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POST #1 (10-10-19) How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order

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POST #1 (10-10-19) How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order

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This article mainly about how new technologies can impact the world. New technologies can replace people with their jobs, healthcare and military. It's a little scary because with these new technologies government can have more control over the people. This technologies can help them now everything about someone and what they are doing. I found this article very interesting and I can relate it to development. Technology is part of development. With new technologies countries can be developed.

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The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every-or almost every-area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.

There is also a third way in which AI promises to reshape the world. By allowing governments to monitor, understand, and control their citizens far more closely than ever before, AI will offer authoritarian countries a plausible alternative to liberal democracy, the first since the end of the Cold War. That will spark renewed international competition between social systems.

For decades, most political theorists have believed that liberal democracy offers the only path to sustained economic success. Either governments could repress their people and remain poor or liberate them and reap the economic benefits. Some repressive countries managed to grow their economies for a time, but in the long run authoritarianism always meant stagnation. AI promises to upend that dichotomy. It offers a plausible way for big, economically advanced countries to make their citizens rich while maintaining control over them.

Some countries are already moving in this direction. China has begun to construct a digital authoritarian state by using surveillance and machine learning tools to control restive populations, and by creating what it calls a "social credit system." Several like-minded countries have begun to buy or emulate Chinese systems. Just as competition between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist social systems defined much of the twentieth century, so the struggle between liberal democracy and digital authoritarianism is set to define the twenty-first.

DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM

New technologies will enable high levels of social control at a reasonable cost. Governments will be able selectively censor topics and behaviors to allow information for economically productive activities to flow freely, while curbing political discussions that might damage

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How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order

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The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences.

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POST #2 (10-12-19) Should We Soak the Rich You Bet 

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POST #2 (10-12-19) Should We Soak the Rich You Bet 

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The world richest people are getting more rich by day. While the poor are getting more poor. This wealth inequality is due to the wealthy people not paying enough taxes. The poor pay more taxes than they do. This is all due thanks to president Trump's tax cut. This reminds me of Adam Smith. He talks about the bourgoise and the proletariats. I can relate this to that because the rich are the bourgeoisie and the proletariats are the poor.

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And they'll still be loaded.

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Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in America, understands who's winning class warfare. Credit Credit Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Donald Trump promised struggling working-class voters that he heard their frustrations and would act.

He did: He pushed through a tax cut that made income inequality worse. In 2018, for the first time, the 400 richest American households paid a lower average tax rate than any other income group, according to new research by two economists.

Those billionaires paid an average total rate of 23 percent in 2018, down from the 70 percent their 1950 counterparts paid. Meanwhile, the bottom 10th of households paid an average of 26 percent, up from 16 percent in 1950.

That's the rot in our system: Great wealth has translated into immense political power, which is then leveraged to multiply that wealth and power all over again - and also multiply the suffering of those at the bottom. This is a legal corruption that President Trump magnified but that predated him and will outlast him; this is America's cancer.

We hear protests about "class warfare" and warnings not to try to "soak the rich." But as Warren Buffett has observed: "There's class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

The infuriating data on tax rates, reported a few days ago by my colleague David Leonhardt, come from a new book, "The Triumph of Injustice," by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The class warfare against struggling Americans has unfolded in many dimensions aside from tax policy - factory closings and lack of job retraining, corporate greed and irresponsibility, assaults on labor unions, stingy social welfare, mass incarceration and so on - and we've seen the results in rising "deaths of despair" from drugs, alcohol and suicide. America's richest men now live almost 15 years longer than the poorest men - roughly the same gap in life expectancy as exists between the U.S. and Nigeria.

As a society, instead of playing Robin Hood to smooth out the inequities, we've played the Sheriff of Nottingham. Lawrence Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary, has calculated that if we had the same income distribution today as we had in 1979, the bottom 80 percent would have about an extra $1 trillion each year and the top 1 percent would have about $1 trillion less.

Instead, each household at the top has averaged an annual bonus of more than $700,000 a year.

One of the most consequential political debates in the coming years will be whether to raise taxes on the wealthy. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has suggested returning to a 70 percent marginal income tax rate, and both Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed taxes on wealth in addition to income.

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, demolish the traditional arguments against higher taxes on the wealthy in an incisive book coming out next month, " Good Economics for Hard Times." While major league sports teams have salary caps that limit athletes' pay, Banerjee and Duflo note that no one argues "that players would play harder if only they were paid a little (or a lot) more. Everybody agrees that the drive to be best is sufficient."

Considerable evidence suggests that the same is true of C.E.O.s, and that higher tax rates don't depress effort. In Switzerland, a shift in tax timing meant that the Swiss were not taxed for one year. This tax holiday, which they knew of in advance, turned out to have no impact on how hard people worked, Banerjee and Duflo write.

"High marginal income tax rates, applied only to very high incomes, are a perfectly sensible way to limit the explosion of top wealth inequality," Banerjee and Duflo write.

There are legitimate concerns about tax evasion, but it would help if the I.R.S. focused its audits less on impoverished Americans claiming the earned-income tax credit and more on wealthy people with murky assets. It's ridiculous that the county in all America with the highest audit rate is Humphreys County, Miss., which is poor, rural and three-quarters black.

As for the wealth tax, which in Warren's version would begin at $50 million, there are legitimate concerns about how to value assets, avoid marriage penalties and enable zillionaires to pay when their wealth is illiquid. But we already have a wealth tax - the property tax - that hits widows on Social Security with an illiquid asset (the family home). If these widows can figure it out, tycoons can as well.

Even if Trump disappeared tomorrow, we would still live in a country where the top 1 percent own more than the bottom 90 percent - and where on any given night more than 100,000 children are homeless.

By raising taxes on the wealthy, we could end the lead poisoning that afflicts half a million American kids, we could provide high-quality preschool for all, we could offer treatment for all people with addictions and we could ensure that virtually all kids graduate from a decent high school and at least get a crack at college.

The wealthy would still have more money than they could ever spend: Jeff Bezos would have had $87 billion in 2018 if Warren's wealth tax had been in place all along, rather than $160 billion, according to calculations of Saez and Zucman. But we would be, I think, a fairer and better nation.

So should we soak the rich? You bet we should.

Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The Times since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur. You can sign up for his free, twice-weekly email newsletter and follow him on Instagram. His next book will be published in January. @NickKristof * Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , Section SR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Should We Soak the Rich? You Bet!. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | Should We Soak the Rich? You Bet!

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And they'll still be loaded. Donald Trump promised struggling working-class voters that he heard their frustrations and would act. He did: He pushed through a tax cut that made income inequality worse. In 2018, for the first time, the 400 richest American households paid a lower average tax rate than any other income group, according to new research by two economists.

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POST #3 (10-12-19) In China Courts Deny Women's Divorces in The Name of Social Harmony

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POST #3 (10-12-19) In China Courts Deny Women's Divorces in The Name of Social Harmony

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In China some women can be protected if they being victims of domestic violence. Yet the court denies them the right to divorce their husbands. If it was a man on the other hand asking for a divorce it s easier for them to get it. I can best relate this article to the UN sustainable development goals. One of its goals is gender. Gender has to be treated equally and according to this article is not.

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T HE BEATINGS were so brutal that Dong Fang (not her real name) was left partially deaf, and her daughter needed three stitches in her hand. Not long ago, China's courts would probably have ignored such an assault, because the attacker was both Ms Dong's husband and the girl's father. Luckily for the victims, however, the country had recently enacted a domestic-violence bill. This enabled Ms Dong to obtain a restraining order from a court in Chengdu, the south-western city where she lives. Local media praised this as an example of the new law in action. Later came the shock. The same court rejected Ms Dong's petition for divorce. It reasoned that the marriage was still on a "very firm" foundation and the husband should be given "a chance", the judge told a newspaper in Beijing.

Ms Dong's plight is common. The law on domestic violence, which took effect in March 2016, aims to protect women. But it is also intended to "promote family harmony and social stability". Judges often consider this more important than women's well-being. A study of 150,000 divorce cases filed between 2009 and September 2016, more than two-thirds of them by women, found the new law had done little to help female victims. When people file their first petition for divorce (many have several tries), judges are more likely to agree if the plaintiff is a man. They are usually unswayed by claims of violence. "For abused women, courts are the problem, not the solution," says the study's author, Ethan Michelson of Indiana University.
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China's leader, Xi Jinping, is a champion of tradition. He describes families as the "cells" of society (mention of Mr Xi's divorce from his first wife in 1982, after only three years of marriage, is taboo). Officials fear those cells are decaying as marriage rates fall and divorce rates soar. Last year more than 10m couples tied the knot and nearly 4.5m undid it. This is partly because, for many people, divorce has become much easier. Before 2003 it needed approval from an employer or community leader. Now, if both partners agree, they can quickly unmarry at a local civil-affairs bureau.

But the one-in-six cases that end up in court are complicated. Last year two-thirds of them were rejected at the first hearing. Domestic violence has been a legal ground for divorce and damages since 2001. But abused spouses often remain trapped. Sometimes judges refuse to approve divorces for the sake of their own jobs. Performance targets often involve finishing a certain number of cases. As citizens become more litigious, caseloads are growing fast. For judges, saying no to a divorce is usually quicker than arranging one.

Some judges also fear that the anger of an aggrieved party may lead to violence. So when a man threatens to murder his wife-or the judge-if a divorce goes through, courts often prefer to keep the marriage together. Poor odds of success in highly contentious divorce cases dissuade women from attempting divorce in the first place, says Leta Hong Fincher, the author of "Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China".

Possibly helped by public attention to her case, Ms Dong eventually got her divorce in June, two years after the beating that temporarily damaged her hearing. "Whether or not to permit a divorce should be based on whether feelings between husband and wife have been ruptured," the court said. In this case, it ruled, they had been. The court said each should have one of the couple's two houses, and compensate the other for any difference in value.

But in another twist the judge refused Ms Dong's application for 50,000 yuan ($7,010) in damages from her ex-husband. The court agreed she had suffered violence, but not with "serious consequences".

Such rulings are common, says Xin He of the University of Hong Kong. Judges often allow a divorce while dismissing charges of domestic violence, thus allowing the husband to avoid any penalty. As a result, says Kwai Ng of the University of California San Diego, "the courts have become an unreliable guardian of the lawful rights and interests of women." Ms Dong still has some faith in the system: she has filed an appeal. She expects a ruling by January.

The passage of the domestic-violence law was a breakthrough. Activists had been campaigning for one for two decades. Even so, Mr He points out flaws. The bill does not treat domestic violence, including marital rape, as a criminal offence. Getting a restraining order requires strong proof that a threat is posed. The penalty for violators is light: a fine of up to 1,000 yuan or 15 days in jail. In the law's first 33 months, courts granted more than 60% of requests for such orders. But only 5,860 women applied for them, a tiny fraction of the number of victims. The state-backed All-China Women's Federation estimates that one in four wives in China suffers domestic abuse-probably an underestimate. Ms Dong, who is a university lecturer, believes her financial independence helped her. "Those who are weaker see no hope," she says. Online commentators on Ms Dong's case often argue that "to stay safe, don't marry and don't have children", says her lawyer.

Since Mr Xi came to power in 2012 he has stressed the importance of the rule of law. But he has also emphasised the judiciary's subordination to the Communist Party. So judges are inclined to interpret the law in ways that please it. In 2016 the supreme court instructed courts how to handle trials involving family matters. Its words echoed the party line: "The settlement of family disputes concerns not only the happiness of individuals and families, but also social harmony and stability and the advancement of civilisation."

Meanwhile Mr Xi has been waging a ruthless campaign against human-rights activists, including those campaigning for better protection of women. Though he has called for an end to "all forms of violence against women", he is not making it easy. ■

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In China, courts deny women divorces in the name of "social harmony"

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T HE BEATINGS were so brutal that Dong Fang (not her real name) was left partially deaf, and her daughter needed three stitches in her hand. Not long ago, China's courts would probably have ignored such an assault, because the attacker was both Ms Dong's husband and the girl's father.

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POST #4 (10-12-14) Welcome To Trumps Impeachment Foreign Policy

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POST #4 (10-12-14) Welcome To Trumps Impeachment Foreign Policy

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Presidents Trump choices haven't been the best choices for the country. This article talks about how he has not done anything to improve trade with Mexico and Canada, foreign policy, and the affordable act. His mainly focus is to prove his conspiracy theory. This article can be related to globalization because trade with Mexico and Canada was mention. Trade, and foreign policy can be related to globalization.

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In my last column, I argued U.S. President Donald Trump should be impeached, because he has repeatedly shown he cannot be trusted to put the nation's interest ahead of his own personal political aims. Since I wrote that column, Trump has publicly confirmed the validity of these concerns, most recently by calling for China to investigate the Biden family. If he's willing to say something like that in the open, can anyone doubt that he'd sell the country out in private if he thought it would benefit him personally? For a good analysis of the situation, see Andrew Sullivan here.

And remember: He did all of this to himself, voluntarily. Nobody made him chase weird conspiracy theories about Ukraine, Crowdstrike, and the Democratic National Committee server, and nobody forced him to withhold aid to Ukraine and pressure its president to keep digging into the family of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden (an issue Ukraine had already investigated and found no evidence of wrongdoing). Nobody pressured Trump into sending his personal lawyer to Ukraine to chase these will-o'-the-wisps. It was entirely Trump's own idea to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with U.S. Attorney General William Barr on this whole bogus business. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi didn't tell him to commit impeachable offenses. In sum: He did all this on his own initiative.

This rather obvious conclusion raises a second question, one that should concern Democrats, Republicans, independents, and the rest of the world. Now that an impeachment investigation is underway (and is likely to lead to a formal House vote), how will this situation affect U.S. foreign policy? Whether you love Trump or despise him, it's important to consider whether impeachment will have other effects on America's position in the world and the policies it is able to pursue over the next few months.

The obvious worry is that the impeachment process will be an enormous distraction, making it more difficult for the U.S. government to address important domestic and foreign-policy issues. How can Trump or the White House deal with opioids, gun violence, Afghanistan, North Korea, the trade war, etc. when they are spending countless hours fighting for their political lives? A related concern is that impeachment will deepen the polarization that has been hampering U.S. politics for some time, especially once Trump goes into overdrive trying to convince his base that the whole business is just a baseless fable concocted by Pelosi, the Clintons, MSNBC, George Soros, or whoever else he can dream up. (He hasn't tried to pin it on Meryl Streep or Robert De Niro or the Dixie Chicks yet, but give him time.)

But will the impeachment process have a big effect on policy? With one important caveat, I don't think so. To understand why, it's useful to distinguish between the short-term effects on Trump's ability to conduct foreign policy effectively and the longer-term effects on the United States' relative power.

Regarding the former, impeachment might have harmful effects if the administration were currently pursuing an ambitious, energetic, competent, and generally successful foreign policy. If that were the case, even Democrats who opposed Trump on other grounds might be bothered by the possibility that impeaching him would derail an otherwise successful effort to solve big international problems or advance U.S. national interests more broadly.

But that's clearly not the case today. In fact, the Trump administration has yet to accomplish anything significant in foreign affairs, and its various misguided initiatives have left it stuck in the breakdown lane. Just look at the record: North Korea is building more nuclear weapons and testing more dangerous missiles; Iran is defying Trump's so-called maximum pressure campaign, gradually restarting its nuclear program, and pushing back in other ways; the revised trade deal with Canada and Mexico remains unratified (and wasn't much of an achievement in the first place); relations with Russia are still in the deep freeze; amateur diplomat Jared Kushner's supposed Middle East peace plan is going nowhere; giving unconditional support for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has further destabilized the region; and, contrary to Trump's breezy assertions, the mishandled trade war with China is proving to be neither "good" nor "easy to win."

As with the Ukraine debacle, this sorry record is entirely the president's doing. In addition to have no clear strategic vision, an erratic approach to decision-making, a lot of poorly informed ideas about key issues, and a prickly impatience ill suited to serious diplomacy, Trump is presiding over an incompetent and chaotic foreign-policy machinery. Having promised to appoint "the best people," he has instead chosen subordinates who were either forced to resign amid criminal scandals (e.g., former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn) or fired by the president himself (e.g., former National Security Advisors H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and countless others). Key positions remain unfilled, turnover inside the administration is at record levels, and the president himself seems to be more interested in debunked conspiracies than in developing and pursuing a coherent and successful foreign policy.

If the Trump White House weren't distracted by impeachment, in short, it would be unable to make much progress on foreign policy. True, we're likely to see more bizarre and embarrassing press conferences with foreign visitors-such as the one that Finnish President Sauli Niinisto had to endure last week-but that's nothing new either. Trump didn't need to be impeached in order to misbehave in meetings with foreign leaders. Even when Trump has good instincts-such as his desire to "get out of the nation-building business"and avoid an open-ended U.S. commitment in places such as Afghanistan or Syria-his impulsive approach to decision-making leads him to implement those instincts in the worst possible way, with neither adequate preparation or sufficient regard for the longer-term consequences.

Indeed, given how badly he's managed U.S. foreign relations, one could argue that having Trump distracted by impeachment might be a good thing. The less time and attention he devotes to foreign affairs, the better off everyone might be.

What about the longer term? Here the question is whether or not the president can advance a domestic agenda that will keep the United States at the pinnacle of power for as long as possible and allow as many Americans as possible to live more bountiful and secure lives. Intelligent policies to address the opioid epidemic, reduce gun violence, protect against climate change and extreme weather events, rebuild the United States' crumbling infrastructure, improve educational standards, and a host of other issues would benefit many Americans in the short term and maintain America's global competitiveness over the longer term. By contrast, failure to address these issues will make it easier for others to reduce America's margin of superiority and further tarnish its global image.

Once again, if Trump were making rapid and positive progress on the home front and impeachment threatened to derail his efforts, that might be grounds for opposing it. But at this point Trump's domestic agenda-such as it is-is dead in the water too. His first-year tax cut made inequality worse but produced no lasting benefits for the economy (which is why he keeps blaming economic sluggishness on the Federal Reserve chairman who he appointed). He came into office promising a big infrastructure push and hasn't even bothered to offer up a concrete plan. His misguided effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act went nowhere, even when Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. There's not going to be a genuine wall on the Mexican border, Mexico certainly isn't paying for it, and the enhanced barrier he's diverted Defense Department funds to erect won't reduce illegal immigration at all. Cabinet Secretaries such as Betsy DeVos (Education) and David Bernhardt (Interior) will be able to continue their wrecking operations, but that would have been true whether Trump was impeached or not. Once again: Impeachment isn't going to affect his ability to advance a positive domestic agenda, because his capacity to do this was already nil.

For all these reasons, impeachment itself may not have that much impact on Trump's foreign or domestic policy. But there is one important caveat, and it's not reassuring. If the accumulating evidence of presidential malfeasance eventually leads the House to vote to impeach, if public opinion supports that move, and if these developments lead some Republicans to grow spines and start putting country ahead of party, the White House is going to get increasingly desperate. And in these circumstances, Trump is likely to be tempted to see foreign policy as a way to distract, divert, or discredit the impeachment campaign. (Fun fact: President Richard Nixon tried this too.)

The most worrisome possibility would be an attempt to rally public support via some sort of war. Or Trump might seek some sort of dramatic diplomatic breakthrough with Iran or China or North Korea. The problem, of course, is that a manufactured crisis can still escalate in dangerous ways, and a president who is desperate for a deal and in need of a big photo-op is in a very weak bargaining position. U.S. adversaries are not stupid, and the people Trump would be bargaining with will be fully aware of his desperation. In this way, impeachment could lead indirectly to additional foreign-policy blunders.

But make no mistake: Those blunders would still be Trump's responsibility. His own actions got him (and the United States) into this mess, and he'll be the one to blame if his desperate attempts to evade accountability end up making a bad situation worse. Don't say I didn't warn you.

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Welcome to Trump's Impeachment Foreign Policy

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In my last column, I argued U.S. President Donald Trump should be impeached, because he has repeatedly shown he cannot be trusted to put the nation's interest ahead of his own personal political aims. Since I wrote that column, Trump has publicly confirmed the validity of these concerns, most recently by calling for China to investigate the Biden family.

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POST #5 (10-14-19) Mysterious Oil Spill Becomes New Environmental Crisis for Brazil

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POST #5 (10-14-19) Mysterious Oil Spill Becomes New Environmental Crisis for Brazil

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Someone abandoned tanks of oil in Brazils prettiest beaches. These beaches are being contaminated by the oil spill. Some animals such as turtles are dying because of the spill. I can relate this article to the Un sustainable development goals. Those goals were to better the world, and natural resources.

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Mysterious Oil Spill Becomes New Environmental Crisis for Brazil (Published 2019)

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Brazil’s president said the government had a theory of what led to the spill, adding that a foreign country was on “the radar.”