfolding in my actual house. Then came the Jan Moir and the LA Fitness shamings - shamings to be proud of - and I remembered how exciting it felt when hitherto remote billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump created their own Twitter accounts. For the first time in history we sort-of had direct access to ivory-tower oligarchs like them. We became keenly watchful for transgressions. After a while it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot.


pages: 214 words: 71,585

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

delayed gratification, demographic transition, Donald Trump, financial independence, happiness index / gross national happiness, index card, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Multics, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, Skype, women in the workforce

When she looked at me strangely, I said, “I’m sorry. I guess I don’t believe you can have it all. I don’t believe any of us can. In fact, I believe the very expression having it all is not only a myth but also a symptom of how sick we are in our contemporary culture. Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.” * * * Feminist friends my age groan in agony when they meet young women who don’t even know precisely what the words Roe v.


pages: 201 words: 64,545

Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air freight, business process, clean water, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, pushing on a string, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Rubik’s Cube, urban sprawl, work culture

This book has been in process for fifteen years because it’s taken that long to prove to ourselves that we can break the rules of traditional business and make it not just work but work even better, especially for a company that wants to be here for the next one hundred years. HISTORY No young kid growing up ever dreams of someday becoming a businessman. He wants to be a fireman, a sponsored athlete, or a forest ranger. The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welches of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values. I wanted to be a fur trapper when I grew up. My father was a tough French Canadian from Quebec. Papa completed only three years of schooling before he had to begin working on the family farm, at the age of nine.


pages: 295 words: 66,824

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

That’s why I thought news stories in November 2002 recounting New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s criticism of Institutional Investor magazine’s analyst awards were a tad superfluous. Spitzer noted that the stock-picking performances of most of the winning analysts were, in fact, quite mediocre. Maybe Donald Trump will hold a press conference pointing out that the country’s top gamblers don’t do particularly well at roulette. Decimals and Other Changes Like analysts and brokers, market makers (who make their money on the spread between the bid and the ask price for a stock) have received more than their share of criticism in recent years.


pages: 222 words: 50,318

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

Leinberger, “The Need for Alternatives to the Nineteen Standard Real Estate Product Types,” Places 17, no. 2 (July 2005). International Council of Shopping Centers and Urban Land Institute, Dollars and Cents of Shopping Centers, 2006. Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), p. 171. Although many developers, personified by Donald Trump, have the image of being the ultimate gamblers, most are extremely cautious. The name of the game is to minimize all risks up front before any financial exposure is taken, such as, have national credit tenants, use other people’s money, do not start a development unless you know your exit strategy, develop only proven conforming products, do not pioneer, have construction-cost guarantees with a bonded construction firm, etc.


Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual by Peter Meyers

computer age, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, lock screen, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex

Anywhere on the row where it’s located will do just fine. Register your Kindle. If you bought it yourself—that is, using your own Amazon account—the Fire has your account info already filled in, as you’ll see on the next screen, which greets you by name. If someone else purchased it for you, as a gift, say, tap Not Donald Trump and then log in using your own Amazon account. (Don’t have one? The box on Creating an Amazon Account shows you how to knock out that must-do chore.) Finally, tap the Get Started Now button. If a software update is available—a likely occurrence in these early days of bug-squashing and feature-adding—the Fire will immediately start downloading it.


pages: 279 words: 71,542

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

It’s often convenient, for example, to connect the experiment to a calendar month, which means you might use thirty-one days, or perhaps twenty-eight days, depending on the month in which you run the process. * The name Raymond Kethledge may sound familiar, as in the summer of 2018 he was reported to be one of four names on President Donald Trump’s shortlist for Supreme Court nominee to replace Anthony Kennedy. * Solitude has been studied in various guises in a religious context back through antiquity, where it has long served important purposes in helping connect to the divine and sharpen moral intuition. I pick up this thread relatively late in the history of civilization mainly for concision’s sake


pages: 196 words: 65,045

Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality by Lee Gutkind, Purba

Apollo 13, Columbine, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, friendly fire, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mason jar, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan

An increasing number of historians, including Simon Schama (The Landscapes of My Life), are creative nonfiction writers, although they call themselves or are described by others as "narrative historians." 1.3 And People with Stories to Tell Autobiographies-memoirs-are becoming increasingly popular, as shown by recent record-setting bestsellers by Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump, and Gore Vidal. Or the many tell-it-all books about O.J. and Nicole Simpson, the sex life of Bill Clinton, and the tragic and frightening story of the Menendez brothers. Not to forget books by Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Charleton Heston-there are celebrities ad infinitum. These authors may not be considered "scholars" or thinkers but many may have compelling stories to tell, and stories, after all, are what good literature of any genre is all about. 1.4 Flies on the Wall The books and essays of Gould, Thomas, and Sacks provide windows through which the general public can observe situations that are often inaccessible.


Into the Fire: My Life as a London Firefighter by Edric Kennedy-Macfoy

Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, post-work

It’s the incidents like this one that make me appreciate all the training we do to maintain and develop our skills. These are jobs where your competence and experience can be the deciding factor as to whether someone lives or dies. There is strength in unity. With joint working between the Fire Service, Ambulance Service and Police, we managed to save him. 17 Croydon The day after Donald Trump was elected President, 9 November 2016, a tram derailed in Croydon, south London. On that morning, I got to work as normal when my shift started at 9.30, but the machines weren’t there. The white watch, who were due to finish when we started, were still at the scene. That included the Fire Rescue Unit and the USAR (Urban Search And Rescue) prime movers.


pages: 274 words: 70,481

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

said Al, a triumphant glint in his eye. “Never heard of him!” Judy agreed. “He’s a psychologist,” I said. I exhaled to indicate that I felt the same way he presumably did about psychologists. Al pointed toward a gold cabinet in his office, inside which were photographs of him with Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, Prince Charles, Ronald Reagan, Kerry Packer, Lord Rothschild, Rush Limbaugh, and Jeb Bush, as if to say, “Those are men I have heard of!” “So, that list . . . ?” said Al. He looked suddenly intrigued. “Go ahead,” he said. “Let’s do it.” “Okay,” I said. I pulled it out of my pocket. “Are you sure?”


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

‘Doom and gloom, everywhere’, as a woman on the street responded when public radio asked her to describe the state of the world.2 This is what we see in the news, and it seems to be the story of our time. An article about the zeitgeist ahead of New Year’s Eve 2015 in the Financial Times ran with the headline: ‘Battered, bruised and jumpy – the whole world is on edge’. These perceptions feed the fear and nostalgia on which Donald Trump has built his US presidential campaign. Fifty-eight per cent of those who voted for Britain to leave the EU in the country’s recent referendum say life is worse today than thirty years ago. In 1955, thirteen per cent of the Swedish public thought that there were ‘intolerable conditions’ in society.


pages: 201 words: 70,698

Into the Fire: My Life as a London Firefighter by Edric Kennedy-Macfoy

Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, post-work

It’s the incidents like this one that make me appreciate all the training we do to maintain and develop our skills. These are jobs where your competence and experience can be the deciding factor as to whether someone lives or dies. There is strength in unity. With joint working between the Fire Service, Ambulance Service and Police, we managed to save him. 17 Croydon The day after Donald Trump was elected President, 9 November 2016, a tram derailed in Croydon, south London. On that morning, I got to work as normal when my shift started at 9.30, but the machines weren’t there. The white watch, who were due to finish when we started, were still at the scene. That included the Fire Rescue Unit and the USAR (Urban Search And Rescue) prime movers.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

In fact, they have arguably even been made worse off by it. So why has automation not been accompanied by similar opposition to new technology as was the case during the Industrial Revolution? In some ways, it already has. To be clear, I am certainly not suggesting that automation is the only reason for Donald Trump’s appeal. But it is hard to believe that he would have won the 2016 election if there were well-­ paying jobs in abundance for the unskilled and wages were rising for 10 Attitudes to Technology: Part 2 95 everyone. Those who voted for Trump are in essence those who have seen a reversal of fortunes over recent decades.


The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living by Brock Bastian

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cognitive dissonance, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, placebo effect, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, sugar pill, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce

TRIGGER WARNINGS This failure to develop psychological resilience has led to an emergent phenomenon within colleges and universities. Lately, it seems that students not only expect to get As or to avoid failure, they also expect to be protected from contradiction. In March 2016 students at Emory University woke to find messages all over campus written in chalk in support of Donald Trump. Rather than viewing this as something they disagreed with, as an indication that a diversity of opinions existed on campus, some students saw this as an act of intimidation. They responded with a protest – about forty or fifty students shouted in the quad: ‘You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!’


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Thiel himself had spoken publicly of New Zealand as a “utopia,” during the period in 2011 when he was maneuvering for citizenship, investing in various local startups under a venture capital fund called Valar Ventures. (Valar, needless to say, was another Tolkien reference.) This was a man with a particular understanding of what a utopia might look like—who did not believe, after all, in the compatibility of freedom and democracy. In a Vanity Fair article about his role as adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a friend was quoted as saying that “Thiel has said to me directly and repeatedly that he wanted to have his own country,” adding that he had even gone so far as to price up the prospect at somewhere around one hundred billion dollars. The Kiwis I spoke with were uncomfortably aware of what Thiel’s interest in their country represented, of how it seemed to figure more generally in the frontier fantasies of American libertarians.


pages: 241 words: 70,307

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era? by David de Cremer

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bitcoin, blockchain, business climate, business process, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, future of work, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, race to the bottom, robotic process automation, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, Turing test, work culture , workplace surveillance , zero-sum game

But, interestingly enough, it is actually the other way around; the situation makes the leader. And history supports this, revealing examples where leadership is attributed to those who, for reasons other than their own unique capabilities, win wars (Sun Tzu’s The Art of War), or can give the impression that their office is doing wonders for the economy (President Donald Trump bragging that ten years without recession is his own doing). One of the most extreme examples of this in my lifetime is President George W. Bush and the tragedy of 9/11. Before the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit by hijacked airplanes, Bush had some of the lowest leadership ratings since records began.


Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

Evan and David found their natural experiment in an obscure, unusual procedure in the Illinois Republican presidential primary. In it, voters cast multiple ballots for delegates selected to represent presidential candidates at the Republican convention, where a candidate is formally nominated. An Illinois voter who supported Donald Trump, for instance, couldn't vote for him in the primary, but rather would vote for three delegates who are legally bound to attend the convention and support this candidate. The twists that create the natural experiment in this case are: first, that these delegates' names appear on the ballot, even though their identities are nearly entirely irrelevant.


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

Regardless of Brian’s ease with Pelosi, the IRS investigation and the gathering regulatory storm meant Coinbase had to double down on its political efforts. Brian hired Mike Lempres, a political fixer who had served as associate attorney general of the Justice Department in the 1990s and had worked with President Donald Trump’s future Attorney General William Barr as well as Robert Mueller, who would lead a high-profile investigation into Russian interference in American elections. A fifth-generation son of San Francisco, Lempres has a fluff of white hair around a growing bald spot, but he still projects youth and vigor.


pages: 211 words: 67,975

The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty by Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Broken windows theory, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, Gavin Belson, hive mind, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, Larry Ellison, off-the-grid, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs

Instead, Steph lit into officials, singling out individuals in the room for coming up short on vision and execution. After perhaps the fastest rise in NBA history, Steph’s off-court status was in stasis as UA scuffled on the basketball front. In February 2017, Steph delivered a public rebuke of his brand’s CEO. Plank was quoted calling Donald Trump “an asset to the country” on CNBC. In response, Steph simultaneously mocked Trump and Plank, telling Marcus Thompson in a Bay Area News Group article, “I agree with that description, if you remove the ‘et’ from asset.” That quote would go viral. Thompson knew what he had the instant Steph said it.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

It had been a rough fourteen months for Zuckerberg since our initial meeting in Menlo Park. In that time, Facebook revealed it had missed a large-scale Kremlin-sponsored misinformation campaign on its service during the 2016 election. And further reports showed that Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm, illicitly used millions of Facebook users’ data in its work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. These events damaged Facebook’s credibility, hurt its standing in the world, and landed Zuckerberg a date with the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees. As Zuckerberg walked in, I wondered how this man, so driven by feedback, so determined to find out what others were thinking, could have been so blind to vulnerabilities in his service.


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

On average, siblings are more similar than random people in just about every dimension you could think to test. For example, siblings are far more likely than random people to share political beliefs. My younger brother, Noah, just about always agrees with my political analysis. We adore Barack Obama. We hate Donald Trump. But why is this? Do Noah and I have coded in our DNA the same genes that make us moved by Obama’s message of hope and change and turned off by Trump’s message? This is certainly possible, since Noah and I share 50 percent of our DNA. Or do Noah and I share political beliefs because our brains were both imprinted in similar ways at a young age?


pages: 205 words: 71,872

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture

I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy job—starting a print and digital publication from scratch was no joke, especially for someone without any media experience. And I’d been given a short deadline: I had to scrape together a full issue of Increment in just two months. But I found that I was thankful for the challenge, grateful for the intensity. It was a dark time in the world. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and no one really knew what to expect. Everyone seemed angry and uncertain, and there was a palpable sense of fear, unrest, and suspense in the air. There were rumors that Russia had influenced the election, and many believed that Trump himself was linked to Russia.


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

Kulkarni, and Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn, “ ‘Exhausting,’ ‘Surreal,’ ‘Dumpster Fire’: How Our Readers Described 2020,” Washington Post, Dec. 18, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/lifestyle/2020-in-one-word/ . BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Katherine Brown, “2020 Tied for Warmest Year on Record, NASA Analysis Shows,” NASA, Jan. 14, 2021, www.nasa.gov/press-release/2020-tied-for-warmest-year-on-record-nasa-analysis-shows. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Anneken Tappe, “Donald Trump’s Final Economic Report Card Could Be Very Underwhelming,” CNN, Jan. 27, 2021, www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/economy/us-gdp-fourth-quarter-preview/index.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Apjit Walia, “America’s Racial Gap & Big Tech’s Closing Window,” Deutsche Bank Research, Sept. 3, 2020, www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/America%27s_Racial_Gap_%26_Big_Tech%27s_Closing_Window/RPS_EN_DOC_VIEW.calias?


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

One thing is sure – that the total debt of many countries (public plus private debt) has reached and has remained at exceptionally high levels (see Tanzi, 2016b). The IMF Fiscal Monitor of October 2016 reported that total (public and private) debt of the nonfinancial sector in the world economy was 225 percent of world GDP at the time, a historic record. Another major question is what impact the intention by the Donald Trump administration to get rid of the Dodd-Frank law will have. The American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, has estimated that this law has imposed costs equivalent to $36 billion. Ch apter 11 The Growth of Termites In the coming chapters I shall discuss ways in which governmental interventions occasionally, or even often, failed to deliver the expected results; some of the reasons why this has happened; and how developments in the private sectors might be contributing to these outcomes.

The situation described has contributed to the rise of populism now evident in the United States and in several other countries, and also to the continued push, on the part of some groups, for more public spending and for higher taxes, especially on the rich, as well as for more regulations on some sectors of the market, especially on the financial market. The remarkable successes, first, of the book by Piketty in 2014 and, later, of Donald Trump in the 2016 US election are, from different angles, both signals of the problem discussed in this book and of its impact on the current world and on the need to bring changes. A future that would de-emphasize specific rules and put more reliance on good general principles would seem desirable.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

In The Swan, working-class women were being altered through plastic surgery and breast implants to look like, say, a more modest, suburban Dolly Parton. While American Idol turned unknowns into overnight singing sensations, the attention-craving heiress Paris Hilton consented to filming an updated Green Acres in The Simple Life, moving into an Arkansas family’s rural home. Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, billed as a “seductive weave of aspiration and Darwinism,” celebrated ruthlessness. In these and related shows, talent was secondary; untrained stars were hired to serve voyeuristic interests, in expectation that, as mediocrities, they could be relied on to exhibit the worst of human qualities: vanity, lust, and greed.

We are a country that imagines itself as democratic, and yet the majority has never cared much for equality. Because that’s not how breeding works. Heirs, pedigree, lineage: a pseudo-aristocracy of wealth still finds a way to assert its social power. We see how inherited wealth grants status without any guarantee of merit or talent. To wit: would we know of Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Jesse Jackson Jr., or such Hollywood names as Charlie Sheen and Paris Hilton, except for the fact that these, and many others like them, had powerful, influential parents? Even some men of recognized competence in national politics are products of nepotism: Albert Gore Jr., Rand Paul, Andrew Cuomo, and numerous Kennedys.


pages: 616 words: 189,609

The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey by Richard Whittle

Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, digital map, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, helicopter parent, military-industrial complex, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, The Soul of a New Machine, VTOL

Cheney’s nonendorsement was followed by an article in Aviation Week reporting that the Air Force Special Operations Command was “reconsidering its commitment” to the Osprey. The same week, the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder Newspapers, a big chain that owned the Philadelphia Inquirer and other important papers, published a story describing how support for the Osprey was flagging. Donald Trump, once a member of the Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition formed by Representative Curt Weldon and Bell-Boeing in the 1990s, had changed his mind. “I believe you should fly in a helicopter or an airplane, but not both,” Trump told Knight Ridder. “The Osprey has too many working parts to ever be a very safe plane.”

Fred McCorkle Briefs on MV-22 Maintenance Allegation, Jan. 19, 2001. 312 On Friday, the day after: Robert Burns, “Officer admitted asking Marines to falsify Osprey records,” Associated Press, Jan. 19, 2001. 312 The next morning, an editorial: “Dangerous Deceptions on the Osprey,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 2001. 312 That evening, CBS broadcast: CBS News Transcripts, 60 Minutes, Jan. 21, 2001. 314 The night after the broadcast: NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript, “Commandant James Jones,” Jan. 22, 2001. 315 Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan: Frank Gaffney, “Osprey as Phoenix,” The Washington Times, Jan. 23, 2001. 315 one in the Chicago Tribune saying: “Kill the Osprey before it kills again,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 23, 2001. 315 sent Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: Robert Burns, “Marines cede control of Osprey probe to Pentagon’s top investigator,” Associated Press, Jan. 24, 2001. 316 Jones issued a statement: United States Marine Corps News Release, “DoD IG asked to assume investigative lead,” Jan. 24, 2001. 316 Vice President Dick Cheney was asked: ABC News Transcript, “Vice President Dick Cheney Discusses Washington Issues,” This Week, Jan. 28, 2001. 316 followed by an article in Aviation Week: Robert Wall, “V-22 Support Fades Amid Accidents, Accusations, Probes,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, Jan. 29. 2001, p. 28. 316 Donald Trump, once a member: Jonathan S. Landay and Peter Nicholas, “Congress wants review of Osprey; future funding could depend on findings,” Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, Feb. 1, 2001. CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE DARK AGES Page 318 He also had published a popular book: Norman R. Augustine, Augustine’s Laws, (Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1997). 318 Commission chairman Dailey had worried: Dailey, deLeon, interviews. 319 where he found a long article: Carlton Meyer, “The V-22 Fiasco,” www.g2mil.com/V-22.htm. 321 In a February 1 conference call: Jennifer Autrey, “Congressman blames makers for V-22 crashes,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Feb. 2, 2001. 322 The investigations found that, as so often: New River JAGMAN Report; Naval Aircraft Mishap Report VMMT-204, Class A FM, 01–01, 11 Dec 00, MV-22B, 165440. 324 the Blue Ribbon Commission had issued: Report of the Panel to Review the V-22 Program, Department of Defense, April 30, 2001. 324 “This was an accident that”: Transcript, Open Meeting, Panel to Review the V-22 Program, March 9, 2001. 326 “This aircraft can do the job”: Otto Kreisher, “Osprey panel recommends continue program, but fix it first,” Copley News Service, April 18, 2001. 326 When Harry P.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Scientists expect the region to perpetually suffer from periods of excessive rain and extreme drought, threatening the water supply, devastating agricultural production and wreaking havoc on wildlife. Meanwhile, the cost of living has skyrocketed and the state has essentially declared war on President Donald Trump (with a small movement for secession billowing after the 2016 election). Good thing voters legalized recreational pot as of January 1, 2018. Best on Film Vertigo (1958) Alfred Hitchcock's noir thriller, set in SF and San Juan Batista. Dirty Harry (1971) Clint Eastwood as an SFPD inspector, investigating murder.

In an attempt to protect the state's productivity and also an enormous population of undocumented immigrants, lawmakers in 2017 introduced legislation that would make California the nation's first sanctuary state, meaning that law enforcement couldn't arrest or detain anyone over immigration violations. The move seemed part of California's larger effort to defy its arch nemesis, President Donald Trump, who promptly accused California of being 'out of control' but didn't explain how. In some ways the California of today is very much under control, with a reasonably balanced budget and low crime rates relative to previous decades. And while fuddy-duddys might argue that relaxing marijuana laws will incite chaos, in Northern California those old things have been ignored for as long as anyone can remember.

Of those who are currently married, 33% won’t be in 10 years. Increasingly, Californians are shacking up: the number of unmarried cohabiting couples has increased 40% since 1990. Politically, Northern California is among the most liberal places in the US, particularly in the coastal areas. In the 2016 election voters overwhelmingly rejected Donald Trump, who lost the state by more than four million votes. Post-election, no state was more vocal about its dissatisfaction with the outcome. Self-help, fitness and body modification are major industries throughout California, successfully marketed since the 1970s as ‘lite’ versions of religious experience – all the agony and ecstasy of the major religious brands, without those heavy commandments.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Such “emergent democracy” can be seen in certain aspects of the Arab Spring that roiled Middle Eastern authoritarian governments in 2011, though it sadly failed to move beyond the coup to the creation of a government. The hacktivist group Anonymous—highly potent, yet completely leaderless—may be the purest expression of emergent democracy. Elements of emergent democracy were a prominent feature in the 2016 presidential campaign; one could easily sense that neither Bernie Sanders nor Donald Trump “led” their respective movements so much as surfed them, hoping and praying the electorate’s collective id would eventually lead safely back to shore. The science writer Steven Johnson, whose book Emergence introduced many of these ideas to a general audience, compares the evolution of new ideas to slime mold—a single-celled organism that gathers together to form a kind of super-organism when food is in short supply.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Concerns about the shrinking role of labor, and the shift in income distribution, have already caused alarm in many corners, from economists such as Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a stinging critique of capitalism, became a global best seller, to populist movements (such as those led by Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump) that promise to eradicate the plight of the displaced worker. And two sets of relatively conventional ideas, one distributive and the other participatory, are being advanced by policy makers and debated in many nations as a response to this troubling trend. As income seems to shift from labor to capital, the proposed measures on the distributive side aim at taxing the sources of this automation-driven income.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

We sought not only to answer Lyle’s specific question about the willingness of wealthy people to pay for amenities A, B, and C the next time they purchase a multimillion dollar home; we also sought to understand who the wealthy are—at fundamental social and psychological levels: their mind-set and lifestyles; their attitudes and values; their aspirations for themselves, their children, and the world in general. Today’s Wealth Explosion 3 We sought to understand how they came by their money, and how, if at all, it has changed them; whether money can buy happiness, or if it just brings a new set of challenges; whether they live loudly or quietly; whether the typical wealthy person is more like Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, Paris Hilton, or none of the above; indeed, whether or not there is such a thing as a ‘‘typical’’ wealthy person. As market researchers, we were, of course, particularly interested in how they save, invest, and spend their money. In where they shop, what brands they like, and what luxury means to them.


pages: 274 words: 73,344

Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World by Nataly Kelly, Jost Zetzsche

airport security, Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, glass ceiling, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the market place

Interpreting always felt easy for him.2 Fast-forward to today, and you’ll see Jason in some situations that also have a lot riding on them, but he’s as relaxed and at ease interpreting as he was as a kid. One moment you’ll find him rendering an acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. The next, you’ll see him standing next to Hollywood stars at galas and charity events. Turn on the television, and there he is, speaking to Larry King, Ellen, or Donald Trump. Peer over at the White House lawn, and you’ll find him having a conversation with President Obama. Jason interprets professionally for only one person, but she happens to be the most famous Deaf person in the world—Marlee Matlin. An Oscar-winning actress, Matlin has a lot riding on her interpreter’s skills.


pages: 252 words: 75,349

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, cashless society, defense in depth, Donald Trump, drop ship, employer provided health coverage, independent contractor, information security, John Markoff, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, pirate software, placebo effect, ransomware, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stuxnet, the payments system, transaction costs, web application

What’s mind-boggling is that when the UCSD researchers calculated the direct and indirect costs of these programs during an eleven-month period between May 2009 and April 2010, they found that the net profit for these programs was about 20 percent of gross revenue. “What’s fascinating about all this is that at the end of the day, we’re not talking about all that much money,” said UCSD’s Savage. “These guys running the pharma programs are not Donald Trumps, yet their activity is going to have real and substantial financial impact on the day-to-day lives of tens of millions of people. In other words, for these guys to make modest riches, we need a multibillion-dollar security industry to deal with them.” Savage and his research team also had a chance to review many of the leaked chats between Gusev and his business partner Stupin, and said the conversations were replete with examples of how these guys were constantly looking for ways to add value to their consumer offerings.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Little, suggests that we may judge an economic system by whether it’s possible, through some series of trades or exchanges, to make at least one individual better off without making anyone worse off. This is a fairly minimalist view on social welfare—for example, if a tax policy brought millions of people out of poverty but in the process left Donald Trump with ten fewer dollars in his bank account, it would fail to be a Pareto improvement because someone—even someone as rich and odious as Trump—is made worse off. But that also means that Pareto improvements should be changes that everyone can agree on because, by definition, everyone is better off.


pages: 258 words: 73,109

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Broken windows theory, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, fudge factor, John Perry Barlow, new economy, operational security, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, social contagion, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

When you make the kind of money that great cheaters make, it changes your life. Is anyone here a foodie?” A few students raised their hands. “What about a meal made personally by Jacques Pépin? A wine tasting at Châteauneuf-du-Pape? When you make enough money, you can live large forever. Just ask Donald Trump! Look, we all know that for ten million dollars you would drive over your boyfriend or girlfriend. I am here to tell you that it is okay and to release the handbrake for you!” By that time most of the students were starting to realize that they were not dealing with a serious role model. But having spent the last ten minutes sharing dreams about all the exciting things they would do with their first $10 million, they were torn between the desire to be rich and the recognition that cheating is morally wrong.


pages: 202 words: 72,857

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy by John Lee

8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, butterfly effect, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Donald Trump, financial independence, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Maslow's hierarchy, multilevel marketing, negative equity, passive income, payday loans, reality distortion field, self-driving car, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

Take care of it; it is a major part of what you are worth. Treat your staff and customers with great respect. Respect and value your business partnerships, and do not put up with people who do not respect you. The money is in the relationships; the fortune is in the follow-ups. Think big. You have to start thinking big instead of small. (Donald Trump says if you're going to do some thinking about investing anyway, you might as well make it big!) Imagine the size of the return on your investment. How big do you want it to be? If you want it to be sizeable, then you have to put in the proportional amount of work, in terms of money and time. Your investment is your money and your time.


Frommer's New York City Day by Day by Hilary Davidson

Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donald Trump, East Village, glass ceiling, Saturday Night Live

Special-Interest Tours 36 BROOKLYN HEIGHTS 06_579312 ch02.qxd 10/3/05 10:01 AM Page 37 37 he city has long been a mecca for ambitious types, from artists to mercenaries—and some things never change. The robber barons of the 19th century, men like Henry Clay Frick and J. P. Morgan, thrived here. Their modern-day counterparts include such power titans as Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg. START: Subway B, F, or V to Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. 1 Trump Tower. Definitely not your average shopping mall. Bold and brassy, the gold signage on this 1983 building practically screams “Look at me!” Step inside to view the six-story mirrored atrium and the waterfall cascading down a pink-granite wall.


Yes Please by Amy Poehler

airport security, Albert Einstein, blood diamond, carbon footprint, David Sedaris, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Pepto Bismol, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, the medium is the message

I would hold up my two index fingers next to my head while Jeffrey put on my old-man wig, and Spivey would stand next to me telling me that my new cue to enter was “Thanksgiving is ruined!” Everyone was equal during those moments, all of us actors in a play trying to get changed in time. I watched Robert De Niro wiggle into spandex pants as Siegfried. Or Roy. I witnessed Donald Trump stepping into a chicken suit. I engaged in small talk with Derek Jeter as he was buttoned into a dress. “How are you doing?” I asked. “Are you nervous?” He just laughed and said, “No,” thus settling the long-standing debate about what is more nerve-racking: live comedy or the World Series. “SNL time” is completely different from real-world time.


pages: 258 words: 71,880

Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street by Kate Kelly

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, fixed income, housing crisis, index arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, moral hazard, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, technology bubble, too big to fail, traveling salesman

He remained chairman of the board and a member of the firm’s executive committee, the powerful cabal of a half dozen executives who made all of Bear’s major decisions. He continued running the cold-sweat meetings and kept his desk among those of the firm’s stock traders. He was in daily contact with friends like Glickman, by then a Bear director, and continued advising clients like Donald Trump and Barbara Walters, whom he had dated in the early 1980s. Greenberg’s emphasis on spending curbs and on troubleshooting risks preserved the firm’s reputation for watching its money. But Bear also had a knack for bending the rules to suit its needs. Not only did the firm hire traders who were considered black sheep by their former employers, it appeared to tolerate improper behavior for years at a time—only to tussle with regulators who then tried to cry foul.


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

And while it’s easy to pick on Vice President Cheney (he did shoot his friend in the face, after all), we are all guilty of surrounding ourselves with like-minded others and comfortable half-truths. A 2009 study out of Ohio State found that people spend 36% more time reading an essay if it aligns with their opinions. In the 2016 US Presidential election, a majority of those who voted for either of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton did not have a single friend who was voting for their non-preferred candidate. Regrettably for honest seekers of truth, it is becoming easier and easier to avoid information that doesn’t square with a cherished personal narrative. The proliferation of news sites and highly specialized pundits means that we increasingly live in a world in which accepted truths chase an audience rather than an audience searching for truth.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

How to reconcile this with the reality of America, where the American dream meets the nightmare of the projects, the prison system, the racism? The flag is still sometimes used to express the belief that there is something rotten in the state as well as something great. For example, in May 2016 anti-Donald Trump activists burnt the Stars and Stripes outside a Trump rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and several have been desecrated at ‘Black Lives Matter’ rallies. But to reconcile these different aspects is not so difficult: there are many positives to the American way of life. Like people everywhere, the flag’s unique symbolism, its aspirations, speak to Americans, as national flags do to people everywhere; just because the country, the world, is not perfect, it doesn’t mean you can’t dream.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

This new entrepreneur is a mishmash between the mom-and-pop traders and retailers associated with the old world, contented to make enough to feed his or her family and little else, and the modern venture-funded, al -about-growth entrepreneurs of Silicon Val ey. These entrepreneurs live in a shrunken, globalized world. They may be grappling with emerging market problems, but their role models aren’t someone in a nearby vil age. They are frequently names like Bil Gates, Steve Jobs, or even Donald Trump and Walt Disney. These entrepreneurs have an inkling of how modern venture capital works. They know tiny companies can become huge powerhouses quickly. They know high risk can be highly rewarded. They know David can beat Goliath. And this new global entrepreneur has three big advantages. The first one is the home field advantage.


pages: 366 words: 76,476

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

The Academy wanted to kick off the telecast with a rapid-fire montage of people, both celebrities and not, talking about their favorite films. My friend Justin was Morris’s casting director, so he got me on the list. There was no guarantee that I’d end up in the final cut of the short, but I could do the interview on-camera and see how it went. Having an in, I got scheduled the same day as the biggest names: Donald Trump, Walter Cronkite, Iggy Pop, Al Sharpton, Mikhail Gorbachev. Trump and Gorbachev were back to back, and somewhere out there there’s a picture of the two of them, with me in the middle, photobombing before photobombing was a thing. I say “somewhere” because right after the flash, Trump snapped his fingers, and his bodyguard took Justin’s camera.


pages: 273 words: 21,102

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place by James Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, market design, Nelson Mandela, Pepsi Challenge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, the market place

Think about the well-known celebrities and members of the rich list who started out with very little and ended up becoming famous. Perhaps you were already wealthy, but through circumstances you lost your money then started on the road back to success again. Many prominent figures today have often lost their money in the past then rebuilt their empire. Donald Trump, one of the United States’ wealthiest businessmen and star of the US version of The Apprentice, lost his fortune in the 1990s but climbed back up to what is now reputed to be billionaire status. Rags to riches (and sometimes back again) is the perfect content for building great stories. But your story doesn’t have to be built around adversity.


pages: 233 words: 73,772

The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein

business intelligence, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, John Deuss, offshore financial centre, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

But one can get a sense of his standard fee by consulting the Web site of the All American Speakers Bureau, another agency that at one time represented Blair (and which still advertises his services). All American puts Blair in its category of Celebrity Headliners and pegs his minimum fee as $200,000. That’s twice the rate demanded by Donald Trump, four times higher than for comedian Don Rickles and ten times higher than for Leah “Coco” Fort, “the developer of the four-step process to personal success known as the Coco Conversion.” In December 2008, he established Tony Blair Associates (TBA), “which will allow him to provide, in partnership with others, strategic advice on both a commercial and pro bono basis, on political and economic trends and governmental reform.”


pages: 255 words: 77,849

Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart

banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Donald Trump, ghettoisation, Live Aid, mail merge, period drama, Rubik’s Cube, wage slave

No, hang on, hang on – ‘Don’t count your chickens before . . . you’ve looked at a gift horse . . .’ OK, right, I know, I know . . . ‘Never go to the supermarket when you’re hungry.’ There you go. Doesn’t get wiser than that. Fact. You’re the pity one. I’m the wise one, I tell you. Wise. You’re deluded. You could be standing at the font between Donald Trump and the Dalai Lama and you’d still think you were the ‘wise’ one. Anyway, what’s so marvellous about being a godparent? It sounds dweeby to me. Loads of things. First and foremost – you get to give them back. Did you hear me? You can give the children back. Joy. Brilliant. The minute the child cries, you immediately hand it straight back to it’s mother in a swift rugby pass manoeuvre (although do make sure the baby isn’t at any point airborne, as it turns out that isn’t funny).


pages: 250 words: 77,544

Personal Investing: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore, Amy E. Buttell, Carol Fabbri

asset allocation, asset-backed security, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, fixed income, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, John Bogle, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Rubik’s Cube, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

In addition, a REIT’s share price goes up if its earnings and the market’s perception of the value of its holdings and management skills increase. So with the right REIT, you can earn good income and capital gains. (Of course, shares can go down, as many have during the recent real estate market crisis.) Most REITs own hundreds of properties, something you could never afford to do, unless you’re Donald Trump. Because many REITs specialize in property types or geographic regions, you can use REITs to diversify your portfolio and the types of real estate investments you make. The Cons As with other pooled investments like mutual funds, you count on REIT investment managers to make advantageous decisions.


pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

“President George W. Bush’s tax cuts didn’t produce a boom; President Barack Obama’s tax hike didn’t cause a depression. Tax cuts in Kansas didn’t jump-start the state’s economy; tax hikes in California didn’t slow growth,” Krugman writes in a 2018 column in the New York Times. Krugman points out that Donald Trump’s massive tax cut for the rich has failed to produce investment; instead, corporations have been using the savings to buy back their own stock, enriching their shareholders.2 While there’s paltry evidence of the benefits of tax cuts, there is a lot of evidence of the benefits of high taxes. Yes, high taxes.


pages: 232 words: 71,965

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

The costs of running an airline are astronomical, and cutthroat competition constantly puts downward pressure on prices (and profits). High costs and poor margins: that’s not exactly a lucrative business model. It almost makes the restaurant industry look like a gold mine by comparison. And yet—just like in the restaurant business—one high-profile figure after another, from Donald Trump to Carl Icahn, has poured millions into their own pet airline ventures. In almost every case, these investments have crashed and burned. Warren Buffett has repeatedly lamented the vast amounts of money airline investors—whom he once jokingly referred to as “aeroholics”—have lost over the decades.


pages: 246 words: 76,561

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

It’s not just the millions of dollars being spent on stadiums; whole neighbourhoods are being re-imagined. In Porto Maravilha, the port zone, for instance, miles and miles of new streets, pavements, tunnels and rail tracks are being laid. And the property developers are on the march. In the port, Donald Trump has a multibillion-dollar plan for five office towers that would form the heart of a new business district. On the other side of town, the wealthy suburb of Barra da Tijuca will be transformed by the Olympic Park. Developers are lining up to build luxury condominiums, while the area’s favela residents are on the verge of being relocated.


pages: 264 words: 74,688

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

Whereas there was no reciprocity in devastation in 2001 and the atrocities there were aimed at civilians and staged without warning, the situation was very different in 1814. Invading Americans had burned freely in Canada in 1813, notably destroying what is now Toronto, then the capital of Upper Canada, while, unlike in 2001, the only people killed in Washington were those who fired on British forces. In a passive-aggressive fashion, Donald Trump followed French president Macron in bringing the issue up in 2018, albeit (wrongly) at the expense of Canada. Most so-called British imperial atrocities lack the sources and discussion devoted to that in Washington in 1814. Scrutiny of the fallacious nature of the general public discussion of the latter invites consideration as to whether other atrocities deserves reconsideration.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

., Biz Carson, ‘The US government just reminded companies like Uber why they could be in serious trouble’, Business Insider UK (15 July 2015), http:// uk.businessinsider.com/us-department-of-labor-reminds-companies-of- 1099-classification-rules-2015–7, archived at https://perma.cc/LZJ4-UGGQ. These interpretations were promptly repealed by President Trump’s adminis- tration: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/donald-trump-s-labor-secre- tary-revokes-obama-era-dol-joint-employer-and-independent, archived at https:// perma.cc/U5P6-QV6Z 17. Simon Goodley, ‘Deliveroo told it must pay workers minimum wage’, The Guardian (14 August 2016), http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/14/ * * * 174 Notes deliveroo-told-it-must-pay-workers-minimum-wage, archived at https://perma.


pages: 338 words: 74,302

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

The way by which this slightly clueless person enacts his criticism is with a stupid little cartoon. He draws big fat Donald J. Trump riding a beleaguered elephant, which is the go-to caricatured symbol of the Republican party. The elephant is trampling an America flag. A dialogue balloon comes out of big fat cartoon Donald Trump’s mouth and it says, “I’m protecting America.” At the bottom of the cartoon, another dialogue balloon comes out of the elephant’s mouth. It says, “Plus he hates Ragheads. He’s not crazy about Spics either.” Whose life will be ruined for at least several years? Will it be the person who banned Muslims and ripped apart families and is literally killing people in the Middle East while ensuring that Palestinians live in misery?


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

It was Bloomberg’s first appearance, and the other candidates turned into a bunch of fire-breathing dragons. Elizabeth Warren was the first to come off the ropes. It took her about eight seconds to go after Bloomberg. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians.’ And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.” Woah, nice to meet you too! Interestingly, the virus did not come up at the debate. It’s not yet on the political agenda. The Big D lit up as soon it was over. “I don’t know if anybody watched last night’s debate,” he said. “And you know what? Mini-Mike didn’t do well last night.


pages: 239 words: 74,845

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

She’d been on Reddit—the social media site that was basically a giant chat room broken up into boards catering to just about every hobby, political stance, belief, philosophy you could imagine—since right before the election of 2016. She’d been led there via Twitter, which she’d been on since 2014. And she’d gone to Reddit entirely because of Donald Trump. She’d discovered a board dedicated to Trump followers called r/The_Donald, which was basically a 24-7 Trump rally. Because of Reddit’s belief in personal privacy—in stark contrast to sites such as Facebook—and the fact that the chat rooms, though moderated, allowed anonymous people to post almost anything they liked, under very loose content rules, from the very beginning r/The_Donald had been filled with over-the-top, contrarian dialogue, which then rapidly morphed into a chaotic hotbed of conspiracy theories, questionable speech, and an immense amount of verbalized anger.


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

But they had time; it would take at least ten days for the Zaandam to reach any of those ports. Carnival needed to lobby governments at the highest levels. It was a language in which the cruise lines were well versed. The son of Carnival’s founder, largest shareholder, and board chairman, Micky Arison, had the political connections to get that done. He’d stoked ties with Donald Trump long before Trump was elected president of the United States. Carnival sponsored episodes of Trump’s TV show, The Celebrity Apprentice, and Arison invited Trump and his wife, Melania, courtside to a Miami Heat game—not difficult, given that Arison owned the team. Carnival retained a network of powerful lobbyists, including Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general.


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

Nasty gets more clicks and shares than truth and love – yes, that is the kind of folks we are – and clicks and shares drive advertising revenue. Facebook’s Oversight Board, established in 2020, claims to be an independent body of forty members. It is a separate entity from the Facebook company and offers ‘independent judgement on both individual cases and questions of policy’. The Board recently affirmed the platform’s ban on Donald Trump. Facebook has previously asserted that it is a platform, with no responsibility for hate speech, pornography and deliberate misinformation posted on the site. Now the company seems to be closer to accepting that it is a publisher and broadcaster – and one that reaches over 2 billion users. It is too early to say whether or not the Board will make a real difference to how Facebook operates


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

The experiments with which this chapter began highlighted the relevance of context if we want to understand the ‘is’ of economic decisions; the time has come to abandon the separation protocol and think properly about the way context also affects the ‘ought’, and what kind of society we want to live in. Intermission What Chapter Three did not explicitly discuss was the changing political environment. In 2016, the ‘Leave’ campaigners won the UK’s Brexit referendum, Donald Trump had won the US presidential election, and across the West populist parties were gaining a significant share of votes even where they lost the election. Political shifts of this kind never have a single cause, but economic disadvantage was certainly involved: studies of different votes have mapped the correlation between populist vote shares and places ‘left behind’ (the term in vogue) by economically-thriving big urban centres.


The Trauma Chronicles by Westaby, Stephen

Albert Einstein, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, James Dyson, lockdown, Nelson Mandela, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

I first met Kevin Dutton when he chaired a packed house for me at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in the Autumn of 2019. The discussion went along the lines of ‘what does it take to become a heart surgeon? following as it did the publication of my book The Knife’s Edge . An adviser for the special forces himself, Kevin had controversially ranked US President Donald Trump higher than Adolf Hitler on Hare’s Psychopathy Diagnosis Checklist. This is how he introduced me in Cheltenham, then subsequently wrote in his next book Black and White Thinking: Stephen Westaby is one of the world’s great heart surgeons. And also one of the toughest. He headed up the Cardiothoracic Unit in Oxford for 30 years and took on operations that would have had other surgeons pissing their pants.


pages: 255 words: 80,190

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke

clockwatching, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, imposter syndrome, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, post-truth, profit motive, sensible shoes, Snapchat, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 11 INSURRECTION Y ou know events have taken a surreal turn when a Canadian pop star with more Twitter followers than the entire UK population decides to campaign publicly for the NHS. Just before Christmas 2015, Justin Bieber – one of the most successful musicians in the history of pop music, a 23-year-old with four times as many Twitter followers as even the tweeting US president, Donald Trump – became the most improbable player in the junior doctor dispute. A couple of months earlier, a young doctor called Harriet Nerva had started a campaign on Facebook to try to get an NHS choir to the coveted Christmas Number One spot in the charts. Her online post won nearly 100,000 fans in a week, captivating the imagination of NHS staff and the public alike.


pages: 713 words: 203,688

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Gordon Gekko, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble

Kravis, on the other hand, lived for the lush life. His first marriage on the rocks, Kravis began seeing Carolyne Roehm, and the couple quickly became a fixture of society pages. Every night, it seemed, they were photographed at some black-tie function or another, laughing with flashy friends such as the Donald Trumps. Kohlberg didn’t think it was the way a grown man ought to act; it was ostentatious, and it gave the firm a bad image. “It came to bother Jerry a lot,” says a Kohlberg friend. “It came between them to the point where Jerry couldn’t stand to go to Henry’s apartment on Park Avenue, there was so much wealth.”

Eaton Tax law Team RJR Nabisco Tender offer leak of Terry, Luther Texaco Thatcher, Margaret “This Week with David Brinkley,” Time Tobacco industry. See also Cigarettes; Philip Morris; RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company lawsuits against RJR Nabisco’s image connected to Tombstone advertisements Tomlinson, Roy Tonabe, Bunichiro Travelers Truesdell, Richard Trump, Blaine Trump, Donald Trump, Ivana Trustbusting Ueberroth, Peter Uneeda Biscuit Ungeheuer, Frederick United Airlines Vantage Pro-Am Volcker, Paul Von Arx, Dolph Wachovia Bank & Trust Wade, Charley Wake Forest University Waldron, Hicks Wall Street Journal, The Walter, Jim Ward, Chuck Warner, Rawleigh Wasserstein, Bruce in The Group resignation of tender offer leak and tender offer suggested by Wasserstein Perella & Co.


pages: 613 words: 200,826

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

He seemed to settle down when he went to work in mergers and acquisitions at Castle & Cook and Dole, where he served as vice president of investments, and ran a pharmaceutical company into which he and his father poured millions. But he remained a player on the local celebrity social scene, too, hosting annual Halloween parties at Murdock Plaza with Ted Field, dating singer Avril Lavigne and Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and allegedly endangering the existence of the rock band Aerosmith in 2009 when he partied a bit too hard with its substance-troubled singer Steven Tyler. In fall 2010, the New York Post’s Page Six column reported that the young heir, his family’s pharmaceutical company, and Castle & Cook were being sued.

The next year, it was announced that the ball would henceforth be held every other year, fueling speculation that the Davises were ready to leave Denver behind. They did and by 1987, Barbara was said to be looking for a Los Angeles cause to support. Instead, in 1990, she relaunched her diabetes benefit as the Carousel of Hope, and it has been held in Beverly Hills ever since. Davis’s shift in geographic focus was evident when he beat Donald Trump and Merv Griffin in a bidding war to buy the Beverly Hills Hotel from its latest owners, the New York arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, his wife Seema, her sister, Muriel Slatkin, and her estranged husband. Boesky concluded the sale as he was negotiating a plea bargain after he was indicted for insider trading; his in-laws had also sued him for misusing hotel funds in his illegal deals.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Hence, Nucor’s executives have claimed that if the US government doesn’t actively enforce antidumping laws, including tariffs, the company will not be able to sustain its enlightened labor practices. Indeed, American steel companies might even be driven completely out of business. That threat appears to have triggered President Donald Trump’s 2018 threatened trade war with China. Ken Iverson, who had pledged that Nucor would not engage in government lobbying, might well have been dismayed to see the company’s current CEO, John Ferriola, sitting beside the president and cheering him on when he announced the imposition of tariffs on foreign steel—even though Nucor has been relatively unaffected by foreign imports, reporting pretax profits of $1.75 billion in 2017, up 35 percent from the previous year.24 Prior to Ferriola, every leader cited in these pages, beginning with Robert Owen, had been an advocate of free trade.

He is the subject of several biographies, but none as readable and objective as Michael D’Antonio’s Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). It is worth noting that D’Antonio is also the author of an unauthorized biography of Donald Trump. I will leave it to readers to decide if the two larger-than-life protagonists had anything in common. 1.Michael D’Antonio, Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 10. 2.Mary Malone, Milton Hershey: Chocolate King (Champaign, IL: Gerrard, 1971). 3.D’Antonio, Hershey, 55–59. 4.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Others had a swagger only the Valley could bring: in 2016, Chamath Palihapitiya tried to persuade New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg to run as a third-party candidate for president, promising that he’d devote all of his firm’s resources to the effort. “The same team that helped build Facebook to one billion users would do our best to activate the entire United States to put him in the White House,” Palihapitiya promised. “I think we’d be successful.” Nervous that his run would hand the presidency to someone like Donald Trump, Bloomberg declined to enter the race.28 That decision left the Valley’s power players solidly in Hillary Clinton’s corner, becoming a reliable source of campaign cash and policy advice. The singular exception to that trend was a highly visible one: Peter Thiel, who overcame his long disdain for the mess of electoral politics to come out publicly in favor of Trump’s renegade bid for the White House.

,” The Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1980, F1; Nicholas Lemann, “New Tycoons Reshape Politics,” The New York Times, June 8, 1986, Section M, 51. The Democrats’ loss of the Senate came in the wake of a $700,000 ad blitz by National Conservative PAC (NCPAC), brainchild of former Nixon operative and lobbyist Roger Stone, whose later presidential campaigns included both George Bushes, Bob Dole, and Donald Trump. Warren Weaver Jr., “Conservatives Plan $700,000 Drive to Oust 5 Democrats From Senate,” The New York Times, August 17, 1979, 1; “Attack PAC,” Time 120, no. 17 (October 25, 1982), 28. 14. Both Tsongas and Hart quoted in Lawrence Martin, “Shift to Right in U.S. Begins to Hit Home,” The Globe and Mail, November 8, 1980, 1.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

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

Tencent, Didi, and the entire education-technology industry became the objects of a political crackdown, with the Communist Party’s regulatory apparatus serving as prosecutor, judge, and jury. For all the faults of the American system, it does not treat entrepreneurs this harshly. The closest Jack Ma parallel might be Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who incurred the wrath of Donald Trump because he owns the fiercely critical Washington Post. But this parallel serves to underscore the difference, not the similarity, between the two nations: in China, the idea that an internet tycoon could publish a daily diet of critical antigovernment reporting is unthinkable. Spend time with venture investors in China, and you sense the pressure that they feel.

Meanwhile, half a century after Arthur Rock’s heyday, Silicon Valley’s freethinking and freewheeling entrepreneurial spirit remains staggering. To savor this spirit, and to appreciate its geopolitical meaning, recall Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Thiel is known primarily as the founder of PayPal, as the seed investor in Facebook, and as a donor to conservative causes, including the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump—the latter being enough to make him a villain in the Valley. But whatever one thinks of this trifecta, Thiel’s most unexpected achievement lies elsewhere. His Founders Fund has backed both of the major defense contractors created since the cold war: SpaceX, which launches satellites for the Pentagon; and Palantir, which supplies a variety of software, including battlefield intelligence systems.


pages: 286 words: 82,970

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

As the subtitle of this book suggests, support for the old order has crumbled, the result of heightened economic anxiety at home (often associated with globalization, free trade, and immigration) and growing doubts about the costs and benefits associated with what the United States has been doing abroad, including fighting several open-ended wars in the Middle East and supporting allies in Europe and Asia. It is significant that Donald Trump, the winning candidate, called for putting America First. The rest of the world has taken note. Assumptions about the willingness of the United States to continue doing what it has been doing in the world are being questioned as never before by friends, foes, and everyone in between. All this, along with an inbox best described as daunting in the quantity and quality of the challenges filling it, is what awaits the forty-fifth president, who, like his predecessors, will enjoy great latitude in matters of national security.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

January 28, 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win. 19. Cadwalladr, Carole. “Robert Mercer: The big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media.” Guardian. February 26, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage. 20. “As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren’t people, says study.” CNBC. April 12, 2017. http://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/technology/2017/04/10/many-48-million-twitter-accounts-arent-people-says-study/. 21. L2 Analysis of LinkedIn Data. 22. Novet, Jordan. “Snapchat by the numbers: 161 million daily users in Q4 2016, users visit 18 times a day.”


pages: 237 words: 82,266

You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up by Annabelle Gurwitch

Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Donald Trump, Donner party, Exxon Valdez, Future Shock, Joan Didion, Mahatma Gandhi, open immigration, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Yogi Berra

Everything that we ever thought was wrong with us, our careers, our relationship, and now our child, started to collide, creating explosions of blame, finger pointing, and score keeping. It was a time of emotional button pushing, and Annabelle and I treated each other to a barrage the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton and would not be seen again until Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump. I’m sure a large part of this marital sniping was a release from all the stresses we were under. Because we couldn’t treat the doctors and nurses badly, or take our frustrations out on our friends, family, the people we worked with, or those who worked for us, we were left with just each other.


pages: 310 words: 82,592

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Swan, clean water, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, framing effect, friendly fire, iterative process, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, price anchoring, telemarketer, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment

Leverage has a lot of inputs, like time and necessity and competition. If you need to sell your house now, you have less leverage than if you don’t have a deadline. If you want to sell it but don’t have to, you have more. And if various people are bidding on it at once, good on you. I should note that leverage isn’t the same thing as power. Donald Trump has tons of power, but if he’s stranded in a desert and the owner of the only store for miles has the water he wants, the vendor has the leverage. One way to understand leverage is as a fluid that sloshes between the parties. As a negotiator you should always be aware of which side, at any given moment, feels they have the most to lose if negotiations collapse.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

A perspective to which others would reply that the value of art and culture is intrinsic, transcending the material and economic altogether; price is irrelevant. Or as the writer Lawrence Weschler has put it: “Any work of art is somewhere between priceless and worthless. To call it anything else is comedy.” 3. Donald Trump has trademarked the phrase “you’re fired” and the hand gesture that accompanies it; McDonald’s polices use of the Scottish prefix “Mc”; the ticking of the 60 Minutes clock and the roar of the MGM lion are protected; Amazon has patented “one-click shopping” and a system for annotating digital books; Apple has applied for patents on turning pages and embedding author autographs in electronic titles; Google has patented its search and ranking algorithms; banks and mortgage providers stake private claim to processes associated with financial products and services; Monsanto sues farmers when the errant seeds of genetically modified crops are blown into their fields; pharmaceutical companies block the manufacture of affordable generic drugs in impoverished countries.


pages: 142 words: 18,753

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Community Supported Agriculture, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

Today’s educated elites tend not to bar entire groups, but like any establishment, they do have their boundary markers. You will be shunned if you embrace glitzy materialism. You will be shunned if you are overtly snobbish. You will be shunned if you are anti-intellectual. For one reason or another the following people and institutions fall outside the ranks of Bobo respectability: Donald Trump, Pat Robertson, Louis Farrakhan, Bob Guccione, Wayne Newton, Nancy Reagan, Adnan Khashoggi, Jesse Helms, Jerry Springer, Mike Tyson, Rush Limbaugh, Philip Morris, developers, loggers, Hallmark greeting cards, the National Rifle Association, Hooters. The New Pecking Order So when the Protestant Establishment collapsed, it is not as if America became a magical place without elites, without hierarchies, without etiquette and social distinctions.


pages: 302 words: 86,614

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes, Mohamed El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, high-speed rail, impact investing, interest rate derivative, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, NetJets, oil shock, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, two and twenty, zero-sum game

The board turned down Ackman’s and Leucadia’s proposal, opting for a deal with a white-shoe group which included David Rockefeller, Tishman-Speyer Properties Inc. and the Whitehall Street Real Estate LP, a real estate investment fund managed by Goldman, Sachs & Company, who on October 1, 1995, offered to pay $296.5 million, or $7.75 a share, for the company. The investor group at the time would also assume about $800 million of the real estate investment trust’s debt, about $191 million of which was owed to Whitehall and a Goldman Sachs subsidiary. Before the Goldman deal closed, Ackman received a call from Donald Trump who said that Goldman Sachs was trying to steal Rockefeller Center. “We have to do something about it,” said Trump. “I’ll come by your office.” Embarrassed by his sparse surroundings, Ackman quickly offered to hop a cab to Trump Towers instead. Trump’s idea was to convert 30 Rock into a residential condominium, but the tower had been nearly fully leased for many years into the future to multiple tenants, making the strategy unfeasible.


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

. ©1971 Claes Oldenburg Ant-Roach Courtesy of Otherlab Roy Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedral, Set 5 1969 Oil and Magna on canvas 63 x 42 in. (160 x 106.7 cm) (each) Courtesy of the estate of Roy Lichtenstein Monet: Water-lilies and Japanese bridge Princeton University Art Museum. From the Collection of William Church Osborn, Class of 1883, trustee of Princeton University (1914-1951), president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1941-1947); given by his family Monet: The Japanese Bridge The Museum of Modern Art, New York Caricature of Donald Trump By DonkeyHotey Francis Bacon: Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-Portrait) Private Collection/Bridgeman Images. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2016 Burins and Blades found by Denis Peyrony in Bernifal cave, Meyrals, Dordogne, France. Upper Magdalenian, near 12,000 – 10,000 BP.


pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

SpaceX, Boeing, and other commercial space providers continue to vie for increased government funding for commercial spaceflight capability. NASA’s overarching plan is for the commercial providers to handle transporting people and cargo to the International Space Station, while Orion/SLS handles NASA’s human exploration plans beyond low Earth orbit.4 President Donald Trump signs a bill reactivating the National Space Council in June 2017. Image credit: NASA This scenario may sound a bit bifurcated, with too little money being spent in two connected camps, but there are reasons for optimism. In early 2017, the Trump administration reactivated a government oversight group called the National Space Council.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

There are no complexities to make this mission morally difficult; to the liberal class, it is simple. The Democratic Party is all that stands between the Oval Office and whomever the radicalized GOP ultimately chooses to nominate for the presidency. Compared to that sacred duty, all other issues fade into insignificance. Let me acknowledge that I sometimes feel this way, too. It is true that Donald Trump seems outrageous and that Ted Cruz is a one-man wrecking crew, and I think it would be a terrible thing if they or any of the rest of the Republican lineup were to capture the nation’s commanding heights. But even when it comes to containing the Republicans—the area where the Democratic Party’s mission is so clear and straightforward—it has not been a great success.


pages: 332 words: 81,289

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Future Shock, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

We cannot ultimately control what the markets do, but if we select and manage the input decisions really tightly, and measure, monitor and control them along the journey, we give ourselves every chance of success (Figure 6.1). Avoiding bad risk choices is a key part of the process. Whatever you may think about Donald Trump, his words of advice when it comes to investing are worth noting: ‘Sometimes your best investments are the ones that you don’t make’ Figure 6.1 Get the risk inputs right and the returns should follow The process of investing is thus one of risk selection and management. A plethora of risks exist from market (bond, equity, currency) to liquidity, complexity, product, counterparty and manager risks, to name a few.


Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

As a teacher, I used to give my Year 7 students questions like ‘If a plank is 3 metres (to the nearest metre) long, how long is it?’ Well, it could be anything from 2.5 metres to 3.49 metres (or maybe something like 2.500 metres to 3.499 metres, depending on rounding conventions). It seems some politicians are as smart as a kid in Year 7. In the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, his White House was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, as it had been branded. When doing this through legislation proved harder than they seem to have expected, they turned to rounding. For while the ACA laid down the official guidelines for the healthcare market, the Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for writing the regulations based on the ACA.


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

In the 2016 presidential election, poll aggregators all predicted a Hillary Clinton victory. But their forecasting models, no matter how clever, were inherently limited by the quality of their input data. The trouble was a small but persistent bias in the underlying polls, which underestimated support for Donald Trump. Many algorithms in AI suffer from a similar problem: bias in, bias out. There’s a classic parable here about a neural-network model the U.S. Army once built to detect tanks that were partially hidden on the edge of a forest.24 Army scientists trained their model using a labeled data set of photographs, some with tanks and some without.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

As Robin Hanson put it, “Your motivation to save for retirement, or to help the poor in Ethiopia, might be muted by realizing that in your simulation, you will never retire and there is no Ethiopia.” A disconcerting thought is that our simulation could be like Russell’s omphalos scenario. Maybe future historians are interested in President Donald Trump because of some momentous effect he had on subsequent world history. In order to understand the dynamics of the Trump era, the historians need to play a certain five-minute segment of it over and over with slightly different initial conditions. Our world is one of those five-minute loops, a Groundhog Day moment for a future historian’s PhD thesis.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

The challenge in the age of networked knowledge and the end of Big Minds and Big Credibility is how to counter these claims without, as Dan Kahan has noted, playing into a context or worldview that would further reinforce false claims. The Obama presidential campaign responded in part by launching the Web site FightTheSmears.com, to build their own network to combat vicious online rumors. But those rumors continued to metastasize until we had Donald Trump on prime time television demanding to see the president’s birth certificate. It created quite a dilemma for the president: giving in to the absurdity might look like a victory for the right, but at the same time the issue was becoming a giant distraction. In the end, President Obama made the rumor about his birth and religion a central part of the annual Gridiron roast of major political people in Washington, D.C., opening by suggesting that new footage of his birth had come to light and then showing a clip from the Disney animated feature The Lion King.


pages: 317 words: 84,400

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Many innovators come from this group. Under pressure, they can be stubborn, negative, and blameful. If you think you spot shades of yourself in more than one of the categories above, you’re not mistaken. Our personalities tend to be dominated by one of the six traits, but we possess differing percentages of the other five. Donald Trump, for instance, is most certainly an actions-based person, but he likely has an emotions-driven piece of his personality that isn’t part of his public face. As one of NASA’s powerful people determining who would be part of its manned space program, McGuire became an expert at quickly reading people.


pages: 266 words: 86,324

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But had it not been for Kildall’s uncooperativeness, IBM’s lack of vision, or the second encounter between Sams and Gates, despite whatever visionary or business acumen Gates possesses, he might have become just another software entrepreneur rather than the richest man in the world, and that is probably why his vision seems like that of just that—another software entrepreneur. Our society can be quick to make wealthy people into heroes and poor ones into goats. That’s why the real estate mogul Donald Trump, whose Plaza Hotel went bankrupt and whose casino empire went bankrupt twice (a shareholder who invested $10,000 in his casino company in 1994 would thirteen years later have come away with $636),13 nevertheless dared to star in a wildly successful television program in which he judged the business acumen of aspiring young people.


pages: 281 words: 79,464

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

Not empathy for those who are lynched or put into the gas chambers, of course, but empathy that is sparked by stories told about innocent victims of these hated groups, about white women raped by black men or German children preyed upon by Jewish pedophiles. Or think about contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric. When Donald Trump campaigned in 2015, he liked to talk about Kate—he didn’t use her full name, Kate Steinle, just Kate. She was murdered in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant, and Trump wanted to make her real to his audience, to make vivid his talk of Mexican killers. Similarly, Ann Coulter’s recent book, Adios, America, is rich with detailed descriptions of immigrant crimes, particularly rape and child rape, with chapter titles like “Why Do Hispanic Valedictorians Make the News, But Child Rapists Don’t?”


pages: 249 words: 81,217

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Anton Chekhov, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, iterative process, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, overview effect, Stephen Hawking, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen

It wasn’t my birthday or my wedding day or a day of holiday or celebration. And it wasn’t one of those days captured in what psychologists call flashbulb memories – where you know exactly where you were when you heard the news that Princess Diana had died (I was in bed), or that the UK had voted for Brexit (I was in bed), or that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election (I was in bed). No, this was an ordinary day; the sort of day I would ordinarily completely forget. Yet several years on I can tell you that our boiler had broken down, meaning I had to have a cold shower; that fortunately the weather was fairly mild for the time of year; that I was offered a choice between orange and apple juice while I sat in a booth reading out loud for the audio version of my previous book; that I ran part of the way home from the recording studio and on the way squeezed through a narrow gap between a wall and skip; that later, on the train, I looked at the hexagonal-texture of the red fabric of my running bag; after I got home, I danced to David Bowie’s ‘Starman’ while tidying my room;1 then, finally, my husband came home and greeted me with a kiss.


pages: 269 words: 83,307

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

More than half of Wharton’s six-hundred-person undergraduate class typically heads to banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, and other financial services companies after graduation. Among the celebrity financiers the school has churned out are SAC Capital billionaire Steven A. Cohen, the junk-bond impresario Michael Milken, and real estate megagoon Donald Trump. Wharton’s list of famous alumni, and the fact that its graduates emerge armed with advanced finance training, has made it a place where recruiters are prone to drooling. “Penn, and especially Wharton, is in a league of its own,” one hiring manager at a top Wall Street firm told me. “It’s the only place where you go to campus and it’s already done and dusted—it’s a matter of which financial services firm students want to go to, not whether they want to go into finance.”


pages: 267 words: 85,265

That Wild Country: An Epic Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands by Mark Kenyon

American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, clean water, Donald Trump, land tenure, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

Things had changed around the rest of the world too. The impetus for this trip and all the others I’d taken over the past year—my desire to gain a better firsthand understanding of public lands—was still top of mind. The land-transfer movement that had triggered it all was still active too. The tone of the crisis had changed, though. Donald Trump had just ascended to the presidency, giving Republicans control of the executive branch of the government along with both the House and the Senate. To the dismay of many conservationists, the politicians that had been preaching the gospel of public-land disposal for years were now in control of the federal government, nearly from top to bottom.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

It was only towards the end of the 1960s that homosexuality was legalised in the UK, and at the height of Empire one of Britain’s exports was laws against homosexuality. ‘Their struggle is bound up with ours,’ Kennedy says of the people who cross the Mediterranean, ‘it wasn’t long ago we were considered illegal.’ As for far-right feminism, Nigel Farage, who has since joked about the idea of Donald Trump sexually assaulting Theresa May, declared the Cologne attacks the ‘nuclear bomb’ of the EU referendum campaign. On New Year’s Eve 2015, outside Köln Hauptbahnhof, the main train station of one of Germany’s largest cities, at least one hundred women said they had been sexually assaulted. Grabbed, robbed and surrounded by groups of men, they reported what seemed to be a coordinated attack, and the news reports referenced others who claimed the attackers ‘looked North African or Arab’.42 A New York Times editorial warned: ‘Europe must … find a way to cope with a problem that has been largely ignored until now: sexual aggression by refugees from countries where women do not have the same freedoms as in Europe.’43 Although it was never uncovered exactly who was responsible for each of the attacks on these women, the reporting read as though the perpetrators were exclusively Syrian men who neither knew nor cared about European social norms.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the absence of a growing finance sector, and with rising debt and asset price inflation, inequality has risen, living standards have fallen, and the old neoliberal institutions have struggled to contain, let alone channel, the anger of the majority of the population. A pervasive sense of crisis hangs in the air of British politics. The old paradigm can offer only more of the same, and ongoing austerity and weak growth will only exacerbate the UK’s political and economic problems. In the US, the election of Donald Trump signals a similar grassroots backlash, even as Trump’s economic policy has served to increase inequality and provide windfalls for finance capital. Socialists within the Democratic Party seem to be profiting from Trump’s failure to address the concerns of the constituency that helped to elect him.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

In 2014 a researcher at the University of Cambridge working with a small British consultancy named Cambridge Analytica (now bankrupt) built one of those millions of Facebook applications. Its main purpose was to track the preferences of users and their friends. The application provided data on as many as 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users in the United States and helped Russian hackers target particular users with fake news stories supporting candidate Donald Trump and criticizing rival Hillary Clinton.8 The U.S. Congress called in Zuckerberg to explain how his seemingly harmless social media platform had become an instrument of such power for a foreign government. Zuckerberg explained in his written testimony: We face a number of important issues around privacy, safety, and democracy, and you will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer.


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

To avoid unnecessary worry, studies suggest that you need to assume the best for as long as possible before bracing for the worst towards the end of the wait. It may also be helpful to concentrate on finding the silver lining in any potential bad news. In the 2016 US presidential election, supporters of Hillary Clinton who pre-emptively looked for the good in Donald Trump being elected were less shattered when he won. But be cautious, this strategy can backfire: Trump supporters who tried to find an upside to Clinton winning were less thrilled when their candidate did. One final piece of advice for dealing with uncertainty: instead of weighing yourself down with worry or trying to problem-solve every eventuality, try sitting with that uncertainty for a while.


pages: 291 words: 85,908

The Skripal Files by Mark Urban

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Skype

Certainly the former GRU colonel regarded their relationship as a social one, a measure of the former MI6 man’s diligence about pastoral care in a relationship that had, after all, lasted decades. Of the theories that would later emerge that Sergei was involved in active intelligence work or had contributed to the notorious Donald Trump dossier compiled by former SIS officer Christopher Steele, there was no indication. Rather Sergei appeared to be a homebody and creature of habit, a man well into his sixties whose cravings for wealth and adventure had faded. He visited Liudmila’s grave regularly, and the corner shop, where he would buy scratch cards a couple of times a week.


pages: 277 words: 85,191

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

China was opening up to foreign investment and my parents’ friends ran trading companies involved in cross-border deals. My father’s friends noticed that I liked listening in. Business in China interested me. I’d started reading the Wall Street Journal’s Asian edition. I’d read Lee Iacocca’s autobiography and, also, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. I liked the idea of doing business, of building something that hadn’t existed before, of leaving a mark. In Hong Kong, business was pretty much the only career path. We didn’t have politicians and the civil service didn’t interest me. You couldn’t afford to become an artist; the colony was a cultural desert anyway.


pages: 247 words: 86,844

Perfect Sound Whatever by James. Acaster

4chan, Airbnb, butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Rubik’s Cube, side project

But in March 2016, while the album was still being recorded, the group suffered a huge loss when founding member Phife Dawg passed away. The remaining members, Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White, made the decision to complete the album, recording two songs in memory of Phife: the emotional ‘Lost Somebody’ and the closing track, ‘The Donald’, a final goodbye that many misread to be about Donald Trump. We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service was released in November 2016. Many see the title as a message to Tribe from this new generation of rappers, but we’ll never know – Phife came up with the name and never had the chance to explain the meaning to anyone else. It was one of the group’s best-received records and possesses a timeless quality due to the fact that it was made by some true veterans still challenging themselves and the world around them right to the end.


pages: 311 words: 88,103

Discovering the Inner Mother: A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power by Bethany Webster

Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, epigenetics, fear of failure, sexual politics, source of truth

In an essay published in Teen Vogue called “Most Women You Know Are Angry. And That’s All Right,” Laurie Penny writes, Female anger is taboo, and with good reason—if we ever spoke about it directly, in numbers too big to dismiss, one or two things might have to change. How many times have men in power—including Donald Trump—tried to push back and put down women who criticize them by implying that our opinions are nothing more than a mess of dirty, bloody hormones, none of it rational, none of it real? These jokes are never just jokes. They’re a control strategy. The patriarchy is so scared of women’s anger that eventually we learn to fear it, too.


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

This, in turn, impeded the adoption in the former industrial heartlands of technologies that demanded high levels of education, further reinforcing their tendency to focus on low-skilled sectors and reducing their prosperity.[11] The repercussions of the relative decline in the importance of manufacturing are illustrated by some of the most high-profile political events of recent years. Donald Trump based his 2016 election campaign on a promise to make American industry ‘great again’. Indeed, much of Trump’s pivotal support came from states in the Rust Belt, such as Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and from other districts that were hollowed out and ravaged by the unemployment generated by industrial decline.


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

Political scientist Thea Riofrancos has argued that auto-makers’ sustainability commitments are first and foremost about appeasing environmentally conscious consumers and investors who are concerned about companies’ environmental, social, and corporate governance.14 The transition to electric vehicles presents an unprecedented opportunity to increase vehicle sales by converting the automobile fleet to battery power; engaging in what is effectively greenwashing will help to ensure it is realized. But what form that shift ultimately takes will be determined by government policy. Governments are not only providing support to build out the infrastructure for electric vehicles and incentivize consumer adoption, but are promising the necessary minerals will be secured. With Donald Trump out of office, President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg put electric vehicles at the center of the Democrats’ plan to reduce emissions. Biden spent the presidential campaign talking about the need for “green highways” equipped with vehicle chargers, and made a commitment to develop domestic supply chains for key minerals needed for vehicle batteries and renewable energy.


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

It would lead to a quintessential New York scene that would make some preservationists shiver, with massive skyscrapers dwarfing tiny landmarks—and ironically protecting them at the same time, by providing them with cash for their air rights. One of the first to take advantage of the more easily transferable air rights was Donald Trump. In the 1970s, he paid $5 million for the air rights above a landmarked building on Fifth Avenue. Together with other air rights and bonuses, this allowed him to inflate a 20-story building into the 58-story Trump Tower.24 He then did it again in 2001, with the Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Blair, “End the First-Use Policy for Nuclear Weapons,” op-ed, New York Times, Aug. 14, 2016. 189.Michael Krepon, “Not Just Yet for No First Use,” blog post, Arms Control Wonk: Leading Voices on Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, July 31, 2016, www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1201722/not-just-yet-for-no-first-use/ (accessed Apr. 27, 2017). Krepon argued here that although there were almost no good arguments against US adoption of a no-first-use policy, one argument—timing—had some merit. He wrote that the actions of Soviet leader Vladimir Putin and the statements of candidate Donald Trump as of mid-2016 made it a bad time to pressure President Obama to declare, before the end of his term in office, an American commitment to no first use. 190.NATO, “Defence and Deterrence: Clause 17,” Active Engagement, Modern Defence: Strategic Concept for the Defence and Security of the Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Nov. 19–20, 2010, 14, www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_publications/20120214_strategic-concept-2010-eng.pdf.

–Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable,” write the authors. “Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like ‘the second Cold War’ ” (44). For a best-selling in-depth investigation, see Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2018). 62.For the saga of Apollo–Soyuz and the decades leading up to it, see Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell, The Partnership: A History of the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project (Washington, DC: NASA, 1978), history.nasa.gov/SP-4209.pdf. See also the Nixon–Kosygin “Cooperation in Space: Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Concerning Cooperation in the Exploration of the Use of Outer Space for the Peaceful Purposes, May 24, 1972,” www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events/centennials/nixon/images/exhibit/agreement-of-cooperation.pdf (accessed May 1, 2017).


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

But he did not have the power to stop the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States launched by Barack Obama. Unfortunately, someone else did. Less than eight months after Obama’s historic visit and just two and a half weeks before Fidel Castro’s death, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the race for the White House to Donald Trump. Fidel Castro had outlived the terms of ten US presidents whose rule overlapped with his. But he did not live to see the country’s strangest modern president assume office. Cubans, like people around the world, have jokes for just about everything. After Trump’s election and Castro’s death, one joke went something like this: Fidel had always said he could not rest until America was destroyed.

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. Representatives from Trump’s business organization had traveled to Cuba to explore investment opportunities only months before he assumed the presidency. While in office, however, he closed off all such opportunities for other Americans.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Another expressed remorse for his "first rape," saying he had felt pressured by the other guys to do it, and promising he would never do it again. Although there was no physical evidence linking the teenagers to the crime—no matching semen, blood, or DNA—their confessions persuaded the police, the jury, forensic experts, and the public that the perpetrators had been caught. Donald Trump spent $80,000 on newspaper ads calling for them to get the death penalty. 1 And yet the teenagers were innocent. Thirteen years later, a felon named Matias Reyes, in prison for three rape-robberies and one rape-murder, admitted that he, and he alone, had committed the crime. He revealed details that no one else knew, and his DNA matched the DNA taken from semen found in the victim and on her sock.


pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

This goes even deeper: as Sebastian Junger points out in his book Tribe, we are the first modern society in human history where people live alone in apartments and where children have their own bedrooms. The gradual decline of trust in societal institutions over the years, meanwhile, from business to government, accelerated in the wake of the Great Recession, making people more receptive to a “fringe” idea than they might otherwise have been (see Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump). Add on a growing sense of unease over geopolitical risk and the sense that horrible and unpredictable things are happening in the world, and the urge to connect with others becomes an unarticulated desire in all of us. Whatever you think about “belonging,” these forces really were a large part of what made people more open to trying this new, quirky, affordable travel experience.


Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

In particular, parts of Europe have experienced a rise of the far right: from Victor Orbán in Hungary, to Marine Le Pen in France, to Frauke Petry in Germany, to Nigel Farage in the UK, to the massive support for a far-right presidential candidate in the Austrian elections. Meanwhile, the election of Donald Trump as the US President shows that these trends extend beyond Europe. Across the entire political spectrum, there has been a lurch towards nativism, as populist nationalism has become the common currency of democratic politics. Isolated terrorist attacks have been used to repudiate the right to asylum in Europe.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

But when the uproar continued for more than a month—an eternity in news cycle time—it was clear that there was something else at work. Looking back now, what I experienced in the wake of the Goldman piece was a lesson in a subtle truth about class politics in this country. Which is this: you can pick on the rich in an ironic, Arrested Development sort of way, you can muss Donald Trump’s hair, you can even talk abstractly about class economics using clinical terms like “income disparity.” But in our media you’re not allowed to just kick the rich in the balls and use class-warfare language. The taboo isn’t so much the subject matter, the taboo is the tone. You’re allowed to grimace and shake your head at their shenanigans, but you can’t call them crooks and imply that they haven’t earned their money by being better or smarter than everyone else, at least not until they’ve been indicted or gone bankrupt.


pages: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

The flaws of simple polls conducted by the click of a mouse or a quick telephone call are well appreciated. They take no account of people who decide not to vote because they don’t care about the issue. Those who do vote are dominated by the extremely interested, who are not beyond voting multiple times. A now infamous poll run by USA Today in 1990 asked readers to vote on whether business magnate Donald Trump was symbolic of what made America a great country. Of more than 6,000 telephoned votes, 81 percent agreed that Trump was a figure of greatness. It later emerged that nearly three-quarters of the votes were called in from just two telephone numbers. Comparisons between such basic polls and more scientific ones show that the results they produce can differ by tens of percentage points.14 Peter Higgs, for one, thought the whole idea of colliders destroying the world was nonsense.


Comedy Writing Secrets by Mel Helitzer, Mark Shatz

Albert Einstein, built by the lowest bidder, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, elephant in my pajamas, fake news, fear of failure, index card, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, Yogi Berra

AMERICAN ENGLISH ITALIAN Dick Chuck Spike Trixy Percy Humphrey Reginald Victor Guido Tony Giuseppe JEWISH FRENCH CHICANO Mendel Sadie Irving Sam Morris Lena Pierre Francois Henri Pepe Suzette Margarita Jose Pablo Manuel Funny Words and Foul Language 183 Most male comedians purposely take short names, more often than not a nickname: Woody, Soupy, Adam, Chris, Dave, Jay, Tim, Billy, Eddie, and Sinbad. Female humorists names are just as short: Goldie, Lily, Lucy, Whoopi, Rita, and Tina. Donald Trump said he named his daughter Tiffany after his favorite store: Tiffany's. How ridiculous is that? In fact, I was just talking about that with my two sons, Crate and Barrel. —Shawn Dion Cities and Places There seems to be no limit to the names of cities, small towns, streets, restaurants, bars, hotels, colleges, and department stores that can be used as humor fuses.


pages: 310 words: 91,151

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

Had I approved the budget for a band?]. The song should show the vigor and vitality of Microsoft employees.” I tried to imagine Jack Welch and his cadre of senior GE executives crooning a tune to the assembled press—“We’re just wild about shareholder value, and our shareholders are wild about us.” Or Donald Trump singing, “Give my regards to Broadway, as I am planning to buy it soon.” I suppressed my smile and changed the subject. “We have to make sure that Bill is well briefed and is constantly citing examples of the great work Microsoft is doing in China. We are spending millions of dollars on programs like technology scholarships for promising students.


pages: 287 words: 92,118

The Blue Cascade: A Memoir of Life After War by Mike Scotti

Bear Stearns, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, Donald Trump, fixed income, friendly fire, index card, information security, London Interbank Offered Rate, military-industrial complex, rent control

And about all the rest of those things that seem to crawl up from the dark depths at times when the cover has been knocked off and the trapdoor that leads down there is left wide open. My eyes scanned the news channel on the TV high on the wall behind the bar, looking for you. But you were not there. A few weeks ago I saw your face on the TV, the story almost a throwaway between Donald Trump’s hiring of Bill on The Apprentice and a stock market report. You were a truck driver in the Army. Ambushed. Dragged away. A POW, with the brim of your boonie hat flipped up in that grainy video. They stuck the camera in your face. You looked away. God knows what was going through your mind, but it looked like you knew what they were going to do to you.


pages: 302 words: 91,517

Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz

Ayatollah Khomeini, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donald Trump, Farzad Bazoft, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, trade route

Since I was barred from visiting the refugee camp, I'd latched onto Faki as the next-best subject for a story about Southern Sudan. I was writing, at the time, for The Wall Street Journal, and Faki struck me as the sort of ruthless entrepreneur with whom bond sharks and arbitragers might identify. Muglad's Mover and Shaker. Donald Trump in turban and galabiya. That evening I saw another side: Faki the village sheik and chieftain. His home lay at the end of a long dirt road, behind a high fence of sorghum stalks. I arrived to find a dozen other guests sitting in the open yard, sipping water. Faki's house was invisible, hidden behind trees in the twilight.


pages: 335 words: 94,657

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing by Taylor Larimore, Michael Leboeuf, Mel Lindauer

asset allocation, behavioural economics, book value, buy and hold, buy low sell high, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endowment effect, estate planning, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Their experiments prove that most investors are more fearful of a loss than they are happy with a gain. We all know people who are afraid of investing in the stock market because they know they might lose money. Risk-averse savers keep billions of dollars in CDs and bank savings accounts, despite their low yields. At the other extreme, we know of investors like Donald Trump who think nothing of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in speculative investments-and are seemingly unworried even when bankruptcy looms. Most of us have a risk tolerance that lies somewhere between these extremes. In order to help determine if your portfolio is suitable for your risk tolerance, you need to be brutally honest with yourself as you try to answer the question, "Will I sell during the next bear market?"


pages: 293 words: 90,714

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Hastily painted pictograms in the middle of car lanes are not infrastructure. They are the awkward watermark of lazy politicians and lazier transport professionals. Hastily painted pictograms in the middle of car lanes are not infrastructure. Then there are center-running lanes. These are the Donald Trumps of bicycle engineering. (Appropriately, Washington, DC, has installed one.) Initially, my international team of planners and urban designers at the Copenhagen Design Company headquarters had a good laugh when we saw a photo of it, but then it sinks in: this is actually a thing. Someone was tasked with putting in bicycle infrastructure and this is what a city ended up with.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

Michelson, Todd Rogers & Ali Adam Valenzuela, ‘Text messages as mobilization tools: the conditional effect of habitual voting and election salience’, American Politics Research, vol. 39, 2011, pp. 664–81. 27Quoted in David E. Broockman & Donald P. Green, ‘Do online advertisements increase political candidates’ name recognition or favorability? Evidence from randomized field experiments’, Political Behavior, vol. 36, no. 2, 2014, pp. 263–89. More recently, Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s digital director, claimed that ‘Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing’: Issie Lapowsky, ‘Here’s how Facebook actually won Trump the presidency’, Wired, 15 November 2016. In a similar vein, see Sue Halpern, ‘How he used Facebook to win’, New York Review of Books, 8 June 2017. 28Quoted in Lapowsky, ‘Here’s how Facebook actually won Trump the presidency’. 29Broockman and Green, ‘Do online advertisements increase political candidates’ name recognition or favorability?’


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

And the most essential key to the future is global agreement that leads us to a sustainable and survivable world. This cannot be based on vague platitudes. No, the key would be economic formulas that are based on wins for all the key players. To Make Humans Great Again Here we steal a catch word from Donald Trump. The idea, though, is not to make the USA great again but to transform our global economy and its worldwide human services to make all Earthlings great. And one of the key steps to achieving this objective would be to ensure the peaceful use of outer space and to find ways to do this so that it would lead to tangible benefits for all humankind.


pages: 279 words: 91,148

Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler by Ethan Brown

barriers to entry, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, forensic accounting, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mandatory minimum

Southeast Queens is home to some of the most sprawling housing projects in all of New York City, most prominently South Jamaica’s Baisley Park Houses and the South Jamaica Houses, nicknamed the “40 Projects” because its cluster of tall brick buildings sits beside Public School 40. South Jamaica is composed mostly of public housing though one area, Jamaica Estates, is dominated by the middle class and is the birthplace of Donald Trump. Further to the south are the Springfield Gardens and Laurelton sections of southeast Queens, which are made up of blocks of middle-class housing developments that breed a professional class of doctors, lawyers, and accountants. Then there is Hollis. Located just east of South Jamaica, the single-family homes of Hollis have for decades been a refuge for lower-middle-class African Americans fleeing the cramped conditions of poor neighborhoods such as the South Bronx and Harlem.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

It became part of the corporate structure it should have been dismantling. It created an ideological vacuum on the left and ceded the language of rebellion to the far right. Capitalism was once viewed by workers as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Donald Trump, are treated as sages, celebrities and populists. The liberal class functions as their cheerleaders. Such misguided loyalty, illustrated by environmental groups that refuse to excoriate the Obama White House over the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, ignores the fact that the divide in America is not between Republican and Democrat.


pages: 341 words: 89,986

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

Giovanni’s palace dresses its marmor­eal permanence in cutting-edge garb, radiating both reliability and modernity – traits essential to a successful business. No wonder he thought building was as important as sex. Rich men like Giovanni have always used architecture to promote themselves and their businesses, even – in the case of flamboyant developers such as Donald Trump – making building itself into an occupation. Architecture is, like any other art, a way of making money, and the priapic towers of developers like Trump expose the business of architecture at its most naked, pulsating with empurpled money lust. From the proto-capitalists who built Florence to the titanic developers of Manhattan, from the German inventors of corporate identity to the deracinated corporations parasitising contemporary London, corporate patrons have reconstructed the city in their own image.


pages: 263 words: 91,898

Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, From Wall Street to Dubai by Ben Mezrich

buy low sell high, carbon credits, Donald Trump, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, upwardly mobile

David declined an offer of champagne and caviar and delicately hung up the phone. He moved a little farther into the incredible two-floor suite. Then he shook his head. An honored guest of the Ministry of Finance. Cristal on the airplane. A silver stretch BMW waiting for him at the curb. And a hotel room right out of Donald Trump’s fantasies. David wasn’t sure who these people were or what they wanted—but they sure as hell had gotten his attention. Chapter 24 From the very moment David lowered himself into his seat at the postmodern, black-glass conference table in the huge, brightly lit penthouse office on top of the second Emirates Tower, he realized that he was way out of his element.


pages: 264 words: 89,323

The Hilarious World of Depression by John Moe

Amazon Robotics, benefit corporation, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

Technology was just starting to open up, so the prizes in the capitalism contest—A phone in your car! A videocassette recorder! A personal computer!—were not only culturally on display but were tools to a more advanced life than other people had. You’d get ahead and stay ahead. We watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on television. We believed that Donald Trump was a shrewd and wealthy businessman. All this in an era when the Reagan administration tilted the federal government to benefit corporations and away from providing protection and a safety net for individuals. We fetishized our own exploitation. Much the same spirit existed at Amazon. The power ties and hair gel had been replaced by blue oxfords and khakis, but the culture was the same.


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

The current order is indeed underpinned by the legacy of the Second World War—but not solely by it. The advance of democratic norms and values in the region has been in large part a product of the presence of the United States. One of the great questions raised in the 2010s, and to be answered in the 2020s, is whether the election of Donald Trump, a US president more careless of norms than his predecessor, and the rise of China, an avowedly nonliberal state, will mean that the democratization of Asia proves a more temporary moment than it might have appeared at the start of the century. Circuits of Memory China’s treatment of its collective memory of the war draws on historical experience and political and social techniques that are in some ways similar to those of other countries, and in other ways profoundly different.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

As Tesla’s own supplier of Autopilot-enabling hardware and others pointed out, Tesla’s decision to rush Autopilot to market, push the technology to the limit, and overhype its capabilities was what put lives—and the future of autonomous-drive technology itself—at risk. By conflating criticisms of Autopilot with criticisms of autonomous vehicles, Musk’s rant proved that he still didn’t get it. In the end, Musk’s bluster and bad statistics won the day. On January 19, 2017, the last day of the Obama Administration, the day before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, NHTSA closed its investigation of the Joshua Brown crash with the conclusion that Autopilot should not be recalled. Not only did NHTSA’s final report exonerate Autopilot, both in the Brown case and more generally, it included a breathtaking endorsement of the most controversial part of the system: “The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation.”


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

The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal provides a smoking gun for how the data we contribute online is used without our explicit consent to sell us political agendas and offer fake news. Here's a brief recap of how the situation played out. Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British consulting firm, developed political ads for the Kenyan leader Uhuru Kenyatta, Donald Trump, and proponents of Brexit during its initial referendum, among others. The firm used personal information from close to 87 million Facebook profiles, which it acquired without account-holders’ explicit permission, to generate psychological profiles. These profiles were then used to target political advertisements that drastically changed the political landscape of Kenya, the United States, Great Britain, and perhaps other countries still to be revealed.2 Questions still exist about whether Facebook knew that the data was collected against their terms of service and to what extent, but it has been confirmed that data was acquired through an application developed by Aleksandr Kogan, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge's psychology department.


pages: 301 words: 90,362

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 90 percent rule, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, game design, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Khan Academy, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TED Talk

He shot cover photographs for Time magazine for many years and was a staff photographer for The New Yorker magazine. His signature style is a photograph taken so close to his subjects that you can see their pores. Platon has photographed every sitting U.S. president from Jimmy Carter through Barack Obama. He has done multiple portraits of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, well before they were presidential candidates. He has photographed world leaders from Angela Merkel to Tony Blair to Ban Ki-moon, the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations, and infamous despots from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.


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

* * * Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964, the eighteen-year “baby boom” that began with the economic recovery of World War II and accelerated as soldiers returned home. They became the biggest, and most influential, generation the United States had ever seen. Today, there are 73 million boomers in America, and 72 percent of them are white. Donald Trump is a boomer—so is Elizabeth Warren. They’re now in their sixties and seventies, parents, grandparents, and in some cases great-grandparents, retiring and grappling with the aging process. But back in the 1970s, they were in the position that many millennials find themselves now: entering the workplace for the first time, getting married, and figuring out what raising a family might look like.


pages: 304 words: 89,879

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

In less than a decade, the company went from launching a rocket with a single engine to one with twenty-seven engines. The world had never seen anything like this before. And then, the two side boosters returned to Earth, landing side by side, almost as a pair of synchronized swimming angels descending down from heaven to Earth. Even President Donald Trump, so often consumed by his personal interests and the politics of the moment, took note of the Falcon Heavy’s graceful launch and landing. “You see the engines coming back down, there’s no wings or nothing,” he said at one campaign event. “It’s almost like, what are we watching? Is this fiction?”


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

For sites that don’t have their own built-in muting function, there are apps you can download that perform a similar function. Sadblock filters and hides news articles about triggering or disturbing topics such as sexual assault.26 More generic apps like CustomBlocker can be programmed to hide any content that a particular person wants to avoid, whether it’s fat-shaming ads for weight-loss products or articles about Donald Trump.27 All of these tools can easily be toggled on and off, so you can get a brief update on a challenging topic and then hide posts for the rest of the day. Block Whoever You Need to (and Don’t Feel Bad about It) Sometimes the source of the overload isn’t a word or a phrase, it’s a person.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As O’Hagan writes, “Satoshi was loved by bitcoin fans for making a beautiful thing and then disappearing. They don’t want Satoshi to be wrong or contradictory, boastful or short-tempered, and they really don’t want him to be a 45-year-old Australian called Craig.” Tall, dark-haired, Hollywood-handsome, contradictory, libertarian, boastful, and short-tempered, Wright smacks of a cypherpunk Donald Trump. Or as his Sydney project manager put it, “He’s like Steve Jobs, only worse.” O’Hagan’s saga opens cinematically on December 9, 2015, with the woebegone Aussie in a rush to the airport from his police-thronged Sydney home, discovering on the way that he has forgotten his passport. Creeping back against the advice of his Asian wife, Ramona, he hides until the police give up and leave.


A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor

Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial independence, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, out of africa, publish or perish, trade route

The hero of his age. And yes, he really did have that bloody awful pudding-bowl haircut. They all did. Whether Henry was a royal trendsetter or it was practical under their helmets, I didn’t know. I certainly couldn’t think of any other reason for having the most hideous hairstyle in a History that includes Donald Trump. His face was very long and badly scarred down one side. He’d caught an arrow in the cheek at Shrewsbury in 1403 and had been lucky to survive. The king was on his way back to his own lines which were already opening up to receive him when a great cry of outrage rose up from the English ranks.


Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

Are there a dozen milk bottles on your doorstep that you can’t get to as you’ve fallen and smashed your hip? Congratulations, you’re ageing very fast. And saved yourself 700 quid – which I suggest you put towards a deposit on a coffin. Scientists claim that baldness can be cured with a pig’s bladder. At last, the mystery of what the fuck Donald Trump is wearing on his head has been solved. They also think they might have found the key to eternal youth by manipulating genes that stop internal organs from aging. Although, if you really want to stay young for ever, you should immerse yourself in a bathtub full of virile young men’s seed. When it hardens, you’ll remain trapped for eternity like a bug in amber.


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

Ellen DeGeneres tweeted a picture from the 2014 Oscars showing Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, and other famous celebs, and that pic was retweeted 3.1 million times. Tweets in March 2011 warned Japanese citizens about a massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake and what soon became the Fukushima disaster. President Donald Trump used Twitter for four straight years to dictate policy, including to sack senior administration officials. Twitter helped shape the zeitgeist. It still does. Twitter now has over 200 million users. It has generated positive and substantial free cash flow for six straight years. Its revenue base has almost tripled since its IPO, from $1.4 billion in 2014 to a path to well over $4 billion in 2021.


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

But his life was changed forever: even if he goes through a lengthy and difficult process of having his record expunged, his arrest could still come up in any future background search or job-application paperwork. It turns out anyone who has ever posted their face on social media has essentially fed it into a public database for the police to use. The same month I spoke with Williams, New York activist Derrick Ingram joined a Manhattan Black Lives Matter protest on the occasion of Donald Trump’s birthday. Ingram, who goes by D-Wreck, had regularly protested in high school, then fell out of the habit in his early twenties. Now he was back, with powerful feelings and a bullhorn. “That passion and anger came out on the megaphone that day,” he told me from the courtyard of his apartment building.


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

These arguments have been made very persuasively in the media and by populist politicians, but let’s look at the facts – they may surprise you. WHO BELONGS HERE? Most of these arguments against immigration rest on the idea that there is a true and pure national identity, which means some people ‘belong’ while others do not. It is no surprise to me that the architects of Donald Trump’s extreme immigration policies have links to ‘race science’ and eugenics.4 As I write this, a Black politician, David Lammy, who was born in London in 1972 and has lived there since, is being asked on a national radio station, ‘How can you call yourself English?’ The caller says that her own ancestors go back to Anglo-Saxon times, whereas his are clearly African-Caribbean.


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

To Wang the project was perfect; it was one hundred miles from the US border so it would allow easy access to the US market without alerting the authorities to the presence of a Chinese company on its home turf. ‘The US is off limits to us,’ Wang conceded, due to the political pressure mounting in the country under President Donald Trump, who had launched a trade war with China. Yet America produced virtually zero lithium. Wang was uniquely relaxed, warm and comfortable in his own skin. He exuded a quiet confidence and a light sense of humour. He had managed to learn fluent English despite never having lived overseas. He was the picture of a successful Chinese executive: he wore a smart black watch, drove a Tesla Model X and had a child studying in New York.


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

He and a number of his friends in Lebanon were outraged by how the Japanese were treating Ghosn. They had all responded with fierce loyalty in the months that had followed the arrest, a movement of sorts led by Ghosn’s wife, Carole, who was now banned from seeing her husband. Convinced of her husband’s innocence, she had lobbied world leaders from US president Donald Trump to French president Emmanuel Macron, filed a complaint with Human Rights Watch about the way the Japanese authorities were treating her husband, and appeared on numerous TV broadcasts to plead his case. The legal fight was also being quarterbacked from Beirut. Days after the arrest, the Lebanese lawyer Carlos Abou Jaoude resigned from his contract with Nissan to fight Ghosn’s case, pulling all-nighters to coordinate the lawyers in Japan, France, and the United States.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

But since capitalism grows through its frontiers, the domestic and international deployments of force through nature to secure money, work, care, food, and fuel are accompanied by ideologies of race and state and nation, together with the appropriations and devaluations that these deployments involve. Cheap lives are made through the apparatus of the modern social order. They’re absolutely necessary to capitalism’s ecology. The power of these narratives of human community and exclusion has a particular salience today, as the tilts of Donald Trump’s America, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, and Narendra Modi’s India suggest. INTRODUCING WORLD-ECOLOGY Our views of capitalism, life making, and the seven cheap things are part of a perspective that we call world-ecology.118 World-ecology has emerged in recent years as a way to think through human history in the web of life.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

The path to money, the places money can take us, the time and freedom and opportunity money can bring—these are what we’re really after. You can have it all. Just not all at once. —OPRAH WINFREY Take a moment now and think about what you really want your money to buy. Not everybody wants to live like Donald Trump or Floyd “Money” Mayweather! Is your dream to travel the globe, exploring ancient cities or photographing lions in the Serengeti? Is it owning your own beach house in the Bahamas or a penthouse in New York? Is it starting your own business—the next Snapchat, or creating an extraordinary contribution to humanity like the next Charity Water?

The first hole is 10 cents, the second hole is 20 cents, the third hole is 40. By the time they get to the fifth hole, it’s $1.60. The sixth hole is $3.20, and they’re only one-third of the way through 18 holes. By the time they get to the 18th hole, how much are they playing for? How about $13,107! That’s a steep golf bet, even for Donald Trump. And that’s the magic of compounding in action. It’s also what happens when you’re investing in your Security Bucket over the long haul. You reinvest the interest you make, and, for a long time, there seems to be no progress at all. But you get to the 13th hole, and then the 14th, and then the 16th, and then it explodes.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Since 2008 Cassandra voices had been heard prophesying the beginning of the end of the Eurozone, and of the European Union, the reversion to a continent of rival nation states, a return to the fascism of the 1930s and reawakening of the spirits of Europe’s dark past, the danger of revived Russian power, the decline of Europe’s influence in the world, an end to peace and prosperity, perhaps even a nuclear war. Donald Trump’s unexpected election in November 2016 as President of the United States brought an impulsive, unpredictable figure into the White House – moreover one who had made no secret of his detachment from Europe and its dominant values. His early months in office were deeply unsettling – and not just for Europeans.

Austria was moving in step with the trend to the anti-immigrant right that was common to much of Europe. Of course, all national elections have specific features. But as 2017 drew to a close, the German and Austrian elections accorded in their own distinctive ways to a pattern that could be seen across Europe, and in the United States in Donald Trump’s election. This pattern, worrying for future social and political stability, was the rise of populist ‘outsider’ movements (mainly of the right). They were able to exploit the rage felt by wide swaths of voters against what they saw as an inept, inadequate or sometimes corrupt mainstream parties.


Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

book value, commoditize, Donald Trump, index card, Indoor air pollution, Maui Hawaii, telemarketer

It is a measure of your personal power, your desire to control situations, and how well you assert yourself in every interaction. Candidates who exhibit high dominance have strong egos. Although the word ego tends to have negative connotations, it is actually a good thing in certain situations. Donald Trump has a strong ego. Do you think that's helped him go from the $25 million his father was worth to the billions he's worth today? Then there are others whose ego is less obvious, but it's clearly working hard for them. Do you think that Steven Spielberg is a wallflower? No, he has a strong sense of self (ego) that has guided him to becoming one of the most powerful producer/directors on the planet.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). 21. Throughout this book, we have opted to use the gender-neutral singular “they” wherever possible. See Jeff Guo, “Sorry, grammar nerds. The singular ‘they’ has been declared Word of the Year,” Washington Post, January 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/08/donald-trump-may-win-this-years-word-of-the-year/, accessed March 16, 2016. 22. R. H. Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics 3 (October 1960): 1–44, at 15–28. 23. Thomas W. Merrill and Henry E. Smith, “Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle,” Yale Law Journal 110 (October 2000): 1–70, at 40–42. 24.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

If the real reason for helping Americans to the exclusion of others is to keep the revolution down—that is, to protect the self-interest of the rich, which is really no moral reason at all—then our moral obligation is to accomplish that objective at the lowest cost possible, so we can use the remaining resources to help others who need it more, wherever they are located. On the other side of the moral issue, does geographic proximity give America’s poor (or middle and working classes) the right to tax America’s successful workers for their own gain? In effect, Donald Trump and his supporters insist that America’s properly trained talent, investors, and risk-takers must work on behalf of Americans only—that they should be restricted from hiring offshore workers, for example. If that’s just, and not just political power, then why don’t those same rights extend to the rest of the world?


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Or perhaps the wealthy person who accepts the gamble and the less wealthy person who declines it are, in fact, choosing completely appropriately in both cases. Consider: a family deep into debt and about to default on their home could really use that first million; the added three million would be icing on the cake but wouldn’t change much. The “quadruple or nothing” offer just isn’t worth betting the farm—literally. Whereas for a billionaire like Donald Trump, a million bucks is chump change, and he’ll probably take his chances, knowing the odds favor him. The two choose differently—and both choose correctly. At any rate, and with examples like this one aside, the prevailing attitude seems clear: economists who subscribe to the rational-choice theory and those who critique it (in favor of what’s known as “bounded rationality”) both think that an emotionless, Spock-like approach to decision making is demonstrably superior.


pages: 309 words: 95,644

On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition) by William Zinsser

affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, feminist movement, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, popular capitalism, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman

Singer’s lethal potion is concocted of hundreds of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul,” Singer describes a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach spa converted by Trump from the 118-room Hispano-Moorish-Venetian mansion built in the 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post and E.


pages: 319 words: 103,707

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, fixed-gear, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, managed futures, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

The Apprentice, a show in which one tries to learn skill in business, teaches the arbitrariness of contemporary success in relation to skill. The winners are conditioned to meet a certain kind of norm, not really familiar from anywhere else in life, which corresponds to “the values of business” as interpreted by Donald Trump. America’s Next Top Model shows how a beauty contest ceases to be about beauty. The real fascination of the show is learning, first, how the norms of the fashion industry don’t correspond to ordinary ideas of beauty (you knew it abstractly, here’s proof!), but to requirements of the display of clothes and shilling for cosmetics; second, how the show will, in the name of these norms, seek something quite different in its contestants—a psychological adhesiveness, a willingness to be remade and obey.


pages: 367 words: 102,188

Sleepyhead: Narcolepsy, Neuroscience and the Search for a Good Night by Henry Nicholls

A. Roger Ekirch, confounding variable, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, global pandemic, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mouse model, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, traumatic brain injury, web application, Yom Kippur War

There are plenty of people who dismiss sleep as if it’s some bothersome encumbrance. When asked how much sleep people needed, Napoleon Bonaparte is fabled to have said: ‘Six for a man, seven for a woman, eight for a fool.’ Margaret Thatcher is thought to have got by nicely on only four hours a night. More recently, Donald Trump is an advocate of cutting back on kip. ‘Don’t sleep any more than you have to,’ he wrote in his 2004 best-seller Think Like a Billionaire. ‘I’m not a big sleeper,’ he reiterated during his presidential campaign in 2016. ‘I like three hours, four hours. I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on.’


pages: 363 words: 98,024

Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government by Paul Volcker, Christine Harper

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, income per capita, inflation targeting, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, Nixon shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning

But disagreements on the board, as I well know, can be healthy as well as destructive. The new position, while now a part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, took years to be formally filled. In the interim, the function was substantially performed by a strong sitting governor, Daniel Tarullo. Randal Quarles, the first of President Donald Trump’s appointees to the Reserve Board, was sworn in and specifically tasked with financial supervision in October 2017. Incidentally, Quarles carries forward the historic connection of Utah’s Eccles family with the Federal Reserve. His wife, Hope Eccles, is a relative of former Federal Reserve chairman Marriner Eccles, who cared a lot about the regulatory process.


pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Though it might be intellectually defensible for a country that went to the Moon in the 1960s to treat Chinese lunar expeditions in the 2030s with a been-there-done-that insouciance, it would probably not be good politics. The desire not to seem outmatched by China is one of the reasons that, under President Donald Trump, NASA has taken on a far more explicitly Moon-focused strategy, with an overt intention to return on a permanent and eventually moneymaking basis.12 But China is not the whole story. Billionaires matter too—particularly, though not exclusively, billionaires with Silicon Valley in their background.


pages: 323 words: 100,923

This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir" by Doug Stanhope

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, bitcoin, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, obamacare, pre–internet, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer, traveling salesman

“Do you know when it’s going to air???” in desperation as the crew quickly disappears. The whole thing was sad and abusive on every level, starting and ballooning at the top. Joe Francis is such a boorish, vile and megalomaniacal person that at times I even skipped his private jet in favor of taking the bus with the crew. Imagine Donald Trump if he were young and could get an erection. A frat boy worth fifty million who’d still bang a girl in the hotel suite toilet and come out saying, “Smell my fingers.” Not in the funny way like a comedian would. Like some guy who would fuck girls at after-parties and then immediately throw them out just to make them cry.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Politicians can license music even if the composer objects because the license is compulsory, but the composer can sue to prevent usage on other grounds, such as by arguing that use of his or her music creates the impression of a false endorsement. These cases are not always easy, however. A lawyer representing Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, for example, sent two letters to Donald Trump’s campaign requesting that the candidate cease and desist from using the band’s song “Dream On” at campaign events, to no avail. The singer, a registered Republican, later objected when President Trump used his “Livin’ on the Edge” at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia.24 Tyler later tweeted: “I do not let anyone use my songs without my permission.


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

Cost management is an obvious priority, where Amazon can realize efficiencies by gaining end-to-end visibility over its entire supply chain. Entrusting the last mile to third parties cedes control over the most visible customer-facing part of that chain and is at odds with its customer-driven ethos. Its US Postal Service custom has also recently been in the firing line of Donald Trump’s peripatetic Twitter rants in what some have seen as thinly veiled attacks on Jeff Bezos and his ownership of the Washington Post newspaper, which has been critical of the US President’s threats against journalists who provide coverage he deems unfavourable. In what Trump has termed Amazon’s ‘Post Office scam’, he tweeted, ‘It is reported that the US Post Office will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon.’8 While this and the taxes Amazon pays have been criticized by Trump and may end up becoming part of a wider antitrust move by the Republican president, industry consensus puts the US Postal Service’s woes down to reasons that have little to do with Amazon.


pages: 344 words: 96,690

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

business process, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, demand response, Donald Trump, estate planning, Firefox, folksonomy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, off-the-grid, Parler "social media", Salesforce, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, social bookmarking, social intelligence, Streisand effect, the long tail, Tony Hsieh

“There is always some nervousness about how it will turn out.” The Dove ads created by the teams on The Apprentice were pretty bad; it wasn’t the best way to showcase and launch a product. But the Dove team took advantage of the Apprentice miscues and the buzz around them to launch their own version of the ad, introduced by Apprentice host Donald Trump himself, which generated a flood of visits to dove.com. In the end the Apprentice gamble and the subsequent ad paid off—Babs told us that Dove Cool Moisture Beauty Body Wash had strong sales results after the episode aired. By 2005, Rob was eager to push the envelope again, and this time the Web was central to this plan.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

The viewers of The Real World, ironically, have no such expectation of the consistency of reality. They know enough about marketing to accept that the clothes the participants wear might be sponsored by fashion companies in the same way that professional sports uniforms are sponsored by Nike. That’s the real world, after all. If Donald Trump’s “apprentices” are all working to brand a new hamburger, the audience understands that Burger King has paid for the exposure. In presentist TV, programmers lose the ability to distinguish between the program and the commercial—but they also lose the need to do so. The bigger challenge is creating content compelling enough to watch, and to do so without any setup at all.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The tycoon is a tough man who shouts belligerently “You’re fired” at the losers, but who, in his own harsh and distant but ethical way, serves as a mentor to help them all. The story shows the challenges of a go-go business world, but it also affirms the quality of the people who inhabit it and of young people’s ambitions to make it big there, if they can just take the heat. The U.S. version features the American real estate magnate Donald Trump, a colorful figure who was already famous even before The Apprentice ever aired. This story spread rapidly all over the world through local remakes during a time of economic expansion. The only thing that producers needed to do to facilitate this spread was to substitute some locally famous tycoon or personality for Trump, to maximize the potential for word of mouth and gossip in each local culture.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Americans are like the humans in the film Wall-E, consuming everything, producing nothing: useless, obese spectators. While the rest of the world’s nations are getting rich, trading with each other and selling stuff to Americans, a mere 1 percent of American firms manage to export. But that’s a myth too. In fact, as Donald Trump might say, the United States is a world-class exporter. We may be a nation of isolationist homebodies—only about 30 percent of Americans have passports—but even as the talk of decline has grown, exports have risen, in real terms and as a percentage of GDP. In fact, the United States is the top exporter in the world.1 And most of the stuff it exports is stuff.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

For example, people who are heavy TV watchers vastly exaggerate the number of Americans with swimming pools, tennis courts, maids, and planes, and their own expectations of what they should have also become inflated, so they tend to spend more and save less.”13 Schor says that as the gap between rich and poor grew during the 1980s, people with relatively high incomes began to feel deprived in comparison to those who were suddenly making even more. “They started to feel ‘poor on $100,000 a year’ as the well-known phrase puts it, because they were comparing themselves to the Donald Trumps and the other newly wealthy.” It happened all the way down the income line, Schor says. “Everybody felt worse compared to the role models, those at the top.” By the late ’90s, polls showed that Americans believed they needed $75,000 (for a family of four) to lead a “minimum” middle-class life.


pages: 193 words: 98,671

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

If, instead, you define the project in terms of quality and user satisfaction, you will get a product that users want, and it won't take any longer. There's an old Silicon Valley joke that asks, "How do you make a small fortune in software?" The answer, of course, is, "Start with a large fortune!" The hidden costs of even well-managed software-development projects are large enough to give Donald Trump pause. Yacht racing and drug habits are cheaper in the long run than writing software without the proper controls. Part II: It Costs You Big Time Chapter 3 Wasting Money Chapter 4 The Dancing Bear Chapter 5 Customer Disloyalty Chapter 3. Wasting Money It's harder than you might think to squander millions of dollars, but a flawed software-development process is a tool well suited to the job.


pages: 333 words: 99,545

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman

affirmative action, Boris Johnson, crowdsourcing, deskilling, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, old-boy network, Russell Brand

19 The MPs who decided that this statement should be debated even though they vehemently disagreed with its sentiments (and perhaps its grammar) used the slot to explain why they disagreed. It was a neat way of giving those who had signed the petition a voice but not validation. Alternatively, it was a waste of parliamentary time. A much greater waste of parliamentary time, which many more MPs took up as a cause célèbre, was a petition to ban then presidential candidate Donald Trump from the UK that attracted 586,930 signatures.20 A three-hour debate in Westminster Hall duly took place, with plenty of grandstanding from backbenchers who were also aware that Trump had, at the time, said nothing about visiting the country. What a lot of noise with no impact. This can be said not just of non-binding debates about petitions, but of so many of the debates in the House of Commons Chamber.


The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean

Donald Trump, financial independence, index card, Joan Didion, new economy, offshore financial centre, Richard Bolles, Suez canal 1869, traveling salesman, tulip mania

., had become a $35-million-a-year business. The average Seminole’s quarterly dividends rose from $100 to $600, and the tribe’s income from its businesses rose from $500,000 annually to more than $10 million. Chief Billie and the tribe began to be approached regularly by businesses looking for joint-venture opportunities. Donald Trump approached them in 1996 with his eye on the tribe’s casinos; Chief Billie said he would talk with Trump only if the meeting was held in the Big Cypress Swamp and if Trump agreed to spend the night watching alligator wrestling and eating Seminole fry bread and frog legs. The meeting took place on Chief Billie’s terms.


pages: 335 words: 98,847

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins

Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans

I get woken up every time they do a count, and Scott’s coping strategy doesn’t help. I’m roused at 5 a.m. by him standing in his pants bellowing, ‘Can you fuck off with your checks? We are Listeners! On call twenty-four-fucking-seven, saving lives!’ The next morning Officer Mendes is noticeably more diligent while taking the H Wing register. 9 November Donald Trump has won the US presidential election. It’s the inevitable next chapter for the parallel universe that was formed following my conviction and the Brexit vote. I can’t help feeling that if I’d done a better job in the witness box, Hillary Clinton would now be in the White House. I pop over to Ted’s cell so that he can bask in his right-wing triumph.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

The UK will have to find another growth formula, whatever deal it ultimately strikes. The Conservatives have looked to the Commonwealth to help with this, in keeping with a certain colonial residue in ‘global-trader’ thinking; the Commonwealth, especially India, has politely looked the other way. They have looked to Donald Trump, artist of the deal, to offer Britain a quick trade pact, perhaps based on the same hawkishly neoliberal terms as the TTIP. But they are dissembling when it comes to how quickly this can be negotiated and how much of a difference it will make. Beyond this, the Tories have opted for what Labour are calling ‘bargain-basement capitalism’ – rolling back exiguous European constraints on labour and environmental protections, driving down wages and cutting corporation taxes to rock bottom.41 Labour is now in a realistic position to offer something else.


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

So to work together, they focused on, to paraphrase MC Rakim, not where they were from, but where they were at. Both brands were at a similar point in their careers. Despite Diddy’s YouTube claim, 50 Cent was the newly crowned king of commercial hip-hop in 2005. He came up by shifting fifty thousand mixtapes on the streets of New York by himself, to become a one-man brand on a par with Donald Trump or Oprah, and getting shot nine times along the way. The year before, he’d made $50 million without releasing a single record. He had a clothing line; a line of Reebok sneakers (that Taki 183 in 2005 was outselling all of Reebok’s shoes endorsed by sports personalities); and his book, video game, and movie were all hits that year, too.


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

Among them were the lucky beneficiaries of life insurance policies: the US life insurance industry paid out nearly $100 million in claims after the pandemic–the equivalent of $20 billion today. Others had been named in wills. Upon the death from flu of one German immigrant to America, for example, his widow and son received a sum of money. They invested it in property, and today the immigrant’s grandson is a property magnate purportedly worth billions. His name is Donald Trump. Most had a less rosy future to look forward to, however. One Swedish study found that for each flu death, four people moved into the poorhouse.3 A person who was accepted into a public poorhouse in Sweden at that time received food, clothing, medical care and their funeral costs, but was declared legally incompetent.


pages: 393 words: 102,801

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

There certainly seems to be no negative correlation between government law-making on immigration and public concern. Quite the opposite; if anything, the more politicians pontificate, the more anxious the public becomes. It could be that this opposite is actually intended, and perhaps the policies are supposed to manufacture public concern for political gain. In the populist age of Donald Trump, this degree of cynicism is far from implausible. Cameron was no Trump, but he certainly used some of the same techniques to bolster his political position. As discussed in Chapter 2, there is evidence that Cameron increasingly focused on immigration from 2010 onwards, in the belief that immigration was an issue that favoured the Conservative Party.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Blackstone-owned firms develop ports and roads, thereby fueling the hostile takeover of lands by agribusiness that damages indigenous land and sovereignty.47 Blackstone’s practices fit within a long history of dispossession sanctioned by state violence and international government alliances. In Brazil, the election of Jair Bolsonaro led to intensified deforestation and land grabs in the Amazon, which profits Blackstone. U.S. president Donald Trump has strongly allied with Bolsonaro, as both men promise their nations a strikingly similar return to a bygone era of whiteness. Bolsonaro has praised Brazil’s military dictatorship—a period marked by violent invasion of white ranchers into the Amazon—and, like Trump, has promised to make his nation “great again.”


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

The phenomenon of fake news, which started to make global headlines in 2016, demonstrated just how powerful social media is, and how easily it can be used to influence events on a global scale. Two events made fake news into global headlines: the US presidential elections of November 2016, which led to the election of Donald Trump; and the June 2016 UK national referendum on continued membership of the European Union, which resulted in a narrow vote in favour of leaving. Social media undoubtedly played a significant role in both campaigns – Trump, whatever one thinks of his politics or personal behaviour, is adept at using social media to rally his supporters.


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

But when those good people cry out for climate policies—and I’m going to include Arvind and myself in that—we may not realize we are partly responsible for the confusion. We have meatball companies. We have organ-printing companies. We have longevity companies. We have robot companies. We do crypto. We have space-agriculture companies. We do all that. We have great friends who are transhumanist advocates. Silicon Valley actually operates a lot like Donald Trump. It says a heck of a lot of things, and the rest of the world can’t tell if it’s bluffing or real. Is it just hype? Is it serious? Is it wishful thinking? Plenty of warnings about pandemic risk had been issued, but little was done. Microbes finally got their 9/11 moment. The world will never be the same.


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

It’s such a well-known, visible sign of Autism that training children to have “quiet hands” is one of the foremost goals of ABA therapy.[1] Though hand flapping is harmless and not disruptive, neurotypical people recognize it instantly as a sign of disability—and therefore punish it harshly. People imitate Autistic hand flapping when they want to imply a disabled person is stupid, annoying, or out of control. Donald Trump famously did a cruel imitation of hand flapping during his 2016 campaign, while criticizing a physically disabled reporter. But in recent years, despite all the social baggage, Trevor has learned to embrace his flaps. Trevor came out as Autistic to his friends a few years ago. He’s forty-five now, but has known about his disability since he was twelve.


pages: 345 words: 100,989

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

In 2016, Justice ran for governor of West Virginia – one of the poorest states in the US. He was a controversial politician and a frequent pundit on cable news. Although Justice was a registered Republican, he ran as a Democrat in the blue-collar state. After he won, Justice switched camps again, back to the Republicans, a move he announced at a rally with President Donald Trump. It was a strange turn of affairs – in a period of major electoral surprises, the political news publication Politico asked, ‘Is West Virginia Holding America’s Weirdest Election?’ Justice had also become known for something else: not paying his debts. In May 2020, the US investigative journalism outlet ProPublica published an investigation into the Justice family’s businesses.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

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

Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present, no. 70 (February 1976): 8. 66. Jen Kirby, “Trump’s Purge of Inspectors General, Explained,” Vox, updated May 28, 2020, www.vox.com/2020/5/28/21265799/inspectors-general-trump-linick-atkinson; Donald Trump, “Statement by the President—The White House,” White House, March 27, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-by-the-president-38/. 67. Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Tim Mak, “Who Is Watching Over Coronavirus Bailout Spending?,” Economy, NPR, April 19, 2020, www.npr.org/2020/04/19/838073166/who-is-watching-over-coronavirus-bailout-spending-1st-panel-appointee-talks-over. 68.


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

Sometimes this person felt torn between these accounts—but their locked (or private) personal Twitter account also provided a very necessary outlet for humor that they couldn’t indulge publicly without worrying about their hireability down the road. Another person I interviewed told me of doing something similar but with even higher stakes. Olivia (not her real name) moved to the US in her late twenties for graduate school. After she graduated, Donald Trump was elected, and with his presidency came new immigration policies. For the first time, she had visa troubles. Though the new administration terrified her, she had no desire to leave. But Olivia didn’t even consider staying in the country undocumented—her mother’s health was declining, and she didn’t want to risk not being able to leave to see her if she needed to, knowing that if she left undocumented she wouldn’t be able to return.


pages: 900 words: 241,741

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean tech, clean water, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where the showing of Twins capped a daylong festival of entertainment in Washington, DC, promoting the Special Olympics. President-elect Bush came with his wife, Barbara, and Teddy Kennedy, Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy II, and other members of the Kennedy and Shriver clans all came. Barbara Walters and TV news anchorwoman Connie Chung were there, and even business tycoons Armand Hammer and Donald Trump. Out front there was a traffic jam of stretch limos, along with dozens of cameras crews and hundreds of fans. A demo of gymnastics and weight lifting by Special Olympics athletes opened the show. Then the president elect got up onstage and praised the athletes for their courage before turning to me.

But someone like Ted Turner goes from running his father’s outdoor advertising business to founding CNN, to organizing the Goodwill Games, to raising bison and supplying bison meat, to having forty-seven honorary degrees. That’s what I call staying hungry. Bono starts as a musician, then buys others’ music, then works to combat AIDS and to create jobs. Anthony Quinn was not happy just being a movie star. He wanted to do more. He became a painter whose canvases sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Donald Trump turned his inheritance into a fortune ten times as big, then had a network TV show. Sarge traveled the world till he died, always hungry for new projects. So many accomplished people just coast. They wish they could still be somebody and not just talk about the past. There is much more to life than being the greatest at one thing.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Horses and classes | Participatory activities Lasker Rink 110th St, Central Park T212/5347639, Wwww.centralparknyc.org. This lesserknown ice rink is at the north end of the park, and used as a pool in summer. Much cheaper than the Wollman Rink, though less accessible – both rinks are now owned by Donald Trump. Nov–March $4.50, under 12 and seniors $2.25, skate rental $4.75. Rockefeller Center Ice Rink between 49th and 50th sts, off Fifth Ave T 212/332-7654. It’s a quintessential New York scene, lovely to look at but with long lines and high prices. $10–14, under 12 and seniors $7.50–8.50, rentals $8.

The real-estate and stock markets boomed during the 1980s, ushering in another era of Big Money; fortunes were made and lost overnight and big Wall Street names, like Michael Milken, were thrown in jail for insider trading. A spate of construction gave the city more eye-catching, though not necessarily well-loved, architecture, notably Battery Park City, and master builder Donald Trump provided glitzy housing for the super-wealthy. The stock market dip in 1987 started yet another downturn, and Koch’s popularity waned. In 1989, he lost the Democratic mayoral nomination to David Dinkins, a 61-year-old black ex-marine who went on to beat Republican Rudolph Giuliani, a hard-nosed US attorney, in a hard-fought election.


pages: 426 words: 105,423

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

If I offered you $10,000,000 to work 24 hours a day for 15 years and then retire, would you do it? Of course not—you couldn’t. It is unsustainable, just as what most define as a career: doing the same thing for 8+ hours per day until you break down or have enough cash to permanently stop. How else can my 30-year-old friends all look like a cross between Donald Trump and Joan Rivers? It’s horrendous—premature aging fueled by triple bypass frappuccinos and impossible workloads. Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly. The NR aims to distribute “mini-retirements” throughout life instead of hoarding the recovery and enjoyment for the fool’s gold of retirement.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

It’s a vicious cycle: if people buy less, companies make less, which means people get paid less, which means people buy less. And so on, until we’re all out of work. (Thankfully it doesn’t get that bad—but only because some people are refusing to lower their wages. The thing that mainstream economists said was causing unemployment is actually preventing it!) But this cycle can be run in reverse. Imagine Donald Trump hires unemployed people to build him a new skyscraper. They’re suddenly getting paid again, which means they can start spending again. And each dollar they spend goes to a different business, which can start hiring people itself. And then those newly hired people start spending the new money they make, and so on.


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Piles of crushed GM EV1 electric cars. 30. Tokyo Power Electric Company. Takafumi Anegawa. 31. Mitsubishi. iMieve Water Testing. 32. Tillemann, Levi. Wada and His iMiev, 2010. 33. Mitsubishi. iMieve Cold Testing. 34. Jurvetson, Steve. Elon Musk Taking Questions, 2014. 35. Davd S. Bob Lutz and Donald Trump with the 2006 Cadillac DTS at the New York International Auto Show, 2005 (Flickr, Creative Commons). 36. Nissan. NISSAN GT-R / NISSAN GT-R NISMO , 2014. 37. C-Span. Government Assistance for U.S. Automakers Hearing, 2008 (screengrab). 38. C-Span. Government Assistance for U.S. Automakers Hearing, 2008 (screengrab). 39.


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Unfortunately, there is a long tradition of politicians and CEOs sacrificing the long term and the greater good in order to satisfy a small constituency at the moment. Educating and retraining a workforce to adapt to change is far more effective than trying to preserve that workforce in some sort of Luddite bubble. But that takes planning and sacrifice, words more associated with a game of chess than with today’s leaders. Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016 with promises of “bringing jobs back” from Mexico and China, as if American workers can or should be competing for manufacturing jobs with countries where salaries are a fraction of those in the United States. Putting high tariffs on foreign-made products would make nearly every consumer good far more expensive for those who can least afford such an impact.


pages: 459 words: 109,490

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Stephen Braun, Douglas Farah

air freight, airport security, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, plutocrats, private military company, Timothy McVeigh

In the early 1990s, this was the atmosphere of obliviousness that allowed Bout to painstakingly lay the groundwork for the expansion of his budding empire of planes, guns, and money. An admiring U.S. defense official would later compare Bout’s appearance at the birth of the world’s transformed arms trade to the emergence of two seminal American business figures. “Viktor Bout is like the Donald Trump or Bill Gates of arms trafficking,” the official said. “He’s the biggest kid on the block.”23 The surge in available weaponry had its greatest immediate impact in Africa, where automatic weapons had previously been expensive and hard to obtain. The influx of the new, high-powered weapons soon wreaked havoc, dramatically beefing up the killing power of the continent’s guerrilla movements.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Ted Cruz live-streams his appearances on Periscope. Marco Rubio broadcasts “Snapchat Stories” along the trail. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham produce goofy YouTube videos. Even grumpy old Bernie Sanders has attracted nearly two million friends on Facebook, leading the New York Times to dub him “a king of social media.” And then there’s Donald Trump. If Sanders is a king, Trump is a god. A natural-born troll, adept at issuing inflammatory bulletins at opportune moments, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm. In a typical tweet, sent out at dawn at the start of a recent campaign week, he described Clinton aide Huma Abedin as “a major security risk” and “the wife of perv sleazebag Anthony Wiener.”


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

Branson's flair would initially focus on the marketing. In the fall of that year, Branson was also knee-deep in the launch of yet another project, a TV program in which he would star called Rebel Billionaire, scheduled to premier on 9 November. It was modeled on the NBC reality program The Apprentice, starring another larger-than-life businessman, Donald Trump. The show would introduce the rogue Branson to the American public as something of an anti-Trump. Branson was an advocate for fun in the workplace, not intimidation. Eager Virgin interns on the show would not be sitting behind a desk creating spreadsheets, a la The Apprentice, but skydiving or engaging in other adventurous challenges, just like their adventure-seeking mentor.


pages: 380 words: 111,795

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith

British Empire, Donald Trump, junk bonds, Malacca Straits

He’ll probably want to meet you.” “That’s fine by me.” “Good,” said Nick. “He’s actually quite good company. I’ve met him a few times. He owns a couple of wine bars in George Street and places like that. Mister Donald, as everybody calls him. Graeme Donald, I think. Yes, Graeme Donald. Big chap. Funny hairstyle, like Donald Trump’s.” Bruce stood absolutely still. Julia’s father. If a few words can end a world, they can have no difficulty in ending a career. Although Nick was unaware of it, he had just disclosed the reason why Bruce would never be the face of Scotland. Unless … unless Graeme Donald was a fair-minded man who would not let personal factors influence a business decision.


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

Alexa, Amazon’s personal home assistant, was a hit, and the company was getting deeper into artificial intelligence. And groceries. Soon Amazon would acquire Whole Foods. There was plenty there to keep him occupied at what he called his “day job.” “I’ve fallen in love with it,” he said. He’d fallen in love with Blue, too. If you asked Alexa what she thought of Donald Trump, for example, she’d respond by saying, “When it comes to politics, I like to think big. We should be funding deep space exploration. I’d love to answer questions from Mars.” And he had also recently scored a small role playing an alien in the film Star Trek Beyond. A few days earlier, Bezos had been to the Seattle Museum of Flight, where the F-1, Apollo-era engines he had recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean had just gone on display.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Paul Ekman and I served on its Scientific Advisory Board. Emotient developed deep learning networks that had an accuracy of 96 percent in real time and with natural behavior, under a broad range of lighting conditions, and with nonfrontal faces. In one of Emotient’s demos, its networks detected within minutes that Donald Trump was having the highest emotional impact on a focus group in the first Republican primary debate. It took the pollsters days to reach the same conclusion and pundits months to recognize that emotional engagement was key to reaching voters. The strongest facial expressions in the focus group were joy followed by fear.


pages: 424 words: 108,768

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, bioinformatics, clean water, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, Google Earth, Khyber Pass, Malacca Straits, megacity, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, peak oil, phenotype, rewilding, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, supervolcano, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

While European nations continued to jostle with each other on their crowded continent, America’s territorial security engendered an isolationist stance in its foreign policy for almost two centuries.¶ But there’s another way that the sea has left its imprint on American politics, with roots reaching much further back in our planet’s history. In the November 2016 US elections the Republican nominee Donald Trump beat his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States. A map of the results shows the blue Democrat-voting states of the north-east and up the Western Seaboard, along with Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and Illinois, whereas huge areas in the centre of the country are coloured Republican red.


pages: 519 words: 104,396

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

For bright, reflective people, a number or hypothetical question triggers a rich network of associations. The longer and harder someone thinks about an answer, the more extended the exposure to these primed thoughts. This appears to counteract whatever accuracy advantages might have come from additional thought. Forty Attention Deficit “When I build something for somebody,” Donald Trump once confided, “I always add $50 million or $60 million onto the price. My guys come in, they say it’s going to cost $75 million. I say it’s going to cost $125 million, and I build it for $100 million. Basically I did a lousy job. But they think I did a great job.” Trump is hardly the only deal maker to appreciate the power of two numbers.


pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Fleiss nearly fell out of his chair. He wanted to talk more, but a gleaming Bentley had just pulled to the curb and Jim Simons quickly disappeared into it. AS Rebellion built up its system, Fleiss began marketing the fund, mailing off descriptions of its strategy to deep-pocketed investors such as Donald Trump. Most of the time, he received form-letter rejections with stamped signatures. Others granted an interview. At a meeting with Highbridge Capital Management, a giant quant fund owned by J.P. Morgan, he and Greenberg were told they had zero chance of success. Far better to close up shop and join an established fund—like Highbridge.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

They tend to worry less about making a bad decision and therefore seem more decisive and less likely to blame themselves if the decision turns out to be disappointing. Burman told me that high-cognition types are not necessarily more intelligent, just more introspective. Highly introspective people are not always the most successful, particularly when their introspection leads to indecision. “Deciders” such as Donald Trump and President George W. Bush are not known for their introspection, and there is no evidence that they suffer greatly from decision regret. They don’t seem to suffer from much outcome regret, either, although this is mere inference. Burman is fascinated by the concept of regret and, in particular, by the impact of this noisome emotion on our everyday lives.


pages: 353 words: 110,919

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Cass Sunstein, coherent worldview, David Brooks, desegregation, digital rights, Donald Trump, follow your passion, George Santayana, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, New Journalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, you are the product

That is just one way the disease of pride presents itself. By another definition, pride is building your happiness around your accomplishments, using your work as the measure of your worth. It is believing that you can arrive at fulfillment on your own, driven by your own individual efforts. Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace.


pages: 364 words: 108,237

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, job-hopping, mass affluent, payday loans, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Fortunately, those resources include more generosity and ingenuity—and less bitterness—than in many communities that have been economically injured. Still, over time, some people prosper. Some grieve. Some get by. This way of understanding what has happened in Janesville fails to align with the common wisdom following the 2016 presidential election, which ended in one of the most astonishing upsets of U.S. history when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. The common wisdom is that an unorthodox Republican (uneasy in his relationship with Paul Ryan and many other leaders of the GOP) became an improbable symbol of hope for the white working class, the fallen middle class, and other people who had accumulated grievances against a government they felt did not understand their pain and resentment.


file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

It contained three earnings numbers: a $1.08-per-share loss under GAAP; a $0.68 pro forma loss that excluded certain one-time acquisition costs and restructuring charges; and a $0.27 pro forma loss that excluded the acquisition and restructuring charges plus $1.9 billion in inventory write-downs. A Nortel news release gave three different net-loss-per-share numbers. In January 2002 the SEC clamped down on pro forma mischief in a case it brought against Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, the company chaired by developer Donald Trump. The Trump case illustrates just how far companies have bent the rules to get investors to focus on pro forma results. In October 1999 the company issued a press release announcing third quarter pro forma net income of $14 million, and said that the resort group's positive operating results had beaten analysts' expectations.


pages: 414 words: 108,413

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, classic study, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gordon Gekko, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Michael Milken, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, shareholder value, yellow journalism

At the dinner table munching on the simple home-cooked fare he favors, he can be a charming host, regaling guests with behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the heavyweights he has encountered in the course of his exploits, offering guests amusing glimpses at such legendary characters as Armand Hammer, Ivan Boesky and Donald Trump. Buoyed by the laughter of his small but appreciative audience, he can be an engaging performer, a borsht-belt comedian on loan from the Concord Hotel. One of his favorite stories recounts a conversation with Trump: “One day Trump invited me to a football game at the New Jersey Meadowlands.


pages: 297 words: 108,353

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

The incompetence and corruption that led to the crisis, coupled with the utter failure of the political system to hold any of those responsible to account, resulted in a widespread loss of faith in the political classes. As in the aftermath of the Great Depression, many voters turned to populist and nationalist politicians. The election of Donald Trump and Brexit both have their roots in the housing bubble of the 2000s. This may ultimately prove to be the most substantial and long-lived effect of the Subprime Bubble. The Subprime Bubble taught us many lessons. Most notably, we were reminded that bubbles do have major negative economic, social and political consequences – not all bubbles are benign or socially useful.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The politically motivated, including Russian operatives keen on disrupting democratic political processes, and the economically motivated, including Macedonian teens keen on turning a quick profit on the clicks of the gullible, seeded online discussions with false content masquerading as legitimate news and political debate. Though it may be impossible to prove, some worried that this flood of propaganda may have been a factor in the U.S. election, handing the presidency to Donald Trump.7 Finding the very mechanisms of democracy in peril has dramatically raised the stakes for what platforms allow and what they can prevent. Evidence that Russian operatives also bought advertisements on Facebook, Twitter, and Google, targeted at users in battleground U.S. states, and designed to fuel racial and economic tensions on both sides of the political spectrum, expanded the issue further.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Notably, while workers with a college degree have been outperforming those with only a high school education, those with postgraduate qualifications have seen their wages soar far more, as seen in Figure 2.3 here.12 The accelerating pace of the race explains, in part, why Silicon Valley responded to President Donald Trump’s immigration controls with such emphatic, collective disapproval. As part of his “America First” policy, Trump promised to restrict the “specialty occupation” H-1B visas that allow around eighty-five thousand foreigners into the United States each year, often to work at high-tech companies. Silicon Valley has a significant appetite for high-skilled workers and relies upon these visas to bring in foreign workers to satisfy this demand.


pages: 374 words: 110,238

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, global village, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, the market place

As the Daily News’s diarist noted, ‘It was a very strange sight to see some of New York’s most high and mighty standing around in their socks, or in blue bootees that had been specially provided to protect the cream deep-pile carpet.’ Among the invitees was the man Maxwell had just supplanted as the most talked-about businessman in New York: Donald Trump. Like Maxwell, Trump had been obsessed with buying the Daily News. Three years earlier, he’d repeatedly phoned Jim Hoge to ask if it was for sale. ‘Donald would never take no for an answer. He never asked whether the paper was making money, or anything like that: he just wanted it. I think about the fifth time he called, I said, Donald, let me put it to you in plain English: it’s not for sale.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

As with anything in business, where you bank, incorporate your company, or choose to live is a simple matter of finding and applying a better solution. Fighting leads nowhere. The people who protest paying US taxes to fund wars they did not choose, or those who object to the election of a president by fleeing to Canada, will both end up paying just as much in taxes. They focus on the bad rather than moving toward something good. After Donald Trump was elected President, traffic to my website surged with people searching for ‘fast citizenships,’ thinking that becoming Canadian was as easy as turning up at a border crossing somewhere. Of course, it is not that easy, but then again, becoming Canadian is probably not the best solution. More on that later.


The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

It’s an impressive portfolio that has earned Amazon the name of the “Everything Store” (also the title of journalist Brad Stone’s 2013 book on the empire), and increasingly, the Everything Company.11 The chief of this megastore has several side hustles too. In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight company, which is intended to make the human species multiplanetary and move polluting industries off the planet.12 And he owns the Washington Post, one of the United States’ leading newspapers and a target of President Donald Trump’s “fake news” campaign. Amazon’s market share is incredible and alarming.13 While originating in the United States, the company now operates separate retail websites in at least sixteen countries, and ships internationally to some others. In 2019, it was the third most valuable company in the United States, behind Apple and Microsoft, and the second-largest employer in the United States, after Walmart.14 For fiscal year 2018, Amazon reported a net income of over $10 billion, with an annual revenue of close to $233 billion, while employing 647,500 people worldwide.15 In the same year, Amazon captured almost half of US-based online spending (or almost 14 percent globally) and (excluding cars and car parts as well as visits to restaurants and bars) approximately 5 percent of Americans’ total retail spending.16 The company’s mission is “to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience”; its vision statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”17 Presumably Blue Origin has got the other planets covered.


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

That’s why.’ ” * * * — ON THE WITNESS stand at Raniere’s trial, psychologist Dawn Hughes described gaslighting as “a behavior that functions to make you think you’re crazy by telling you up is down and left is right.” Gaslighting has become something of a buzzword in recent years, best known as the thing Teen Vogue accused President Donald Trump of doing to America. “It functions to make the victim not trust her own perceptions, not trust her own judgment, and not really have a sense of what really is going on, because she’s continually told that she is to blame,” Hughes testified. The prosecutors would return to “up is down” moments with many of the witnesses, often spending excruciating amounts of time unpacking what the women understood as reality and what Raniere and his fixers insisted instead.


pages: 432 words: 106,612

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

It is telling that the industry’s “Big Three”—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—and many of their smaller rivals have eschewed these, concerned that these more niche, complex products may tarnish the entire index fund universe. * * * ♦ IN EARLY 2018, THE STOCK MARKET was basking in the afterglow of President Donald Trump’s corporate tax cut, which had added at least some temporary vim to a steady if disappointingly slow economic expansion since the financial crisis. US equities were setting record high after record high, and broke the 1960s and 1990s records for the longest streak without a big drop. Unfortunately, the tranquility didn’t last much longer.


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

EMERALD HAZE CANNABIS EMPORIUM: 4033 NE Sunset Boulevard #5, Renton, WA 98056, Tel 425 793 4293, www.emeraldhazece.com (prices vary) HOLLINGSWORTH CANNABIS COMPANY: See www.hollingsworthcannabis.com for a list of Washington State retailers carrying their products (prices vary) West Virginia * * * A year after the election of Donald Trump to the office of president, Tony and the Parts Unknown crew visited West Virginia, seeking to better understand, without prejudice, what life was like in a fiercely Red state in 2017. “It’s easy to think, having lived in New York City all my life, that this is what America looks like, thinks like, that the things that are important to me are important to everybody.


Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline by Steven K. Kapp

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, book value, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, demand response, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, epigenetics, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Internet Archive, Jeremy Corbyn, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, slashdot, theory of mind, twin studies, universal basic income, Wayback Machine

Being autistic and having that institutional knowledge gave me a roadmap other reporters didn’t necessarily have, without bringing my own narrative into the story. It showed that I knew which perspectives mattered the most with these things. Furthermore, my understanding of autism allowed me to debunk hoaxes and pseudoscience that arose in the campaign. Then-candidate Donald Trump decried autism as being “an epidemic” during the primary debates and told a dubious anecdote about a friend’s child becoming autistic after vaccinations [10]. Similarly, during the campaign, Trump met with Andrew Wakefield, the discredited former doctor responsible for promoting the bunk theories of vaccines-autism causation, and Gary Kompothecras, another major promoter of the anti-vaccine theories [11].


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

The influence of empire can also be felt in recurring crises about the status of Gibraltar, in the way Scottish nationalists talk about gaining independence from their English ‘colonizers’ and in the use of the monarchy as a lobbying force in national and international affairs. The royal family are wheeled out routinely to cement relations for Britain, whether it is inviting Donald Trump over for a state visit or the Queen visiting Ireland to seal the ultimate success of the peace process, much as they did during empire. Queen Victoria may not have visited her treasured possessions, but her grandson King George V visited all Britain’s main territories, some 14,000 people with 600 elephants escorting him on a hunting trip in India in 1906, when in one day his party slaughtered eighteen lions, thirty-nine tigers and four bears, and the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales, went on a series of imperial tours, being greeted by a banner at Aden in 1921 which declared: ‘TELL DADDY WE ARE ALL HAPPY UNDER BRITISH RULE’.4 ‘A martial spirit still pervades the royal regime,’ Jan Morris has observed.


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

There are wartime pictures of Sasakawa posing with Benito Mussolini, whom he admired and emulated, ordering his private militia to wear black shirts just as the Italian Fascists did.20 After a change of policy in Washington, however, Sasakawa was released three years later, and his wartime activities were never aired at trial.21 In the postwar years, Sasakawa thrived by building a gambling empire for motorboat racing and operated as a sort of kingmaker in the surprisingly intertwined worlds of the Japanese mafia, known as the yakuza, and right-wing political parties.22 In 1980, he founded what was known unofficially as the Sasakawa Foundation, handing out generous grants to charities and universities around the world in what seemed to many like an obvious attempt to burnish his legacy.23 “Despite all his do-gooding and donating, Sasakawa remained a gambling czar with strong ties to the extreme right in Japan, and with less overt but definite ties to the yakuza,” wrote the investigative journalists David Kaplan and Alec Dubro.24 The Sasakawa Foundation later became the Nippon Foundation after Ryōichi Sasakawa died in 1995 and the left-leaning Japanese government at the time pressured the foundation to change its name.25 The new name, Nippon, has a nationalistic connotation within Japan, perhaps most directly in the form of the Nippon Kaigi, a powerful ultra-right-wing lobby group that echoes some of the same nationalistic sentiments found in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.26 The Nippon Foundation is a charitable organization that funds meaningful projects, such as Seabed 2030, but it has also tried to silence historians who raise Ryōichi Sasakawa’s wartime record or his ties to organized crime and far-right politics in Japan.27 “[The Nippon Foundation’s] favorite targets are people who don’t know anything about Japan.


Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

anti-communist, British Empire, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, full employment, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

” *10 Wilson had restored the old presidential practice, suspended by Jefferson, of speaking to Congress in person, well aware that the scene would enhance a Chief Executive’s power. *11 Ironically Wilson had provided a name for the national movement, founded in the late 1930s, which opposed intervention against Adolf Hitler’s Germany trampling on many of Wilson’s beliefs, while Americans struggled over whether to enter the conflict ultimately known as World War II. Donald Trump adopted the term during his 2016 presidential campaign and used it in his inaugural address. *12 Under the new policy, any ship sailing within a zone that encompassed Britain, France, Italy, and part of the Mediterranean would be vulnerable, although, it was said, a few well-identified US ships might be allowed to sail in the area over one specific route

He was aided by his early opposition, as an Illinois state senator, to the war in Iraq. In the fall of 2002, Obama had proclaimed in Chicago, “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” As President, he withdrew US forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. But the Afghanistan struggle did not end—and in 2017, Donald Trump took office as a wartime President, facing a conflict that was, by more than three times, the longest in American history. At the dawn of the American Republic, the framers of the Constitution had dreamt that war would be a last resort under the political system they had invented. Unlike in Great Britain and other monarchies and dictatorships of old, it would be declared by Congress, not by the chief of state.


George Marshall: Defender of the Republic by David L. Roll

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, Defenestration of Prague, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fear of failure, invisible hand, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, one-China policy, one-state solution, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Marshall arrived at the 1925 F Street Club, a yellow Greek Revival house named for its street address that was located a few blocks west of the White House (today, the residence of the president of George Washington University). Attorney General Tom Clark had invited about forty close friends and supporters of the president to participate in the celebration. Truman needed an emotional lift. His approval rating was hovering at 36 percent, a record low that no chief executive would sink to until the presidency of Donald Trump. Republicans controlled Congress. His own party was imperiling the president’s effectiveness, having helped to override his veto of what he termed a “rich man’s” tax bill. In the presidential sweepstakes, Truman trailed in the polls behind Dewey, Vandenberg, and MacArthur. Columnist Arthur Krock had written that Truman’s “influence is weaker than any President’s has been in modern history.”1 After-dinner toasts were proposed by Attorney General Clark and others, but it was Marshall’s unexpected and deadly serious tribute that silenced the room, leaving the president almost speechless.

When Dewey conceded the race to Truman at 11:14 a.m. East Coast time it was late afternoon in Paris. By then, the expression on Dulles’s face was anything but elated. Truman’s come-from-behind victory in 1948 was astonishing, arguably the most surprising in the history of presidential politics. Donald Trump’s narrow electoral win in 2016, though shocking to many, was not as surprising as Truman’s. In the days leading up to Trump’s election, virtually all pollsters concluded that Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory had narrowed considerably and that it was almost a dead heat. By contrast, in Truman’s case none of the experts predicted that he had come close enough in popular or electoral votes in the final days to actually pull off a win, particularly because the Democratic party was split three ways.


pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

In 2014 French economist Thomas Piketty’s 700-page book on inequality became a bestseller in the United States. Strikes by fast-food workers and prominent debates about raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour also put the spotlight on low-wage workers in this period. The 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, despite their differences, kept outrage about economic disparities in the public eye. The language of class, especially the “working class,” appeared in political discourse often in the period both before and after Trump’s election. Public opinion critical of inequality has increased since 2000 as perceptions of the possibility of upward mobility have grown gloomier.27 INVESTIGATING AFFLUENCE Given these contradictory ideas about wealthy people, how do the beneficiaries of growing inequality feel about and manage their privilege?


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Kaus’s proposed program would not only eliminate the need to provide public assistance or “workfare” for able-bodied workers but, unlike welfare, the WPA-style jobs would be available to everybody, men as well as women, single or married, mothers and fathers alike. No perverse “anti-family” incentives. It wouldn’t even be necessary to limit the public jobs to the poor. If Donald Trump showed up, he could work too. But he wouldn’t. Most Americans wouldn’t. There’d be no need to “target” the program to the needy. The low wage itself would guarantee that those who took the jobs would be those who needed them, while preserving the incentive to look for better work in the private sector.


pages: 372 words: 115,094

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

The next day, Shultz hosted a luncheon in the magnificent reception area on the eighth floor of the State Department building. The glitterati of Washington, New York, and Hollywood attended. In the long receiving line, Gorbachev—innately charming and superbly briefed—mustered up a quip for virtually every person he met, most for the first time. Carol and I sat with Barbara Walters and Donald Trump and strained to get a word in edgewise at our chatty table. Gorbachev sat smiling and thumping his hand on the table near ours, while the Yale Russian Chorus sang Russian ballads and, for Shevardnadze’s sake, a few from Georgia as well. The next day, Gorbachev’s last in Washington, he and Vice President George H.


pages: 336 words: 113,519

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, complexity theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, endowment effect, feminist movement, framing effect, hindsight bias, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, the new new thing, Thomas Bayes, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

The writer Nate Silver for several years enjoyed breathtaking success predicting U.S. presidential election outcomes for the New York Times, using an approach to statistics he learned writing about baseball. For the first time in memory, a newspaper seemed to have an edge in calling elections. But then Silver left the Times, and failed to predict the rise of Donald Trump—and his data-driven approach to predicting elections was called into question . . . by the New York Times! “Nothing exceeds the value of shoe-leather reporting, given that politics is an essentially human endeavor and therefore can defy prediction and reason,” wrote a Times columnist, late in the spring of 2016.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

(Schwarzman had also purchased a home in the Hamptons on Long Island, previously owned by the Vanderbilts, for $34 million, and a thirteen-thousand-square-foot mansion in Florida called Four Winds, originally built for the financial advisor E. F. Hutton in 1937, which ran $21 million. He later decided the house was too small and had it wrecked and reconstructed from scratch.) The guest list at Schwarzman’s fete included Colin Powell and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with Barbara Walters and Donald Trump. Upon entering the orchid-festooned armory to a march played by a brass band, ushered by smiling children in military garb, visitors were treated to a full-length portrait of their host by the British painter Andrew Festing, president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. The dinner included lobster, filet mignon, and baked Alaska, topped off with potables such as a 2004 Louis Jadot Chassagne-Montrachet.


pages: 459 words: 118,959

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff by Christine S. Richard

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Blythe Masters, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, electricity market, family office, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, glass ceiling, Greenspan put, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, money market fund, moral hazard, old-boy network, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, statistical model, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, white flight, zero-sum game

There was the morning Ackman and Jerry Speyer, a founding partner of real estate giant Tishman Speyer, emerged from an all-night strategy session in a diner to grab a predawn copy of the New York Times and read that their supposed partner in the deal, Mitsubishi Estate, had decided to default on the Rockefeller Center mortgage. And there was the time Donald Trump called. “Goldman Sachs is trying to steal Rockefeller Center, Bill. We’ve got to do something about it,” announced Trump, who had never spoken with Ackman before. When Trump suggested a meeting at Ackman’s office, the young man quickly offered to make the trip to Trump Tower. “I didn’t want him to see that we worked out of shared office space,” Ackman says.


pages: 403 words: 119,206

Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, stocks for the long run, the market place, transaction costs

In the days following the crash, many people rushed forward to offer explanations for what had happened. The market break was said to be the result of the failure of the Senate to confirm Robert Bork to the Supreme Court (showing Reagan to be a lame duck), mistaken Fed monetary policy (either too tight or too loose), or concerns about the ever-present budget and trade deficits. Donald Trump said that there were “too many things wrong with the country” and claimed that he had sold out all his stocks before the crash.7 One explanation that received a great deal of attention involved proposed legislation to disallow tax deductions for interest paid on money borrowed to finance corporate takeovers.


pages: 395 words: 118,446

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Martha Banta

Albert Einstein, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

CONTENTS Introduction Note on the Text Select Bibliography A Chronology of Thorstein Bunde Veblen THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS Explanatory Notes INTRODUCTION Veblen’s Pivotal Work ‘Everyone’ appears to acknowledge the importance of The Theory of the Leisure Class, for has not Veblen’s 1899 analysis of the socioeconomics of affluent American societies introduced into the vernacular provocative terms such as ‘conspicuous consumption’ still operative in a world that embraces the notion that ‘greed is good’ and celebrates the Donald Trumps and the Paris Hiltons who clutter our ‘pecuniary culture’? The question remains how well Veblen’s study is really ‘known’—both for what it represents within the range of his own long career and in the newly defined disciplines he guided into the modern world that have had a major impact upon our understanding of the relations between business, industry, and social mores.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

Yet from that billion-dollar swamp of ultra-high-risk consumer lending, look what Wall Street managed to do: it created $980 million worth of investment grade assets. The ‘AAA’ rated assets were supposedly as safe as Treasury bonds issued by the US government. Even the ‘BBB’ rated assets were supposedly as safe as bonds issued by the governments of Russia, India, and Brazil. Even Fat Boy, as he sat there waving his joint to illustrate his path to Donald Trump style wealth, would have been disconcerted to learn that Wall Street rated around 80% of his loan as being at least as creditworthy as the US government itself. Lunacy. Stage 4 It gets worse. The Housing Issuance and Trading unit at Bear, Lehman, Lynch, Sachs & Stanley (BLLSSHIT, for short) decided they liked stage 3 so much, they’d do it all over again.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

But had the predominantly liberal Fed leadership not facilitated the bad behavior of the elite by encouraging them to borrow at virtually no cost, their wealth and power would never have become as concentrated as it is today. The ostentatiousness with which the so-called one percent has flaunted its wealth has fueled the rise of anger and extremism, leading to the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. And politicians wonder about the genesis of a deeply divided and dispirited populace. Central bankers have invited politicians to abdicate their leadership authority to an inbred society of PhD academics who are infected to their core with groupthink, or as I prefer to think of it: “groupstink.”


pages: 372 words: 116,005

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by Secret Barrister

cognitive bias, Donald Trump, G4S, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandatory minimum, post-truth, race to the bottom, Schrödinger's Cat, statistical model

The means of persuasion are often material – new trainers, contraband cigs in prison, a nice cash deposit in the girlfriend’s bank account – but just as frequently fall back on the simple device of false advertising. Keres & Co. were peddling post-truth back before it was popular. We guarantee to get you a not guilty, they ooze. We’ll get you the best barrister – we have all the best barristers, they spin like a poor Donald Trump parody. Sometimes they will indeed instruct very good barristers – the individuals in my chambers whose returns I was covering were excellent advocates. I don’t know how on a human level they could bear to associate with Keres, but they seemingly accepted his malignancy as the price to pay for work.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

“We envision in the future, you can take your hands off the wheel, and your commute becomes restful or productive instead of frustrating and exhausting,” said Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council. President Barack Obama himself wrote an op-ed on behalf of driverless cars in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the same day. President Donald Trump affirmed these priorities early in his administration.1 Driverless cars will finally solve the problem of moving people around with maximum efficiency, by ceding human control to impersonal algorithms. They promise to bring a messy, dangerous domain of life under control at last. Traffic jams will likely become a thing of the past, and accidents will be greatly reduced.


Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide by Martin S. Fridson, Fernando Alvarez

Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, corporate governance, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fixed income, information trail, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, offshore financial centre, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, speech recognition, statistical model, stock buybacks, the long tail, time value of money, transaction costs, Y2K, zero-coupon bond

The business proved highly successful, thanks in large measure to a generous Medicare reimbursement policy for physical rehabilitation of an aging population keen on sports and exercise. Over two decades, Scrushy built the Birmingham, Alabama, company into the largest chain of its kind in the United States, with 1,500 rehabilitation hospitals. In the process, Scrushy amassed immense wealth, becoming known as the Donald Trump of Birmingham. He acquired seven corporate jets, which he frequently piloted. Several philanthropies that benefited from HealthSouth's generosity named buildings after Scrushy. He also captured attention as the lead singer of his own country music band. Famed athletes John Smoltz and Dan Marino were hired to speak at a children's road show sponsored by HealthSouth.


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

Together with Harry Truman, he was one of the most ordinary of American presidents, a common man distinguished mainly by his restlessness and awkwardness. He lacked the pedigree of the Roosevelts, the glamour of the Kennedys, the privilege of the Bushes, the star power of Ronald Reagan, the eloquence of Barack Obama, the showmanship of Donald Trump. What he possessed instead were the virtues and defects of regular Americans, the difference being that he displayed these qualities in outsize quantities. He worked harder than anyone else, hated his enemies more intently, took bigger risks, and dreamed bigger dreams. He never accepted defeat and was constantly remaking himself.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

groups known as APT 3 and APT 10: Andrew Griffin, “Wikileaks Files Detail CIA ‘Umbrage’ Project, Which Would Allow Spies to Pin Attacks on Other Countries,” Independent, March 8, 2017, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/wikileaks-files-cia-umbrage-hacker-secret-spies-explained-countries-donald-trump-russia-a7618661.html. most “reckless and indiscriminate”: This quote is attributed to British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, said at a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other defense ministers in Brussels in 2018. shut down a French television network: Joseph Menn and Leigh Thomas, “France Probes Russian Lead in TV5Monde Hacking: Sources,” Reuters, June 10, 2015, reut.rs/1IGfCBo.


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

The drivers he encounters are stressed-out and angry, threatening each other over the CB radio when they perceive violations of road etiquette or when another driver misses a gear when climbing a hill and is forced to go slower than he would like, blocking others from passing him. “[Trucking] is like making a deal with the devil,” says Robert, as we pass a giant LED sign showing an image of Donald Trump riding on a tank, the slogan “America Is Back!” in giant letters across the top. “You don’t see the family; whatever relationships you have can get strained; there’s stress, traffic.” Later, Robert tells me he’s fighting with his wife of eight years “constantly.” “I think I’m going to have to divorce her,” he says, almost nonchalantly.


pages: 372 words: 117,038

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

Despite its insubstantial physical presence, T has managed to achieve a substantial reputation, dwarfing that of any other corporeal chemical. After all, T is an “androgen,” from the Greek “andro”—man—and “gen”—generating. If the Y chromosome is the essence of maleness, then T is the essence of masculinity, at least in the popular mind. Bill Clinton was assumed to have plenty of it, but with Donald Trump we got actual numbers. Just before the 2016 presidential election, Trump appeared on Dr. Oz’s national TV show to reveal the results of his latest physical. Oz read off the various numbers—weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar. While the doctor seemed quite positive about what he described as “good numbers,” only one number seemed to move the audience: 441 (nanograms per deciliter).


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

An analysis by the Houston Chronicle found that between five thousand and twelve thousand flooded homes were sold after Harvey, and that many of those sales were to large institutional investors and hedge funds. Among the largest buyers that year was a company called Cerberus Capital Management. The firm was founded by a billionaire Donald Trump ally named Steve Feinberg, whose watchword in all things was secrecy—“If any [employee] at Cerberus has his picture in the paper,” he once told shareholders, “we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him.” Cerberus had around $50 billion in assets by the time Hurricane Harvey struck, with ownership stakes in a security contractor called DynCorp and the Remington Arms Company, and in recent years the company had also invested in single-family rentals around the country.


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

His criticism of qualified immunity focused not on its impact on policing but, rather, on the Court’s role: Justice Thomas argued that the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity doctrine bore no resemblance to any immunity that existed in 1871, when Section 1983 became law, and instead reflected “precisely the sort of ‘freewheeling policy choice[s]’ that we have previously disclaimed the power to make.” Lower court judges appointed by every president elected since Jimmy Carter, Republican and Democrat, have offered scathing critiques of qualified immunity. Judge Don Willett, a Donald Trump appointee, has written that “qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly.” The doctrine is, Judge Willett writes, “an Escherian Stairwell. Heads government wins, tails plaintiff loses.”


pages: 449 words: 127,440

Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, haute couture, It's morning again in America, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine, The Chicago School

In May, accompanied by Raisa, their daughter, Irina, and interpreter Pavel Palazchenko, Gorbachev also travels to the United States, on a trip cohosted by Ronald Reagan and George Shultz and organized by his American admirer Jim Garrison, and is once more able to drink in the intoxicating brew of celebrity adulation and peer worship so lacking at home.7 The wealthy publisher Malcolm Forbes Jr. puts his private jet, named Capitalist Tool, at Gorbachev’s disposal to fly the party around eleven American cities, where they are accommodated in five-star hotels and greeted by fawning hosts, among them Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and David Rockefeller. Twenty thousand people come to hear Gorbachev speak in Fulton, Missouri, the location of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. In the New York Stock Exchange the former communist leader is cheered by traders as he declares that “anybody who comes to the Russian market will have the opportunity to extract enormous profits.”


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

In the recognition that it is a structure for organized aggression, corporate capital systematically recruits skilled operatives, individuals who can manage contingency by coordinating operations, seizing fresh opportunities for expanding the resources of the firm, and defending it against the challenges of rivals while its PR experts make certain that the proper spin is attached. The culture is refreshed, systematized, and transmitted by professional schools and increasingly by much of higher education; it is even popularized by television, most recently in The Apprentice featuring a real CEO (Donald Trump) who regularly fired some contestants, after first humiliating them, and encouraging each to undercut the others.25 Among the main functions of the modern manager are to foresee the unexpected, eliminate or cope effectively with the unforeseen (“risk management,” “crisis management”); to exploit or contain change insofar as it affects his or her enterprise; and to seize opportunities and aggressively use them to advance the power advantage of the firm—and of him- or herself.


pages: 442 words: 127,300

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, autism spectrum disorder, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, impulse control, lifelogging, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, systems thinking, the scientific method, time dilation

Precisely this relationship has now been reported in numerous epidemiological studies, including those individuals suffering from sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea.VIII Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night—both went on to develop the ruthless disease. The current US president, Donald Trump—also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night—may want to take note. A more radical and converse prediction that emerges from these findings is that, by improving someone’s sleep, we should be able to reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease—or at least delay its onset.


pages: 621 words: 123,678

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need by Grant Sabatier

8-hour work day, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, bitcoin, buy and hold, cryptocurrency, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, drop ship, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, lifestyle creep, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, Skype, solopreneur, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, TaskRabbit, the rule of 72, time value of money, uber lyft, Vanguard fund

Thirty-two percent of credit card holders: Jamie Gonzalez and Tamara Holmes, “Credit Card Debt Statistics,” https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-debt-statistics-1276.php. Warren Buffett, the world’s most successful investor: Peter Walker, “Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett Made $32.2m a Day in 2016 (the Year of Populism),” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/warren-buffett-billions-millions-makes-per-day-2016-berkshire-hathaway-donald-trump-gates-foundation-a7500126.html. Americans on average spend roughly 53 minutes: Christopher Ingraham, “The American Commute Is Worse Today Than It’s Ever Been,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/22/the-american-commute-is-worse-today-than-its-ever-been/. In 2016 the average American family’s before-tax income: U.S.


pages: 406 words: 120,933

The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin

clean water, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), off grid, Ronald Reagan, urban sprawl

“Any plan that disrupts commercial navigation with a big-barge bottleneck at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam will face opposition from the state of Illinois,” she wrote. “As chair of the Illinois River Coordinating Council, I ask that the federal government delay this project and immediately review whether its costs can justify its purported benefits.” Four days later, the report was put on hold, and word circulated that President Donald Trump’s White House wanted it reviewed before release. Reviews of this sort by new administrations are normal, of course, but this review dragged on for months, and things quickly got political. Twelve Democratic senators, representing all eight Great Lakes states, sent a letter imploring the president to release the study.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

In part this reflects the overrepresentation of rural districts in the electoral system, but the main point is simply that populist sentiments are less likely to spill over into new party formation when policies—and, in the case of Japan, the LDP—are already reflective of such sentiments. For this reason we cannot simply measure the extent of populism by the vote shares of populist parties. Neither major party in the United States, for example, would have counted as populist in the past, but Donald Trump is now seen as a primary example of large-scale populism (even, as we will argue, the Republican Party still cannot be counted as a populist party). The contemporary Conservative party in England is another example, if in a more muted way. Still, we will consider the dynamic effects of economic change on the support for populist parties within countries.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The fact that tankers carrying African crude that has despoiled and corrupted the countries in which it was pumped are free to ply the same routes did not enter the debate. After two American aid workers in Liberia became infected with the Ebola virus in July 2014 and were flown back to the United States for treatment, Donald Trump wrote on Twitter, ‘Stop the EBOLA patients from entering the U.S. Treat them, at the highest level, over there. THE UNITED STATES HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS!’ Newsweek ran a picture of a monkey on its cover, alongside an improbable story about the danger that imports of African bushmeat would unleash the virus on America.1 Few made the connection between the debilitating effects of a looting machine that funnels African wealth to the rich world and the inability of the countries where Ebola was rife to fight the virus.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

The inclusion of ISDS was a major bone of contention, because it sidelined domestic courts in the member states of the EU as well as the European Court of Justice for matters that often cut to the core of domestic constitutional and EU treaty law.67 In the end, the adoption of TTIP (and its trans-Pacific counterpart) was thwarted for domestic reasons in the United States, where the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president has ushered in a period of greater unilateralism and the primacy of national interests.68 However, there has been progress on a different front. Canada and the EU have entered into a “modern” treaty (CETA), as the two parties call it, which acknowledges the right of states to change their laws “regardless of whether this may negatively affect an investment a co d e fo r th e g Lo B e 157 or investor’s expectations of profits.”69 This might sound harsh to investors who have come to rely on using investment treaties as an insurance device against future legal change; but it only confirms the basic principles of democratic self-governance.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

The petitioners then list the YouTuber’s alleged sins, including using the N-word, playing videos of Adolf Hitler’s speeches, and giving the Nazi heil in a video. For those unaware, PewDiePie is a Swedish comedian and video game player named Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose YouTube channel has a massive following and whom Tarrant referenced in his manifesto (along with Candace Owens, Donald Trump, and others). It is true that PewDiePie once used the N-word during a video game competition (and then apologized profusely for doing so).8 He also has used brief audio and video snippets of Nazi imagery as part of satirical responses to attacks against him that he lampooned as melodramatic.9 The idea that any of this betrays PewDiePie as a closet white supremicist is absurd.


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

That morning, he collapsed while exercising, and the following day the company confirmed his sudden passing at the age of just 62. There was also a sense of unease hanging over the conference as the 800 attendees mingled on the mezzanine level of the hotel. The first Tuesday in November of a leap year meant a US presidential election. Donald Trump, the reality TV star, had defied all conventional wisdom to win the Republican nomination. He could win the race to White House, but the betting odds suggested he would fall short. As the conference was winding up, and guests were jetting home or heading to Sydney’s bars and high-end restaurants, Americans were heading to the polls.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

At times, despite her nod to Frankfurt, Penny appears to equate bullshit with deliberate deceit: “Never in the history of mankind have so many people uttered statements they know to be untrue.” But then she says that George W. Bush (“a world-historical bullshitter”) and his circle “distinguish themselves by believing their own bullshit,” which suggests that they themselves are deluded. One wonders whether she would extend the same backhanded tribute to Donald Trump. Frankfurt concedes that in popular usage “bullshit” is employed as a “generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning.” What he wanted to do, he says, was to get to the essence of the thing in question. But does bullshit have a single essence? In a paper titled “Deeper into Bullshit,” the Oxford philosopher G.


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

Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 and Republican nominee for president in the 2012 election. 26.Newton Leroy Gingrich, born McPherson (June 17, 1943–), Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1995–1999. 27.Rudolph William Louis Giuliani (May 28, 1944–), mayor of New York City, 1994–2001, personal attorney to President Donald Trump, 2018–2021. 28.Richard Bruce Cheney (January 30, 1941–), vice-president of the United States, 2001–2009. White House chief of staff from 1975 to 1977; U.S. House of Representatives member for Wyoming’s at-large district, 1979–1989; secretary of defense, 1989–1993. 29.For once he found himself agreeing with J.


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

Today, when it comes to the production of knowledge about the nation, most households and most individuals will be represented instead by a group of people no one voted for. Statistical representation is undoubtedly valid as science, but can it be counted on to build reliable national truths? * * * Sampling made the 2020 census sheet much shorter than it would have been otherwise. But it very nearly was a little bit longer. In March 2018, President Donald Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, announced his decision to add a new question to the 2020 form.17 It was new but quite similar to a question asked in 1940, one that had, in the intervening years, been sloughed off into the sampling sphere. Trump and Ross wanted all individuals to submit their citizenship status.


pages: 438 words: 126,284

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage by Jeff Guinn

Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

Texas governor Greg Abbott promptly ordered the state’s National Guard to shadow all Army activities within the Texas borders so Texans could feel certain that “their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.” The Times article concluded, “The specter of Waco has not faded.” * * * The focus of American militias altered after Donald Trump succeeded Obama in the White House. Dissidents still were prepared to use threats of violence, or, sometimes, violence itself, but now its foes were different. A 2020 analysis by the Anti-Defamation League noted that “during the 2015–2016 [presidential] campaign, the greater part of the militia movement became Trump supporters, viewing Trump as an anti-establishment outsider candidate.… Trump’s victory, though, did pose a threat to the militia movement, because, until Trump took office, the movement had largely sustained and energized itself through its opposition to the federal government.”


pages: 412 words: 121,164

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

., p. 133. 24.Quarterly Review, No. 19, p. 255. 25.Rig Veda, Book 6, Hymn 27. 26.Calasso, Ardor. 27.Outlook India, 4 June 2018. 28.Henry V, Act 4, Scene 3. 29.Lucian, vol. 3, p. 56. 30.https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/invasion-ancient-egyptmay-have-actually-been-immigrant-uprising 31.Quoted in Van Seters, p. 172. 32.Homer, Iliad, Book IX, 178–9. 33.Lucian, vol. 2, p. 91. 34.Rawlinson, p. 1. 35.Herodotus, p. 3. 36.Redfield, p. 111. 37.Herodotus, p. 357. 38.Ibid., p. 568. 39.Ibid. 40.Kent, p. 144. 41.Diodorus, ch.70–1. 42.Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, 7 June 2018. 43.Chatwin, Songlines, p. 185. 44.Herodotus, p. 67. 45.Quoted in History Today, 22 May 1972. 46.Herodotus, 4.75. 47.Donald Trump on Twitter, 19 June 2018. 48.Plato, 4.704d. 49.Ibid., 4.705a. 50.Herodotus, 1.73. 51.Ibid., 4.5. 52.Ibid., 1.205. 53.Ibid. 54.Ibid., 1.212. 55.Ibid., 1.214. 56.Ibid., 4.46. 57.Ibid., 4.126. 58.Ibid., 4.127. 59.Ibid. 60.Watson, p. 60. 61.Herodotus, 4.23. 62.Hill, p. 27. 63.Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 2, p. 129. 64.Watson, p. 60. 65.Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 1, p. xii. 66.Ibid., 2, p. 155. 67.https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/exhibit/xiongnu/essay.html 68.Khazanov and Wink, p. 237. 69.Han Shu 94A: 4b, quoted in Twitchett and Loewe, p. 387. 70.Ibid., 5a, quoted in ibid. 71.Watson, vol. 2, p. 168. 72.Ibid., p. 183. 73.Ibid. 74.Frankopan, p. xvi. 75.Pliny, Natural History, quoted in Whitfield, Life, p. 21. 76.Florus, quoted in Yule, p. xlii. 77.Blockley, p. 249. 78.Ibid. 79.Raven, p. 89. 80.https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/sogdlet.html 81.Lactantius, p. 48. 82.Gibbon, ch. 26, p. 5. 83.Ammianus, Book 31, p. 578. 84.Bury, Priscus, fr.8 https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/priscus.html 85.Blockley, p. 261. 86.Ibid., p. 275. 87.Ibid., p. 281. 88.Ibid. 89.Ibid., p. 285. 90.Ibid., p. 289. 91.Herodotus, p. 659. 92.Sidonius Apollinaris, quoted in Brown, p. 129.


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

I get into arguments with my friends who are Democrats, and they all think I am a conservative Republican. I get into arguments with my friends who are Republicans, and they all think I am a bleeding heart liberal. It’s automatic for me to take the other side. People get into such one-sided views that their logic disappears. If you ask me on a personal basis whether I think Donald Trump is an asshole, yes, I think he is an asshole. But does that mean every single thing he says has to be lambasted, every single time? That’s illogical. OK, I’ll bite. Give me an example of something Trump said that he was lambasted for that actually was right. He said he would win the election, which everyone thought was ridiculous, and he is the president.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

The White House draped with a red flag with a hammer and sickle, and inside they’re singing ‘Moscow Nights!’ ”41 A grand luncheon in the State Department’s elegant diplomatic receptions rooms the next day. “Everyone wanted to come,” Shultz recalled, “The crowd was the largest ever for such an event.” “People came from all corners of America,” Gorbachev remembered. “ ‘The cream of society.’ ” Donald Trump supposedly fit that description; so did Ross Perot. Seated at Gorbachev’s table were Pepsico chairman Donald Kendall, philanthropist Brooke Astor, and Senator Alan Simpson (R–Wyo.). “Gorbachev’s strong, he’s tough as hell, and he likes the reputation,” Simpson said afterward. “He’s not one of those guys with a 2,000-mile stare.”

UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar hosted a splashy reception, something he hadn’t done for other visiting heads of state during the General Assembly, and a magnificent luncheon (attended, said cosmetics executive Estée Lauder, by “all the people who run the country and New York”) at the Pérez de Cuéllars’ Sutton Place home. A Gorbachev imitator fooled the all-knowing Donald Trump into greeting him at the Trump Tower, where the Gorbachevs were to visit but never showed up. Something else happened in Manhattan: the first ladies finally made peace. Their détente was visible at a chic lunch that Mrs. Pérez de Cuéllar gave for them after Gorbachev’s UN speech. They smiled at each other and held hands.


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

IN THE WOODS On August 8, 2011, President Obama approved Shell Oil’s permit to drill in the Beaufort Sea off the shore of the Village of Kaktonic. And now, it’s my birthday. Linda called. A moonless eve, especially dark, came over the woods and other, older regrets also called. At Steven Schwartzman’s sixtieth birthday party, Rod Stewart sang “Happy Birthday.” The Sack and Paul Singer and Donald Trump sang along. Blackrock’s trophy wife, Christine Hearst, paid the aging rocker $1 million to sing it ($40,000 per note). Maybe it was love. Maybe it was fear that she’ll end up like the previous four Mrs. Schwartzmans. Life is choices. I suppose I fucked up when I gave away my interview with Goldman Sachs.


pages: 497 words: 130,817

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

Fiona Chin, a sociology graduate student at Northwestern University, found a similar pattern among the top 1 and 0.1 percent of income earners in Philadelphia and Chicago.9 Although her respondents earned well over a million dollars per year, they still conceptualized themselves as middle or upper-middle class because of upward comparisons and feelings of relative deprivation. They vividly described those who had more status and money than they did—not only families down the block but also the Lloyd Blankfeins, Donald Trumps, and Paris Hiltons of the world. In addition, the consumption patterns they needed to keep up with their peers and create a desirable lifestyle for themselves (e.g., vacations, fitness and grooming, membership to social clubs, and participation in charity circuits) and their children (e.g., extracurricular activities, paid child care, private schools, and personal tutors)—kept them watching their balance statements and made them feel constrained.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

While we of course cannot force these values and behaviors on our public representatives, we can limit their decisions and actions through smart contracts that define their roles and responsibilities as our representatives and then monitor and measure them on the blockchain. Remember, smart contracts are self-executing agreements stored on the blockchain, which nobody controls and therefore everyone can trust. Political factions such as the Grand Old Party could use them so that candidates like Donald Trump who use their party infrastructure to debate and campaign during primaries couldn’t run as independents in a general election. We could apply smart contracts to different government operations (supply chain, external legal services, pay-for-success contracts) and even more complex roles of government and our elected representatives.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Through 2016, less than a decade after its founding, the agency’s grants to researchers developing early-stage energy technologies had already stimulated even more investment—nearly $2 billion—in those projects from the private sector. When I returned in February 2017 for the annual summit, the mood was different. The technology showcase was still impressive, and the speakers still presented optimistic visions of roads filled with autonomous electric vehicles (EVs) or a grid run by sophisticated artificial intelligence. But Donald Trump was now president, and the elephant in the room was the unanswered question of whether his administration would continue to prioritize energy innovation. The answer emerged a month later: an emphatic “no.” The Trump administration’s budget proposal to Congress set out to slash funding for research and development (R&D) into renewable energy by 70 percent.


pages: 556 words: 141,069

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

Instead, the $150 million cost reduction offset the increased costs of $130 million to $150 million to manage the labs, with a tenfold increase in management fees, which increased by $40 million annually. “Bechtel gets nuclear lab, taxpayers foot the bill,” wrote an employment lawyer in response to the lab’s restructuring. Hundreds of career employees were fired in the labs’ transition from public to private—“massive layoffs executed with the finesse of Donald Trump,” as one account described them. Bechtel’s elimination of the jobs—and high salaries—of older physicists generated more income for the LLCs, while also resulting in what industry observers described as a “brain drain” of the country’s best nuclear scientists. Union members and scientists argued that the profit motive driving the brain drain was not only bad public policy but also set a dangerous precedent that endangered the safety of the American public.


pages: 420 words: 130,714

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

The following statements will sound all too familiar. ‘I don’t trust educated intellectuals, elitists who know more than I do. I’d prefer to vote for somebody like me, rather than somebody who is actually qualified to be President.’ What other than this mentality accounts for the popularity of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush – politicians who flaunt their ignorance as a vote-winning virtue?*3 You want your airline pilot to be educated in aeronautics and navigation. You want your surgeon to be learned in anatomy. Yet when you vote for a President to lead a great country, you prefer somebody who is ignorant and proud of it, someone you’d enjoy having a drink with, rather than somebody qualified for high office?


pages: 458 words: 136,405

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

In November, Zac Goldsmith, having lost the London mayoral election to Sadiq Khan, resigned his Richmond Park seat to protest against government support for a new runway at Heathrow. In a by-election he ran as an independent but, without a conservative challenger, was beaten by the Lib Dems. At the same time, British politics were to be given a new example of political upheaval from the US. On 8 November 2016, Donald Trump was elected President. 2016 was a contender for the year that killed both globalism and liberalism. It made Jeremy Corbyn’s election even more unusual but reflected the same underlying causes: anger at elites, social media as the engine of change supplanting traditional communication outlets, and a sense of the impossible becoming the norm.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Goldman Sachs is spending $100 million over the next five years to promote entrepreneurialism among women in the developing world, particularly through management education. Dragon’s Den, a television program that features entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to business people (“dragons”) in order to attract venture capital, is shown, in various forms, in twelve countries, including Nigeria and Afghanistan. The Apprentice, which features Donald Trump looking for a protégé, has produced numerous spin-offs, including Apprentice Africa, which is seen in twelve African countries. Even China’s state-owned Central Television has a show about entrepreneurs pitching ideas to try to win $1.3 million in seed money, Win in China. The fourth reason for the mainstreaming is that the world’s governments are competing to see who can create the most probusiness environment.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Successful businesspeople-from Andrew Carnegie, in the nineteenth century, the ruthless steel tycoon who wrote that "a man who dies rich dies disgraced," to Bill Gates in the twentieth century-regard building a successful business as a primary, not an intermediate, goal. That is what they tell us and we should not disbelieve them. 19 When Carnegie or Gates declared their intention to crush competitors, they were not trying to persuade us to like or admire them. Even in financial services, self-interest is not an overriding motivation. Donald Trump is perhaps the most aggressive and high-living American trader of the last two decades. Yet Trump's autobiography begins with "I don't do it for the money." He goes on, "I've got enough, much more money than I"ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form." 20 What ofWarren Buffett? His motives are complex.


pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

Consider the exclusive right to sell cars. From a legal point of view, there is nothing to prevent the government from giving me this as a property right. As with any property, I could sell or license the right – I could authorize General Motors and Ford to sell cars in exchange for fees; I could sell my exclusive franchise to Donald Trump; I could create a shrink-wrap agreement that anyone who purchased a car would have to agree to get off the road whenever I drove my car down the street. Pretty obviously this is a terrible idea, but the analogy between the exclusive right to sell cars and land is no different from the analogy between property of idea and property of land.


pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

Natalia Vodianova, the supermodel and wife of the British aristocrat and billionaire property heir Justin Portman, commutes between Britain and New York with their two young children. In another British/Russian liaison, fashionistas have also been intrigued by the relationship between another supermodel, Naomi Campbell, and the Russian billionaire Vladimir Doronin, a property magnate with a towering ego who has been called Moscow’s version of Donald Trump. Doronin was educated in St Petersburg, the home city of Russia’s former and current presidents, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev. A close friend of the present Mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and his wife Yelena Baturina (at the last count, Russia’s only female dollar billionaire), Doronin is another plutocrat who likes to ensure that he keeps in with the political in-crowd.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Crooked Timber, June 25, 2013. http://crookedtimber.org/2013/06/25/the-hayek-pinochet-connection-a-second-reply-to-my-critics. ———. “Hayek von Pinochet.” CoreyRobin.com, July 8, 2012. http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/08/hayek-von-pinochet. ———. “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children.” Nation, May 27, 2013. ———. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Robinson, Joan. Contributions to Modern Economics. London: Academic, 1978. Rodgers, Daniel. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. “Ron Paul Newsletters.” TNR, January 8, 2012. https://newrepublic.com/article/71377/ron-paul-newsletter.


pages: 520 words: 134,627

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

“They’re getting it from the Bay Area and from New York.” * * * • • • JARED KUSHNER IS PERHAPS the best known example of a “back door” deal, as Daniel Golden detailed in his 2006 book The Price of Admission. The son of a real estate magnate turned convicted felon, and son-in-law of President Donald Trump, Kushner was a mediocre high school student at best, with test scores below Ivy League standards. His father, Charles, pledged $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998, around the time Jared was starting the college admissions process at the Frisch School in New Jersey. The gift was to come in annual installments of $250,000, and Harvard’s former president said it was intended for scholarships.


pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

Queen Rex introduced me to ketamine, a veterinary anesthetic. Its packing reads: FOR USE IN CATS AND SUBHUMAN PRIMATES ONLY. Like a message written in hot neon, a clarion call to the world’s drug fiends. This drug destroys minds and reaps souls. In the chapel of a deconsecrated church, while Donald Trump and his bodyguard played a hand of pinochle, I snorted bumps off the key to Regina’s apartment. Ketamine was like water, clear, like being disconnected and shut down from the senses, being forced into using the hidden senses to comprehend input of the primary five. The body imprisoned in one place, the soul in another.


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

The message to those in attendance was clear: Son was going to be the one who could fund the race and anoint the winners. He was going to be a kingmaker. CHAPTER 17 Neumann & Son On December 6, 2016, Masayoshi Son was on his way to Trump Tower, having flown to New York to meet the president-elect. Much of the world was still in shock over Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton. Son, however, was eager to gain favor with the incoming administration, particularly after the Obama administration had dashed his hopes for a Sprint/T-Mobile deal. Son would join a long line of dignitaries, ranging from business titans like Jack Ma to celebrities like Kanye West, as well as those angling for jobs in the administration, all of whom would make the very public pilgrimage to the president-elect’s gilded penthouse.


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

And if the polar ice is getting a little scorched, well, maybe that is just a message from God.” Pedophilia and bestiality, the brothers believe, are soon likely to become legal in America. The nation is fast heading for the scripturally predicted end times, an armageddon, a rapture, brought about by humankind’s eternally sinful and nonbelieving practices. They believe Donald Trump the best leader to push back against such evils, the man most prepared and determined to repair the damage already done; they have given millions to support him and those causes that are dear to his heart. These are the people who currently own 705,000 of America’s acres. In the name of their god, they have since put up their fences, have closed access to roads still considered by the state as belonging to the public at large, have turfed loggers off their lands, have forbidden snowmobiling, skiing, and snowshoeing.


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

But nobody thinks this policy was driven by an innocent desire to improve people’s interpretation of research. It was announced because much of the work done at the Department of Agriculture involves climate change, and the results are often inconvenient for an administration that’s as pro-fossil-fuels that of as Donald Trump. The new regulations caused an uproar and the guidelines on the use of ‘preliminary’ were rolled back a month after they were introduced. What was particularly striking about this case, though, was how some scientists overcompensated in their response to the political attack. The editor of the Journal of Environmental Quality was quoted in the Washington Post arguing that a published paper is ‘the end product to your research … It is now finalised.


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

In 2015 the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reviewed the existing scientific literature on glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, a herbicide showered on Texas cotton, and declared the chemical to be “probably” carcinogenic to humans. Roundup was produced and sold by Missouri-based chemical giant Monsanto—famous for producing both pesticides and genetically engineered seeds. In June 2018, Bayer purchased Monsanto for $63 billion. They maintained, as did the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Donald Trump, that glyphosate was not linked to cancer. Bayer knew it had acquired a public relations nuisance along with Monsanto, and announced immediately after the purchase that it would retire the 117-year-old Monsanto name. By then the world’s largest supplier of genetically modified seeds, “Monsanto” was a rallying point for the anti-GMO movement.


pages: 413 words: 134,755

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle

back-to-the-land, clean water, D. B. Cooper, dark pattern, Donald Trump, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the High Line, the scientific method, trade route

Midwestern seed-and-feed companies were among the first to give out these hats as promotions to drivers and farmers. They have since hybridized with baseball caps to become the national headwear of the rural American male. This form reached its apotheosis in 2015 in the red cap emblazoned with the slogan make america great again—a major prop in the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Instead of cotton duck, like baseball caps, feed caps are made of polyester in front and sweat-net in back. The forehead panel is always padded with foam to make it stand up aggressively, or maybe to mask the absence of anything behind it. At the back is a plastic snap-tab closure.


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

This is how biologists proceed when they make taxonomies, for example, and it’s also how cultures and civilizations evolve, gradually moving towards the capability of sorting all the situations in the world into the categories to which they objectively belong. ANNA:Well, I’m sorry, but I have to contradict you (and needle your friend Plato as well): categorization is not objective, as you would have it, but is profoundly subjective. For instance, if I assert “Donald Trump is a troublemaker”, is it not the case that in thus categorizing Donald Trump I am making a highly subjective judgment? KATY:I understand your example, but troublemaker is an extremely blurry category. You deliberately chose a category that is as blurry as possible! I even think you did it just to be a troublemaker! ANNA:Me, a troublemaker?


Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

W i t h The ables entertainment content—and brand Apprentice, Burnett charged up to $25 messages—to break through the "clutter" million per company for a significant product placement, and in the process and become memorable for consumers: the series became a test site for a range "We w i l l use a diverse array of entertain- of different approaches of linking brands ment assets to break into people's hearts and series content. and minds. In that order. . . . We're movHow many different ways is The ing to ideas that elicit emotion and create Apprentice involved in branding? connections. A n d this speeds the converI. The Brand as Protagonist: Program gence of M a d i s o n + Vine. Because the host Donald Trump casts himself and ideas w h i c h have always sat at the heart his corporate empire as the series protagonists. In the course of the of the stories you've told and the content you've sold . . . whether movies or 1 2 3 music or television... are no longer just intellectual property, they're emotional capital."


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

There are nineteen independent religious communities (such as the Druze) in Lebanon and a dispersal of judicial power along sectarian lines that makes a mockery of its secular pretensions.11 Lebanon’s army is riddled with sectarian divides, and Beirut neighborhoods are still segregated along the sectarian lines that formed as militias swept through the city during the civil war, coercing and bribing families to relocate or become refugees. Lebanese are not democratic by nature but capitalist, even profiting by funneling European women into Saudi harems during the 1970s oil boom. Soon after the civil war, during which fully a tenth of Lebanon’s population was killed, Rafiq Hariri, a sort of political Donald Trump of Lebanon, began funneling the country’s fortunes through his Solidere Corporation to raise the country from its charred ashes.*39 In Beirut at least, he superimposed a glamorous façade over a landscape of total ruin, an approach befitting both Lebanese society and much of the second world: targeted political philanthropy grafted onto sectarian divides with status and influence for sale.


pages: 487 words: 151,810

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

They and everybody in their party will be condemned to spend ninety minutes wrestling with traditional date fritters, squid with aioli, saffron rice with cuttlefish and grilled peppers straight from the Canary Islands, which they neither look forward to nor savor but which they must simply endure as one of the mysteries of their civilization. As they walk that long gray mile to the tapas of doom the group will radiate a certain sort of male giddiness, and a strange transformation will take place. For it is a law of human nature that the more men you concentrate in one happy pack, the more each of them will come to resemble Donald Trump. They possess a sort of masculine photosynthesis to start with—the ability to turn sunlight into self-admiration. By the law of compound egotism, they create this self-reinforcing vortex of smugness, which brings out the most pleased-with-themselves aspects of their own personalities. These men are, in other circumstances, loving grandfathers, eager to talk about their offspring at Stanford, who are in year-abroad programs in Cambodia.


pages: 618 words: 160,006

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

It is unlikely that China plans to wage war at sea in the classic symmetrical sense; its assets are configured to enhance land-based control. The PLAN is, after all, the Army’s Navy. The Chinese project may succeed, because fault lines between sea and land identity are emerging in the Western collective. Donald Trump’s populist protectionism conveys a hemispheric isolationist message, while the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the continental protectionist European Union moves in the opposite direction. The British decision reflected many agendas, but deep within lay a residual seapower culture, a sense that 1588 and Trafalgar were critical landmarks in the construction of a national identity that reflects a long engagement with seapower, one where Turner’s tiny steam boat remains a portentous emblem.


pages: 391 words: 22,799

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

In the superheated fiÂ�nanÂ�cial climate of the mid-Â�1980s, however, the local Chevrolet dealer might not be the object of desire. In a 1989 segment for the TV show Nation’s Business Today, an interviewer asked the SIFE director Alvin Rohrs the obvious question: Who were the business heroes of these young people? Were they dazzled by the “glamorous comings and going of a Donald Trump?” Just who were their role models?89 Rohrs responded diplomatically that there was a range of figÂ�ures that the young people looked up to, starting with “the entrepreneur,” who could be anyone from a local restauranteur to Sam Walton himself. When the interviewer pressed him to choose the big corporation or the inÂ�deÂ�penÂ�dent business as their ultimate destination, the SIFE director concluded with the same theme of countless professors of entrepreneurship: As best he could tell, “a lot of them would like to own their own business, but a lot of them have the entrepreneurial spirit that they want to bring to corporations.”90 Again, the unique power of the Sun Belt’s entrepreneurial corporations squared the circle: with Sam Walton as the exemplar, entrepreneurship could be a character trait, not an economic function.


pages: 477 words: 144,329

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

He keeps suitcases packed and has invested widely in real estate, so his family would have multiple escape options if the end drew near. A common trend in the prepper community is to purchase land and an airstrip in New Zealand and then buy your way into citizenship. As Osnos reported: “In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. . . . Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance.


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

Siegel commented, “Well, I agreed with him. Don’t forget the original irrational exuberance was the 2000 bubble, and … his timing couldn’t have been better either. [Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance book] comes out in March of 2000.… I mean, we both hit the jackpot then. And we were exactly in synch on that bubble.”56 In 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president, Siegel and Shiller also shared similar views about Trump’s likely effects on the stock market. “Right after Trump was elected, we both said, he and the Republican platform were good for the market. Believe it or not, Bob was a bull! We were filming in New York early in Trump’s administration, and [the National Public Radio host] asked us a question, ‘Do you think the market is going to be higher a year from now?’


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

The first, which came late in that decade, was embodied by George Wallace. The second came under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who kicked off his 1980 campaign at a fairground just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a speech in which he emphasized, “I believe in states’ rights.” A third wave, less restrained and uglier, emerged in recent years under Donald Trump. America’s demographics and values are changing, with more Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and women holding positions of power, and greater acceptance of openly gay and transgender people, and that is causing older white heterosexual men too often to react with anger and resentment. As the United States becomes more of a multiethnic, multicultural democracy, their traditional positions of privilege are eroding.


pages: 553 words: 153,028

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney, Jason Miklian

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bob Geldof, British Empire, clean water, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, rolodex, South China Sea, statistical model

Droughts, floods, desertification, and other shocks to fragile environments can all trigger political and economic upheavals. For example, in 2018 Central American farmers were pushed off land that was no longer arable, and were unable to settle in violent local cities. They joined what then-president Donald Trump called the “migrant caravan”: four thousand displaced people seeking an opportunity simply to live productive lives again. Experts estimate that two million climate refugees from Central America alone will attempt to enter the United States by 2040. That’s two new climate caravans every month for the next two decades.


pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

Eli Meixler, “With over 29,000 Homicides, 2017 Was Mexico’s Most Violent Year on Record,” Time, January 21, 2018, https://time.com/5111972/mexico-murder-rate-record-2017. 38. While the EF had thought about security ahead of time, the conference moved from continent to continent; it was North America’s turn. The Bitcoin Expo had been in Canada in 2014, and in 2017 the Donald Trump administration had banned citizens of seven countries from entering the United States, leaving Mexico. 39. Elaine Ramirez, “Crazy for Cryptocurrency: Why South Koreans Are Risking It All on Ethereum,” Forbes, August 2, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2017/08/02/crazy-for-cryptocurrency-why-south-koreans-are-risking-it-all-on-ethereum/#12a3aad46341.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

A Playground for Millionaires COLUMBUS CIRCLE New York, New York For all its centrality as the gateway to the beautiful Upper West Side, one of the city’s finest residential neighborhoods, Columbus Circle was, until recently, a total mess, dominated by the nearly Stalinesque New York Coliseum convention center, the empty hull of the defunct Huntington Hartford Gallery (a nearly windowless white marble slab directly facing a great view of Central Park), and a skinny 44-story office tower, creaking like a ship in high winds and making workers on high floors queasy. What a difference a decade makes. Today the Coliseum has been replaced by the dazzling 55-story Time Warner Center, the swaying tower has been shored up and transformed into Donald Trump’s Trump International Hotel & Tower, and the Hartford Gallery got a major makeover and is now home to the Museum of Arts & Design. In the center of things, standing atop a 70-foot granite column and surrounded by newly landscaped fountains, stands a statue of Christopher Columbus erected in 1892 to mark the 400th anniversary of his voyage.

On the other, you pass the pristinely manicured grounds of the rich and famous surrounding mega-mansions. On the Atlantic side of the island, Ocean Boulevard is home to another agglomeration of estates, including Mar-a-Lago, the former home of heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, now reincarnated as a country club owned by Donald Trump. “The Season” in Palm Springs runs from mid-December through February, a ten-week stretch of parties, charity balls, and high-profile events. On the mainland, the social set gathers for the January start of polo season at Wellington’s Palm Beach Polo and Country Club, its 3,000 box seats filled with stars, heirs, minor royalty, and lookers-on, dressed in their blue blazers and finery.

From here you don’t even have a trail to follow until you’re past the summit; it’s just “up.” Take heart: From the top you hike down through beautiful boreal forest and on to Lake Bennett. There’s not much there now, but during the gold rush there was a restaurant called the Arctic, run by entrepreneur Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather. WHERE: Dyea is 111 miles northwest of Juneau. Hiking info: Tel 907-983-2921; www.nps.gov/klgo. Cost: permits $16 (U.S. side only); $48 (entire trail). HOW: Klondike Tours provides shuttle service to hikers (tel 907-983-2075; www.klondiketours.com). Cost: $90. BEST TIMES: Trail is generally free of snow mid-July–mid-Aug, though this is also the busiest season; mid-Aug–late Sept has wetter weather and colder temperatures, but hiking conditions generally remain good.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

Despite temptations to ‘impose order on this apparent chaos’ this would ‘ultimately would be too costly in the short run and would fail in the long.’ The lessons of the past century were summoned to note how difficult it would be to overcome less powerful adversaries. It warned of Russia and China being emboldened, curtailed international cooperation, and a tendency towards the revival of ‘spheres of influence’.39 Donald Trump was inaugurated as 45th president of the United States on 20 January 2017. [ 25 ] The Future of the Future of War I had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts, or fades but doesn’t end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain safe as long as possible.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

By contrast, in the United States, bankruptcy at an individual level was often regarded as a badge of honor, worn by someone whose business ideas were innovative and essentially ahead of their time. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs treated bankruptcy as essentially a learning experience. Prominent individuals in American life, such as Donald Trump, owed their fortune and their position to the repeated use of bankruptcy provisions to escape liabilities to creditors. American economists sometimes applied the same lessons to states, especially in a period in which state debt had accumulated to such an extent as to impose a severe fiscal burden on future generations.


pages: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

Both brothers, while unfailingly polite (as if their parents would take away the car keys if they didn’t behave like gentlemen), cut high profiles in New York’s fast lane. Jared had bought the New York Observer, a Manhattan weekly that lost money yet was a favorite in New York media and real estate circles. And he was married to Donald Trump’s glamorous daughter, Ivanka. Josh, too, was regularly found in the gossip columns that kept tabs on the models he was dating. Although Joshua Kushner was not your usual health insurance executive, he was an insurance customer, which is how he got the idea that he had started talking to friends about.


pages: 577 words: 171,126

Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, place-making, Silicon Valley, William Langewiesche

In her “Big City Beat” column, the Houston Chronicle’s society columnist regularly mentioned where and with whom Alan and Louise had dined, and began referring to his house—as she did with many of her wealthy Houstonian pals—as a “swankienda.” When Frank Sinatra came to town for a performance, he’d set up a bar in his dressing room and invite Alan and Louise back for drinks. Alan and Louise attended galas with former Texas governors, dined with Donald Trump, and played golf with the king of Morocco, as columnist Maxine Messinger breathlessly told readers. Sometimes Shepard was spotted at a star-studded dinner at Tony’s, a famous Houston restaurant. Other times it was a cheeseburger with famed heart surgeon Denton Cooley at the lunch counter of Avalon Drugstore, a messy-but-chic old pharmacy and convenience store on the edge of Shepard’s River Oaks neighborhood, where Shepard kept a running tab.


Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America by Henry Petroski

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, independent contractor, intermodal, Loma Prieta earthquake, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, transcontinental railway

Whether Ammann actually knew who he was or not, the story serves to carry one step further the image of this engineer as quietly devoted to his job, oblivious to everything else in the world. But one could also interpret the story as one shy engineer’s private retaliation for his anonymity at the ceremony dedicating the bridge that owed so much to him. Among the onlookers at the dedication ceremonies for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was a college freshman named Donald Trump, who was attending the event with his father. Sixteen years later, after the younger Trump had established himself as a real-estate developer in his own right and been credited with “reshaping the skyline of Manhattan,” he recalled to a reporter having had “a sudden realization, an epiphany,” at the ceremony that “always remained with him, shaping the way he made his fortune in real estate in New York City.”


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Bossie, however, was forced to resign in disgrace after being caught doctoring tapes to make it appear that Hillary Clinton was guilty of defrauding clients of her Arkansas law firm. Nonetheless, he would stage a political comeback with the Citizens United organization, and he would eventually taste the fruit of victory over the Clintons in 2016 when he served as deputy campaign manager to Donald Trump.5 Back in 2007, Bossie and his organization decided to make a hard-hitting, feature-length documentary about Hillary Clinton, the presumptive front-runner in the 2008 election. Bossie had first been inspired to turn his partisan attentions to filmmaking by Michael Moore and his successful 2004 documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, a harshly critical exposé of President George W.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The Republican Party, which ironically was the party that emancipated the slaves, has disproportionately attracted white voters who were upset with the Democratic Party’s new leanings. Consider these numbers: In the 1976 presidential elections, white voters voted for Republican Gerald Ford over Democrat Jimmy Carter, 52 percent to 48 percent. In 2016, white voters chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, 57 percent to 37 percent, the same twenty-point margin by which they had chosen Republican Mitt Romney over Democrat Barack Obama in the previous election.33 Perhaps the most dramatic example of the divide is a 2012 study that examines attitudes toward interparty marriage.34 In 1960, only 5 percent of Republicans and four percent of Democrats felt “displeased” if their son or daughter married someone from the other political party.


pages: 552 words: 163,292

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art by Michael Shnayerson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, banking crisis, Bonfire of the Vanities, capitalist realism, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Etonian, gentrification, high net worth, index card, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, mass immigration, Michael Milken, NetJets, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, rent control, rolodex, Silicon Valley, tulip mania, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

Six other Richters went for a combined $63.3 million. As for the Ames collection that had lifted all boats, Sotheby’s took in well over its $100 million estimate. The art world had bucked Brexit, at least for the moment. Outside the auction houses, another historic vote rocked the world that November. How President Donald Trump would affect the market—or if he would at all—would not become clear for some time, and perhaps it was a bit churlish even to consider the art market’s fate above that of the globe. But about Sotheby’s and Art Agency, Partners, the picture was clear. In just a year, the consultants had redefined and expanded Sotheby’s from an old-style auction house with a private treaty arm to an across-the-board advisory, and art was the currency that made the firm work.


pages: 598 words: 169,194

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle by Diana B. Henriques

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, British Empire, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, index fund, locking in a profit, low interest rates, mail merge, merger arbitrage, messenger bag, money market fund, payment for order flow, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, traveling salesman

While not in some historically elite enclave like upper Fifth Avenue or Sutton Place, the Federal-style building had been built in the late 1920s and had a quiet prestige. The unit reportedly had been decorated by Angelo Donghia, a prominent Manhattan interior designer whose clients included newsmakers such as Donald Trump and Ralph Lauren. Ruth Madoff made some minor renovations—chiefly customizing some closets and adding a greenhouse extension to link the spacious kitchen to the broad encircling terrace. It was a tastefully decorated and grandly comfortable apartment, and it marked a significant step up for the Madoffs, formerly of Laurelton, Queens, by way of Roslyn, Long Island.


pages: 756 words: 167,393

The Tylenol Mafia by Scott Bartz

AOL-Time Warner, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, independent contractor, intangible asset, inventory management, Just-in-time delivery, life extension, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, too big to fail

We had to act to protect the public, whether it was more widespread than it appeared to be, whether it was a condition that could be repeated by other copycats using our product. So the first and foremost, we had to protect the public.” In the lawsuit that J&J filed against its insurers; J&J suggested that company executives had treated the recall with far greater urgency than they actually had. Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, the older sister of real estate magnate Donald Trump, presided over this lawsuit. She said the “Plaintiff [J&J] itself admits, both in its complaint and in its briefs, that it would have been negligent or grossly negligent were any subsequent deaths caused by its retention of Tylenol on the market. It is a well settled proposition of law that an actor who has negligently imperiled the life of another has a duty to aid that person and save him or her if at all possible.”


Frommer's San Diego 2011 by Mark Hiss

airport security, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, machine readable, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

This coastal area was once sparsely populated, but developers began exploiting the world-class ocean vistas here, and luxury condominiums—mostly snapped up by Americans—cropped up everywhere. The ensuing real estate bust has led to a string of unsightly, unfinished 284 14_626214-ch11.indd 28414_626214-ch11.indd 284 7/23/10 11:23 PM7/23/10 11:23 PM 11 SIDE TRIPS FROM SAN DIEGO Tijuana: Going South of the Border projects, the most notable of which is Donald Trump’s Ocean Resort Baja. Unfortunately for investors, the Donald drained them of $32 million they’ll never see again; for the rest of us, though, the demise of this project means one less ill-conceived development along what had been a pristine coastline. Once a tiny resort town that remained a secret despite its proximity to Tijuana, Rosarito developed explosively in the 1980s; it’s now garish and congested beyond recognition.


pages: 506 words: 167,034

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

Besides the open bars at our soirées, there were other attractions for the males…young, beautiful women. Lots of them. At a Florida event one of the coarser TFNGs observed, “Mullane, look at this party. It’s a potpourri of pussy.” I had been in enough officers’ clubs in my life to know that aviator wings had more babe-attracting power than Donald Trump’s twelve-inch wallet. The Navy SEAL insignia had the same effect. One SEAL told me that some of the young women who frequented their officers’ club were nicknamed Great White Sharks because they had swallowed so much SEAL meat. The male TFNGs were learning there was an even more powerful pheromone than jet-jockey wings and the SEAL insignia: the title astronaut.


pages: 618 words: 159,672

Fodor's Rome: With the Best City Walks and Scenic Day Trips by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

call centre, Donald Trump, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, low cost airline, Mason jar, mega-rich, messenger bag, Murano, Venice glass, retail therapy, starchitect, urban planning, young professional

For this personalized line, the menswear icon has 5,000 spectacular fabrics to select from. As thoughtful as expensive, one bespoke suit made from wool will take a minimum of 32 hours to create. Their prêt-à-porter line is also praised for peerless cutting and stitching. Past and present clients include Clark Gable, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and, of course, James Bond. And they say clothing doesn’t make the man? | Via Barberini 79 | 00187 | 06/484517 | www.brioni.it | Via Condotti 21/A, Piazza di Spagna | 00187 | 06/485855. CAMPO Children’s Clothing Rachele. Rachele is a small, charming shop tucked down a small alley not far from the Campo de’ Fiori piazza.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

A study of financial crises in developed nations since 1870 found far-right political parties often are the beneficiaries, winning popular support by blaming immigrants and minorities for the loss of prosperity.19 This time was no different. Nationalist sentiment in the West had been on the rise at least since the 9/11 terrorist attacks; the Great Recession intensified the trend.20 In June 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union. That November, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. In 2018, Brazilians elected a new president, the nationalist Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned in Trump’s image. Trump’s contempt for economics — and for its basic building blocks, statistics and reasoning — is without parallel among modern American presidents.


pages: 769 words: 169,096

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Maxwell Austensen, Vicki Been, Luis Inaraja Vera, Gita Khun Jush, Katherine M. O’Regan, Stephanie Rosoff, Traci Sanders, Eric Stern, Michael Suher, Mark A. Willis, and Jessica Yager “State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods in 2015,” Furman Center, New York University, New York, 2016. 22. See http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/nyregion/donald-trump-tax-breaks-real-estate.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news. 23. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, “Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth,” NBER Working Paper 21154, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, May 2015 (revised June 2015), 4. 24.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

They are – internally, to refine and optimize mechanisms for profiting from platform-based trade in attention, labour power, capital and (non-data) commodities. But data are not often sold, even by Facebook: as the New York Times pointed out to its readers in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – in which the political data firm hired by Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign controversially gained access to private information on more than 50 million Facebook users – Facebook does not allow user data ‘to be sold or transferred “to any ad network, data broker or other advertising or monetization-related service” ’.20 This, Facebook argued, was exactly what Dr Aleksandr Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University, had done in providing the information to Cambridge Analytica.


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

The same is true of China, which now has more billionaires than any other country in the world except the United States. This growth in inequality led to a resurgence of nationalism – exactly the opposite of the kind of cosmopolitan future imagined by champions of globalization. Over the past decade, we’ve seen Britain leave the European Union, Donald Trump elected as President of the United States, the revival of Hindu nationalism in India, and the rise of right-wing political leaders across Latin America.5 It is this strange combination of globalization and nationalism which really characterizes the New Cold War. States around the world see their participation in the globalized world of science as a means to assert national and regional authority.


pages: 456 words: 185,658

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott

affirmative action, Columbine, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, G4S, gun show loophole, income per capita, More Guns, Less Crime, Sam Peltzman, selection bias, statistical model, the medium is the message, transaction costs

During the 1996 legislative session, for example, Georgia “state legislators quietly gave themselves and a few top officials the right to carry concealed guns to places most residents can’t: schools, churches, political rallies, and even the Capitol.”78 Even local prosecutors in California strenuously objected to restrictions on their rights to carry concealed handguns.79 Although people with concealed handgun permits must generally view the police as offering insufficient protection, it is difficult to discern any pattern of political orientation among celebrities who have concealedhandgun permits: Bill Cosby, Cybill Shepherd, Howard Stern, Donald Trump, Arthur O. Sulzberger (chairman of the New York Times), union bosses, Laurence Rockefeller, Tom Selleck, and Robert De Niro. The reasons these people gave on their applications for permits were similar. Laurence Rockefeller’s reason was that he carries “large sums of money”; Arthur Sulzberger wrote that he carries “large sums of money, securities, etc.”; and William Buckley listed “protection of personal property when traveling in and about the city” as his reason.80 Some made their decision to carry a gun after being victims of crime.81 And when the Denver Post asked Sen.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

Anyway, they wouldn’t be any use to me because my neural network’s not exactly the same as yours. What you have to do is somehow convey information about how you are working so that I can work the same way, and you do that by giving me examples of inputs and outputs. For example, if you look at a tweet from Donald Trump, it’s a big mistake to think that what Trump is doing is conveying facts. That’s not what he’s doing. What Trump is doing is saying that given a particular situation, here’s a way you might choose to respond. A Trump follower can then see the situation, they can see how Trump thinks they ought to respond, and they can learn to respond the same way as Trump.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Peter Thiel was an outspoken campus conservative at Stanford who went on to found PayPal at the height of the dot-com bubble. PayPal was quickly absorbed by eBay but the core team behind it, the so-called PayPal mafia, is still regarded with awe and even fear in the Valley. Thiel was a very early investor in Facebook, and just about the only Silicon Valley figure to voice support for Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. Clive Thompson is a journalist specializing in science and technology. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. His next book will explore the distinctive thought processes of computer programmers. Aleks Totić was on the student team that built Mosaic at the University of Illinois.


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 elements of such a framework include an institutionalized system of checks and balances, the rule of law, and a trusted central bank. These elements provide a security blanket to investors, assuring them that the value of those investments will be protected and that investors, both domestic and foreign, will be treated fairly and not subject to risk of expropriation. There are legitimate concerns that Donald Trump and his enablers inflicted irreparable damage on the institutions that underpin trust in the dollar. More troubling, America’s vaunted system of checks and balances did not work well during his administration. Republican members of Congress abrogated their role to act as a check on the powers of the president, tolerating his attacks on the independence of the Fed, the evisceration of the rule of law, and a range of capricious economic policies.


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

A bill introduced in the State Senate the month before, SB 1421, broke through the logjam of police lobbying and was signed into law later that year. Written by State Senator Nancy Skinner of Berkeley, SB 1421 required police departments to make public records of police shootings, uses of force resulting in great bodily injury, and cases where an officer lied or engaged in sexual misconduct. The election of Donald Trump, and his anti-immigrant rhetoric, also galvanized California to push back on hard-line deportation policies begun under Barack Obama, whose administration deported more undocumented migrants than any other presidency before or since. Starting in 2014 the state legislature passed laws reversing the decades-long status quo in which local law enforcement worked hand in glove with immigration agents.


pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

And by 2013, when Breaking Bad presented its last episodes, expectations for a fitting finale, following in the wake of everything from The Sopranos and The Shield to Lost, were overwhelmingly high. “Somewhere along the line, as we created the final sixteen episodes of Breaking Bad,” Gilligan recalls, “you start thinking to yourself, ‘We’ve got to have a big, big ending. It’s got to be big!’ As Donald Trump would say, ‘It’s got to be huge!’ Anyway, I came to realize, with the help of my wonderful writers, it doesn’t need to be huge. It just needs to satisfy. It needs to be satisfying.” Alternative endings were considered, in which Walter White would be carted off to jail in handcuffs or, perhaps worse, get away with all his crimes.


pages: 588 words: 193,087

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft by Mike Sacks

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fake news, fear of failure, game design, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Martin Parr, Norman Mailer, out of africa, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

If Lookwell had stayed on the air, I was hoping to have a marginal celebrity each week playing themselves taking the class, in hopes of stretching out their fifteen minutes of fame. For the pilot we asked Donna Rice, the woman who had an affair with the '88 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, to do it. She actually came very close to saying yes. Marla Maples — Donald Trump's former wife — said yes, but after we'd already cast the part with another actress. Do you think that Adam West was in on the joke? It doesn't look like he was cognizant at certain points during the pilot. Definitely. He knew he was being made fun of, and he had been self-deprecating in the past about his role as Batman.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina would help Bush to regain his standing with the public.16 On the eve of the 2008 elections, he predicted that Barack Obama would win Tennessee and Arkansas.17 In 2010, Morris predicted that the Republicans could easily win one hundred seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.18 In 2011, he said that Donald Trump would run for the Republican nomination—and had a “damn good” chance of winning it.19 All those predictions turned out to be horribly wrong. Katrina was the beginning of the end for Bush—not the start of a rebound. Obama lost Tennessee and Arkansas badly—in fact, they were among the only states in which he performed worse than John Kerry had four years earlier.


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The income per person after inflation in almost all the LDC countries with high levels of debt was lower in 1989 than in 1981. Citibank under Reed fell in line with most of the new financing fashions. It made large risky loans to finance LBOs in the late 1980s. Many of these acquisitions failed. It lent to the most glamorous real estate investors of the period, including Donald Trump and the Reichmann family of Canada, then real estate crashed. In 1990, the U.S. economy sank into recession and some of Citibank’s own bonds were downgraded to junk status. In 1991, Reed took other write-downs for bad debts and reported an $850 million loss for the year. During the recession, Reed had slashed expenses, fired tens of thousands of employees, and made Citibank a more cautious and conservative lender, but Alan Greenspan cut interest rates sharply beginning in 1991, producing an economic recovery.


pages: 650 words: 204,878

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, William J. O'Neil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, British Empire, business process, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, refrigerator car, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, short selling, short squeeze, technology bubble, tontine, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, yellow journalism

Livermore’s broker, E. F. Hutton, also had interests in the area. Hutton and his wife, Marjorie Post—heiress of the Post Cereals fortune—built their huge Mar-a-Lago estate on Palm Beach Island. The grounds were later transformed into the Mar-a-Lago Club, a private resort complex renovated and owned by Donald Trump, a real estate developer who would have been at home in the wheeler-dealer days of the early 1900s. In Livermore’s time, the resorts were buzzing with the electricity and energy of the nation’s new prosperity. Business tycoons, financers, and royalty could be seen in hotel lobbies, on the white-sand beaches, and in the dining halls of Flagler’s impressive hotels.


pages: 356 words: 186,629

Frommer's Los Angeles 2010 by Matthew Richard Poole

call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, upwardly mobile

The Trump N ational G olf Club, 1 O cean Trails D r. ( & 310/265-5000; www . trumpgolf.com/trumplosangeles), recently opened in Rancho Palos Verdes. Perched on a bluff overlooking the P acific Ocean, the course pr ovides a spectacular vie w from every hole. Originally designed by Pete Dye as the Ocean Trails Golf Course, the property was purchased by developer Donald Trump, who spent mor e than $250 million to r edesign it with elements such as lakes and water falls. Located on the P alos Verdes Peninsula, 30 minutes south of D owntown Los Angeles, the course also offers a 45,000-squar e-foot clubhouse with locker rooms, a pro shop, three dining options, conference rooms, and a grand ballroom.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

Kupchan (May/June 1996). For a later American perspective, see Drozdiak (May/June 2010). EU leaders have also long coveted an independent European defense capacity to supplement NATO. See, for example, Norman and Barnes (September 13, 2016). The initiative received a further boost from the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in November 2016: see, for example, Barnes and Norman (November 15, 2016); and Emmott (November 30, 2016). 85 See, for example, Gaddis (February 26, 2009:7). 86 See, for example, Shlapak and Johnson (2016), which concludes that “as currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members” in the Baltics.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Stiffening its upper lip, the paper called for a second referendum to approve the terms of Brexit, preferably on the Norwegian model guaranteeing full single market access (which ‘might be easier to win than seems possible today’ as ‘the economy will suffer and immigration will fall of its own accord’). To contain a similar backlash elsewhere, the EU must boost growth by ‘completing the single market in, say, digital services and capital markets’ and creating a ‘proper banking union’.3 In the US, the ‘truly terrifying’ Donald Trump was quick to see the parallels between his own presidential bid and Brexit – hailing the latter as a ‘great thing’ on a visit to his golf course in Scotland that June. The Economist had asked Republicans to steer clear of the real estate mogul since the primaries in 2015 with little success. It did not warm to him afterwards: in one interview, a bewildered New York bureau chief surveyed Trump in his office, an ‘Aladdin’s cave of celebrity puff’, desk stacked with magazines like a ‘dentist’s waiting room’, a ‘mound of Trump-covered copies of The Economist’ and the assurance, ‘I put you up front’.4 Above all, it objected to his pessimism as unworthy of Reagan (a man he professed to admire) and a ‘caricature’ of America – which was neither as hateful nor as badly-off as he made out, ‘and on most measures is more prosperous, more peaceful and less racist than ever before’.


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 they would not make any statements on the record expressing even the slightest criticism of the business decisions of the other branches of the family. After this new wave of publicity, that changed. Elizabeth Sackler, who had endowed the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and maintained a Twitter feed full of urgent exclamations about the perfidy of Donald Trump and her allegiance to Black Lives Matter, belatedly made a statement in which she distanced herself from her cousins. In an interview with the website Hyperallergic, she said that Purdue’s role in the opioid crisis “is morally abhorrent to me.” Her father died in 1987, she pointed out, long before the introduction of OxyContin, and she and her siblings had agreed to sell their one-third stake in Purdue to her uncles soon thereafter.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

Indeed, the greatest threat to the New World Order comes from those who wish to abandon this role and turn inward. Throughout the world, anti-internationalist sentiment is growing. In the United States, the bipartisan consensus in favor of global free trade that has held strong since the mid-1930s is collapsing. Donald Trump won the presidency on an anti-internationalist platform that promised to restrict the movement of goods and people across borders. He has flirted with defunding the United Nations, pulling back U.S. support for NATO, ignoring the World Trade Organization, seizing Iraqi oil, and abandoning the policy of resisting Russia’s annexation of Crimea with an array of outcasting tools.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face—and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place. I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure. Not like Donald Trump and the Tea Partiers going on about how the continued existence of winter proves it’s all a hoax. But I stayed pretty hazy on the details and only skimmed most of the news stories, especially the really scary ones. I told myself the science was too complicated and that the environmentalists were dealing with it.


pages: 790 words: 253,035

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

RON MEYER: Mike was very good at making sure all roads led to him. He set himself up very intelligently. He was the guy who could get your kids into the best private schools; he was the guy who could get you into the best hospitals. We didn’t know it at the time, but he had a personal press guy, same one as Donald Trump—Howard Rubenstein—and this guy engineered a big Wall Street Journal story. One Friday, Mike said to me, “By the way, the Wall Street Journal is doing a story on us.” I said, “What are you talking about? No one has come to talk to me,” and he said, “Oh, they’ve talked to me.” I just said, “Wow, when is it coming out?”


pages: 941 words: 237,152

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

America’s first members-only resort, Bailey’s Beach Club, is a veritable WASP nest occupying a private slice of chalky gray sand in Newport, Rhode Island. If your surname isn’t Vanderbilt and you don’t have a roman numeral attached, then chances are slim – make that impossible – that you’ll get to nibble their foie gras and crack open the bubbly. In fact, the members list is so tightly guarded even Donald Trump got the proverbial talk-to-the-hand! Don’t despair though; locals joke that Bailey’s Beach is the most hideous strip of sand around and, besides, Newport has plenty of other opportunities for us plebeians to nab a fancy nosh. Our favorite is the White Horse Tavern on Marlborough St. Founded by a pirate in 1687, this gambrel-roofed tavern is one of the oldest establishments in the United States.


How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, global pandemic, Live Aid, medical residency, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, sugar pill, trickle-down economics

Each week brought expanding reports from Staley, whose efforts succeeded in making ACT UP–branded clothing among the city’s most popular fashionwear. An intense man with a large voice named Bob Rafsky headed up the Media Committee, as good a match as Staley was to fund-raising. By day, Rafsky was spokesman for the real estate developer Donald Trump. He knew assignment producers and editors at the highest levels. Besides his work on T+D alongside Iris Long, Jim Eigo headed a committee called Issues, whose task it was to make sure that each person in the room could understand all that was being discussed, whether the topic was the potential clinical value of gamma globulin or the mechanisms by which the city determined its overall hospital bed count.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

For the real estate development process to be profitable, the amount received from sales has to be greater than the production costs. A calculus of reward, mediated by the risk of achieving that reward, thus, drives the process. Reward is easily understood, but considerations of risk are as important and instrumental as reward. As Leinberger (2008: 183) explains:‘Although many developers, personified by Donald Trump, have the image of being the ultimate gamblers, most are extremely cautious. The name of the game is to minimise all risks up front before any financial exposure is taken, such as, have national credit tenants, use other people’s money, do not start a development unless you know your exit strategy, develop only proven conforming products, do not pioneer, have construction-cost guarantees with a bonded construction firm, etc.’


pages: 898 words: 266,274

The Irrational Bundle by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business process, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, compensation consultant, computer vision, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, name-letter effect, new economy, operational security, Pepsi Challenge, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, second-price auction, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, social contagion, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, young professional

When you make the kind of money that great cheaters make, it changes your life. Is anyone here a foodie?” A few students raised their hands. “What about a meal made personally by Jacques Pépin? A wine tasting at Châteauneuf-du-Pape? When you make enough money, you can live large forever. Just ask Donald Trump! Look, we all know that for ten million dollars you would drive over your boyfriend or girlfriend. I am here to tell you that it is okay and to release the handbrake for you!” By that time most of the students were starting to realize that they were not dealing with a serious role model. But having spent the last ten minutes sharing dreams about all the exciting things they would do with their first $10 million, they were torn between the desire to be rich and the recognition that cheating is morally wrong.


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

a founder of poetic modernism in Arabic: cf. Adonis, Thabit IV, pp. 140–2. You are neighbours . . . vault of space: quoted in Adonis, Thabit IV, p. 146. go from place to place . . . its grave: quoted in Adonis, Thabit IV, p. 187. today’s border-beset age . . . into ‘Nayy Yark’: almost the first of Donald Trump’s acts as president was to ban all visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries entering the United States. The traveller’s passport . . . equally well: Baedeker, Palestine and Syria, 1876, ‘Passports and Custom House’. A joint commission . . . of a divided Yemen: Dresch, History of Modern Yemen, pp. 10–11.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Francis Benjamin Franklin pride of being pride of service pride of dealing honor calling integrity forthrightness candor honesty loyalty solidarity trustworthiness courage stoicism enterprise wit jocularity humor courtesy reverence respect propriety benevolence consideration justice fairness responsibility foresight wisdom prudence self-restraint frugality thrift love charity affection grace, sprezzatura dignity self-possession subjective objective conjective The property developer, TV personality, and Republican politician Donald Trump, to take an extreme example, offends. But for all the criticism he has provoked, and for all his unusual opinions about Barack Obama’s nationality and Mexican immigrants and numerous other matters, he is not a thief. He did not get his millions from aristocratic cattle raids, acclaimed in bardic glory.


pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

Panetta, Gates, Vickers and several other core members of the team planning the bin Laden raid were there as well. Obama’s demeanor revealed nothing about the high-stakes preparations that were taking place on the other side of the globe. Instead, the president appeared calm and jovial, cracking a number of jokes, including one targeting billionaire Donald Trump, who was in the audience. Trump had been on a media rampage, promoting his inane theory that the president was not a US citizen. Saturday Night Live star Seth Meyers, who hosted the dinner, actually made a joke about bin Laden, obviously unaware that a number of people in the room were intimately involved in planning his imminent demise.


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

Even though the article was heavily edited and taken off the cover of Forbes, it caused a sensation around Lazard and on Wall Street. Although Lewis once wrote an article about Bohner's perfect derriere, the marriage lasted a mere eighteen months. After leaving Forbes in 1997, Bohner co-wrote Trump: The Art of the Comeback with Donald Trump. The book hit the best-seller lists in November 1997. As the Internet bubble inflated, she became an on-air correspondent at CNBC, reporting on business celebrities. But in 1998, her contract with CNBC was not renewed. So she then went off to London as president of an Internet venture, Startupcapital.com, backed by the British venture capitalist Stephen Morris.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Temporary exhibits have even more academic polish, and overall the museum does an excellent job of presenting Seminole history and tribal life today. Palm Beach & Around Palm Beach isn’t all yachts and mansions – but just about. This area, 45 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, is where railroad baron Henry Flagler built his winter retreat, and it’s also home to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago (cnr Southern & S Ocean Blvds). In other words, if you’re looking for middle-class tourism or Florida kitsch, keep driving. Contact the Palm Beach County Convention & Visitor Bureau ( 800-544-2756; www.palmbeachfl.com; 1555 Palm Beach Lakes Blvd) in West Palm Beach for area information and maps.


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

There is, in other words, overlap: we should not expect absolute differences in order for the differences to be substantial, even dramatic, as in the case of those two countries. A couple of related points are worth making. I have heard it said that ‘the hemispheres are more like than they are unlike’. It’s hard to know exactly what this phrase means; but whatever it means, sometimes in life it is the differences that count. Donald Trump and Albert Einstein are undoubtedly ‘more like than they are unlike’. An old banger and a new Ferrari are both cars, with internal combustion engines, and are in that sense much more alike than not. But when I am buying one, I am interested in their differences. Nor am I ‘dichotomising’. Nature got there before me, beginning with a remarkable physical division at the core of the brain, which she has since made more robust through mechanisms of interhemispheric inhibition.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Herbert Allen made an exception for Ken Auletta, the first and only time a writer was allowed to attend and write about Sun Valley. “What I Did at Summer Camp” appeared in the New Yorker, July 26, 1999. 2. Interview with Don Keough. Other guests commented on Buffett’s role at Sun Valley as well. 3. Except Donald Trump, of course. 4. Dyan Machan, “Herbert Allen and His Merry Dealsters,” Forbes, July 1, 1996. 5. Elephant herds are matriarchal, and the females eject the males from the herd as soon as they are old enough to become dominant and aggressive. Then the solitary males approach herds of females, trying to mate.


pages: 769 words: 397,677

Frommer's California 2007 by Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert, Matthew Richard Poole

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

The Trump National Golf Club, 1 Ocean Trails Dr. (& 310/265-5000; www.trumpgolf.com/trumplosangeles), recently opened in Rancho Palos Verdes. On a bluff overlooking the Pacific, the course provides a spectacular view from every hole. Originally designed by Pete Dye as the Ocean Trails Golf Course, the property was purchased by Donald Trump, who spent more than $250 million to redesign it with lakes and waterfalls. On the Palos Verdes Peninsula, 30 minutes south of downtown, the course also offers a 45,000-square-foot clubhouse with locker rooms, a pro shop, three dining options, conference rooms, and a grand ballroom. Greens fees at the public course are $195 Monday through Thursday, $300 Friday through Sunday.


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Daily breads include black olive, walnut raisin, and jalapeno and cheese. Try the curried chicken salad at lunch. Bronx Pizza (Map; 619-291-3341; 111 Washington St; pizza slices from $2, mains $13-19; 11am-10pm Sun-Thu, until 11pm Sat & Sun) For a no-fuss, New York–style slice, order at the counter then check out the black-and-white photos of The Sopranos, Donald Trump and tough-guy boxers dotting the walls while you wait. Lines can spill out the door (this is the best pizza in town), so be ready with your order and remember: no credit cards, no pineapple, no beer. But don’t worry, the guys behind the counter aren’t as gruff as they let on. Blue Water Seafood Market & Grill (Map; 619-497-0914; 3667 India St; mains $4-30; ) Yeah, it’s weak on decor, service can be slow and parking challenging, but the made-to-order fish tacos (go for mahi mahi) and the clam chowder (loaded with clams) make this blue-trimmed seafood shack worth the effort.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Canouan Resort RESORT $$$ ( 458-8000; www.oceanview-can.com; ste from US$1500; ) While the resort gets its situation sorted, its 30 lavishly luxurious rental suites continue to be on offer. Services abound, including a sybaritic spa and a championship golf course branded by that master of class, Mr Donald Trump. Restaurants and other niceties abound and you can always explore the private beaches of the walled enclave that is your half of Canouan. Getting There & Away Air Canouan’s airport receives regular scheduled flights from Barbados and St Lucia. See Click here for more details. Ferry Canouan ferry options include: Jaden Sun ( 451-2192; www.jadeninc.com) Fast ferry, serves St Vincent (EC$85), Bequia (EC$55), Mayreau, Union Island (EC$30), up to three times daily, never Tue MV Barracuda ( 455-9835) Slow cargo boat, serves St Vincent, Bequia, Mayreau, Union Island, three runs each way each week MV Gem Star ( 457-4157) Slow cargo boat, serves St Vincent, Mayreau, Union Island, two runs each way each week MAYREAU POP 300 The compact palm-covered island of Mayreau sits just west of the Tobago Cays.


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

This spills out onto Burgplatz, where you confront the impressive 114m-high tower of the neo-baroque Neues Rathaus (18), one of the world’s largest town halls with some 600 rooms. It was completed in 1905 and stands on the foundations of the Pleissenburg fortress. Recently renovated, it has a rich interior, including a grand staircase straight out of a Donald Trump dream. From Burgplatz, turn north and walk up Burgstrasse to the Thomaskirche (19; Click here). Outside the church is the 1908 Bach Memorial (20) showing the composer standing against an organ, with his left-hand jacket pocket turned inside-out (with 20 children from two marriages, the great man always claimed to be broke).


Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

. (& 310/265-5000; www.trump golf.com/trumplosangeles), recently opened in Rancho P alos Verdes. Perched on a bluff overlooking the P acific Ocean, the course pr ovides a spectacular vie w from every hole. Originally designed by Pete Dye as the Ocean Trails Golf Course, the property was purchased by developer Donald Trump, who spent mor e than $250 million to r edesign it with elements such as lakes and water falls. Located on the P alos Verdes Peninsula, 30 minutes south of do wntown Los Angeles, the course also offers a 45,000-squar e-foot clubhouse with locker rooms, a pro shop, three dining options, conference rooms, and a grand ballroom.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Temporary exhibits have even more academic polish, and overall the museum does an excellent job of presenting Seminole history and tribal life today. Palm Beach & Around Palm Beach isn’t all yachts and mansions – but just about. This area, 45 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, is where railroad baron Henry Flagler built his winter retreat, and it’s also home to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago (cnr Southern & S Ocean Blvds) . In other words, if you’re looking for middle-class tourism or Florida kitsch, keep driving. Contact the Palm Beach County Convention & Visitor Bureau ( 800-544-2756; www.palmbeachfl.com; 1555 Palm Beach Lakes Blvd) in West Palm Beach for area information and maps.