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[davkol]

Rollups: The Big Tech Monopoly Down on the Farm. John Deere refuses to allow farmers to repair their own equipment. That’s because it wants to control farm technology and data, critics contend.

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When Green Century Funds, an environmentally conscious activist shareholder, filed its proposal last September asking Deere to reverse its stance on right to repair, the company repeated its long-held claim that less than 2 percent of repairs on its equipment are reliant on proprietary software. “They’ve never shown any evidence to show where the heck that number came from,” said PIRG’s Proctor. Others point out that 2 percent of repairs does not equal 2 percent of repair sales, and that multiple lawsuits, legislative efforts, and presidential-level endorsements of right to repair wouldn’t be happening if Deere allowed customers to make nearly all fixes.

Nevertheless, based on that phantom 2 percent figure, Deere sought to block the shareholder proposal. The company had promised back in 2018 that it would make software, tools, and diagnostic equipment available to everyone by January 1, 2021. That date came and went, however, with no changes.

Deere’s latest tactic has been to say that it is required to make some software changes proprietary to “protect the emissions controls.” Deere executive Grant Suhre told the Nebraska legislature that the company would be “liable to the EPA under the Clean Air Act to ensure that the emissions controls remain functional and perform,” and that the company could be shut down if emissions controls were altered on just one of its tractors.

Right-to-repair advocates were perplexed by the claim. In fact, one farmer asked the EPA whether this was true, and an EPA official responded that “manufacturers are not responsible for the end user tampering with their engines/equipment.”

PIRG has thoroughly debunked many of Deere’s arguments. “Once you dig into the engineering, I don’t know how else to put it, I just think Deere is being dishonest,” Proctor said.

Nevertheless, in November, Green Century withdrew its right-to-repair proposal. They couldn’t move the unmovable John Deere.

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And of course, monopolizing repair services is quite lucrative for Deere. The lawsuits allege that labor costs at authorized dealerships range from $150 to $180 per hour, plus travel and parts. “For Deere and its Dealerships,” the Alabama case states, “parts and services are three to six times more profitable than sales of original equipment.” The repair business has also grown more rapidly than equipment sales.

But Deere’s transformation into more of a tech company is also a major factor. Deere convened a Special Technologies Group in 1999, kicking off a slew of acquisitions in the space. The company bought NavCon Technologies in 2000, data management firm T-Systems in 2009, European precision planting company Monosem in 2015, and Blue River Technology, a farm-management corporation, in 2017. Deere also launched a startup collaboration program in 2019, which just added seven new companies in 2022. It also has an AI partnership with Audi and Intel.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Deere unveiled a fully autonomous tractor with a GPS guidance system that would be rolling out for purchase later this year. It features six stereo cameras, a machine learning network that guides the vehicle, and a mobile monitoring functionality that starts the device and can adjust operations with a swipe of a button.

Deere’s bid to become the Tesla of farm equipment only enhances the technology inside its machines. None other than current FTC chair Lina Khan wrote in 2013 about data collection through farm equipment. Deere tractors and combines “automatically transmit data collected from particular farms to company databases,” Khan wrote. The machines stream data to the John Deere Operations Center, where it is continuously analyzed and optimized. It’s unclear how farmers could turn off this data stream, even if they wanted to.

This information is incredibly valuable: It can inform where seeds should be planted, how much fertilizer should be sprayed, and other decisions to maximize yields. “On the farm, that data can mean the difference between profitability and nonprofitability,” said Joe Maxwell of Farm Action.

But the farmer can’t manipulate and customize that data to their needs; rather, it goes off to Deere corporate HQ. While Deere chief technology officer Jahmy Hindman stated unequivocally on a podcast last year that “It’s the farmer’s data … it is their data to control,” he hedged over whether farmers could get their data exclusively to do with as they please. “We can serve those insights up to them, because the data analysis part of this problem is becoming significantly larger because the datasets are so complex and large,” Hindman said.

This has many farmers concerned that Deere is turning the data into a commodity, and while access to the Operations Center is currently free, eventually they will have to pay up to access the information they generate in the fields. In fact, farmers already do have to pay for a connectivity plan to run the equipment. “They’re fighting my right to repair knowing that the next thing is the data harvesting,” Schweitzer said.

He explained how Deere is integrating data with seed companies like Syngenta; in fact, 184 different companies, according to Hindman, are connected to the Operations Center. Farmers worry that seed companies with insight into farm data could engage in price discrimination, charging more for some products that they know a farmer needs. If a company knows the economic value of a harvest, it could use that to raise prices on inputs.

Deere maintains that it doesn’t share data with seed companies. But Deere does run a thriving credit business, lending to farmers to buy land and equipment (potentially from Deere itself). For years, Deere has said it would consult data from machinery in making lending decisions, if the farmer agrees to it. That could lead to forms of de facto extortion as well.

Beyond just not charging for data, some farm advocates argue that farmers should be compensated for it. “The data has value and should be a profit center for the farmer,” said Maxwell. “That power it hands to that company is the issue.”

The way to make sure that farmers control their own data would be through legislating that right. The right to repair is an adjacent step to farmers retaining that sort of control. “Deere’s goal is unmanned tractors run by private equity,” said Austin Frerick, a former Treasury Department official and antitrust researcher now running for the state legislature in Iowa. “They want to control the data.”

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David Dayen
February 7, 2022
The American Prospect

[davkol]

What Was the TED Talk?​ Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting"

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Of course, Gates’s popular and well-shared TED talk — viewed millions of times — didn’t alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other “ideas worth spreading” (the organization’s tagline) presented at the TED conference that year — including Monica Lewinsky’s massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy, or a Google engineer’s talk about how driverless cars would make roads smarter and safer in the near future. In fact, seven years after TED 2015, it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year. A president took office in part because of his talent for online bullying. Driverless cars are nowhere near as widespread as predicted, and those that do share our roads keep crashing. Covid has killed five million people and counting.

The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories — hence Gates’s opening anecdote about the barrel. In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn’t to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, “We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.” And yet, TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.

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[historie TED od roku 1984]

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TED was never the sole purveyor of inspiresting content. Malcolm Gladwell was inspiresting. The blog Brain Pickings was inspiresting. Burning Man was (once) inspiresting. Alain de Botton, Oliver Sacks, and Bill Bryson were masters of the inspiresting. “This American Life” and “Radiolab,” and maybe narrative podcasting as a form, are inspiresting. But it was TED talks that perhaps best distilled the inspiresting down into its most concentrated form — eighteen minutes of pure inspiresting.

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Perhaps the most incisive critique came, ironically, at a 2013 TEDx conference. In “What’s Wrong with TED Talks?” media theorist Benjamin Bratton told a story about a friend of his, an astrophysicist, who gave a complex presentation on his research before a donor, hoping to secure funding. When he was finished, the donor decided to pass on the project. “I’m just not inspired,” he told the astrophysicist. “You should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.” Bratton was outraged. He felt that the rhetorical style TED helped popularize was “middlebrow megachurch infotainment,” and had begun to directly influence the type of intellectual work that could be undertaken. If the research wasn’t entertaining or moving, it was seen as somehow less valuable. TED’s influence on intellectual culture was “taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing,” Bratton said. “This is not the solution to our most frightening problems — rather, this is one of our most frightening problems.” (Online, his talk proved to be one of many ideas worth spreading. “This is by far the most interesting and challenging thing I’ve heard on TED,” one commenter posted. “Very glad to come across it!”)

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I became directly acquainted with the TED philosophy in 2015 — the year Holmes went under, the year Gates gave his pandemic talk. A friend was scheduled to appear at a TEDx in Sydney but had at the last minute decided against it and asked if I would do it in her place. I agreed and put together a talk about some of the research I was doing at the time on computer-generated poetry. The talk was later featured on the TED website. I got lots of new followers on Twitter and some emails, including one inviting me to an all-expenses-paid trip to a university in Switzerland where I would serve as a “creative A.I.” expert. I told the university I was no such thing, but the administrators there didn’t care.

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And they have continued to do so. Indeed, if TED’s cultural high-water mark was during the Obama years, grand utopian fantasies are still spun by the technologists and tech-believers, despite all of their past failures and deceptions. Jeff Bezos recently predicted, for instance, that humans will soon live in space, and when we do, Earth itself will become a vacation destination, like a national park. It is a garish, puerile prediction, to be sure, but it is undeniably visionary — as are the crypto, AI, metaverse, geo-engineering, space-bound futures promoted by many tech leaders and their adoring acolytes. Amid seemingly intractable problems here on Earth, a vision of the future can resemble a life raft, and in the absence of viable alternatives, substanceless promises of space travel, crypto-utopias, and eternal life in the cloud may become the only things to look forward to.

TED of course can’t be held solely responsible for the increasingly eschatological pronouncements of this cohort. That would be, in a way, to buy into its hype too much. But as the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy. It helped refine prediction into a rhetorical art well-suited to these aspiring world conquerors — even the ones who fail.

Oscar Schwartz
January 31, 2022
The Drift

[davkol]

The IMF’s Bottomless Bottom-Line Cruelty. How the IMF & the World Bank—in the name of progress—succeed in keeping poor countries poor.

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For centuries, most of what is now called the developing world was part of the colonial systems of the European powers—Britain controlled India and Egypt, the French owned West Africa and Vietnam, the Netherlands possessed Indonesia, the Portuguese ran Brazil, the Belgians brutalized the Congo, the Portuguese ran Brazil, and so on. These imperial “possessions” of nations and peoples were sometimes held directly by the crown, sometimes run by European militaries, and sometimes owned by monopolistic trading corporations like the East India Company, but all were used in a common pattern.

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After the imperial powers were beaten, exhausted, and/or occupied during World War II, the developing world strove for independence—and the Europeans fought like mad to avoid giving it to them. From French Algeria to British India, the colonial powers used ungodly violence and torture on a huge scale against dissidents, keeping cruel pro-Western dictators in office as long as possible. As the developing countries of the Global South gradually won independence through long, bloody struggles, their traumatized societies came under what leftists often call “neocolonialism”—a system in which rich capitalist states install and support local dictators and strongmen, allowing Western companies to continue owning many of the same old crucial resources and selling products to profitable, effectively captive markets. This pattern widened after the Cold War, when the “fall of the Soviet bloc… [created] a new imperial age,” as the conservative Financial Times of London related, with “a system of indirect rule that has involved the integration of leaders of developing countries into the network of the new ruling class.”

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Despite requests for capital grants as reparations rather than lines of credit, many developing countries ended up borrowing money, ostensibly for development—investing in education, health, and domestic infrastructure to begin the journey to something more like the developed world’s standard of living. Often funds were needed to pay the developed powers “compensation” for nationalizing their assets, like the Suez Canal. Frequently these loans were organized by the World Bank, created by the Western powers after World War II to help provide development credit to the Third World. These loans for roads, bridges, schools and hospitals were supposed to be paid for by the countries’ great future economic growth, although notably the World Bank and Western investors favored projects that built on poor countries’ existing comparative trade advantages. This meant exporting basic commodities like bulk crops, or raw materials like oil and copper—largely leaving the higher valued-added processing and manufacturing to the developed world.

But the numerous right-wing authoritarians installed by the U.S. in the Cold War environment were extremely corrupt, including the Shah of Iran, the fascist Brazilian military government, and the string of U.S.-backed dictators in Pakistan. So the countries borrowed giant amounts from international banks located in Western countries in the name of their penniless citizens, but much of the money went straight up their noses. Meanwhile, the debts stayed on the books despite being clearly “odious”—debt that should be canceled due to illegitimacy, in economics lingo. Since the populations of the former colonies didn’t borrow the money and often didn’t even benefit from it in the form of improved public services or broader economic development, why should the people have to pay these loans to fabulously wealthy banks and investors? It’s not a small question: according to the World Bank, by 2010 the “external debt” owed by poor Third World states had reached an outrageous, towering $4 trillion.

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Why did the giant loans from the World Bank and private foreign investors so absolutely fail to jump-start economic growth in the developing world? It’s partly because of the inherently limited, primary commodity export-based development model, and also because much of the money has gone into corrupt dictators’ Swiss bank accounts. Additionally, according to Perkins, the system was a grift from the beginning; the enormous infrastructure products launched with the credit were mostly built by U.S. and European engineering contractors, thus meaning the benefits to local economies were likely overstated. And when the promised growth failed to materialize and countries were left unable to readily pay their debts, creditors called the IMF—the International Monetary Fund.

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Somewhat like a Victorian charity project, the IMF is itself funded by “subscriptions.” Member countries pay based on their share of the world economy, and voting power is based on their monetary contributions. Western countries and allies have dominated the world economy, paying the most in subscriptions, and thus have always held a large majority of the voting rights. According to the Fund, the U.S. has 16.7 percent of the vote total while the tiny island nation of Tuvalu has 0.03 percent.

For decades, the IMF was steered by the usual developed world suspects, above all the U.S. and Western Europe. But after many years of wrangling, the U.S. finally dropped its hold-out resistance and the IMF board was rebalanced in 2015, allowing large developing countries China, Russia, Brazil, and India to join Western countries in the top 10 most powerful countries in the IMF system—yet without much change in its cruel demands. Regardless of who’s seated at the table, the Fund has become infamous worldwide for the policy changes it requires before extending new loans, changes known as SAPs (structural adjustment programs). Allegedly these are meant to help countries stabilize their finances, giving lenders confidence that the countries can manage their debt and resume economic growth. However, the policies demand aggressive “austerity” programs, in which social safety nets are shredded to ribbons in order to satisfy wealthy foreign lenders.

For example, SAPs typically include fiscal austerity—fixing the government’s budget deficit by cutting social spending. The main targets usually include health and education spending, like when Greece was bailed out in 2010 by the IMF, and in return was forced to chop its health spending to below 6 percent of GDP (compared to other developed countries, where 10 percent or more is common). Another common target is public commodity subsidies—a.k.a. spending by the state to lower prices for basic food and fuel, like rice or heating oil. For the globe’s poorest people, these subsidies are often life-and-death issues, saving families from having to choose between eating and keeping the heat on, and so they’re often the most popular government policies. But, since huge numbers of desperate people rely on these programs, they are a fiscal drag on the poorest states, and they make an obvious target for IMF policy writers. SAPs additionally require new, highly-regressive taxes, usually on the poor or small middle classes.

SAPs also require monetary austerity—hiking interest rates to strengthen the local currency so that foreign investors don’t dump their holdings. Another frequent demand of the IMF is privatization, where public agencies and assets are sold to private investors. One of the most famous examples occured in Argentina in the 1990s, which was forced to sell most of its major infrastructure, like ports, telecommunications networks, and airlines. This helps the government budget but means citizens must pay for formerly free services, and comes with large layoffs as the newly-private agencies try to make money, damn the cost.

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So the IMF and their brutal SAPs, along with other Third World calamities, have kept the developing world in a perpetual state of “development” for many decades now, turning them into debt-servicing machines at the expense of public health and happiness. Don’t take my word for it—the late archconservative economist (and my personal archnemesis) Milton Friedman himself said, “IMF bailouts are hurting the countries they are lending to, and benefitting the foreigners who lent to them. The United States does give foreign aid. But this is a different kind of foreign aid. It only goes through countries like Thailand to Bankers Trust.”

And so as decades pass, large countries containing enormous wealth and resources of all kinds— like Brazil, Indonesia, and the Congo—somehow remain grindingly poor. This is neocolonialism—the component of neoliberalism that maintains the people of the Third World in debt traps—which looks not all that different from classic colonialism when those same countries were formal subjects of European empires. After so many decades of failed promises, even the IMF has been forced to recognize the real effects of its SAPs. In a truly incredible IMF paper titled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” staff economists report: “Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion … Austerity policies … hurt demand—and thus worsen employment and unemployment. … episodes of fiscal consolidation have been followed, on average, by drops rather than by expansions in output.” Yet new IMF lending programs for states like Argentina and Pakistan are still based on austerity-heavy terms, just as with previous bailouts. It’s no longer possible to ignore that these “bailouts” are intended not for the countries themselves but for their creditors, past and future.

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[příklady z různých zemí]

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For countries in desperate need of money, the IMF has simply been the only game in town—until the last few years. Amusingly, Western analysts are widely suspicious of the rise of China and its enormous Belt and Road Initiative, a program which makes large loans to developing countries for building trade-related infrastructure like highways and commercial ports. Former U.S. national security adviser and prominent war-mongering dick John Bolton claimed China is making “strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands.” You might ask: holy shit, where did they get the idea that you can get away with that?

If you live in one of the developed world’s rapidly crumbling democracies, remember that each night as you sleep, governments in the poorest countries on the planet are cutting social supports and raising taxes to line the pockets of rich foreigners. This is the way of the (neocolonial) world. And as long as these practices continue in the name of progress, there will be more IMF riots, and potentially revolution to come. Bet your bottom dollar on it.

Rob Larson
February 2, 2022
Current Affairs

[anon1803]

Nejvyšší soud Evropské unie: Polsku a Maďarsku může EU zadržovat platby, protože nedodržují právní požadavky. To se týká nejen H a PL, ale též všech státu sdružených v Unii.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... ary-funds/
Naprosto to vítám.

[davkol]

Never Believe a Bank’s Net-Zero Pledge

A new report finds that climate-friendly financial institutions have been funding fossil fuel projects to the tune of $38 billion.

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A new report from the U.K.-based charity ShareAction, however, now finds that 25 European NZBA members have provided at least $38 billion in financing to 50 of the most expansionary upstream oil and gas companies on earth. Half of that financing was provided by four of the founding signatories of the Alliance: Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC. Since the Paris Agreement was brokered in 2016, the European banks analyzed have furnished upstream oil and gas expanders with $400 billion, and they “show no signs of stopping,” the report writes. The global banking sector has provided $3.6 trillion in bonds and loans to the fossil fuel industry over the same time period. The International Energy Agency, by contrast, reported last year that capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) would mean no new oil and gas development beyond what had already been committed to in 2021.

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ShareAction found that 92 percent of the funds NZBA members devoted toward the 50 most expansionary fossil fuel firms were for general corporate purpose—meaning few if any restrictions on how they could be spent—while just 8 percent was for dedicated, project-specific financing. Fifty-seven percent was spent on underwriting to help fossil fuel companies raise additional financing from capital markets, a service for which companies pay banks sizable fees. Overall, including and beyond just NZBA members, bank financing for coal, oil, and gas projects has been more than double the green debt issued since the Paris Agreement was brokered.

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Politicians in Europe and the United States are far less keen to discuss the role financial institutions continue to play in financing fossil fuel projects that could sabotage these climate targets. Just as European oil companies have been quicker to announce net-zero pledges than U.S. companies, European banks have generally been more forthcoming with climate commitments. But talk doesn’t always translate to action: Just five of the European banks analyzed have begun to restrict financing for oil and gas projects, while only one—La Banque Postale—has a defined phaseout plan, to exit the oil and gas sector by 2030. Others have been more canny: Barclays, for instance, pledged to cut off financing for shale drilling in Europe and the U.K. but not the U.S. “It’s a trend with a lot of bank policies,” Shields said of the Barclays pledge. “They have great headlines to go out with, but once you drill down into the policies, you see these big exceptions. A huge number of those exceptions allow them to continue business as usual.”

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At an oil and gas conference in Cairo on Tuesday, the companies to which European banks have been lending hearty support seemed to be making two contradictory things clear: They believe climate change is real, and they want to develop a lot more oil and gas. “We won’t run out of oil and gas resources,” Quartz’s Tim McDonnell reported Exxon vice president of exploration John Ardill as saying, “but we could run out of funding to develop them.” At least for now, the most allegedly climate-friendly banks are happy to keep Ardill and his ilk satisfied. COP27 convenes in Egypt in November.

Kate Aronoff
February 15, 2022
The New Republic

[Alexa.Valentova]

The Worst Timeline: A Printer Company Is Putting DRM in Paper Now

Dymo’s latest generation of desktop label printers use RFID chips to authenticate the labels that Dymo’s customers put in their printers.

[davkol]

Saudi-Russia Collusion Is Driving Up Gas Prices — and Worsening Ukraine Crisis. A spat between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Biden is pushing gas prices ever higher. It started under Obama.

As Russia ordered troops into Ukraine on Monday, gas prices soared to their highest levels in over seven years. While the media focuses on the conflict in Ukraine, a major cause of the gas price spike has gone overlooked: Moscow’s partnership with Saudi Arabia has grown dramatically in recent years, granting the two largest oil producers in the world the unprecedented ability to collude in oil export decisions. The desert kingdom’s relationship with the U.S. has chilled in the meantime, as demonstrated earlier this month, when President Joe Biden pleaded with the Saudis to increase oil production — a move that would not only have helped to alleviate rising inflation and gas prices, but also reduced Russia’s extravagant profits amid its aggression against Ukraine. The Saudi king declined.

The Saudi and Russian relationship has blossomed under Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose first formal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin took place in the summer of 2015. MBS pursued the meeting after then-President Barack Obama declined to meet with him, The Intercept has learned from two sources with knowledge of the matter who were granted anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.

Now, as Biden refuses to meet with MBS due to his culpability in the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the crown prince may again see a friend in Moscow, which is profiting handsomely off MBS’s refusal to increase oil production. Hints of MBS’s resentment over Biden’s refusal to meet with him occasionally spill out into the public, as they did last year, when the crown prince canceled a meeting with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on a day’s notice. He opted instead to meet with Leonid Slutsky: a top Russian lawmaker who was sanctioned by the U.S. for his role in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. (MBS canceled Austin’s visit because he was “holding out for a call from the president before responding to the administration’s entreaties,” according to senior officials cited by Council on Foreign Relations fellow Martin Indyk in Foreign Affairs magazine.)

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In September 2016, Saudi Arabia signed an agreement with Russia to cooperate in global oil markets, hinting that it could limit oil production at some point in the future. This was a major economic victory for Russia, which had never been admitted into the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and would now be a member of “OPEC Plus”— the plus referring to Russia — enabling Putin’s government to coordinate oil production decisions with other member nations.

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“The practical reality of Saudi Arabia transforming its military from decades of American military-made equipment and technology would be enormously expensive, difficult and time consuming,” Douglas London, a retired CIA senior operations officer and author of “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence,” told The Intercept in an email. London, who served extensively in the Middle East during his 34 years in the CIA, said that mixing Russian and Chinese military technology with U.S. equipment would also cause significant interoperability issues. “The kingdom’s flirtation with America’s rivals is largely to feign greater independence in security issues and send a message.”

Saudi Arabia lacks an advanced military of its own, depending heavily on the U.S. not just for military equipment but also for its maintenance. While this affords Washington plenty of leverage to treat the desert kingdom as a “pariah,” as candidate Biden promised to do, his administration has done little to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for a range of human rights abuses, from the Khashoggi killing to the starvation and bombing of countless civilians in Yemen.

…

Ken Klippenstein
February 24, 2022
The Intercept

[Martin.Stanek]

"This study shows strong demand among everyday Americans for the highest quality information to help improve at their jobs, to help their relatives, neighbors, and communities, and in some cases simply to learn for learning's sake," said Hicks. "We never hear these stories because everyone is focusing on all the misinformation that goes out over social media."
The study emphatically shows that open access to scientific information matters to the average American, said co-author Ameet Doshi, a School of Public Policy Ph.D. student and the head of the Donald E. Stokes Library at Princeton University.
"This research will, hopefully, raise awareness about the positive returns that accrue to society from investments in institutions that democratize public access to high-quality research," said Doshi, who for his dissertation is analyzing similar data on downloads from Harvard University's open-access portal.

Study reveals strong demand for open-access science

[davkol]

Worse Than a Crime; It’s a Blunder. Anatol Lieven on the meaning and consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s response.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has profoundly shaken the world order (such as it is) and raised a host of questions about Putin’s endgame, the West’s response, the alternative courses that neither side took, and the consequences for Ukraine, Russia, and nearly everyplace else. In search of some preliminary answers, Prospect editor at large Harold Meyerson and managing editor Ryan Cooper talked to Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry. An edited transcript follows.

Harold Meyerson, Ryan Cooper
February 25, 2022
The American Prospect

[davkol]

Suisse Secrets

Swiss banks have been synonymous with secrecy for decades, conjuring up visions of vast riches safely held in mountain vaults. It's a strong brand — one Switzerland's government does everything it can to protect.

But what's good for the banks' wealthy clients can be bad for everyone else. When corrupt politicians or organized criminals turn to Switzerland to keep their money safe from prying eyes, the victims of their crimes will likely never see it again. And once dirty money makes it into a Swiss bank account, it's free to go anywhere.

Switzerland's draconian banking secrecy laws have made it nearly impossible for other governments or journalists to hold the industry to account. Until now.

Through our partner, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, OCCRP obtained leaked records on more than 18,000 Credit Suisse accounts, the largest leak ever from a major Swiss bank. This is just a small subset of the bank's overall holdings, but we still found dozens of dubious characters in the data, including an Algerian general accused of torture, the children of a brutal Azerbaijani strongman, and even a Serbian drug lord known as Misha Banana.

Read on to learn more about what we — and our media partners on five continents — found in the data.

February 20, 2022
OCCRP