For Faizah al-Sulimani, the hope stirred by Yemen’s Arab Spring uprising has long since faded.
Four years ago, she joined the wave of nonviolent demonstrations that rippled across the Middle East and led to the ouster of entrenched autocrats, including Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh. Sulimani’s optimism, however, quickly turned to bitterness over what followed — a post-revolutionary order that she and many of her fellow Yemeni protesters consider as corrupt and inept as the one they had struggled to overturn.
Yet, even they never imagined that things would get this bad. A civil war looms after Shiite Houthi rebels deposed the government last month and dissolved parliament...
Making Do With More →
In the United States, just three out of ten workers are needed to produce and deliver the goods we consume. Everything we extract, grow, design, build, make, engineer, and transport – down to brewing a cup of coffee in a restaurant kitchen and carrying it to a customer's table – is done by roughly 30% of the country's workforce.
The rest of us spend our time planning what to make, deciding where to install the things we have made, performing personal services, talking to each other, and keeping track of what is being done, so that we can figure out what needs to be done next. And yet, despite our obvious ability to produce much more than we need, we do not seem to be blessed with an embarrassment of riches. One of the great paradoxes of our time is that workers and middle-class households continue to struggle in a time of unparalleled plenty.
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One way to reconcile the changes in the job market with our lived experience and statistics like these is to note that much of what we are producing is very different from what we have made in the past. For most of human experience, the bulk of what we produced could not be easily shared or used without permission...
......The creation of information-age goods is difficult to incentivize; their distribution is hard to monetize; and we lack the tools to track them easily in national accounts...
This produces a set of unique problems. To ensure that the workers of today and tomorrow are able to capture the benefits of the information age will require us to redesign our economic system to stimulate the creation of these new types of commodities. In addition to developing ways to account for this new type of wealth, we will have to develop channels through which demand for a product contributes to the income of its creator.
But for the video… →
He was not only arrested, he was also charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor. A prior drug charge on his record meant he was potentially looking at decades in prison. Seven witnesses backed up the police account that Dendinger had assaulted Cassard.
But Dendinger had asked his wife and nephew to record him serving the papers. It was a last minute decision, but one that may have saved him his freedom.
From what can be seen on the clips, Dendinger never touches Cassard, who calmly takes the envelope and walks back into the courthouse, handing [prosecutor Leigh Anne] Wall the envelope.
No one could see the color blue until modern times →
If you see something yet can't see it, does it exist? Did colors come into existence over time? Not technically, but our ability to notice them may have...
Meditation booms as people seek a way to slow down →
Given the increasing workaholism in the U.S., I am not surprised.
Meditation, primarily a 2,500-year-old form called mindfulness meditation that emphasizes paying attention to the present moment, has gone viral.
The unrelenting siege on our attention can take a good share of the credit; stress has bombarded people from executives on 24/7 schedules to kids who feel the pressure to succeed even before puberty. Meditation has been lauded as a way to reduce stress, ease physical ailments like headaches and increase compassion and productivity.
Take some time for reflection, every day.
Big-Data Project on 1918 Flu Reflects Key Role of Humanists →
Neat project. An example of the kinds of social scientific research that's possible these days.
...Now a team of humanists and computer scientists has combined early-20th-century primary sources and 21st-century big-data analysis to better understand how America responded to the viral threat in 1918...
The team began with several questions: How did reporting on the Spanish flu spread in 1918? And how big a role did one influential person play in shaping how the outbreak was handled?
The School Closure Playbook – How Billionaires Exploit Poor Children in Chicago →
The piece uses Chicago to explore the broader neoliberal campaign against public schools, focusing on how education “reformers” manufactured a budget crisis through a combination of creative accounting, secretive tax schemes (specifically TIF), and media cooperation. It also looks at some of the organizing that developed to regain local control of schools (and possibly just forced Rahm into a run-off election!).
What is stunning is the degree of out and out grifting that has taken place in Chicago, with millions diverted from public schools to create a false image of a budgetary crisis. And some of the money wound up in dubious-looking pockets, like a Hyatt Hotels franchise.
Vertical farm can make 44,000 pounds of tomatoes on the side of a parking lot →
This kind of project highlights the ways we may eventually reintegrate humanity with nature.
The Wyoming town of Jackson gets long and bitter winters. One mile above sea level in a landlocked state, months of heavy snow leave the town unable to grow much of its own produce, forcing it to import fresh fruit and vegetables from other states or other countries. But the creators of a new initiative called Vertical Harvest — a multi-story greenhouse built on the side of a parking lot — hope that one of the world's few vertical farms can help feed the town with tomatoes, herbs, and microgreens.