Thursday, April 2nd, 2015
Brian Fung, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is about as clear a statement of the noncarbon generation high tech mogul perspective as I have read. The article also gives an accurate, I believe, critique as to where he is in error.
Most fundamentally I think Thiel has confused process and specific circumstances. I think democratic government can work very well. It certainly does so in many other countries. There is a reason why Danes are happy, and Americans are not.
It is not working well here because of corruption, unlimited money in politics, and the Republican gridlock that has produced, and the compromised nature of our regulatory agencies. There is nothing wrong with the Founders' vision, and everything wrong with its execution. American politics is to the Founders' democratic republic as Fundamentalist Pre-millennial Dispensationlist Christianity is to Jesus' teachings.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal Inc.
Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Democracy in America is dead, according to Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.
No, not in the anthropological, Alexander-de-Toqueville sense. The PayPal co-founder means it literally.
“It’s not clear we’re living in anything resembling a democracy,” he told a crowd Tuesday at George Mason University. “We’re living in a republic that’s modified by a judicial system, that’s been largely superseded by these agencies that drive the decision-making.”
“Calling our society a democracy is very misleading,” Thiel went on. “We’re not a republic; we’re not a constitutional republic. We live in a state that’s dominated by these technocratic agencies.”
For even the typically colorful Thiel, this is a surprisingly blunt critique of the American political system. It fits into a much larger brand of Washington skepticism that’s become characteristic of Silicon Valley in recent years. And while much of it may ring true to the casual observer, it also draws its own critics.
Thiel says that organizations like the […]
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Thursday, April 2nd, 2015
Vickery Eckhoff, - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: If you are poor it is hard to get government to give you a dollar. If you are rich, as this story describes, you can get the government to give you millions. It is a symptom of our social sickness.
Credit: pixshark.com
Americans love ranchers: Gritty ranchers, mom-and-pop ranchers, renegade ranchers — especially those who raise livestock on the vast open prairies of the West through a mixture of hard work and rugged independence. But there’s another side to the ever-popular rancher mythology— a side the media doesn’t cover and the public never sees. The Koch brothers, Ted Turner, the Hilton family and nine other powerful ranchers share an uncommon privilege: giant public subsidies, unknown to U.S. taxpayers.
It’s the other side of the Cliven Bundy story, the other side of the Wright brothers saga—the bronc-riding, ranching family at the center of the New York Times photographic essay published this March.
That “other side” of those stories is the federal grazing program that enables the Wrights to run their livestock on public lands for cheap; allows ranchers to have thousands of protected wild horses removed from public lands at public expense. It’s also the program that earned Cliven Bundy the title of “welfare rancher.”
Bundy didn’t earn it by failing to pay his grazing fees. The welfare […]
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Wednesday, April 1st, 2015
Nicholas Fitz, - Scientific American
Stephan: Part of our social stability, I think, depends on the ignorance most people share about the true measure of economic inequality in the U.S. A definition of the one per cent:
"they have median annual household income of $750,000, median assets of $7.5 million, and there are 1.2 million of them across the country."
That's a lot of money, but at that level you are still living in a universe that can be recognized by the 99 per cent. When you get above that by perhaps three times you to move into another realm.
And when you are a hundred times that, as are the uber-rich, you may occupy tangential geography, but you live in another world. Why wouldn't you want to avoid all the unpleasant inconvenience of modern air travel for instance if you could move through the world more effortlessly than the 99 per cent move through neighborhoods. It changes the scale of your thought, but it also blurs perception of what life is really like for most people.
According to Pew Research, most Americans believe the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, but 60% believe that most people can make it if they’re willing to work hard.
Credit: Allan Danahar via Thinkstock
In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, “Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” The findings of three studies, published over the last several years in Perspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become.
In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the percentage of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by […]
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Wednesday, April 1st, 2015
Bruce Murphy, Columnist - Urban Milwaukee
Stephan: I first reported this story some months ago. (search the archives for "Wisconsin and Minnesota") The degrading of Wisconsin under Governor Scott Walker's corporatist Theocratic Rightist policies, particularly when compared with Minnesota, is a sad cautionary tale. Here is the latest on this trend. This is what the majority of Wisconsin voters said they wanted. Think about that.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
It was not long ago that Wisconsin was a leading state in the size of its middle class. “In 2000, only one state – Utah – had a bigger middle class than Wisconsin,” the non-profit Wisconsin Budget Project notes. “But by 2013, eight states had larger middle classes than Wisconsin, including the nearby states of Iowa and Nebraska.”
This change happened in just 13 years, and is documented in a new analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which shows that no state in America saw its middle class decline more than Wisconsin from 2000-2013. All 50 states and the District of Columbia saw a reduction in the percent of households that are middle class during this period, ranging from Wyoming with just a 0.3 percent decrease to Wisconsin, with a 5.6 percent decrease. Only three other states saw a decline of at least 5 percent in middle class households: Ohio (5.2 percent), North Dakota (5.1 percent) and Vermont (5.0 percent).
Pew […]
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Wednesday, April 1st, 2015
Federico Guerrini, - Forbes
Stephan: Here is another update on an aspect of the transition out of carbon that SR has been following: the rapidly decreasing cost of solar. I chose this take on the trend because it comes from Forbes, a conservative but still rational wing of the Republican Party.
It is very good news.
Federico Guerrini
Solar power still amounts for a small share of net electricity generation around the world. In the USA, for instance, as of December 2014 it was responsible for just 0.45% of the total electricity produced.
Things are changing quite quickly, however, and if the German think tank Agora Energiewende is right, faster than expected.
The main obstacle to a more widespread adoption of photovoltaic so far, has been cost: solar used to be very expensive compared to coal or gas, but, according to Agora – that recently commissioned a study on the subject to the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems – this is no longer true.
Solar power – researchers say – thanks to technological advancements, is already cost-effective in some sunny regions: in Dubai, a long-term power purchase contract was signed recently for 5 cents per kilowatt hour. Projects under construction in Brazil, Uruguay and other countries are reported to produce at costs below 7 ct/KWh.
By comparison, electricity from new coal and gas-fired plants costs between 5 and 10 cents per kilowatt hour. And in Germany, right now, large solar plants […]
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