Climate Change Is a People’s Shock. What if, instead of accepting a future of climate catastrophe and private profits, we decide to change everything? A garbage dumpsite in Paranaque city, Manila (Reuters/Romeo Ranoco) Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, by Naomi Klein (Simon & Schuster). Click here for information about the book and Naomi’s September/October 2014 tour dates. The Nation will be livestreaming her sold-out US book launch on September 18 at 6 pm EST; you can watch that here.
About a year ago, I was having dinner with some newfound friends in Athens. I had an interview scheduled for the next morning with Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Greece’s official opposition party and one of the few sources of hope in a Europe ravaged by austerity. I asked the group for ideas about what questions I should put to the young politician.
At the time, Tsipras’s party, Syriza, was putting up a fine fight against austerity. This is, of course, entirely understandable. When The U.S. Paid Off The Entire National Debt (And Why It Didn't Last) : Planet Money. On Jan. 8, 1835, all the big political names in Washington gathered to celebrate what President Andrew Jackson had just accomplished. A senator rose to make the big announcement: "Gentlemen ... the national debt ... is PAID. " That was the one time in U.S. history when the country was debt free. It lasted exactly one year. By 1837, the country would be in panic and headed into a massive depression. We'll get to that, but first let's figure out how Andrew Jackson did the impossible. It helps to remember that debt was always a choice for America.
Deciding to default "would have ruined our credit and would have left the economy on a very agricultural, subsistence basis," says Robert E. So the U.S. agreed early on to consolidate the debts of all the states — $75 million. During the good times, the country tried to pay down the debt. "What the battle was really about was how quickly to pay off the national debt, not whether to pay it off or not," Wright says. He was also ruthless on the budget. Deep Inside the Wild World of China's Fracking Boom. On a hazy morning last September, 144 American and Chinese government officials and high-ranking oil executives filed into a vaulted meeting room in a cloistered campus in south Xi'an, a city famous for its terra-cotta warriors and lethal smog.
The Communist Party built this compound, called the Shaanxi Guesthouse, in 1958. It was part of the lead-up to Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which, to surpass the industrial achievements of the West, the government built steelworks, coal mines, power stations, and cement factories—displacing hundreds of thousands and clearcutting a tenth of China's forests in the process. Despite its quaint name, the guesthouse is a cluster of immense concrete structures jutting out of expansive, manicured lawns and man-made lakes dotted with stone bridges and pagodas. It also features a karaoke lounge, spa, tennis stadium, shopping center, and beauty salon. chapters There are two main reasons behind China's newfound zeal for gas.
Google announces open source security initiative, continuing its love-hate relationship with user privacy. By Nathaniel Mott On September 18, 2014 Google, Dropbox, and the Open Technology Fund have partnered to create Simply Secure, a group meant to make it easier for companies to build open source security tools into their products. They couldn’t have picked a better year to found a group dedicated to digital security.
Whether it was the crippling Heartbleed bug that rocked the Internet earlier this year or Apple’s inability to use basic tools in its operating systems, this has been a banner year for online insecurity. Simply Secure intends to address those problems, as the group makes clear in its unveiling: While consumer-facing security tools exist and are technically effective, they often have low adoption rates because they’re inconvenient or too confusing for the average person to operate. Other companies have committed to funding independent security auditors in an effort to promote digital security — the oxymoron that it is — and restore faith in the foundation of the Web.
Enterprise Growth In The Internet Of Things Market. Primal pull of a baby crying reaches across species - life - 18 September 2014. THERE'S something primal in a mother's response to a crying infant. So primal, in fact, that mother deer will rush protectively to the distress calls of other infant mammals, such as fur seals, marmots and even humans. This suggests such calls might share common elements – and perhaps that these animals experience similar emotions. Researchers – and, indeed, all pet owners – know that humans respond emotionally to the distress cries of their domestic animals, and there is some evidence that dogs also respond to human cries.
However, most people have assumed this is a by-product of domestication. However, Susan Lingle, a biologist at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, noticed that the infants of many mammal species have similar distress calls: simple sounds with few changes in pitch. Lingle and Riede's study is one of the first to show that wild mammals respond instinctively to the calls of other species, says Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University in Pullman.
Ramstein Air Base Tour. Meet the McGill professor who got inside Anonymous. MONTREAL—At 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 14, Gabriella Coleman dragged herself from the bedroom of her apartment to her desk, where her laptop had sat running overnight. Coleman, a McGill University professor, toggled between windows of a chat client, trying to catch up. Some kind of vote was underway. The context was hazy. Finally, she pieced it all together. Anons, as members of the shapeshifting online collective Anonymous are known, had potentially uncovered the name of the police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking weeks of protests . Getting the name wrong would mean renewed portrayals of Anonymous as dangerous, immature hackers. For a bleary Coleman, either way meant a maelstrom. Coleman is an anthropologist. That perspective has put Coleman in demand, and informs her soon-to-be-published book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous .
“I’m not a full insider,” she says. Anonymous released the wrong name. She did. The Tesla Battery Report 2014 - Overview - Advanced Automotive Batteries. The Tale of the Manson Tapes — Law of the Land. Last year, on April 12, two Los Angeles Police Department detectives were about to board a plane at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport with 44-year-old tape recordings of an infamous murderer describing his crimes to his attorney. Moments before they boarded the craft, one of the detective’s cell phones rang. “Are you on the plane yet?” Los Angeles county deputy district attorney Patrick Sequeira asked Detective Dan Jenks, LAPD Unsolved Homicides. “Don’t jinx it!” Jenks replied. The tapes of convicted Manson Family murderer Charles “Tex” Watson, detailing the horrific killings he and several female accomplices had carried out on the orders of their cult leader, Charles Milles Manson, over two hot nights in August 1969, had been at the center of a court battle that went all the way to the Federal Court of Eastern Texas the preceding year.
Fifteen days earlier, U.S. But he had a formidable foe in the LAPD. On May 9, I sent an email instead of calling him. Again, I said, so what? Peter Thiel Says Computers Haven’t Made Our Lives Significantly Better. Peter Thiel has been behind some prominent technologies: he cofounded PayPal and was an early investor in such companies as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla Motors. But he’s convinced that technological progress has been stagnant for decades. According to Thiel, developments in computers and the Internet haven’t significantly improved our quality of life. In a new book, he warns entrepreneurs that conventional business wisdom is preventing them and society as a whole from making major advances in areas, such as energy or health, where technology could make the world a better place—though he doesn’t offer detailed answers about how we might unlock such breakthroughs.
Thiel spoke to MIT Technology Review’s San Francisco bureau chief, Tom Simonite, at the offices of his venture capital firm, Founder’s Fund. One of the most striking claims in your book is that we haven’t had significant technological progress since around 1970. Some. What kinds of technologies might do that? Super-rich make last stand against California drought. Why Warren Buffett hates gold. Warren Buffett didn't become one of the greatest investors of our generation by investing in gold. In fact, he pretty much hates the shiny metal. Just take a look at part of a speech Buffett gave at Harvard in 1998 when he said of gold: (It) gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace.
Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. Buffett just doesn't get what all the fuss is about when it comes to gold. However, that's not the worst part of gold in Buffett's view. Lazy, good-for-nothing ... Wikimedia photo by Agnico-Eagle (Agnico-Eagle Mines Limited) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons The problem with gold is that it has two major insurmountable shortcomings. Productivity builds wealth, not gold Buffett ends his diatribe on gold in that letter by contrasting it to the productive assets he prefers: Wikimedia photo by Bala (Flickr: Brown/Green) [CC-BY-2.0 ( via Wikimedia Commons. Sinquefield Cup: One of the most amazing feats in chess history just happened, and no one noticed.
Photo by Lennart Ootes Before any of the six entrants in the 2014 Sinquefield Cup had nudged a white pawn to e4, they’d already been hailed as the strongest collection of chess talent ever assembled. The tournament, held in St. Louis, featured the top three players in the game. The weakest competitor in the field was the ninth best chess player on the planet. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Gwladys Fouche/Reuters. The favorite was current world No. 1 and reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen. As the tournament began on Aug. 27, Carlsen was mired in an ongoing faceoff with FIDE, the international governing body of chess.
One of the many conspiracy theories bandied about in the fever swamps of the chess world’s collective imagination has it that Ilyumzhinov (and his friend Vladimir Putin) yearn for a return to the glory of Soviet-era chess supremacy. Carlsen seemed reluctant to sign on. In St. Photo illustration by Slate. Rex Sinquefield was born with a cleft palate. Found a hat I wore 30 years ago. iPhone Lines Video. ‘Poor people don’t plan long-term. We’ll just get our hearts broken’ | Society | The Observer. In the autumn of 2013 I was in my first term of school in a decade. I had two jobs; my husband, Tom, was working full-time; and we were raising our two small girls. It was the first time in years that we felt like maybe things were looking like they’d be OK for a while. After a gruelling shift at work, I was unwinding online when I saw a question from someone on a forum I frequented: Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive?
I thought I could at least explain what I’d seen and how I’d reacted to the pressures of being poor. I wrote my answer to the question, hit post, and didn’t think more about it for at least a few days. This is what it said: Why I make terrible decisions, or, poverty thoughts There’s no way to structure this coherently. Rest is a luxury for the rich. When I was pregnant the first time, I was living in a weekly motel for some time. I know how to cook. We have learned not to try too hard to be middle class. We have very few of them. Ever.
I smoke. The secret to raising well behaved teens? Maximise their Zzzzz’s! Printer friendly version Share 26 September 2014 Taylor & Francis While American paediatricians warn sleep deprivation can stack the deck against teenagers, a new study from Taylor & Francis reveals youth’s irritability and laziness aren’t down to attitude problems but lack of sleep. Recently published in the journal of Learning, Media and Technology, this interesting paper exposes the negative consequences of sleep deprivation caused by early school bells, and shows that altering education times not only perks up teens’ mood, but also enhances learning and health. It is no secret that human biology and education measure time in different ways; however, ‘our ability to function optimally [and learn], varies with biological time rather than conventional social times’, explain the team leading the research. When the two are more closely aligned, like in the early years of education, this is not so critical.
This 15-Year-Old Boy's Letter About Emma Watson's UN Speech Is Going Viral. 22 maps and charts that will surprise you. By Ezra Klein on March 11, 2015 A good visualization helps you see what the data is telling you. The best visualizations help you you see things you never thought the data would tell you.
These 22 charts and maps were, at least for me, in that category: all of them told me something I found surprising. Some of them genuinely changed the way I think about the world. More than half the world's population lives inside this circleThis map can be summed up quite simply: a ton of people live in Asia. Here a few surprising things you should know about America's oh-so-dysfunctional health care system. Correction: A previous version of this article identified Per Square Mile as One Square Mile.
Drugs, Minimum Wage and Gambling: Inside 2014’s $1 Billion-Plus Ballot Initiatives. The 2014 elections are shaping up to be the most expensive in history, not for electoral campaigns, but for ballot initiatives. More than $1 billion has already been spent on them, according to the National Institute of Money in State Politics. And all that money could swing some key races. Studies have shown controversial ballot initiatives can boost turnout as much as 8% in midterm elections, which typically see lower turnout than polling during presidential elections. Since Oregon first kicked off ballot initiatives in the early 1900’s, the practice has grown steadily — that is, until this year.
Some of the millions already spent were intended to keep certain measures off the ballot. Perhaps the main issue on ballots nationwide this cycle is marijuana. Another big issue is minimum wage, with four red states—Arkansas, Alaska, Nebraska and South Dakota—considering raising the minimum wage. Colorado Sen. However, some of the most expensive ballot issues are not national ones. The Top 10 Smartphones on the Market for Fall 2014 | TIME. Leo Polovets's answer to What are some of the most counterintuitive mathematical results? The 20 Greatest Standup Specials of All Time. Modern standup has been around in one form or another since vaudeville, but it’s only been since the late ‘70s that the standup special has gained traction as the crowning achievement of a successful comic.
Fortunately, the beginnings of the standup special were as fertile as rock ‘n’ roll’s birth 25 years prior, with many of the all-time greats setting templates right from the start. The material always comes first, of course, but as a video document of a honed act it’s also important to appreciate the visual elements — the framing, editing, and backdrop — and how they enhance or detract from the pacing and quality of the jokes. Whether it was released on HBO or Netflix, streamed or screened theatrically, filmed specials remain arguably the most accessible example of standup. Here are the best of the best. 20. 19. 18. 17. 16. 15. 14. 13.
Pages: 1 2 3. New film uncovers racism in Germany. Safety Worries May Slow Integration of Robots into Human Workforce. Jerry Seinfeld ripped apart the advertising industry on its biggest night. DRcSchR. One in three jobs will be taken by software or robots by 2025 | Computerworld. LP2VHtZ. Divyarani Adupa's answer to What can adults learn from children? 'You Have The Right To Remain Silent.' Or Do You?
Rory Young's answer to What experience have you had/watched with wild animals that has touched you? Rising Jobless Rates Are a Southern Mystery - WSJ. Why the FCC will probably ignore the public on network neutrality. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. Watch a cargo shorts-clad Bill Murray cover Bob Dylan. Unhappy Customer: Comcast Told My Employer About Complaint, Got Me Fired. Best New Architecture - Business Insider. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. Angela Merkel and Mikhail Gorbachev Savaged by Helmut Kohl.
Would we opt out of food if given the chance? – Nicola Twilley. FBI's James Comey accuses China of hacking into every major American company - Business News - Business - The Independent. How I got my driving licence without a test. Our cities' water systems are becoming obsolete. What will replace them? The Common Core makes simple math more complicated. Here's why. This is the keyboard iPhone 6 Plus owners deserve | The Verge. U.S. Balks at Bills for Afghanistan’s Treacherous Salang Tunnel - WSJ. This researcher gave 10,000 women free birth control. Here's what she found. The Best Tips and Tricks for Your Microwave. End of life medical decisions: Atul Gawande book excerpt on no risky chances. Is Capturing Carbon from the Air Practical? How Much Energy Does the World Need? National Crime Agency director general: UK snooping powers are too weak | UK news. Elon Musk is the true successor to Steve Jobs. Reverse Engineering Star Wars: Yoda Stories.
Z Is For Zebra — 90 Percent Of The Time. Absolutely No Machete Juggling » The Star Wars Saga: Introducing Machete Order. Container Store Shares Fall Oct 6 - Business Insider. Soylent gets a version bump to 1.1—new flavor, new gut flora help. u3yPXhO. The Biggest Failures of Successful People (and How They Got Back Up) Nobody Knows What The Hell They Are Doing. The Myth of the Lone Genius — The Aspen Journal of Ideas. AeJzgAt.jpg (JPEG Image, 1838 × 1159 pixels) - Scaled (55%) Most Famous Movie Set In Every State Map - Business Insider. Robert Downey Jr. “Avengers” (member). "Emerson, Lake, Palmer and Associates” (lawyer). AMA. : IAmA. EvFRjy9. Speed Limits: Frequently Asked Questions. The Tesla Model S Won’t Be Out of Your Price Range for Long | Money.com. How to Navigate Office Politics and Avoid Needless Drama.
The Limits of Friendship - The New Yorker. Panetta: '30-year war' and a leadership test for Obama. King of click: the story of the greatest keyboard ever made. What 50 Years of Bullet Trains Have Done for Japan. Why You Might Want to Tell Your Boss You’re Thinking About Quitting. US says it can hack into foreign-based servers without warrants. Being a Better Online Reader. Canberra ranked 'best place to live' by OECD.
Why Saying Is Believing — The Science Of Self-Talk. Competency-Based Education: No More Semesters? : NPR Ed. What the Garbageman Knows. Supreme Court won’t hear Superman heirs’ copyright case. 41 Two-Person Costumes That Will Up Your Halloween Game. Ia6BqRK.gif (GIF Image, 200 × 200 pixels) RRRiOUs.gif (GIF Image, 345 × 233 pixels) Yahoo just sacked nearly all of its engineers in India. Scientists seen as competent but not trusted by Americans. RZHCtoZ.jpg (JPEG Image, 2688 × 1520 pixels) - Scaled (38%) IMG_0691-LR.jpg (JPEG Image, 2560 × 1707 pixels) - Scaled (40%) Heroin, Guns, Stolen Credit Cards: Meet Evolution, the New Silk Road. iPhone 6 Camera vs. Galaxy S5 vs. iPhone 5s vs. Moto X. Even Apple didn't want my iPhone 6 Plus | The Verge.
This reporter quit her job on live TV—and she had a surprising announcement. World Cafe Next: Cleopatra Degher : World Cafe. Fwc5qNu. Newyorker. Rockefellers to switch investments to 'clean energy' Where In The World Is The Fastest Broadband?