We’re Facing A Collapse Of Information
We are currently facing a new systemic collapse, one that has built far more swiftly but poses potent risks for all of humanity: the collapse of the information ecosystem. We see it play out every day with the viral spread of misinformation, widening news deserts and the proliferation of fake news. This collapse has much in common with the environmental collapse of the planet that we’re only now beginning to grasp, and its consequences for life as we know it are shaping up to be just as profound. – The Guardian
"When you learn someone else's secret, your own secrets aren't safe. Dig up one, release them all."
– The Peach Keeper
Across societies, the richest 1% now hold a larger percentage of national income than ever before. What’s puzzling is that the latest research on attitudes toward inequality suggests that citizens in more unequal countries are less concerned about income inequality than those in more egalitarian countries. If income inequality is overwhelmingly bad for most people in a society, why do they – especially those who live in the most unequal of places – still put up with it?
HOW THE GREAT TRUTH DAWNED:
How the Navy chief's firing illustrates Trump's most corrupt impulses
It
bears a remarkable resemblance to the Ukraine scandal, in the way
people with their own agendas played on Trump's most repugnant impulses
to manipulate him.
I paid $300 an hour for the VIP experience at Disneyland, and it made me realize how wealth has transformed the American Dream Business InsiderDylan Ratigan: The Super Rich Have No Country. YouTube. UserFriendly: “This is a 2 hour tour de force nailing down the failures of the media and Democrats on the GFC. Great explanation of the whole GFC too.”Foster America Al Franken
Lucia Macchia (City, University of London), Anke C. Plagnol (City, University of London) & Nattavudh Powdthavee (Warwick Business School), Why Do People Tolerate Income Inequality?:
According to the latest work by Harvard sociologist Jonathan J. B. Mijs, this income inequality puzzle can be explained in part by evidence showing that people’s belief in meritocracy (i.e., that income differences stem from differences in effort, not in luck) often goes hand in hand with the level of income inequality in a society. It seems that people in the most unequal societies, irrespective of whether they are from the working class, the lower middle class, or the upper middle class, are more likely to believe that the rich are rich because they worked hard for their income, while the poor are poor because of a lack of trying.
Cryptoqueen: How this woman scammed the world, then vanished BBC. Former McKinsey consultant takes the punters for $4 billion with “OneCoin” cryptocurrency scheme. “The total worth of the cryptocurrency market has fallen to $139.7 billion – a staggering 80-percent-plus downswing compared to a $819 billion market cap in January 2018.” So 4 / 139.7 = 0.02863278453829635 or 2.9%. That’s impressive. As Yves has always said: Crypocurrencies are “prosecution futures” (2017). And, of course, Companies House! See our own RIchard Smith here (also 2017).
Private equity comes under fire in Washington FT. A week after the hearing? For a decidedly less rosy take, see Yves’ contemporaneous reporting here.
HOW THE GREAT TRUTH DAWNED:
For all prisoners, the first discovery was of unprecedented evil, evil they could never have imagined and in as pure a form as possible. One way Solzhenitsyn conveys this evil is to compare it with earlier supposed embodiments of it, especially the tsarist regime, which, throughout the Western world, was regarded as the symbol of pure oppression. Solzhenitsyn reflects: From 1876 to 1904, a period when Russian terrorists killed many top officials, including Tsar Alexander II, the regime executed 486 people, or 17 per year. From 1905 to 1908—including the period of the revolution of 1905—executions “rocketed upwards” to 2,200, or 45 per month before coming to an abrupt halt. Although terrorists in those years killed more tsarist officials than that—were more sinning than sinned against—such brutality “astound[ed] Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from Korolenko.” Of course, from 1917 to the death of Stalin in 1953, 2,200 was about the number of people killed on an average day.* * * * * * * *Why is it, Solzhenitsyn asks, that Macbeth, Iago, and other Shakespearean evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, while Lenin and Stalin did in millions? The answer is that Macbeth and Iago “had no ideology.” Ideology makes the killer and torturer an agent of good, “so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.” Ideology never achieved such power and scale before the twentieth century.
And that socialist ideology would eventually pour out of the Soviet Union, to be aped by Germany’s National Socialism and Mussolini’s socialist-inspired fascism. As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1996 article, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” in 1882, Nietzsche declared that “God is Dead.” And as a consequence, “predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘wars such as have never happened on earth,’ wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods.”
Our latest research, however, offers an additional explanation for the income inequality puzzle. We find that people put up with high levels of inequality for two reasons
“EVERYTHING WITHIN THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE,” BUT IN MANDARIN: Huawei is suing French critics who say it’s tied to the Chinese state.
HMM: Many Chinese manufacturers are behaving as though they have no future. Symptom: “a new mood among many Chinese businesspeople that they are at the end of the long Chinese boom and that there’s no reason not to burn their bridges with non-Chinese firms, because they’re not going to be doing business with them for much longer no matter what.” This is self-fulfilling, as it just encourages more companies to move their supply chains.
“EVERYTHING WITHIN THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE,” BUT IN MANDARIN: Huawei is suing French critics who say it’s tied to the Chinese state.
HMM: Many Chinese manufacturers are behaving as though they have no future. Symptom: “a new mood among many Chinese businesspeople that they are at the end of the long Chinese boom and that there’s no reason not to burn their bridges with non-Chinese firms, because they’re not going to be doing business with them for much longer no matter what.” This is self-fulfilling, as it just encourages more companies to move their supply chains.
