Wealth inequaltiy worldwide

May 18, 2013
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Following the recent wealth inequality in America video that has gone viral on youtube, /The Rules, an organization and movement to “bring power back to people, and change the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world,” has put together a very similar video that uses the same statistical graphics to describe wealth inequality on a global scale. The displayed statistics are all taken from credible sources (e.g. the UNDP Human Development Reports, OECD, World Bank etc.) In an accompanying article, Jason Hickel, one of the people behind /The Rules and a lecturer at the London School of Economics,…

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Born Rich (documentary)

May 17, 2013
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As the rich get richer, their children live lives of abundance. One wealthy American family decided to make this point perfectly clear by naming their son “Lavish.”  Considering his behavior, though, perhaps the parents should have named him “Obnoxious” instead: he  openly boasts about his wealth on his instagram account (eloquently named “itslavishbitch“), he uses gold-plated staples, and shows off flying around the world with his family’s private jet. Lavish is just one of a growing number of insanely wealthy teenagers who are, contrary to their rather secretive plutocrat parents, not shy to show off their assets. These kids grow…

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How Class Works (animated lecture by Richard Wolff)

May 17, 2013
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The description for this short lecture reads as follows: Richard Wolff is an economist who has studied class issues for more than 40 years. In this animation and audio presentation, Wolff explains what class is all about and applies that understanding to the foreclosure crisis of 2007–2011. He argues that class concerns the “way our society splits up the output [and] leaves those who get the profits in the position of deciding and figuring out what to do with them… We all live with the results of what a really tiny minority in our society decides to do with the…

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Guantanamo human factory farm

May 5, 2013
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It’s not often that one can turn to the Economist for moral guidance, but on the issue of Guantanamo Bay, the British pro-business magazine  is right on target. A recent Economist article entitled “Enough to make you gag,” correctly calls the American military prison a “disgrace” that “needs to be closed rapidly. There are now 166 prisoners at Guantanamo, some of whom have been there for more than 11 years, and 90% of whom have not been charged with any crime. Approximately 100 of these prisoners are currently on a hunger strike. In a sane world, this would be a horrible…

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Windmill made from washing machine (creative responses)

May 1, 2013
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Using a standard washing machine motor (Fisher and Paykel direct drive),  some blades cut from a 200mm PVC pipe, a cheap and easy-to-use charge controller (555 chip), and some other random bits of wiring and fiberglass, Timot put together a DIY windmill power generator that produces enough electricity to charge and/or operate a phone, laptop or other devices. Considering that washing machines rarely last longer than 5 years, and assuming that most families in the developed world possess a washing machine, the conversion of old washing machines to mini windmills could add up to a lot of energy savings. Let’s…

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Harris, Greenwald, and elementary logic

April 26, 2013
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An opinion piece written by Murtaza Hussain and posted on the Al Jazeera website last month has given rise to a rather heated and very public dispute between Sam Harris and Glenn Greenwald. The dispute can be found in this vitriolic email exchange, which Harris posted on his blog, this response from Greenwald, published in the Guardian, and this follow-up piece from Harris. All are well worth reading. Those who have skimmed through this material may well wonder why these two well-educated and highly articulate men, who share much in common, can’t seem to agree on anything. What exactly is it that so divides…

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Wealth inequality in America

April 24, 2013
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The following short video recently went viral and received more than 5.5 million views on YouTube. Using accurate and easy to comprehend graphs, it showcases the full scope of U.S. income inequality. The video is mostly based on a paper written and published by Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, titled “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time.” It also references other data provided by a number of mainstream and progressive websites such as CNN, Motherjones and ThinkProgress. The video is receiving interesting responses from conservative and neo-liberals, who either challenge the accuracy of the video or attempt…

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Political reform and gun control in the US

April 4, 2013
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What is the most important problem facing Americans today? Gallup has been polling Americans on this question and their data, which is divided into two categories (economic and non-economic), can be found here. On the economic front, Americans are concerned about the economy in general (24%), unemployment (16%), federal debt (13%), lack of money (4%), and taxes (2%). In the non-economic category, the main concerns are  dissatisfaction with government (20%), healthcare (7%), illegal aliens (5%), education (4%), gun control (4%), and religious decline (4%). Interestingly, only 2% of Americans mention environmental concerns as the most serious problem facing the nation. And…

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Michael Moss on the extraordinary science of addictive junk food

March 22, 2013
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Michael Moss on the extraordinary science of addictive junk food

  In this editorial for the New York Times Magazine, Michael Moss discusses the “Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food”. He begins the article, which derives from his current book “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” by describing a fateful afternoon when the CEOs from all the major corporations in the junk food industry gathered to be warned about their significant role in the American obesity epidemic. The article also features interviews with former and current junk food industry insiders, PR professionals and other experts who helped or continue to help create, market and sell the most addictive,…

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Renewable energy could provide 99.9% of all power by 2030

March 22, 2013
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It is commonly asserted that even with massive investments, solar, wind and other renewable energy technologies could not possibly meet all of the energy needs of any industrialized economy. However, a recent study done by Budischak et al. debunks this piece of conventional wisdom. The study suggests that with an optimized energy production and storage network, up to 99.9% of all energy needs could be met using nothing more than currently existing renewable energy technologies–and at roughly the same cost of conventional energy production. The abstract of the study report reads as follows: We model many combinations of renewable electricity sources (inland wind,…

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Keeping the public in the dark about animal cruelty

March 18, 2013
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Keeping the public in the dark about animal cruelty

The picture below comes from a 2010 video provided by the US Humane Society showing a slaughterhouse worker in California forcing a “downed” cow onto its feet by ramming it with the blades of a forklift. According to this news piece in the Associated Press, the video led to the largest meat recall in US history.  The massive meat recall occasioned by this video clearly shows that many people are disgusted by the cruelty its depicts. And consumers obviously want to know, or at least have the right to know, the conditions in which their meat is being raised. In…

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Studying economics increases the tendency to lie

March 9, 2013
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A working paper by Raúl López-Pérez and Eli Spiegelman, from universities in Montreal and Madrid, suggests that studying economics at the university might increase a student’s inclination to lie. The abstract for the paper reads as follows: “Recent experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We use experiments as well to study the socio-demographic covariates of such lie aversion, and find gender and religiosity to be without predictive value. However, subjects’ major is predictive: Business and Economics (B&E) subjects lie significantly more frequently than other majors. This is true even after…

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You don’t have to go down in my basement (lecture by Dan Barker)

March 9, 2013
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Dan Barker, ex-evangelical priest and now outspoken atheist and secularization-activist begins his lecture for the 4th Skepticon, the annual skeptics convention set in Springfield, Missouri, with the following words: If I wasn’t a true Christian, nobody is. I felt it, I believed it, I prayed, I read the Bible, I dedicated my life, I lived by faith, I was preaching for 19 years, and also when I prayed I got these feelings, all these amazing goosebumps, and I knew God was real. It’s a real thing that is happening in the brain, in fact I can still do it now.…

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Aaron’s Law: law and justice in a digital age (lecture by Lawrence Lessig)

March 6, 2013
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In his inaugural speech as the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School,  Lawrence Lessig,  a cyber-law expert and self-described mentee of Aaron Swarts, talks about Aaron’s life, his activism, and his ideas for a better world. He also discusses copyright and the access to information–not in the sense of access to the latest entertainment products, but rather access to academic material, government data, and other important information.

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Andrew McAfee’s technological utopia

March 1, 2013
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Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, delivered this astonishing lecture at a TEDx event in Boston in 2012. The main question of the lecture was “Are droids taking our jobs?” His answer, which is based on research, not mere speculation, is “most definitely yes.” And it’s not just mechanical or manufacturing jobs that are being taken over by robots, but also jobs involving higher order cognitive skills, like writing newspaper articles. Indeed, McAfee points out that Forbes online magazine has already started publishing flawless articles written by droids,…

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More reasons not to trust Fox News

March 1, 2013
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More reasons not to trust Fox News

There are of course many controversies surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s obnoxious Fox News, but it is no secret that Fox is very much a mouth-piece of American conservatism. According to a recent poll done by Public Policy Polling, Fox News currently enjoys the confidence of about 41% of American voters, which is basically the percentage of Americans who support the Republicans. In fact, Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling, points out that: “We continue to find that Democrats trust most TV news sources other than Fox, while Republicans don’t trust anything except Fox. News preferences are very polarizing along party lines.”…

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Western support for the slave trade

February 24, 2013
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Western support for the slave trade

The historical Arab slave trade, which began in the 7th century and lasted for than a millennium, brought millions of East Africans to the Persian Gulf to work as laborers, servants, and sex slaves. While it ended officially in the 19th century, something strikingly similar continues to the present day. Each year a global network of recruiters carries thousands of men and women from developing countries in East Asia and Africa to work as housemaids, waitresses, and construction workers. Paid a pittance for their work, often abused by their employers, denied basic rights, and housed in squalid compounds, these laborers…

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Electric cars just can’t get a break

February 24, 2013
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Who Killed the Electric Car? (shown below) is an excellent documentary detailing the rise and fall of one of the first electric automobiles in North America, GM’s EV1. Although it was produced, marketed, and leased to customers for a brief time in the 1990s, GM eventually decided to cancel the leases, reclaim the cars, and destroy them against the wishes of many enthusiastic customers. The film offers a complex explanation of why this popular car line was terminated, one that implicates the car manufacturers and the oil industry in a conspiracy of sorts to halt the production of these vehicles that…

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Lives well lived: Amy Goodman

February 21, 2013
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Democracy Now is perhaps the best daily news programs anywhere in the world and a shining example of the power and importance of independent media. The success of Democracy Now is due to a large number of dedicated individuals who do the hard work of putting together a show each day as well as a larger group of listeners and viewers who voluntarily donate to the program to keep it going. But at the heart of this success story is Amy Goodman, a remarkable individual who has spent her life informing, enlightening, and ultimately empowering others. She’s a role model…

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Life in a cage

February 10, 2013
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Life in a cage

At one extreme end of the spectrum of enlightened architecture, there are the Earthships and other forms of biotecture that are the subject of several earlier posts. These amazing houses, built mostly of recycled material, are eco-friendly, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing. Most importantly, they maximize human potential and freedom in the sense that they enable their inhabitants to live self-sufficient lives, free from the chains of mortgages, commuting costs, and utility bills. Here is a photo of the interior of one Earthship. At the other extreme end of the spectrum of enlightened architecture, there are cages, slightly larger than coffins,…

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