Tag: Governance

  • Reforming the World Bank

    In this brief published by the Center for Global Development, the authors discuss the calls for setting a reform agenda for the World Bank aimed at “enabling the institution to respond to today’s global development challenges.”

    “The reform agenda is being negotiated by representatives of World Bank shareholders and the institution’s management, which  put forward an evolution roadmap laying out key issues for discussion. Among these issues is whether the World Bank should take on a bigger and stronger role in addressing major global challenges. The United States has been a leading voice in the push for World Bank evolution […]. However, some shareholders have voiced concerns that the evolution agenda could detract from the bank’s core development mission or create financing trade-offs in the absence of significant new resources.”

    Read/download the full document here.

  • Japan's Intelligence Ambitions

    This piece in SpyTalk.co, a popular Substack where Founding Editor Jeff Stein and a “team of veteran reporters” provide “original reporting, scoops and analysis on national security topics, with an emphasis on U.S. intelligence operations, both foreign and domestic,” talks about the problems Japan is facing in strengthening its spy program: 

    “Japan’s efforts to re-arm in response to escalating threats from China and North Korea are well-known. Less understood are controversial efforts by some in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to reestablish world class intelligence and counterespionage capabilities.” 

    Apart from the resistance that such efforts have historically faced from the public in view of “World War Two memories” of “militarism, neighborhood informants, and other mass spying against the population,” there are geopolitical concerns: 

    “Though further efforts to consolidate and strengthen Japan’s intelligence and counterintelligence organizations might seem logical in Washington, such plans face significant opposition from those government institutions, politicians, and parts of the business community that support closer relations with Beijing.” 

    Interestingly, “[t]hose opposed to strengthening intelligence perceive China as rising and America in decline.” The author says that the “prickly challenge” ahead for Washington is “to persuade not only Japanese elites, but the country’s voters, of American resolve, reliability, and support.” 

    It is yet to be seen if a third, “more independent policy dubbed “autonomous defense,”” advocated by the late Shinzo Abe, is totally out of the window. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Similarities Between India and China

    This piece in the Asian Labour Review compares the economic histories and current economic policies of India and China, arguing that the two countries are very much mirror images of each other. 

    Historically speaking, the author argues, the two countries have “more similarities than often acknowledged.” For instance: 

    “From inheriting largely rural, agrarian societies, to seeking similar goals for their population in terms of development and industrial modernisation or adoption of command planning strategies, there are striking patterns of convergence between India and China. 

    One prominent aspect in this comparison is the global neoliberal turn from the latter half of the 1980s and the restructuring of labour. 

    The advent of market reforms, along with the state’s retreat from an interventionist role, is predominant in labour relations for both India and China. Despite minor variations, the changing nature of the state-labour relations and the declining power of labour as a political subject is conspicuous across the spectrum.”

    The competition between the two countries is related to the larger global economic system: 

    “As transnational corporations outsourced their production, there has been tremendous competition among countries in the Global South to attract these investments. Governments in the Global South provide companies with infrastructure, resources and incentives to embed their production facilities in their territorial jurisdiction.”

    This is why we see (sometimes failed) “attempts to weaken labour protections for the sake of attracting transnational corporations” like trying “to extend working hours per day from 8 to 12.”

    The author makes this interesting observation about China: “‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ may continue to hold ground as a political-ideological euphemism, but capitalism is living reality in China’s economic transformation.” Recently, “[i]n response to rising labour costs, supply chain disruption and labour unrest, Apple and Foxconn have tried to diversify their manufacturing facilities to other geographies away from heavy dependency on China.” India is very much “in the race to parallel China, if not completely eclipse it,” with Indian policymakers “increasingly looking to copy the China playbook to shape the country’s growth and development.”

    The following lines perfectly sum up the central argument of the piece:

    “The nation-state narratives about India and China, centering on their geopolitical competition and itinerant border tensions, tend to emphasize differences and divergences more than convergences and parallels. There are admittedly vast differences in their political and social systems. But recognising points of convergence allows us to more fully explore their trajectories in all their complexities.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Saving the Public Sphere from the Onslaught of Digital Media

    In this piece, Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, discusses what some respected thinkers are saying about how to approach “the infopocalypse,” which Aviv Ovadya of Harvard has described as “a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas with no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.”

    The piece argues that “democracy cannot survive this failure of the marketplace of ideas because it disables the formation of any shared ground where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole.”

    The main problem that the piece is trying to highlight is that “the digital media ecosystem disempowers the public sphere.” The author writes:

    “Without institutions and practices that can establish and preserve the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for democratic discourse.”

    His suggestion for creating such institutions and practices:

    “[…] new mediating institutions, such as citizens’ assemblies, that encourage and enable civil discourse and consensus formation at the same virtual scale as social networks, are more necessary than ever because the forces of fragmentation have never been greater. Mending the breach of distrust between the public and institutions of self-government in the digital age can only happen by absorbing the wired activation of civil society into governance through integrating connectivity with common platforms for deliberation.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Buying Russian Oil with Chinese Currency: Pakistan Flirts with De-dollarisation

    As widely reported, including in this report in The Cradle, “Pakistan paid for its first imports of discounted Russian crude oil in Chinese currency.”

    As the report goes on to point out, this is significant because:

    “Pakistan’s purchase takes advantage of new opportunities arising from the war between Russia and Ukraine. Due to western sanctions, Moscow lost its European markets for oil and natural gas exports and has instead redirected its sales toward other nations, notably India and China.

    Large quantities of oil paid for in non-US denominated currency and at reduced prices comes at a crucial time for Pakistan, which suffers from a balance of payments problem that risks the country defaulting on its external debt. The Pakistan central bank’s foreign exchange reserves are currently only sufficient to cover a month of controlled imports.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Germany to Purchase Israel-made Air Defence System

    As multiple reports have pointed out, including this one in the European version of Politico, Germany is set to purchase the Israeli Arrow-3 air defence system. 

    The purchase is part of Germany’s efforts “to modernize its military under a €100 billion fund.” The anti-missile system has apparently “been in use in Israel since 2017 as part of its Iron Dome protection network.” 

    The cost of the procurement is not insignificant: 

    “Eventually, Germany’s expenditure on Arrow-3, which is designed to intercept ballistic missiles, is expected to reach €4 billion.”

    This is only one instance of “a splurge in defense spending across Europe following Russia’s war on Ukraine.” 

    Read the full Politico report here.

  • The PPE Medpro Saga in the UK

    This report in the Byline Times summarises the PPE Medpro case. 

    The UK government had sued the company for £122m in 2022. But in the latest development: 

    “PPE Medro’s unaudited accounts, published last month for the year ended 31 March 2022, show just over £4m in current assets and just over £47,000 in cash. It reported no employees for the accounting period and none in 2021.”

    As the report points out: 

    “Byline Times was the first publication to reveal in September 2020 that PPE Medpro had won hundreds of millions in Government COVID contracts, just 44 days after being incorporated.” 

    During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company had “won two contracts worth more than £200 million to supply personal protective equipment (PPE)” including one contract “for £122 million worth of sterilised gowns to the NHS.” The government has since claimed that the supplied gowns “did not comply with the specification in the contract”. 

    The concern is that the company “won contracts through the so-called ‘VIP lane’ of suppliers” with the Conservative peer Michelle Mone being “accused of lobbying Michael Gove and Lord Agnew at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to secure business for PPE Medpro.” Mone “has denied having any relationship with the company” and “PPE Medpro claims it delivered the contract to its terms and supplied equipment “fully in accordance” with the contracts.” 

    It is important to note that: 

    “The Byline Times has previously been the subject of legal threats from PPE Medpro.”

    Read the full report here.

  • The Long Road to Peace in Colombia

    This piece in The New Humanitarian, “the trusted news source on humanitarian crises,” by Bogotá-based journalist Joshua Collins is a useful resource in understanding the durability and effectiveness of long-term peace efforts. The writer reports on the aftermath of the 2016 peace deal in Colombia: 

    “Despite a historic peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ending more than a half-century of civil war in 2016, conflict has been surging since in many rural areas of the country. 

    New armed groups have moved into the vacuum left behind when FARC fighters laid down their weapons and are now vying for territorial control with other older criminal organisations, with the lucrative production and smuggling of cocaine continuing to drive the violence.” 

    Even though the government of Gustavo Petro, famously the first leftist President of Colombia, “announced ceasefires with four of the five largest armed groups in Colombia,” the problem is that “none of the groups signed official written agreements.”

    Civil society organisations were reportedly “cautiously supportive of the ceasefire strategy.” While the government had claimed that the ceasefires “will allow for much-needed assistance to reach civilians in conflict zones,” humanitarian organisations raised questions about “whether they will actually improve conditions on the ground for civilians.” What makes matters worse is that many of the affected regions “are also effectively stateless as they’ve been neglected for decades – across administrations – by the national government in Bogotá.” 

    The scale of the problem is sobering: 

    “The UN estimates that 7.7 million Colombians are in need of some type of immediate humanitarian assistance, including hundreds of thousands of people who have suffered due to rising levels of conflict in recent years, in particular displacement and confinement.”

     The issues raised in the article take on more significance in light of recent reports that “[t]he administration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced it is suspending a ceasefire agreement with a rebel group accused of killing four Indigenous people in a recent attack.” 

    Read the full article in The New Humanitarian here.

  • Degrowth and the UK Economy

    This article in The Conversation discusses the current state of the UK economy and the idea of degrowth that has been gaining traction around the world in the recent past. 

    The author points out that the two main political parties of the UK are presenting economic growth as a solution to the country’s current economic problems based on “conventional economic wisdom that “growth, growth, growth” increases incomes and standards of living, employment and business investment.” But according to the author, “economic growth on its own is not going to solve these multiple and intersecting crises.” 

    The article goes over some of the main ideas behind the degrowth movement, like “abandoning our obsession with growth at all costs” and instead “orienting the economy towards social equality and wellbeing, environmental sustainability and democratic decision making.” 

    The author argues that while “for many people the word smacks of misery and the type of frugality they are trying to escape from during the cost of living crisis,” actually “degrowth, if successfully achieved, would arguably feel better than a recession or a cost-of-living crisis.” 

    Importantly, “degrowth is not the same as negative GDP growth”: 

    “Instead, degrowth envisions a society in which wellbeing does not depend on economic growth and the environmental and social consequences of its pursuit. Degrowth proposes an equitable, voluntary reduction of overconsumption in affluent economies.

    Equally important is to shift the economy away from the ecologically and socially harmful idea that producing more stuff is always good.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Making the Case for Reforming the IMF

    This article in Phenomenal World, “a publication focused on political economy,” juxtaposes “the rigidity and discipline enforced in IMF loan programs” with the “elasticity in liquidity and legal constraints” and “expedited financing” that is provided to financial institutions in the North Atlantic like Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse at times of crises.

    The author makes the case that “[s]urveying the contemporary landscape of sovereign debt and IMF lending programs reveals pervasive inequalities in the Bretton Woods system.” Such inequalities disproportionately impact low- and middle-income economies because “if countries fail to meet the structural reforms spelled out in the IMF’s program review, lending can come to a halt.”

    Busting a popular myth, the author writes that “[f]or many developing countries, the problem is not over-indebtedness per se” as “[m]ost governments pay back their external loans, often at the expense of imposing austerity on citizens.” Much like Credit Suisse, “the problem that most sovereigns face today is a liquidity constraint.” 

    Not only do “[p]rohibitively high interest rates make it difficult to access new financing and roll over existing loans” but high interest rates and debt servicing costs have led to central banks in some developing countries “selling part of their dollar stockpiles to buy—and thereby bolster—their own currencies.” Reportedly, the IMF does not seem to approve of this: 

    “Recently, IMF economists have criticized central banks that accumulate hard currency reserves to bypass interest rate hikes. But using foreign exchange reserves to purchase and thereby bolster the value of domestic currencies enables central banks to dampen some of the inflation. Given the inherent asymmetry in the international monetary system, hard currency war chests empower countries lower in the monetary hierarchy to cope with financial shocks.” 

    Between 2013 and now, the IMF’s own assessments have concluded that “IMF-imposed austerity mandates incur more damage to economic growth than previously calculated” and that “on average, fiscal consolidation does not lower debt-to-GDP ratios.” 

    The author makes a detailed argument that unless there are fundamental reforms in existing IMF lending policies and the Bretton Woods institutions are modernised, “the IMF’s future as the preferred lender for countries in crisis” is itself not secure: 

    “Much has changed since the initial drafting of the IMF Articles of Agreement in 1944. The Articles have been amended seven times, most recently in 2010. Shifts in the global financial system justify revisiting the Articles as a living document.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Authoritarianism and Neoliberal Education in Indonesia

    This article in Inside Indonesia discusses the “[l]egacies of Indonesia’s authoritarian past” in how “the Indonesian government continues to exert influence over how knowledge is consumed and produced within academic institutions.” 

    According to the author, “the state’s education policies have actively enforced an ideology of neoliberalism.” The author is concerned that “[a]cademics are shaping their ways of producing knowledge to conform with the expectations of a growing neoliberal authoritarian state.” This is concerning because: 

    “Knowledge that is produced within a neoliberal authoritarian environment deprives people of their economic and political rights, sustaining the state’s power. Controlling the people who produce knowledge is to control knowledge.”

    But the author draws hope from “the many examples of collective forms of education and knowledge production” and “a number of examples of collective resistance” to the Indonesian government’s authoritarian “marketisation of curriculum.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Scam Involving International Missed Calls on WhatsApp

    As this report in The Indian Express explains, “many WhatsApp users in India have reported receiving a spate of missed calls from international numbers” and “[t]he scam has caught the government’s attention.”

    This is how the scam works: 

    “The scam typically involves defrauding unsuspecting people on platforms such as WhatsApp, where the victim, who responds to a missed call, is promised money for YouTube video likes or a positive Google review. The scammer makes initial payments to the victim, who is invited to join a group, typically on Telegram app. The victim is encouraged to “invest” small amounts for bigger payouts, but after a considerable sum has been invested, they are blocked from the group.” 

    Further investigation by The Indian Express revealed that “the fraudster who intends to target multiple people doesn’t even need to manually call each of them” as “automatic dialer software” can make multiple calls to an entire database of numbers “in one go.” 

    Reportedly, experts have “pointed to holes in WhatsApp’s security systems” but “[a] detailed questionnaire sent to WhatsApp on whether it was aware that its platform was being used by an ecosystem that created fake accounts to scam people and if it was working to strengthen its firewall remained unanswered till the time of publication of” the report. 

    Read the full report here.

  • International Peace Mission Prepares to Withdraw from Somalia

    As this report in Africa Defense Forum, a quarterly security magazine published by U.S. Africa Command, summarises: 

    “After 18 years and three multinational peace missions, Somalia is getting ready to take full control of its own security. The 1-year-old African Union Transitional Mission in Somalia (ATMIS) is preparing to withdraw 2,000 troops from the embattled Horn of Africa nation by June 30, 2023, the first of three drawdowns in its transition plan.”

    ATMIS is supposed to withdraw completely by December 31, 2024, and this is a test run of sorts for that.

    As the report states, there has been an arms embargo on Somalia since 1992, which has since “been modified several times and remains in force until at least November 17, 2023.”

    As far as Somalian self-reliance goes, “Somalia intends to gradually ramp up its force levels to about 23,000 and take over when ATMIS liquidates its assets and fully withdraws.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Ireland Considering Starting a Sovereign Wealth Fund

    According to this report by CNBC, “Ireland is considering funneling some of the bumper tax income it’s receiving from the many multinationals based in the country into a new sovereign wealth fund.”

    Ireland is one of the few countries worldwide to have a budget surplus and “[p]revious reports have suggested the new fund would be used to continue to pay down debt as well as on pensions and health care spending.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Senegalese Parliament Refuses to Make Existing Anti-gay Laws Harsher

    As reported on Erasing 76 Crimes, ” [a] news site [that] focuses on the human toll of 68+ countries’ anti-LGBTI laws and the struggle to repeal them”:

    “On Friday, April 28, Senegal’s Parliament rejected a series of proposals, including a text that would toughen the criminalization of homosexuality, already punishable by one to five years in prison and a fine (Article 319 of the Penal Code, dating from 1966).”

    Even though the existing anti-LGBTI laws were not repealed, activists have welcomed this move considering the wave of anti-gay hysteria sweeping through some African countries.

    It is promising that the Senegalese “[p]arliament had already rejected a similar bill in January 2022” and that one legislator was quoted as saying “[w]e don’t need a law based on emotions that fills up our prisons.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Starbucks in New York For Collecting Biometric Data and Sharing It with Amazon

    According to this press release put out by Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P) on May 4, 2023: 

    “Today, a Starbucks customer, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P), Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC, and Pollock Cohen LLP filed a proposed class action lawsuit claiming that Starbucks illegally failed to notify customers that Starbucks’ stores using Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology in New York City collect biometric data on customers. The class action also claims that Starbucks illegally shared those customers’ biometric data with Amazon. Two Starbucks stores in Manhattan use the “Just Walk Out” technology to track each customer’s movements and purchases in the store’s lounge and marketplace. They also take palm images of customers who enter those areas of the stores with a palm signature. The case was filed under New York City’s 2021 biometric notice law, which requires businesses to post signs warning customers whenever their biometric information is being collected or shared and prohibits sharing customers’ biometric information for anything of value.”

    In addition to the parties listed above, the class action suit was filed on behalf of “a proposed class of tens of thousands of Starbucks customers.” 

    Starbucks did try to take some steps belatedly, but apparently, they do not cover all legal grounds: 

    “On March 13, 2023, Starbucks allegedly took the additional step of posting signs that state that it only collects biometric data from customers who opt into the optional palm scanner program that Starbucks operates at two of its stores. However, as the lawsuit alleges, Starbucks collects and shares biometric data on all customers who enter the gated area of the store that includes the lounge and marketplace, even those customers who refuse to use the palm scanner, namely information on the shape and size of each customer’s body.” 

    Read the full press release here.

  • Social Media, Disinformation, and the Sudan Conflict

    This newsletter from Coda Story paints a grim picture of how “Big Tech is ‘failing the Sudanese people.’” 

    Reportedly, the conflict in Sudan has led to a situation on social media platforms “that bore many hallmarks of a coordinated disinformation campaign.”

    A Twitter account with a blue checkmark that “looked like the official account of the RSF” falsely announced the death of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “the leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces — the paramilitary organization formerly known as the Janjaweed, notorious for carrying out the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s”: 

    “In the current situation, the disinformation — whether it’s a bogus tweet claiming the general is dead or one claiming that attacks have taken place where they haven’t — could affect how the fighting plays out and how civilians make decisions about where to take shelter or how to traverse dangerous territory.”

    Adding to the chaos of the conflict are factors like internet connections “faltering or collapsing altogether” and social media being “a jumble of real news, hearsay and propaganda.” 

    “With blue ticks available to anyone for a fee, it’s become exponentially harder to know who’s really speaking.” 

    Read the full report in the Coda newsletter here.

  • Bernie Sanders Calls for A Reduced Workweek

    In this piece for Leftist magazine Jacobin, philosophy professor and author, Ben Burgis argues in support of Bernie Sanders renewing “his long-standing call to reduce the workweek to thirty-two hours.” 

    Burgess discusses state-level efforts in California and the federal attempt in Congress to make this reduced workweek a reality. “Right now, these efforts face an uphill battle to say the least.”

    Burgis writes: 

    “There was a 299 percent increase in labor productivity from 1950 to 2020. As Senator Sanders rightly suggests, the benefits of that increase largely went to the top of society. It certainly didn’t automatically generate a shorter workweek.”

    and

    “Technology and productivity have advanced to an astonishing degree since President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. But the limitation on how many hours workers can be made to spend on the job if they want to be able to make a living has stayed in place.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Cryptocurrency in Africa

    This article in Rest of World looks at the decline of crypto in Africa in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. The author quotes reports that talked of the “tens of millions of Africans who bought into the cryptocurrency frenzy over the last few years” and how “[b]lockchain startups and businesses on the continent raised $474 million in 2022, a 429% increase from the previous year.” 

    Now, however, “crypto-related startups across the African continent have been struggling to survive.” 

    Regulatory pushbacks have been seen around the world, including by African governments. But “[s]ome industry stakeholders believe crypto is too important to just be a bubble in Africa, and that the current troubles aren’t unique to this industry. Some industry insiders claim that “several African crypto startups still seem to be doing well, and that stablecoins are a great alternative to Africa’s cross-border remittance restrictions.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Irresponsible Nuclear Posturing by Politicians in India and Pakistan

    This piece in South Asian Voices, “an online policy platform for strategic analysis on South Asia” published by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., argues that “irresponsible statements” about the use of nuclear weapons by politicians in Pakistan and India over the last few years “contribute to cultivating nuclear war psychology” instead of promoting a responsible “stigmatize the bomb” strategy. 

    Politicians from Pakistan and India making irresponsible remarks about nuclear weapons is said to “reinforce South Asian atomic culture”: 

    “This atomic culture has facilitated the acquisition of nuclear technology with chauvinistic pride and a symbol of supreme power for political independence. It has limited space for negotiating potential threats of nuclear exchanges and shared responsibilities of hostile SNW [strategic nuclear weapon]. For instance, New Delhi and Islamabad have not been able to build robust institutional arrangements for Nuclear Confidence Building Measures (NCBMs).” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Rising Debt Servicing Costs Eating into Government Revenues in Poorest Countries

    This piece in the Financial Times reports how studies from across the ideological spectrum, by Debt Justice campaign and the IMF, show that “[l]ow-income countries will face their biggest bills for servicing foreign debts in a quarter of a century this year, putting spending on health and education at risk.”

    The report says: “The figures — the highest since 1998 — follow a steep rise in global borrowing costs last year, when central banks sought to counter high inflation with rapid rate rises.”

    Some argue that this may call for debt relief at a large scale like when “[m]ultilateral lenders and foreign governments led by the IMF and the World Bank delivered far-reaching debt relief around the turn of the millennium.” The argument goes that this may even require “changes to laws governing bond contracts in England and the state of New York to force private creditors to take part in debt cancellation.”

    Sri Lanka, having been in the news for some time now due to its financial troubles, “faces the steepest schedule of external repayments, equal to 75 per cent of government revenues this year. The country is unlikely to meet those payments following a default on its external debts last year.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Politically Motivated Anti-gay Hysteria in East Africa

    In this “letter” for BBC, Sammy Awami, a freelance journalist based in Tanzania, talks about the “wave of anti-homosexuality sentiments sweeping through” East Africa. 

    Awami argues, as have others, that this anti-gay sentiment is being whipped up “by politicians and political parties who have not delivered on their promises to their voters.” Ugandan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo is quoted as making a similar argument in a tweet: “There is currently no anti-gay hysteria in African countries with high economic growth rates or which are able to manage their debt”. 

    About the bogus claim of homosexuality being un-African, Awamy writes: 

    “It is interesting that these politicians ignore the fact that it is actually the harsh anti-homosexuality laws – not homosexuality – that were imposed on us by the colonial government. 

    Indeed, the original anti-homosexuality law was first introduced across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda by the British colonialists, after successfully using it in India about 150 years ago.” 

    Read the full article here. 

  • The Urgent Need to Significantly Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions

    In this article for Nature, climate scientist David Ho re-iterates his long-standing argument that while there is no denying “the need to develop CDR (carbon dioxide removal) methods over the longer term”, urgently cutting down emissions is important because currently available CDR methods will not remove enough carbon dioxide to be able to compensate for the levels of emissions. 

    Ho argues: “We must stop talking about deploying CDR as a solution today, when emissions remain high — as if it somehow replaces radical, immediate emission cuts.” 

    This is necessary because: 

    “Developing methods to verify that CDR works is a major challenge. It will be many years before we have the science to tell us which methods work and whether they harm or benefit the environment.”

    Read the full article here.

  • San Francisco After the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

    This piece on Bloomberg takes a look at San Francisco in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. While all the usual issues that come up when talking about San Francisco – the city’s fiscal deficit, cost-of-living, tech slump, post-pandemic economic recovery, layoffs, vacant offices, homelessness, drug use, etc. – are touched upon in the article, it doesn’t give a conclusive picture on whether or not there is any cause for optimism in the sombre picture that the quoted figures paint. Even as the mayor of the city is said to have “pointed to cataclysms from the 1906 earthquake to the bursting of the dot-com bubble that brought in a spate of naysayers, only to have the city rebound stronger than ever”, an investor at a venture capital firm is quoted as having said that “the renewed interest in San Francisco is more in spite of the city, not aided by it”. 

    Read the full article here.

  • Avoiding Deliberations in Policy-making in the Name of Efficiency

    In this editorial for the Deccan Herald, policy researcher Yamini Aiyar warns against the tendency to problematise the bureaucracy only as a means to undermine democratic processes. 

    As she writes: 

    “Too often, debates on State capacity veer in the direction of setting up a false dichotomy between democracy and efficiency (conflated with State capacity). “Too much democracy”, the argument goes, with its attendant chaos caused by necessary rules of deliberation-negotiation and consensus-building, can become an impediment to State capacity. Indeed, this is the ruse that has been used to legitimise strongman leadership across the globe.” 

    Such demonising of bureaucracy in the name of “efficiency” is often used as a way to circumvent institutional mechanisms for deliberations on matters of policy, the author argues. As she concludes: “The expectation that a less democratic, low-capacity State can endow itself with the capacity to do what the State ought to do in a complex and unequal social setting is a falsity spurred by a deep desire to legitimise undemocratic political regimes.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The CERN of AI Research

    Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) has launched this petition to “democratize AI research by establishing an international, publicly funded supercomputing facility equipped with 100,000 state-of-the-art AI accelerators to train open source foundation models.” They are calling such a proposed facility “a CERN for open source large-scale AI research and its safety.” 

    Significantly, the petition has this to say on AI Safety research: 

    “The proposed facility should feature AI Safety research labs with well-defined security levels, akin to those used in biological research labs, where high-risk developments can be conducted by internationally renowned experts in the field, backed by regulations from democratic institutions. The results of such safety research should be transparent and available for the research community and society at large. These AI Safety research labs should be capable of designing timely countermeasures by studying developments that, according to broad scientific consensus, would predictably have a significant negative impact on our societies.”

    LAION’s website describes them as a non-profit “aiming to make large-scale machine learning models, datasets and related code available to the general public.”

    Read the full petition here. Read more about LAION’s work and philosophy on their team blog here.

  • The Backlash Against Campaigns to Ban Caste Discrimination in North America

    In this report, Time covers the backlash to the attempt to explicitly ban caste discrimination in California, part of a growing number of such efforts across North America. As the report points out:

    “Caste is a system of social hierarchy that has been especially pervasive in South Asia. It dates back more than 3,000 years but even today is the basis of discrimination for those considered to be lower caste or falling outside the system, including Dalits, who have been ostracized as “untouchables.”

    Caste discrimination has made its way overseas to the U.S., too. A 2018 survey by Equality Labs—a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits—found that one in four Dalits in the U.S. say they faced verbal or physical assault and two out of every three reported facing discrimination at work.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Windowless Housing

    In this post on his Substack, The Column, Adam H. Johnson discusses the problems with real estate developers building windowless housing under the guise of solving the homelessness crisis. Johnson points out that over the last few years “calls for gutting regulations” in construction have become “not only mainstream, they’re elite conventional wisdom in Democratic-aligned media circles.”

    Importantly, this is not something new. “Real estate interests have said regulations stand in the wage of housing supply, and kept rents artificially high, since the dawn of government regulation.”

    One such regulation that seems to have become a target is the requirement for windows in bedrooms. Windowless abodes are passed off as necessary to solve the housing shortage. As Johnson writes:

    “Like much of the housing discourse, one is baffled by how quickly the discussion goes from the perfectly sensible—albeit generic—axiom of “we need more housing” to the idea that maintaining standards for windows in bedrooms is a pro-homelessness policy.

    The whole thing feels like a hostage situation, and in many ways it is. Taken to its logical end point, this reasoning means any housing standard that is a notch above homelessness would therefore be acceptable so long as it drove down development cost for real estate interests.”

    Read the full article here.

  • US Media's Coverage of the Latest IPCC Report and the Willow Project

    Media Matters has put out this piece condemning the coverage (or lack of it) in US corporate TV news on the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the controversial Willow project, an oil drilling project in Alaska. The report claims  “national TV news mostly failed to contextualize the Willow project’s recent approval within the framework of the IPCC report.”

    Talking of the expected role of the media in such matters, the report says:

    “National TV news has the potential to shape public opinion and drive action on climate change and therefore has a crucial role to play in holding the fossil fuel industry and politicians accountable for their role in exacerbating the crisis. Making these connections is one of the key actions climate correspondents can take whenever they are asked to discuss major climate news.”

    The main conclusion of the report is that “the overall lack of coverage of the IPCC report and the failure to connect it to the Willow project represents a missed opportunity to demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry and the Biden administration for its continued support for new fossil fuel infrastructure.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Preventing Harm Caused by Machine-learning

    “As a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru has long believed that machine-learning algorithms could one day power much of our lives,” writes Emily Bobrow in this profile for the The Wall Street Journal.

    “Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws” and Gebru is well-known for her work in trying to change that. As Bobrow points out:

    “For years, Dr. Gebru earned notoriety as an in-house AI skeptic at big tech companies. In 2018, while she was working at Microsoft, she co-authored a study that found that commercial facial-analysis programs were far more accurate in identifying the gender of white men than Black women, which the researchers warned could lead to damaging cases of false identification. Later, while working at Google, called on companies to be more transparent about the errors baked into their AI models.”

    Gebru “hopes for laws that push tech companies to prove their products are safe, just as they do for car manufacturers and drug companies.”

    At Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a non-profit she launched in 2021, “Dr. Gebru is working to call attention to some of the hidden costs of AI, from the computational power it requires to the low wages paid to laborers who filter training data.”

    Read the full article here.