Greece on the Brink →

The story so far: At the end of 2009 Greece faced a crisis driven by two factors: High debt, and inflated costs and prices that left the country uncompetitive.
Europe responded with loans that kept the cash flowing, but only on condition that Greece pursue extremely painful policies. These included spending cuts and tax hikes that, if imposed on the United States, would amount to $3 trillion a year. There were also wage cuts on a scale that’s hard to fathom, with average wages down 25 percent from their peak.
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By late 2014 Greece had managed to eke out a small “primary” budget surplus, with tax receipts exceeding spending, excluding interest payments. That’s all that creditors can reasonably demand, since you can’t keep squeezing blood from a stone. Meanwhile, all those wage cuts have made Greece competitive on world markets — or would make it competitive if some stability can be restored.
The shape of a deal is therefore clear: basically, a standstill on further austerity, with Greece agreeing to make significant but not ever-growing payments to its creditors. Such a deal would set the stage for economic recovery, perhaps slow at the start, but finally offering some hope.
But right now that deal doesn’t seem to be coming together. Maybe it’s true, as the creditors say, that the new Greek government is hard to deal with. But what do you expect when parties that have no previous experience in governing take over from a discredited establishment? More important, the creditors are demanding things — big cuts in pensions and public employment — that a newly elected government of the left simply can’t agree to, as opposed to reforms like an improvement in tax enforcement that it can. And the Greeks, as I suggested, are all too ready to see these demands as part of an effort either to bring down their government or to make their country into an example of what will happen to other debtor countries if they balk at harsh austerity.

Debating "Robots Taking Our Jobs"

There is historical precedent, and it seems almost impossible that they aren't:

Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.
Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world, software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and whom they’ll vote for.
...Most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data.

On the other hand, there may be little evidence that this is happening:

We have a very good way to measure the extent to which machines are taking our jobs. It's called "productivity growth." It means the extent to which we can produce more output with the same amount of human labor. If the machines are taking our jobs, productivity growth should be very fast.
It isn't. Productivity growth was very fast in the years from 1947-73. It grew at a pace of roughly 3.0 percent annually. This was a period of strong wage growth and low unemployment. It then fell to around 1.5 percent annually from 1973-1995. There was then a pick-up to close to 3.0 percent annually in the years from 1995 to 2005. (For some technical reasons, like a faster pace of depreciation in the more recent period, the 1947-73 productivity growth was much stronger.) Since 2005 productivity growth has fallen to an average rate of about 1.5 percent. In the last two years it has been under 1.0 percent.

Food Feud: More Cities Block Meal-Sharing for Homeless →

To date, 33 cities have adopted or are considering such food–sharing restrictions, according to the coalition, which shared with NBC News a draft of its soon-to-be published study.
Police in at least four municipalities – Raleigh, N.C.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Daytona Beach, Fla. – have recently fined, removed or threatened to jail private groups that offered meals to the homeless instead of letting government-run service agencies care for those in need, the advocacy group reports.
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Daytona Beach offers a clear view of this muddy issue – two sides, two distinct arguments. Jimenez asserts citizens have the authority, if not an obligation, to provide an occasional, nutritious meal to folks in need, and that everyone should share the parks. Daytona Beach leaders argue that the couple’s work worsens homelessness by coaxing impoverished people away from centralized, city-run programs, and they complain that during the couple’s feedings some homeless people mistreated the park and frightened other patrons.

Forty years after genocide, Cambodia finds complicated truth hard to bear →

Friday marks 40 years since the Khmer Rouge first marched into Phnom Penh. Over the following 44 months in the region of 2 million people from a population of just over 8 million died – killed, starved or struck down by disease – as Pol Pot’s brutal regime attempted to style Cambodia into a classless, agrarian society.
Cambodia is still struggling to deal with its history, where personal memory is politicised and the spectre of the Khmer Rouge is ever-present but often wilfully ignored. Even the most basic term remains contentious: can a regime be described as genocidal when so much of the killing of Khmers was done by Khmers?
Nhem En, a survivor of sorts from that dark time, is an unwelcome reminder of a knot of dilemmas that Cambodia is only starting to untangle – who to blame; how to forgive; and how to understand a regime that implicated such large swaths of the population in seemingly unfathomable cruelty.

As police body cameras catch on, a debate surfaces: Who gets to watch? →

A legal fight's brewing:

Officials in more than a dozen states — as well as the District — have proposed restricting access or completely withholding the footage from the public, citing concerns over privacy and the time and cost of blurring images that identify victims, witnesses or bystanders caught in front of the lens.
In the wake of fatal shootings by police of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., North Charleston, S.C., and elsewhere, government watchdog groups, journalists and protesters say keeping the videos secret undercuts the point of an initiative designed to improve trust between citizens and law enforcement.
In the District, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) tucked a proposal into a budget bill to exempt videos from the Freedom of Information Act, effectively barring access to the public. That came weeks after she announced a new era of open government and a police force held accountable through the widespread use of body cameras to allay fears of misconduct that are roiling other American cities.

State seizes 11-year-old, arrests his mother after he defends medical marijuana during a school presentation

The absurdity here of course is that a woman could lose her custody of her child for therapeutically using a drug that’s legal for recreational use an hour to the west. It seems safe to say that the amount of the drug she had in her home was an amount consistent with personal use. (If she had been distributing, she’d almost certainly have been charged by now.)
This boy was defending his mother’s use of a drug that helps her deal with an awful condition. Because he stuck up for his mother, the state arrested her and ripped him away from her. Even if he is eventually returned to his mother (as he ought to be), the school, the town, and the state of Kansas have already done a lot more damage to this kid than Banda’s use of pot to treat her Crohn’s disease ever could.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-wat...

An Autonomous Car Might Decide You Should Die →

We're moving into a science fiction future, where artificial intelligence (however defined) will be programmed by us for us, but, like all other policy, we're not really thinking through to the end, logically:

On some level, I believe many of us realize we are fast becoming inefficient parties in the face of artificial intelligence. Science fiction movies where the robots have “deemed us expendable” give many people cause for concern, fleeting as the thought might be. However, we may find out all too soon that autonomous cars will have been the first salvo fired off by robots in such a future. We program them to understand our values. They make decisions that reflect our values. The decisions frighten us. What does that mean?

So how do we program these things, when, right now, we can't solve fundamental moral problems? I really like the examples and logic puzzles. Well worth the read.