person:steve

  • View from Nowhere. Is it the press’s job to create a community that transcends borders?

    A few years ago, on a plane somewhere between Singapore and Dubai, I read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). I was traveling to report on the global market for passports—how the ultrawealthy can legally buy citizenship or residence virtually anywhere they like, even as 10 million stateless people languish, unrecognized by any country. In the process, I was trying to wrap my head around why national identity meant so much to so many, yet so little to my passport-peddling sources. Their world was the very image of Steve Bannon’s globalist nightmare: where you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many passports.

    Anderson didn’t address the sale of citizenship, which only took off in earnest in the past decade; he did argue that nations, nationalism, and nationality are about as organic as Cheez Whiz. The idea of a nation, he writes, is a capitalist chimera. It is a collective sense of identity processed, shelf-stabilized, and packaged before being disseminated, for a considerable profit, to a mass audience in the form of printed books, news, and stories. He calls this “print-capitalism.”

    Per Anderson, after the printing press was invented, nearly 600 years ago, enterprising booksellers began publishing the Bible in local vernacular languages (as opposed to the elitist Latin), “set[ting] the stage for the modern nation” by allowing ordinary citizens to participate in the same conversations as the upper classes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the proliferation (and popularity) of daily newspapers further collapsed time and space, creating an “extraordinary mass ceremony” of reading the same things at the same moment.

    “An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000–odd fellow Americans,” Anderson wrote. “He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time.” But with the knowledge that others are reading the same news, “he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.”

    Should the press be playing a role in shaping not national identities, but transnational ones—a sense that we’re all in it together?

    Of course, national presses enabled more explicit efforts by the state itself to shape identity. After the US entered World War I, for instance, President Woodrow Wilson set out to make Americans more patriotic through his US Committee on Public Information. Its efforts included roping influential mainstream journalists into advocating American-style democracy by presenting US involvement in the war in a positive light, or simply by referring to Germans as “Huns.” The committee also monitored papers produced by minorities to make sure they supported the war effort not as Indians, Italians, or Greeks, but as Americans. Five Irish-American papers were banned, and the German-American press, reacting to negative stereotypes, encouraged readers to buy US bonds to support the war effort.

    The US media played an analogous role in selling the public on the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But ever since then, in the digital economy, its influence on the national consciousness has waned. Imagined Communities was published seven years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty-two years before Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and a couple of decades before the internet upended print-capitalism as the world knew it (one of Anderson’s footnotes is telling, if quaint: “We still have no giant multinationals in the world of publishing”).

    Since Trump—a self-described nationalist—became a real contender for the US presidency, many news organizations have taken to looking inward: consider the running obsession with the president’s tweets, for instance, or the nonstop White House palace intrigue (which the president invites readily).

    Meanwhile, the unprofitability of local and regional papers has contributed to the erosion of civics, which, down the line, makes it easier for billionaires to opt out of old “imagined communities” and join new ones based on class and wealth, not citizenship. And given the challenges humanity faces—climate change, mass migration, corporate hegemony, and our relationships to new technologies—even if national papers did make everyone feel like they shared the same narrative, a renewed sense of national pride would prove impotent in fighting world-historic threats that know no borders.

    Should the press, then, be playing an analogous role in shaping not national identities, but transnational ones—a sense that we’re all in it together? If it was so important in shaping national identity, can it do so on a global scale?

    Like my passport-buying subjects, I am what Theresa May, the former British prime minister, might call a “citizen of nowhere.” I was born in one place to parents from another, grew up in a third, and have lived and traveled all over. That informs my perspective: I want deeply for there to be a truly cosmopolitan press corps, untethered from national allegiances, regional biases, class divisions, and the remnants of colonial exploitation. I know that’s utopian; the international working class is hardly a lucrative demographic against which publishers can sell ads. But we seem to be living in a time of considerable upheaval and opportunity. Just as the decline of religiously and imperially organized societies paved the way for national alternatives, then perhaps today there is a chance to transcend countries’ boundaries, too.

    Does the US media help create a sense of national identity? If nationalism means putting the interests of one nation—and what its citizens are interested in—before more universal concerns, then yes. Most journalists working for American papers, websites, and TV write in English with a national audience (or regional time zone) in mind, which affects how we pitch, source, frame, and illustrate a story—which, in turn, influences our readers, their country’s politics, and, down the line, the world. But a news peg isn’t an ideological form of nationalism so much as a practical or methodological one. The US press feeds off of more pernicious nationalisms, too: Donald Trump’s false theory about Barack Obama being “secretly” Kenyan, disseminated by the likes of Fox and The Daily Caller, comes to mind.

    That isn’t to say that global news outlets don’t exist in the US. When coaxing subscribers, the Financial Times, whose front page often includes references to a dozen different countries, openly appeals to their cosmopolitanism. “Be a global citizen. Become an FT Subscriber,” read a recent banner ad, alongside a collage featuring the American, Chinese, Japanese, Australian, and European Union flags (though stories like the recent “beginner’s guide to buying a private island” might tell us something about what kind of global citizen they’re appealing to).

    “I don’t think we try to shape anyone’s identity at all,” Gillian Tett, the paper’s managing editor for the US, says. “We recognize two things: that the world is more interconnected today than it’s ever been, and that these connections are complex and quite opaque. We think it’s critical to try to illuminate them.”

    For Tett, who has a PhD in social anthropology, money serves as a “neutral, technocratic” starting point through which to understand—and tie together—the world. “Most newspapers today tend to start with an interest in politics or events, and that inevitably leads you to succumb to tribalism, however hard you try [not to],” Tett explains. “If you look at the world through money—how is money going around the world, who’s making and losing it and why?—out of that you lead to political, cultural, foreign-policy stories.”

    Tett’s comments again brought to mind Imagined Communities: Anderson notes that, in 18th-century Caracas, newspapers “began essentially as appendages of the market,” providing commercial news about ships coming in, commodity prices, and colonial appointments, as well as a proto–Vows section for the upper crust to hate-read in their carriages. “The newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops, and prices belonged,” he wrote. “In time, of course, it was only to be expected that political elements would enter in.”

    Yesterday’s aristocracy is today’s passport-buying, globe-trotting one percent. The passport brokers I got to know also pitched clients with the very same promise of “global citizenship” (it sounds less louche than “buy a new passport”)—by taking out ads in the Financial Times. Theirs is exactly the kind of neoliberal “globalism” that nationalist politicians like Trump have won elections denouncing (often hypocritically) as wanting “the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.” Isn’t upper-crust glibness about borders, boundaries, and the value of national citizenship part of what helped give us this reactionary nativism in the first place?

    “I suspect what’s been going on with Brexit and maybe Trump and other populist movements [is that] people. . . see ‘global’ as a threat to local communities and businesses rather than something to be welcomed,” Tett says. “But if you’re an FT reader, you see it as benign or descriptive.”

    Among the largest news organizations in the world is Reuters, with more than 3,000 journalists and photographers in 120 countries. It is part of Thomson Reuters, a truly global firm. Reuters does not take its mandate lightly: a friend who works there recently sent me a job posting for an editor in Gdynia, which, Google clarified for me, is a city in the Pomeranian Voivodeship of Poland.

    Reuters journalists cover everything from club sports to international tax evasion. They’re outsourcing quick hits about corporate earnings to Bangalore, assembling teams on multiple continents to tackle a big investigation, shedding or shuffling staff under corporate reorganizations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “more than half our business is serving financial customers,” Stephen Adler, the editor in chief, tells me. “That has little to do with what country you’re from. It’s about information: a central-bank action in Europe or Japan may be just as important as everything else.”

    Institutionally, “it’s really important and useful that we don’t have one national HQ,” Adler adds. “That’s the difference between a global news organization and one with a foreign desk. For us, nothing is foreign.” That approach won Reuters this year’s international Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the mass murder of the Rohingya in Myanmar (two of the reporters were imprisoned as a result, and since freed); it also comes through especially sharply in daily financial stories: comprehensive, if dry, compendiums of who-what-where-when-why that recognize the global impact of national stories, and vice versa. A recent roundup of stock movements included references to the US Fed, China trade talks, Brexit, monetary policy around the world, and the price of gold.

    Adler has led the newsroom since 2011, and a lot has changed in the world. (I worked at Reuters between 2011 and 2013, first as Adler’s researcher and later as a reporter; Adler is the chair of CJR’s board.) Shortly after Trump’s election, Adler wrote a memo affirming the organization’s commitment to being fair, honest, and resourceful. He now feels more strongly than ever about judiciously avoiding biases—including national ones. “Our ideology and discipline around putting personal feelings and nationality aside has been really helpful, because when you think about how powerful local feelings are—revolutions, the Arab Spring—we want you writing objectively and dispassionately.”

    The delivery of stories in a casual, illustrated, highly readable form is in some ways more crucial to developing an audience than subject matter.

    Whether global stories can push communities to develop transnationally in a meaningful way is a harder question to answer; it seems to impugn our collective aptitude for reacting to problems of a global nature in a rational way. Reuters’s decision not to fetishize Trump hasn’t led to a drop-off in US coverage—its reporters have been especially strong on immigration and trade policy, not to mention the effects of the new administration on the global economy—but its stories aren’t exactly clickbait, which means ordinary Americans might not encounter them at the top of their feed. In other words, having a global perspective doesn’t necessarily translate to more eyeballs.

    What’s more, Reuters doesn’t solve the audience-class problem: whether readers are getting dispatches in partner newspapers like The New York Times or through the organization’s Eikon terminal, they tend to be the sort of person “who does transnational business, travels a good deal, is connected through work and media, has friends in different places, cares about what’s going on in different places,” Adler says. “That’s a pretty large cohort of people who have reason to care what’s going on in other places.”

    There are ways to unite readers without centering coverage on money or the markets. For a generation of readers around the world, the common ground is technology: the internet. “We didn’t pick our audience,” Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, tells me over the phone. “Our audience picked us.” He defines his readers as a cohort aged 18–35 “who are on the internet and who broadly care about human rights, global politics, and feminism and gay rights in particular.”

    To serve them, BuzzFeed recently published a damning investigative report into the World Wildlife Fund’s arming of militias in natural reserves; a (not uncontroversial) series on Trump’s business dealings abroad; early exposés of China’s detention of Uighur citizens; and reports on child abuse in Australia. Climate—“the central challenge for every newsroom in the world”—has been harder to pin down. “We don’t feel anyone has cracked it. But the shift from abstract scientific [stories] to coverage of fires in California, it’s a huge change—it makes it more concrete,” Smith says. (My husband is a reporter for BuzzFeed.)

    The delivery of these stories in a casual, illustrated, highly readable form is in some ways more crucial to developing an audience than subject matter. “The global political financial elites have had a common language ever since it was French,” Smith says. “There is now a universal language of internet culture, [and] that. . . is how our stuff translates so well between cultures and audiences.” This isn’t a form of digital Esperanto, Smith insists; the point isn’t to flatten the differences between countries or regions so much as to serve as a “container” in which people from different regions, interest groups, and cultures can consume media through references they all understand.

    BuzzFeed might not be setting out to shape its readers’ identities (I certainly can’t claim to feel a special bond with other people who found out they were Phoebes from the quiz “Your Sushi Order Will Reveal Which ‘Friends’ Character You’re Most Like”). An audience defined by its youth and its media consumption habits can be difficult to keep up with: platforms come and go, and young people don’t stay young forever. But if Anderson’s thesis still carries water, there must be something to speaking this language across cultures, space, and time. Call it “Web vernacular.”

    In 2013, during one of the many recent and lengthy US government shutdowns, Joshua Keating, a journalist at Slate, began a series, “If It Happened There,” that imagined how the American media would view the shutdown if it were occurring in another country. “The typical signs of state failure aren’t evident on the streets of this sleepy capital city,” Keating opens. “Beret-wearing colonels have not yet taken to the airwaves to declare martial law. . . .But the pleasant autumn weather disguises a government teetering on the brink.”

    It goes on; you get the idea. Keating’s series, which was inspired by his having to read “many, many headlines from around the world” while working at Foreign Policy, is a clever journalistic illustration of what sociologists call “methodological nationalism”: the bias that gets inadvertently baked into work and words. In the Middle East, it’s sectarian or ethnic strife; in the Midwest, it’s a trigger-happy cop and a kid in a hoodie.

    His send-ups hit a nerve. “It was huge—it was by far the most popular thing I’ve done at Slate,” Keating says. “I don’t think that it was a shocking realization to anyone that this kind of language can be a problem, but sometimes pointing it out can be helpful. If the series did anything, it made people stop and be conscious of how. . . our inherent biases and perspectives will inform how we cover the world.”

    Curiously, living under an openly nationalist administration has changed the way America—or at the very least, a significant part of the American press corps—sees itself. The press is a de facto opposition party, not because it tries to be, but because the administration paints it that way. And that gives reporters the experience of working in a place much more hostile than the US without setting foot outside the country.

    Keating has “semi-retired” the series as a result of the broad awareness among American reporters that it is, in fact, happening here. “It didn’t feel too novel to say [Trump was] acting like a foreign dictator,” he says. “That was what the real news coverage was doing.”

    Keating, who traveled to Somaliland, Kurdistan, and Abkhazia to report his book Invisible Countries (2018), still thinks the fastest and most effective way to form an international perspective is to live abroad. At the same time, not being bound to a strong national identity “can make it hard to understand particular concerns of the people you’re writing about,” he says. It might be obvious, but there is no one perfect way to be internationally minded.

    Alan Rusbridger—the former editor of The Guardian who oversaw the paper’s Edward Snowden coverage and is now the principal at Lady Margaret Hall, a college at Oxford University—recognizes the journalistic and even moral merits of approaching news in a non-national way: “I think of journalism as a public service, and I do think there’s a link between journalism at its best and the betterment of individual lives and societies,” he says. But he doesn’t have an easy formula for how to do that, because truly cosmopolitan journalism requires both top-down editorial philosophies—not using certain phrasings or framings that position foreigners as “others”—and bottom-up efforts by individual writers to read widely and be continuously aware of how their work might be read by people thousands of miles away.

    Yes, the starting point is a nationally defined press, not a decentralized network, but working jointly helps pool scarce resources and challenge national or local biases.

    Rusbridger sees potential in collaborations across newsrooms, countries, and continents. Yes, the starting point is a nationally defined press, not a decentralized network; but working jointly helps pool scarce resources and challenge national or local biases. It also wields power. “One of the reasons we reported Snowden with the Times in New York was to use global protections of human rights and free speech and be able to appeal to a global audience of readers and lawyers,” Rusbridger recalls. “We thought, ‘We’re pretty sure nation-states will come at us over this, and the only way to do it is harness ourselves to the US First Amendment not available to us anywhere else.’”

    In employing these tactics, the press positions itself in opposition to the nation-state. The same strategy could be seen behind the rollout of the Panama and Paradise Papers (not to mention the aggressive tax dodging detailed therein). “I think journalists and activists and citizens on the progressive wing of politics are thinking creatively about how global forces can work to their advantage,” Rusbridger says.

    But he thinks it all starts locally, with correspondents who have fluency in the language, culture, and politics of the places they cover, people who are members of the communities they write about. That isn’t a traditional foreign-correspondent experience (nor indeed that of UN employees, NGO workers, or other expats). The silver lining of publishing companies’ shrinking budgets might be that cost cutting pushes newsrooms to draw from local talent, rather than send established writers around. What you gain—a cosmopolitanism that works from the bottom up—can help dispel accusations of media elitism. That’s the first step to creating new imagined communities.

    Anderson’s work has inspired many an academic, but media executives? Not so much. Rob Wijnberg is an exception: he founded the (now beleaguered) Correspondent in the Netherlands in 2013 with Anderson’s ideas in mind. In fact, when we speak, he brings the name up unprompted.

    “You have to transcend this notion that you can understand the world through the national point of view,” he says. “The question is, What replacement do we have for it? Simply saying we have to transcend borders or have an international view isn’t enough, because you have to replace the imagined community you’re leaving behind with another one.”

    For Wijnberg, who was a philosophy student before he became a journalist, this meant radically reinventing the very structures of the news business: avoiding covering “current events” just because they happened, and thinking instead of what we might call eventful currents—the political, social, and economic developments that affect us all. It meant decoupling reporting from national news cycles, and getting readers to become paying “members” instead of relying on advertisements.

    This, he hoped, would help create a readership not based on wealth, class, nationality, or location, but on borderless, universal concerns. “We try to see our members. . . as part of a group or knowledge community, where the thing they share is the knowledge they have about a specific structural subject matter,” be it climate, inequality, or migration, Wijnberg says. “I think democracy and politics answers more to media than the other way around, so if you change the way media covers the world you change a lot.”

    That approach worked well in the Netherlands: his team raised 1.7 million euros in 2013, and grew to include 60,000 members. A few years later, Wijnberg and his colleagues decided to expand into the US, and with the help of NYU’s Jay Rosen, an early supporter, they made it onto Trevor Noah’s Daily Show to pitch their idea.

    The Correspondent raised more than $2.5 million from nearly 50,000 members—a great success, by any measure. But in March, things started to get hairy, with the publication abruptly pulling the plug on opening a US newsroom and announcing that staff would edit stories reported from the US from the original Amsterdam office instead. Many of the reasons behind this are mundane: visas, high rent, relocation costs. And reporters would still be reporting from, and on, the States. But supporters felt blindsided, calling the operation a scam.

    Today, Wijnberg reflects that he should have controlled the messaging better, and not promised to hire and operate from New York until he was certain that he could. He also wonders why it matters.

    “It’s not saying people who think it matters are wrong,” he explains. “But if the whole idea of this kind of geography and why it’s there is a construct, and you’re trying to think about transcending it, the very notion of Where are you based? is secondary. The whole point is not to be based anywhere.”

    Still: “The view from everywhere—the natural opposite—is just as real,” Wijnberg concedes. “You can’t be everywhere. You have to be somewhere.”

    And that’s the rub: for all of nationalism’s ills, it does instill in its subjects what Anderson calls a “deep, horizontal comradeship” that, while imagined, blossoms thanks to a confluence of forces. It can’t be replicated supranationally overnight. The challenge for a cosmopolitan journalism, then, is to dream up new forms of belonging that look forward, not backward—without discarding the imagined communities we have.

    That’s hard; so hard that it more frequently provokes a retrenchment, not an expansion, of solidarity. But it’s not impossible. And our collective futures almost certainly depend on it.

    https://www.cjr.org/special_report/view-from-nowhere.php
    #journalisme #nationalisme #Etat-nation #communauté_nationale #communauté_internationale #frontières #presse #médias

  • Connecticut legislators to consider minimum pay for Uber and Lyft drivers - Connecticut Post
    https://www.ctpost.com/politics/article/Connecticut-legislators-to-consider-minimum-pay-13608071.php

    By Emilie Munson, February 11, 2019 - Prompted by growing numbers of frustrated Uber and Lyft drivers, lawmakers will hold a hearing on establishing minimum pay for app-based drivers.

    After three separate legislative proposals regarding pay for drivers flooded the Labor and Public Employees Committee, the committee will raise the concept of driver earnings as a bill, said state Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, who chairs the committee, on Friday night.

    A coalition of Uber and Lyft drivers from New Haven has been pressuring lawmakers to pass a pay standard, following New York City’s landmark minimum pay ordinance for app-based drivers approved in December. The legislation, which set an earnings floor of $17.22 an hour for the independent contractors, took effect on Feb. 1.

    Connecticut drivers have no minimum pay guarantees.

    Guillermo Estrella, who drives for Uber, worked about 60 hours per week last year and received $25,422.65 in gross pay. His pay stub doesn’t reflect how much Estrella paid for insurance, gas, oil changes and wear-and-tear on his car. Factor those expenses in, and the Branford resident said his yearly take-home earnings were about $18,000 last year.

    Estrella and other New Haven drivers have suggested bill language to cap the portion of riders’ fares that Uber and Lyft can take at 25 percent, with the remaining 75 percent heading to drivers’ pockets. The idea has already received pushback from Uber, which said it was unrealistic given their current pay structure.

    Connecticut legislators have suggested two other models for regulating driver pay. State Sen. Steve Cassano, D-Manchester, filed a bill to set a minimum pay rate per mile and per minute for drivers. His bill has not assigned numbers to those minimums yet.

    “What (drivers) were making when Uber started and got its name, they are not making that anymore,” said Cassano. “The company is taking advantage of the success of the company. I understand that to a point, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of the drivers.”

    State Rep. Peter Tercyak, D-New Britain, proposed legislation that says if drivers’ earnings do not amount to hourly minimum wage payments, Uber or Lyft should have to kick in the difference. Connecticut’s minimum wage is now $10.10, although Democrats are making a strong push this year to raise it.

    As lawmakers consider these proposals, they will confront issues raised by the growing “gig economy”: a clash between companies seeking thousands of flexible, independent contractors and a workforce that wants the benefits and rights of traditional, paid employment.

    Some Democrats at the Capitol support the changes that favor drivers.

    “I thought it was important to make sure our labor laws are keeping up with the changes we are seeing in this emerging gig economy, that we have sufficient safeguards to make sure that drivers are not being exploited,” said Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown.

    But the proposals also raise broad, difficult questions like what protections does a large independent contractor workforce need? And how would constraining the business model of Uber and Lyft impact service availability around the state?

    Sen. Craig Miner, a Republican of Litchfield who sits on the Labor committee, wondered why Uber and Lyft drivers should have guaranteed pay, when other independent contractors do not. How would this impact the tax benefits realized by independent contractors, he asked.

    Uber and Lyft declined to provide data on how many drivers they have in the state, and the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles does not keep count. In Connecticut, 82 percent of Lyft drivers drive fewer than 20 hours per week, said Kaelan Richards, a Lyft spokesperson.

    Last week, Hearst Connecticut Media spoke to 20 Uber and Lyft drivers in New Haven who are demanding lawmakers protect their pay. All drove full-time for Uber or Lyft or both.

    An immigrant from Ecuador, Estrella, the Branford driver, struggles to pay for rent and groceries for his pregnant wife and seven-year-old son using his Uber wages.

    “A cup of coffee at the local Starbucks cost $3 or $4,” said Estrella. “How can a trip can cost $3 when you have to drive to them five minutes away and drop them off after seven or eight minutes?”

    In December, 50 Uber and Lyft drivers held a strike in New Haven demanding better pay. The New Haven drivers last week said they are planning more strikes soon.

    “Why is Uber lowering the rates and why do we have to say yes to keep working?” asked Carlos Gomez, a Guilford Uber driver, last week.

    The drivers believe Uber and Lyft are decreasing driver pay and taking a larger chunk of rider fares for company profits. Many New Haven drivers said pay per mile has been decreasing. They liked Sen. Cassano’s idea of setting minimum pay per mile and per minute.

    “The payment by mile, it went down by 10 cents,” said Rosanna Olan, a driver from West Haven. “Before it was more than one dollar and now when you have a big truck SUV, working long distance especially is not worth it anymore.”

    Uber and Lyft both declined to provide pay rates per mile and per minute for drivers. Drivers are not paid for time spent driving to pick up a passenger, nor for time spent idling waiting for a ride, although the companies’ model depends on having drivers ready to pick up passengers at any moment.

    Lyft said nationally drivers earn an average of $18.83 an hour, but did not provide Connecticut specific earnings.

    “Our goal has always been to empower drivers to get the most out of Lyft, and we look forward to continBy Emilie Munson Updated 4:49 pm EST, Monday, February 11, 2019uing to do so in Connecticut, and across the country," said Rich Power, public policy manager at Lyft.

    Uber discouraged lawmakers from considering the drivers’ proposal of capping the transportation companies’ cut of rider fares. Uber spokesman Harry Hartfield said the idea wouldn’t work because Uber no longer uses the “commission model” — that stopped about two years ago.

    “In order to make sure we can provide customers with an up-front price, driver fares are not tied to what the rider pays,” said Hartfield. “In fact, on many trips drivers actually make more money than the rider pays.”

    What the rider is pays to Uber is an estimated price, calculated before the ride starts, Hartfield explained, while the driver receives from Uber a fare that is calculated based on actual drive time and distance. Changing the model could make it hard to give customers up-front pricing and “lead to reduced price transparency,” Hartfield said. New York’s changes raised rates for riders.

    James Bhandary-Alexander, a New Haven Legal Assistance attorney who is working with the drivers, said Uber’s current pay model is “irrelevant to how drivers want to be paid for the work.”

    “The reason that drivers care is it seems fundamentally unfair that the rider is willing to pay or has paid $100 for the ride and the driver has only gotten $30 or $40 of that,” he said.

    Pursuing any of the three driver-pay proposals would bring Uber and Lyft lobbyists back to the Capitol, where they negotiated legislation spearheaded by Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guilford, from 2015 to 2017.

    Scanlon said the companies eventually favored the bill passed in 2017, which, after some compromise, required drivers have insurance, limited “surge pricing,” mandated background checks for drivers, imposed a 25 cent tax collected by the state and stated passengers must be picked up and delivered anywhere without discrimination.

    “One of my biggest regrets about that bill, which I think is really good for consumers in Connecticut, is that we didn’t do anything to try to help the driver,” said Scanlon, who briefly drove for Uber.
    By Emilie Munson Updated 4:49 pm EST, Monday, February 11, 2019
    emunson@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson

    #USA #Uber #Connecticut #Mindestlohn #Klassenkampf

  • Beyond the Hype of Lab-Grown Diamonds
    https://earther.gizmodo.com/beyond-the-hype-of-lab-grown-diamonds-1834890351

    Billions of years ago when the world was still young, treasure began forming deep underground. As the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates plunged down into the upper mantle, bits of carbon, some likely hailing from long-dead life forms were melted and compressed into rigid lattices. Over millions of years, those lattices grew into the most durable, dazzling gems the planet had ever cooked up. And every so often, for reasons scientists still don’t fully understand, an eruption would send a stash of these stones rocketing to the surface inside a bubbly magma known as kimberlite.

    There, the diamonds would remain, nestled in the kimberlite volcanoes that delivered them from their fiery home, until humans evolved, learned of their existence, and began to dig them up.

    The epic origin of Earth’s diamonds has helped fuel a powerful marketing mythology around them: that they are objects of otherworldly strength and beauty; fitting symbols of eternal love. But while “diamonds are forever” may be the catchiest advertising slogan ever to bear some geologic truth, the supply of these stones in the Earth’s crust, in places we can readily reach them, is far from everlasting. And the scars we’ve inflicted on the land and ourselves in order to mine diamonds has cast a shadow that still lingers over the industry.

    Some diamond seekers, however, say we don’t need to scour the Earth any longer, because science now offers an alternative: diamonds grown in labs. These gems aren’t simulants or synthetic substitutes; they are optically, chemically, and physically identical to their Earth-mined counterparts. They’re also cheaper, and in theory, limitless. The arrival of lab-grown diamonds has rocked the jewelry world to its core and prompted fierce pushback from diamond miners. Claims abound on both sides.

    Growers often say that their diamonds are sustainable and ethical; miners and their industry allies counter that only gems plucked from the Earth can be considered “real” or “precious.” Some of these assertions are subjective, others are supported only by sparse, self-reported, or industry-backed data. But that’s not stopping everyone from making them.

    This is a fight over image, and when it comes to diamonds, image is everything.
    A variety of cut, polished Ada Diamonds created in a lab, including smaller melee stones and large center stones. 22.94 carats total. (2.60 ct. pear, 2.01 ct. asscher, 2.23 ct. cushion, 3.01 ct. radiant, 1.74 ct. princess, 2.11 ct. emerald, 3.11 ct. heart, 3.00 ct. oval, 3.13 ct. round.)
    Image: Sam Cannon (Earther)
    Same, but different

    The dream of lab-grown diamond dates back over a century. In 1911, science fiction author H.G. Wells described what would essentially become one of the key methods for making diamond—recreating the conditions inside Earth’s mantle on its surface—in his short story The Diamond Maker. As the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) notes, there were a handful of dubious attempts to create diamonds in labs in the late 19th and early 20th century, but the first commercial diamond production wouldn’t emerge until the mid-1950s, when scientists with General Electric worked out a method for creating small, brown stones. Others, including De Beers, soon developed their own methods for synthesizing the gems, and use of the lab-created diamond in industrial applications, from cutting tools to high power electronics, took off.

    According to the GIA’s James Shigley, the first experimental production of gem-quality diamond occurred in 1970. Yet by the early 2000s, gem-quality stones were still small, and often tinted yellow with impurities. It was only in the last five or so years that methods for growing diamonds advanced to the point that producers began churning out large, colorless stones consistently. That’s when the jewelry sector began to take a real interest.

    Today, that sector is taking off. The International Grown Diamond Association (IGDA), a trade group formed in 2016 by a dozen lab diamond growers and sellers, now has about 50 members, according to IGDA secretary general Dick Garard. When the IGDA first formed, lab-grown diamonds were estimated to represent about 1 percent of a $14 billion rough diamond market. This year, industry analyst Paul Zimnisky estimates they account for 2-3 percent of the market.

    He expects that share will only continue to grow as factories in China that already produce millions of carats a year for industrial purposes start to see an opportunity in jewelry.
    “I have a real problem with people claiming one is ethical and another is not.”

    “This year some [factories] will come up from 100,000 gem-quality diamonds to one to two million,” Zimnisky said. “They already have the infrastructure and equipment in place” and are in the process of upgrading it. (About 150 million carats of diamonds were mined last year, according to a global analysis of the industry conducted by Bain & Company.)

    Production ramp-up aside, 2018 saw some other major developments across the industry. In the summer, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reversed decades of guidance when it expanded the definition of a diamond to include those created in labs and dropped ‘synthetic’ as a recommended descriptor for lab-grown stones. The decision came on the heels of the world’s top diamond producer, De Beers, announcing the launch of its own lab-grown diamond line, Lightbox, after having once vowed never to sell man-made stones as jewelry.

    “I would say shock,” Lightbox Chief Marketing Officer Sally Morrison told Earther when asked how the jewelry world responded to the company’s launch.

    While the majority of lab-grown diamonds on the market today are what’s known as melee (less than 0.18 carats), the tech for producing the biggest, most dazzling diamonds continues to improve. In 2016, lab-grown diamond company MiaDonna announced its partners had grown a 6.28 carat gem-quality diamond, claimed to be the largest created in the U.S. to that point. In 2017, a lab in Augsburg University, Germany that grows diamonds for industrial and scientific research applications produced what is thought to be the largest lab-grown diamond ever—a 155 carat behemoth that stretches nearly 4 inches across. Not gem quality, perhaps, but still impressive.

    “If you compare it with the Queen’s diamond, hers is four times heavier, it’s clearer” physicist Matthias Schreck, who leads the group that grew that beast of a jewel, told me. “But in area, our diamond is bigger. We were very proud of this.”

    Diamonds can be created in one of two ways: Similar to how they form inside the Earth, or similar to how scientists speculate they might form in outer space.

    The older, Earth-inspired method is known as “high temperature high pressure” (HPHT), and that’s exactly what it sounds like. A carbon source, like graphite, is placed in a giant, mechanical press where, in the presence of a catalyst, it’s subjected to temperatures of around 1,600 degrees Celsius and pressures of 5-6 Gigapascals in order to form diamond. (If you’re curious what that sort of pressure feels like, the GIA describes it as similar to the force exerted if you tried to balance a commercial jet on your fingertip.)

    The newer method, called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), is more akin to how diamonds might form in interstellar gas clouds (for which we have indirect, spectroscopic evidence, according to Shigley). A hydrocarbon gas, like methane, is pumped into a low-pressure reactor vessel alongside hydrogen. While maintaining near-vacuum conditions, the gases are heated very hot—typically 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius, according to Lightbox CEO Steve Coe—causing carbon atoms to break free of their molecular bonds. Under the right conditions, those liberated bits of carbon will settle out onto a substrate—typically a flat, square plate of a synthetic diamond produced with the HPHT method—forming layer upon layer of diamond.

    “It’s like snow falling on a table on your back porch,” Jason Payne, the founder and CEO of lab-grown diamond jewelry company Ada Diamonds, told me.

    Scientists have been forging gem-quality diamonds with HPHT for longer, but today, CVD has become the method of choice for those selling larger bridal stones. That’s in part because it’s easier to control impurities and make diamonds with very high clarity, according to Coe. Still, each method has its advantages—Payne said that HPHT is faster and the diamonds typically have better color (which is to say, less of it)—and some companies, like Ada, purchase stones grown in both ways.

    However they’re made, lab-grown diamonds have the same exceptional hardness, stiffness, and thermal conductivity as their Earth-mined counterparts. Cut, they can dazzle with the same brilliance and fire—a technical term to describe how well the diamond scatters light like a prism. The GIA even grades them according to the same 4Cs—cut, clarity, color, and carat—that gemologists use to assess diamonds formed in the Earth, although it uses a slightly different terminology to report the color and clarity grades for lab-grown stones.

    They’re so similar, in fact, that lab-grown diamond entering the larger diamond supply without any disclosures has become a major concern across the jewelry industry, particularly when it comes to melee stones from Asia. It’s something major retailers are now investing thousands of dollars in sophisticated detection equipment to suss out by searching for minute differences in, say, their crystal shape or for impurities like nitrogen (much less common in lab-grown diamond, according to Shigley).

    Those differences may be a lifeline for retailers hoping to weed out lab-grown diamonds, but for companies focused on them, they can become another selling point. The lack of nitrogen in diamonds produced with the CVD method, for instance, gives them an exceptional chemical purity that allows them to be classified as type IIa; a rare and coveted breed that accounts for just 2 percent of those found in nature. Meanwhile, the ability to control everything about the growth process allows companies like Lightbox to adjust the formula and produce incredibly rare blue and pink diamonds as part of their standard product line. (In fact, these colored gemstones have made up over half of the company’s sales since launch, according to Coe.)

    And while lab-grown diamonds boast the same sparkle as their Earthly counterparts, they do so at a significant discount. Zimnisky said that today, your typical one carat, medium quality diamond grown in a lab will sell for about $3,600, compared with $6,100 for its Earth-mined counterpart—a discount of about 40 percent. Two years ago, that discount was only 18 percent. And while the price drop has “slightly tapered off” as Zimnisky put it, he expects it will fall further thanks in part to the aforementioned ramp up in Chinese production, as well as technological improvements. (The market is also shifting in response to Lightbox, which De Beers is using to position lab-grown diamonds as mass produced items for fashion jewelry, and which is selling its stones, ungraded, at the controversial low price of $800 per carat—a discount of nearly 90 percent.)

    Zimnisky said that if the price falls too fast, it could devalue lab-grown diamonds in the eyes of consumers. But for now, at least, paying less seems to be a selling point. A 2018 consumer research survey by MVI Marketing found that most of those polled would choose a larger lab-grown diamond over a smaller mined diamond of the same price.

    “The thing [consumers] seem most compelled by is the ability to trade up in size and quality at the same price,” Garard of IGDA said.

    Still, for buyers and sellers alike, price is only part of the story. Many in the lab-grown diamond world market their product as an ethical or eco-friendly alternative to mined diamonds.

    But those sales pitches aren’t without controversy.
    A variety of lab-grown diamond products arrayed on a desk at Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan. The stone in the upper left gets its blue color from boron. Diamonds tinted yellow (top center) usually get their color from small amounts of nitrogen.
    Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
    Dazzling promises

    As Anna-Mieke Anderson tells it, she didn’t enter the diamond world to become a corporate tycoon. She did it to try and fix a mistake.

    In 1999, Anderson purchased herself a diamond. Some years later, in 2005, her father asked her where it came from. Nonplussed, she told him it came from the jewelry store. But that wasn’t what he was asking: He wanted to know where it really came from.

    “I actually had no idea,” Anderson told Earther. “That led me to do a mountain of research.”

    That research eventually led Anderson to conclude that she had likely bought a diamond mined under horrific conditions. She couldn’t be sure, because the certificate of purchase included no place of origin. But around the time of her purchase, civil wars funded by diamond mining were raging across Angola, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia, fueling “widespread devastation” as Global Witness put it in 2006. At the height of the diamond wars in the late ‘90s, the watchdog group estimates that as many as 15 percent of diamonds entering the market were conflict diamonds. Even those that weren’t actively fueling a war were often being mined in dirty, hazardous conditions; sometimes by children.

    “I couldn’t believe I’d bought into this,” Anderson said.

    To try and set things right, Anderson began sponsoring a boy living in a Liberian community impacted by the blood diamond trade. The experience was so eye-opening, she says, that she eventually felt compelled to sponsor more children. Selling conflict-free jewelry seemed like a fitting way to raise money to do so, but after a great deal more research, Anderson decided she couldn’t in good faith consider any diamond pulled from the Earth to be truly conflict-free in either the humanitarian or environmental sense. While diamond miners were, by the early 2000s, getting their gems certified “conflict free” according to the UN-backed Kimberley Process, the certification scheme’s definition of a conflict diamond—one sold by rebel groups to finance armed conflicts against governments—felt far too narrow.

    “That [conflict definition] eliminates anything to do with the environment, or eliminates a child mining it, or someone who was a slave, or beaten, or raped,” Anderson said.

    And so she started looking into science, and in 2007, launching MiaDonna as one of the world’s first lab-grown diamond jewelry companies. The business has been activism-oriented from the get-go, with at least five percent of its annual earnings—and more than 20 percent for the last three years—going into The Greener Diamond, Anderson’s charity foundation which has funded a wide range of projects, from training former child soldiers in Sierra Leone to grow food to sponsoring kids orphaned by the West African Ebola outbreak.

    MiaDonna isn’t the only company that positions itself as an ethical alternative to the traditional diamond industry. Brilliant Earth, which sells what it says are carefully-sourced mined and lab-created diamonds, also donates a small portion of its profits to supporting mining communities. Other lab-grown diamond companies market themselves as “ethical,” “conflict-free,” or “world positive.” Payne of Ada Diamonds sees, in lab-grown diamonds, not just shiny baubles, but a potential to improve medicine, clean up pollution, and advance society in countless other ways—and he thinks the growing interest in lab-grown diamond jewelry will help propel us toward that future.

    Others, however, say black-and-white characterizations when it comes to social impact of mined diamonds versus lab-grown stones are unfair. “I have a real problem with people claiming one is ethical and another is not,” Estelle Levin-Nally, founder and CEO of Levin Sources, which advocates for better governance in the mining sector, told Earther. “I think it’s always about your politics. And ethics are subjective.”

    Saleem Ali, an environmental researcher at the University of Delaware who serves on the board of the Diamonds and Development Initiative, agrees. He says the mining industry has, on the whole, worked hard to turn itself around since the height of the diamond wars and that governance is “much better today” than it used to be. Human rights watchdog Global Witness also says that “significant progress” has been made to curb the conflict diamond trade, although as Alice Harle, Senior Campaigner with Global Witness told Earther via email, diamonds do still fuel conflict, particularly in the Central African Republic and Zimbabwe.

    Most industry observers seems to agree that the Kimberley Process is outdated and inadequate, and that more work is needed to stamp out other abuses, including child labor and forced labor, in the artisanal and small-scale diamond mining sector. Today, large-scale mining operations don’t tend to see these kinds of problems, according to Julianne Kippenberg, associate director for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, but she notes that there may be other community impacts surrounding land rights and forced resettlement.

    The flip side, Ali and Levin-Nally say, is that well-regulated mining operations can be an important source of economic development and livelihood. Ali cites Botswana and Russia as prime examples of places where large-scale mining operations have become “major contributors to the economy.” Dmitry Amelkin, head of strategic projects and analytics for Russian diamond mining giant Alrosa, echoed that sentiment in an email to Earther, noting that diamonds transformed Botswana “from one of the poorest [countries] in the world to a middle-income country” with revenues from mining representing almost a third of its GDP.

    In May, a report commissioned by the Diamond Producers Association (DPA), a trade organization representing the world’s largest diamond mining companies, estimated that worldwide, its members generate nearly $4 billion in direct revenue for employees and contractors, along with another $6.8 billion in benefits via “local procurement of goods and services.” DPA CEO Jean-Marc Lieberherr said this was a story diamond miners need to do a better job telling.

    “The industry has undergone such changes since the Blood Diamond movie,” he said, referring to the blockbuster 2006 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio that drew global attention to the problem of conflict diamonds. “And yet people’s’ perceptions haven’t evolved. I think the main reason is we have not had a voice, we haven’t communicated.”

    But conflict and human rights abuses aren’t the only issues that have plagued the diamond industry. There’s also the lasting environmental impact of the mining itself. In the case of large-scale commercial mines, this typically entails using heavy machinery and explosives to bore deep into those kimberlite tubes in search of precious stones.

    Some, like Maya Koplyova, a geologist at the University of British Columbia who studies diamonds and the rocks they’re found in, see this as far better than many other forms of mining. “The environmental footprint is the fThere’s also the question of just how representative the report’s energy consumption estimates for lab-grown diamonds are. While he wouldn’t offer a specific number, Coe said that De Beers’ Group diamond manufacturer Element Six—arguably the most advanced laboratory-grown diamond company in the world—has “substantially lower” per carat energy requirements than the headline figures found inside the new report. When asked why this was not included, Rick Lord, ESG analyst at Trucost, the S&P global group that conducted the analysis, said it chose to focus on energy estimates in the public record, but that after private consultation with Element Six it did not believe their data would “materially alter” the emissions estimates in the study.

    Finally, it’s important to consider the source of the carbon emissions. While the new report states that about 40 percent of the emissions associated with mining a diamond come from fossil fuel-powered vehicles and equipment, emissions associated with growing a diamond come mainly from electric power. Today, about 68 percent of lab-grown diamonds hail from China, Singapore, and India combined according to Zimnisky, where the power is drawn from largely fossil fuel-powered grids. But there is, at least, an opportunity to switch to renewables and drive that carbon footprint way down.
    “The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption.”

    And some companies do seem to be trying to do that. Anderson of MiaDonna says the company only sources its diamonds from facilities in the U.S., and that it’s increasingly trying to work with producers that use renewable energy. Lab-grown diamond company Diamond Foundry grows its stones inside plasma reactors running “as hot as the outer layer of the sun,” per its website, and while it wouldn’t offer any specific numbers, that presumably uses more energy than your typical operation running at lower temperatures. However, company spokesperson Ye-Hui Goldenson said its Washington State ‘megacarat factory’ was cited near a well-maintained hydropower source so that the diamonds could be produced with renewable energy. The company offsets other fossil fuel-driven parts of its operation by purchasing carbon credits.

    Lightbox’s diamonds currently come from Element Six’s UK-based facilities. The company is, however, building a $94-million facility near Portland, Oregon, that’s expected to come online by 2020. Coe said he estimates about 45 percent of its power will come from renewable sources.

    “The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption,” Coe said. “That’s something we’re focused on in Lightbox.”

    In spite of that, Lightbox is somewhat notable among lab-grown diamond jewelry brands in that, in the words of Morrison, it is “not claiming this to be an eco-friendly product.”

    “While it is true that we don’t dig holes in the ground, the energy consumption is not insignificant,” Morrison told Earther. “And I think we felt very uncomfortable promoting on that.”
    Various diamonds created in a lab, as seen at the Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan.
    Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
    The real real

    The fight over how lab-grown diamonds can and should market themselves is still heating up.

    On March 26, the FTC sent letters to eight lab-grown and diamond simulant companies warning them against making unsubstantiated assertions about the environmental benefits of their products—its first real enforcement action after updating its jewelry guides last year. The letters, first obtained by JCK news director Rob Bates under a Freedom of Information Act request, also warned companies that their advertising could falsely imply the products are mined diamonds, illustrating that, even though the agency now says a lab-grown diamond is a diamond, the specific origin remains critically important. A letter to Diamond Foundry, for instance, notes that the company has at times advertised its stones as “above-ground real” without the qualification of “laboratory-made.” It’s easy to see how a consumer might miss the implication.

    But in a sense, that’s what all of this is: A fight over what’s real.
    “It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in. They are a type of diamond.”

    Another letter, sent to FTC attorney Reenah Kim by the nonprofit trade organization Jewelers Vigilance Committee on April 2, makes it clear that many in the industry still believe that’s a term that should be reserved exclusively for gems formed inside the Earth. The letter, obtained by Earther under FOIA, urges the agency to continue restricting the use of the terms “real,” “genuine,” “natural,” “precious,” and “semi-precious” to Earth-mined diamonds and gemstones. Even the use of such terms in conjunction with “laboratory grown,” the letter argues, “will create even more confusion in an already confused and evolving marketplace.”

    JVC President Tiffany Stevens told Earther that the letter was a response to a footnote in an explanatory document about the FTC’s recent jewelry guide changes, which suggested the agency was considering removing a clause about real, precious, natural and genuine only being acceptable modifiers for gems mined from the Earth.

    “We felt that given the current commercial environment, that we didn’t think it was a good time to take that next step,” Stevens told Earther. As Stevens put it, the changes the FTC recently made, including expanding the definition of diamond and tweaking the descriptors companies can use to label laboratory-grown diamonds as such, have already been “wildly misinterpreted” by some lab-grown diamond sellers that are no longer making the “necessary disclosures.”

    Asked whether the JVC thinks lab-grown diamonds are, in fact, real diamonds, Stevens demurred.

    “It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in,” she said. “They are a type of diamond.”

    Change is afoot in the diamond world. Mined diamond production may have already peaked, according to the 2018 Bain & Company report. Lab diamonds are here to stay, although where they’re going isn’t entirely clear. Zimnisky expects that in a few years—as Lightbox’s new facility comes online and mass production of lab diamonds continues to ramp up overseas—the price industry-wide will fall to about 80 percent less than a mined diamond. At that point, he wonders whether lab-grown diamonds will start to lose their sparkle.

    Payne isn’t too worried about a price slide, which he says is happening across the diamond industry and which he expects will be “linear, not exponential” on the lab-grown side. He points out that lab-grown diamond market is still limited by supply, and that the largest lab-grown gems remain quite rare. Payne and Zimnisky both see the lab-grown diamond market bifurcating into cheaper, mass-produced gems and premium-quality stones sold by those that can maintain a strong brand. A sense that they’re selling something authentic and, well, real.

    “So much has to do with consumer psychology,” Zimnisky said.

    Some will only ever see diamonds as authentic if they formed inside the Earth. They’re drawn, as Kathryn Money, vice president of strategy and merchandising at Brilliant Earth put it, to “the history and romanticism” of diamonds; to a feeling that’s sparked by holding a piece of our ancient world. To an essence more than a function.

    Others, like Anderson, see lab-grown diamonds as the natural (to use a loaded word) evolution of diamond. “We’re actually running out of [mined] diamonds,” she said. “There is an end in sight.” Payne agreed, describing what he sees as a “looming death spiral” for diamond mining.

    Mined diamonds will never go away. We’ve been digging them up since antiquity, and they never seem to lose their sparkle. But most major mines are being exhausted. And with technology making it easier to grow diamonds just as they are getting more difficult to extract from the Earth, the lab-grown diamond industry’s grandstanding about its future doesn’t feel entirely unreasonable.

    There’s a reason why, as Payne said, “the mining industry as a whole is still quite scared of this product.” ootprint of digging the hole in the ground and crushing [the rock],” Koplyova said, noting that there’s no need to add strong acids or heavy metals like arsenic (used in gold mining) to liberate the gems.

    Still, those holes can be enormous. The Mir Mine, a now-abandoned open pit mine in Eastern Siberia, is so large—reportedly stretching 3,900 feet across and 1,700 feet deep—that the Russian government has declared it a no-fly zone owing to the pit’s ability to create dangerous air currents. It’s visible from space.

    While companies will often rehabilitate other land to offset the impact of mines, kimberlite mining itself typically leaves “a permanent dent in the earth’s surface,” as a 2014 report by market research company Frost & Sullivan put it.

    “It’s a huge impact as far as I’m concerned,” said Kevin Krajick, senior editor for science news at Columbia University’s Earth Institute who wrote a book on the discovery of diamonds in far northern Canada. Krajick noted that in remote mines, like those of the far north, it’s not just the physical hole to consider, but all the development required to reach a previously-untouched area, including roads and airstrips, roaring jets and diesel-powered trucks.

    Diamonds grown in factories clearly have a smaller physical footprint. According to the Frost & Sullivan report, they also use less water and create less waste. It’s for these reasons that Ali thinks diamond mining “will never be able to compete” with lab-grown diamonds from an environmental perspective.

    “The mining industry should not even by trying to do that,” he said.

    Of course, this is capitalism, so try to compete is exactly what the DPA is now doing. That same recent report that touted the mining industry’s economic benefits also asserts that mined diamonds have a carbon footprint three times lower than that of lab-grown diamonds, on average. The numbers behind that conclusion, however, don’t tell the full story.

    Growing diamonds does take considerable energy. The exact amount can vary greatly, however, depending on the specific nature of the growth process. These are details manufacturers are typically loathe to disclose, but Payne of Ada Diamonds says he estimates the most efficient players in the game today use about 250 kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity per cut, polished carat of diamond; roughly what a U.S. household consumes in 9 days. Other estimates run higher. Citing unnamed sources, industry publication JCK Online reported that a modern HPHT run can use up to 700 kWh per carat, while CVD production can clock in north of 1,000 kWh per carat.

    Pulling these and several other public-record estimates, along with information on where in the world today’s lab diamonds are being grown and the energy mix powering the producer nations’ electric grids, the DPA-commissioned study estimated that your typical lab-grown diamond results in some 511 kg of carbon emissions per cut, polished carat. Using information provided by mining companies on fuel and electricity consumption, along with other greenhouse gas sources on the mine site, it found that the average mined carat was responsible for just 160 kg of carbon emissions.

    One limitation here is that the carbon footprint estimate for mining focused only on diamond production, not the years of work entailed in developing a mine. As Ali noted, developing a mine can take a lot of energy, particularly for those sited in remote locales where equipment needs to be hauled long distances by trucks or aircraft.

    There’s also the question of just how representative the report’s energy consumption estimates for lab-grown diamonds are. While he wouldn’t offer a specific number, Coe said that De Beers’ Group diamond manufacturer Element Six—arguably the most advanced laboratory-grown diamond company in the world—has “substantially lower” per carat energy requirements than the headline figures found inside the new report. When asked why this was not included, Rick Lord, ESG analyst at Trucost, the S&P global group that conducted the analysis, said it chose to focus on energy estimates in the public record, but that after private consultation with Element Six it did not believe their data would “materially alter” the emissions estimates in the study.

    Finally, it’s important to consider the source of the carbon emissions. While the new report states that about 40 percent of the emissions associated with mining a diamond come from fossil fuel-powered vehicles and equipment, emissions associated with growing a diamond come mainly from electric power. Today, about 68 percent of lab-grown diamonds hail from China, Singapore, and India combined according to Zimnisky, where the power is drawn from largely fossil fuel-powered grids. But there is, at least, an opportunity to switch to renewables and drive that carbon footprint way down.
    “The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption.”

    And some companies do seem to be trying to do that. Anderson of MiaDonna says the company only sources its diamonds from facilities in the U.S., and that it’s increasingly trying to work with producers that use renewable energy. Lab-grown diamond company Diamond Foundry grows its stones inside plasma reactors running “as hot as the outer layer of the sun,” per its website, and while it wouldn’t offer any specific numbers, that presumably uses more energy than your typical operation running at lower temperatures. However, company spokesperson Ye-Hui Goldenson said its Washington State ‘megacarat factory’ was cited near a well-maintained hydropower source so that the diamonds could be produced with renewable energy. The company offsets other fossil fuel-driven parts of its operation by purchasing carbon credits.

    Lightbox’s diamonds currently come from Element Six’s UK-based facilities. The company is, however, building a $94-million facility near Portland, Oregon, that’s expected to come online by 2020. Coe said he estimates about 45 percent of its power will come from renewable sources.

    “The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption,” Coe said. “That’s something we’re focused on in Lightbox.”

    In spite of that, Lightbox is somewhat notable among lab-grown diamond jewelry brands in that, in the words of Morrison, it is “not claiming this to be an eco-friendly product.”

    “While it is true that we don’t dig holes in the ground, the energy consumption is not insignificant,” Morrison told Earther. “And I think we felt very uncomfortable promoting on that.”
    Various diamonds created in a lab, as seen at the Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan.
    Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
    The real real

    The fight over how lab-grown diamonds can and should market themselves is still heating up.

    On March 26, the FTC sent letters to eight lab-grown and diamond simulant companies warning them against making unsubstantiated assertions about the environmental benefits of their products—its first real enforcement action after updating its jewelry guides last year. The letters, first obtained by JCK news director Rob Bates under a Freedom of Information Act request, also warned companies that their advertising could falsely imply the products are mined diamonds, illustrating that, even though the agency now says a lab-grown diamond is a diamond, the specific origin remains critically important. A letter to Diamond Foundry, for instance, notes that the company has at times advertised its stones as “above-ground real” without the qualification of “laboratory-made.” It’s easy to see how a consumer might miss the implication.

    But in a sense, that’s what all of this is: A fight over what’s real.
    “It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in. They are a type of diamond.”

    Another letter, sent to FTC attorney Reenah Kim by the nonprofit trade organization Jewelers Vigilance Committee on April 2, makes it clear that many in the industry still believe that’s a term that should be reserved exclusively for gems formed inside the Earth. The letter, obtained by Earther under FOIA, urges the agency to continue restricting the use of the terms “real,” “genuine,” “natural,” “precious,” and “semi-precious” to Earth-mined diamonds and gemstones. Even the use of such terms in conjunction with “laboratory grown,” the letter argues, “will create even more confusion in an already confused and evolving marketplace.”

    JVC President Tiffany Stevens told Earther that the letter was a response to a footnote in an explanatory document about the FTC’s recent jewelry guide changes, which suggested the agency was considering removing a clause about real, precious, natural and genuine only being acceptable modifiers for gems mined from the Earth.

    “We felt that given the current commercial environment, that we didn’t think it was a good time to take that next step,” Stevens told Earther. As Stevens put it, the changes the FTC recently made, including expanding the definition of diamond and tweaking the descriptors companies can use to label laboratory-grown diamonds as such, have already been “wildly misinterpreted” by some lab-grown diamond sellers that are no longer making the “necessary disclosures.”

    Asked whether the JVC thinks lab-grown diamonds are, in fact, real diamonds, Stevens demurred.

    “It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in,” she said. “They are a type of diamond.”

    Change is afoot in the diamond world. Mined diamond production may have already peaked, according to the 2018 Bain & Company report. Lab diamonds are here to stay, although where they’re going isn’t entirely clear. Zimnisky expects that in a few years—as Lightbox’s new facility comes online and mass production of lab diamonds continues to ramp up overseas—the price industry-wide will fall to about 80 percent less than a mined diamond. At that point, he wonders whether lab-grown diamonds will start to lose their sparkle.

    Payne isn’t too worried about a price slide, which he says is happening across the diamond industry and which he expects will be “linear, not exponential” on the lab-grown side. He points out that lab-grown diamond market is still limited by supply, and that the largest lab-grown gems remain quite rare. Payne and Zimnisky both see the lab-grown diamond market bifurcating into cheaper, mass-produced gems and premium-quality stones sold by those that can maintain a strong brand. A sense that they’re selling something authentic and, well, real.

    “So much has to do with consumer psychology,” Zimnisky said.

    Some will only ever see diamonds as authentic if they formed inside the Earth. They’re drawn, as Kathryn Money, vice president of strategy and merchandising at Brilliant Earth put it, to “the history and romanticism” of diamonds; to a feeling that’s sparked by holding a piece of our ancient world. To an essence more than a function.

    Others, like Anderson, see lab-grown diamonds as the natural (to use a loaded word) evolution of diamond. “We’re actually running out of [mined] diamonds,” she said. “There is an end in sight.” Payne agreed, describing what he sees as a “looming death spiral” for diamond mining.

    Mined diamonds will never go away. We’ve been digging them up since antiquity, and they never seem to lose their sparkle. But most major mines are being exhausted. And with technology making it easier to grow diamonds just as they are getting more difficult to extract from the Earth, the lab-grown diamond industry’s grandstanding about its future doesn’t feel entirely unreasonable.

    There’s a reason why, as Payne said, “the mining industry as a whole is still quite scared of this product.”

    #dimants #Afrique #technologie #capitalisme

  • How owning an Instagram-famous pet changes your politics.
    https://www.salon.com/2019/06/23/how-owning-an-instagram-famous-pet-changes-your-politics

    Ici on apprend que...
    – l’acquisition de followers instagram est big business
    – il faut une équipe composé de la star, du talent pour dessiner, photogrphier, écrire, entretenir des relations, gérer les finances ...
    – une mission et un message clair qui touchent un naximum d’intéressés
    – ne pas souffrir d’une allergie contre toute forme de commercialisation.

    –> les petits enfants et les animaux domestiques ou vivant en groupes familiales constituent le contenu de base idéal.
    #fcknstgrm #seenthis-pour-les-nuls

    Owners of social media–famous animals say the experience has shaped their politics and beliefs

    Matthew Rozsa, June 23, 2019 11:30PM (UTC)

    I must begin this article with a confession: If it weren’t for my fiancee, I never would have gotten so deep into the world of Instagram-famous pets.

    To say that they give her joy is an understatement. Many restful slumbers have been disrupted by her random exclamations of unbridled happiness, followed by her pressing an iPhone against my face while cooing, “Look at the adorable dog!” or “Isn’t this the most beautiful pig in the world?”

    At first I affectionately teased her for her obsession, but then I began to dig a little deeper. What I soon learned — first from a trip to Canada last year to visit the famous Esther the Wonder Pig and then from my own research — is that animal social media stars are more than just cute pets. They are at the vanguard of a new way of viewing humanity’s relationship with other species — one that has left a positive impact on the larger world.

    “We raise awareness for the Toronto Humane Society and the Basset Hound Rescue of Ontario on our social media platforms through posts and live broadcasts,” Nathan Sidon, who along with Carly Bright co-owns Dean the Basset, told Salon by email. Incidentally, Dean the Basset has over 400,000 followers across social media platforms.

    “We also donate a significant portion of the account’s profits to these charities (over $5,000 in the last 12 months),” Sidon adds. “It’s hard to follow Dean’s account and not see how much love, attention and care he’s showered with daily.... It’s my hope that our greatest contribution to this cause is by setting an example to all pet owners and anyone considering getting a pet of how to be the best pet-owner you can be.”

    According to Sidon, he and Bright believe that “pets are a privilege and that animals in your care should be made a top priority.” He added, though, that “in our case we’ve gone so far that whether or not we’ve become Dean’s slaves is a legitimate question. I think this really shines through on Dean’s account. He’s calling the shots!”

    Salon also emailed Gemma Gené, whose social media presence includes not only pictures of her beloved pug Mochi, but also a comic series that colorfully depicts his ebullient personality.

    “I was working as an architect in my first big job in New York,” Gené recalled when asked about how she met Mochi. “It was my dream job at the time but unfortunately the hours were crazy. I used to finish work at night every day and I had to work most weekends. I missed my dog Mochi so much during work. I always liked comics and used comic as a journal. I started drawing little stories about Mochi on my subway commutes. I posted them on Instagram and eventually they become big enough that I was able to focus on my art work.”

    Now she says that she has 250,000 followers on Instagram, over 50,000 on Facebook and over a 100,000 visits every day.

    “We have participated in several campaigns,” Gené told Salon when asked about her animal rights work. “We were part of Susie’s Senior Dogs and Foster dogs NYC #famousfosters campaign where they pair people who have big audiences with a senior dog to foster. This is a great way to show how important fostering is. We fostered a little senior that we renamed Dorito and was adopted after a very few days.”

    Gené says that she donates her artwork to raise money for dog rescues — including pug rescues.

    “A cause that is very dear to our hearts is the ’Animals are not property’ petition the Animal Legal Defense Fund is working on,” Gené explained. “We try to use our influence to share this message to help change the laws on animals so they stop being considered an object and start having rights.”

    “A big part of our work presents Mochi as a little character with a big personality, much closer to a human than what most people think of dogs. We are trying to show the world that animals are much more than objects and that have many more similarities to us than what we think,” she adds.

    Salon also reached out to Steve Jenkins, who, along with Derek Walter, co-owns Esther the Wonder Pig. They told Salon that their various social media pages have roughly 2,000,000 followers and garner around 450,000 interactions every week.

    “Esther was supposed to be a mini-pig, we never had any intention of anything else,” Jenkins wrote to Salon. “By the time we realized Esther wasn’t what we thought she was, and that she would in fact be many hundreds of pounds, we had fallen in love with her and weren’t willing to give up. Technically having a family member like Esther was illegal where we lived, so we kept it quiet and opted to make a ’little Facebook page’ to show our more removed friends and family what was happening. The page went viral somehow, and all of a sudden we had thousands of people checking in every day to see what she was up to.”

    Their ownership of Esther soon caused them to become full-time animal rights activists, eventually purchasing a farm where they keep pigs, dogs, turkeys, horses and at least one (literally) strutting peacock.

    “We have been able to establish the Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary, where we rescue abused and abandoned farm animals,” Jenkins explained. “We donated the largest CT scanner in the world to our local veterinary hospital. Until then, the didn’t have equipment large enough to properly get proper diagnostic images for an animal Esther’s size. We also established a fund called ’Esther Shares’ that we use to pay the medical bills for other sanctuaries and rescue organization. Last but not least, we use our pages to help people build a relationship with Esther, something that can have a deep and lasting impact on the person’s life because of their newfound love and respect for pigs.”

    Jenkins, like Gené and Sidon, also told Salon that he began to reevaluate how human beings view their relationship with animals.

    “We think everybody has a connection with animals, but we learn over time to love some animals differently than others,” Jenkins explained. “Esther really leveled that playing field in our mind, and elevated farm animals to the position we previously reserved for companion animals like cats and dogs. She ignited a passion within us that we didn’t know we had. It became a mission of our to help others see Esther the way did, and to bring her larger than life personality across in a way that people could relate to.”

    These arguments are what makes the social media movements so powerful — and why, I suspect, my fiancee is so enamored with them. It is easy to objectify animals, to view them as vessels for whatever immediate function they can provide human beings (food, clothing, recreation). Yet by presenting their animals online as hilarious personalities, with quirks and stories of their own worth following, these sites help us see animals as more than just tools of human beings. They become individuals — and, like all individuals, worthy of not just affection, but respect.

    Gené, Jenkins and Sidon also had heartwarming stories about how their social media work had improved the lives of the two-legged animals who visit them.

    “Through photos and videos requested by fans, Dean has helped a teenager ask a girl to prom, surprised a bride on her wedding day, been the theme of a 90 year old woman’s [birthday] party, and the list goes on,” Sidon told Salon. “We’ve also received hundreds of very personal messages from fans around the world telling us that Dean’s account has provided them with a much needed daily dose of positivity that’s helped them when they’re going through difficult times in their life. Suffice to say that Dean gets a lot of love from around the world and he hopes to give the love back!”

    Jenkins had a similar story about Esther.

    “My favorite message ever came from a young mother in the southern United States,” Jenkins recalled. “She was having a rough time emotionally, and found Esther’s page was becoming a bit of a crutch for her. She would check every day to see what we were up to, and engage with our posts as a way to take her mind off stuff. One day she sent a message to let us know that we had been the source of most of her smiles lately. She wanted to thank us for helping keep a positive attitude, and for helping her show her two small boys that it was ok to have two dads [Jenkins is in a same-sex relationship with Walter] and a turkey for a brother. A family is a family no matter what it looks like, and I still well up when I think about her message.”

    Gené discussed how lucky she is to “have a very loving audience,” telling Salon that “we get hundreds of messages a day telling us the impact our comic has on people and they really fuel us to keep going. Some of them particularly warm my heart like when people say that our comics make them smile when they are going through a difficult time, or when they bring back sweet memories of an animal they loved that passed away.”

    She added, “If one day we don’t post anything, we get messages of people checking up on us. That made us realize we have a community that look forward to our posts daily.”

    I should add, on a final personal note, that I do not write this article from a position of presumed moral superiority. Despite vowing to eliminate my meat consumption since I visited the Esther farm last year, I have only been able to somewhat reduce it, and aside from writing pieces like this I can’t claim to have done very much to advance the cause of animal rights in my own life. Sometimes I suspect the plaque which clogs my arteries is karmic, a punishment for sustaining my own life at the expense of those animals who have given theirs, and one that will likely shorten my own time in this world.

    The goal here is not to shame those who eat meat, or search for a firm distinction between companion animals and farm animals. The point is that social media’s animals stars have made more people think of animals as individuals — to start to see them as living souls. That isn’t enough to solve the problems facing our world today, but it’s the only place where we can start.

    #animaux #business #politique #morale #affaires #instagram #médias

  • Justice : Jeune éborgné au Port (La Réunion) : un policier devant la cour criminelle
    http://www.ipreunion.com/faits-divers/reportage/2019/06/11/justice-jeune-eborgne-au-port-un-policier-devant-la-cour-crimine-lle,1034

    Poursuivi pour violence volontaire ayant entraîné une mutilation, un policier de la Brigade anti-criminalité (BAC) du Port a été renvoyé devant la Cour criminelle ce mardi 11 juin 2019. Les faits remontent à la nuit du 1er au 2 février 2014 lors de violences urbaines dans la commune portoise. Steve C. alors âgé de 16 ans avait reçu un tir de P40, une arme plus puissante qu’un flash-ball en plein visage. Il avait perdu définitivement l’usage d’un oeil. L’affaire avait au d’autant plus de retentissement que les quatre policiers de la #BAC mis en cause avaient aussi été poursuivis. Au final, un seul fonctionnaire est donc renvoyé devant la Cour criminelle. A mi chemin entre le tribunal correctionnel et la cour d’assises cette nouvelle juridiction composée de cinq magistrats qui jugeront à partir de septembre 2019 des crimes punis de 15 à 20 ans de prison

    #maintien_de_l'ordre #police #justice

    • 50 ans après, le policier est enfin poursuivi. Dans 70 ans, le temps de l’enquête approfondi sur les faits et sur l’enquête psy concernant la victime, le procès aura lieu, et le policier sera sanctionné. 70 ans et 3 mois après, le policier sera relaxé en appel. 90 ans après, la Cour de cassation découvrira une erreur de procédure dans l’appel, et l’annulera. 120 ans après la CJUE condamnera l’état Français pour son absence de célérité et la violence de ses forces de l’ordre.

  • Ces nouveaux troubles mentaux qui frappent les entrepreneurs
    https://www.lesechos.fr/amp/1019511

    Tremblez (auto)entrepreneurs : les maladies mentales sont devant vous !

    En cause, la mythologie de l’entrepreneur capable de tout sacrifier au nom de la réussite. « La Silicon Valley a lié l’idée du succès entrepreneurial à celle de la souffrance et du sacrifice. Prenez Elon Musk (PDG fondateur de Tesla), présenté comme l’un des hommes les plus créatifs du xxie siècle. Et pourtant lorsque l’on parle de lui, on valorise sa productivité : Elon dort dans les usines de Tesla, Elon bosse seize heures par jour. Même scénario avec Steve Jobs. On a mis la créativité du fondateur d’Apple sur un piédestal mais sa légende a été principalement alimentée par son addiction au travail », explique Rahaf Harfoush, anthropologue du numérique.

    Cette course à la réussite entrepreneuriale a fini par normaliser le burn-out comme condition physique de l’entrepreneur méritant.

    #Burn-out #Travail #Santé #entrepreunariat

    • Augmentalisme : Psychose liée à l’impression de ne pas être assez « augmenté ». Certains individus ne se trouvent pas assez intelligents, forts, jeunes, connectés… Des insatisfactions qui deviennent psychoses et provoquent des dénis de personnalité.

      Binarisme : Le fruit d’une utilisation excessive des ordinateurs, dont le fonctionnement binaire modifie la personnalité des utilisateurs qui souffrent d’une informatisation de leur personnalité. Leurs raisonnements se limitent à des réponses binaires : oui/non, continuer/annuler, ouvrir/fermer… Ce rationalisme excessif leur donne l’impression d’être des machines.

      Nomophobie : Le smartphone étant devenu pour certains une extension d’eux-mêmes, la peur excessive d’en être séparé et de ne plus pouvoir l’utiliser génère un stress intense, une augmentation de l’anxiété, du rythme cardiaque et de la pression artérielle. Cette pathologie peut se doubler de fomophobie, la peur de manquer une information.

      Zappite : Qualifie ces crises d’ennui provoquées par l’absence de sollicitation. Le constant zapping permis par Internet a rendu les individus accros aux clics.

      Zombiquisme : Un syndrome qui se manifeste par l’incapacité à communiquer directement avec des personnes dans une pièce : les individus sont présents physiquement mais absents mentalement.

  • XAMP Duo pour accordéons microtonals
    Premier samedi du mois, à Le Mans c’est la fièvre du samedi matin, et concert le soir.
    Voilà le programme, plus une œuvre de Ligeti pour commencer. Les deux artistes explorent leur instrument (doté de quart de ton) de façon subtile et magnifique.

    XAMP réunit les accordéonistes Fanny Vicens et Jean-Etienne Sotty : musicalement inclassables, artistiquement indomptables, ils partent à la découverte de nouvelles sonorités avec les compositeurs de leur temps, revisitent les musiques du passé, étonnent et enthousiasment leurs auditeurs.
    En 2015, ils révolutionnent le paysage musical en créant deux accordéons microtonals, instruments aux gammes et aux vibrations nouvelles. Au fil de leurs périples, ils rallient deux bandonéons Arnold, un sheng, et s’équipent en matériel électronique : leur instrumentarium évolue sans cesse, décuplant les possibles sonores.
    Autant d’instruments qu’il nous feront découvrir au cours de la fièvre du samedi matin et qu’ils mettront en action durant leur récital du soir, où résonneront des musiques de Régis Campo, Juan Arroyo, Edith Canat de Chizy, Jacques Rebotier, Mauricio Kagel, Steve Reich ou encore Pascale Criton.

    L’œuvre de Pascale Criton est incroyable, avec une seule note jouée avec sensibilité et doigté tout un univers emplit l’espace.
    http://duoxamp.com/instrumentarium
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=584&v=xBdmZOvHFUg


    #musique

  • First-ever private border wall built in #New_Mexico

    A private group announced Monday that it has constructed a half-mile wall along a section of the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico, in what it said was a first in the border debate.

    The 18-foot steel bollard wall is similar to the designs used by the Border Patrol, sealing off a part of the border that had been a striking gap in existing fencing, according to We Build the Wall, the group behind the new section.

    The section was also built faster and, organizers say, likely more cheaply than the government has been able to manage in recent years.

    Kris Kobach, a former secretary of state in Kansas and an informal immigration adviser to President Trump, says the New Mexico project has the president’s blessing, and says local Border Patrol agents are eager to have the assistance.

    “We’re closing a gap that’s been a big headache for them,” said Mr. Kobach, who is general counsel for We Build the Wall.


    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/may/27/first-ever-private-border-wall-built-new-mexico
    #privatisation #murs #barrières_frontalières #USA #Mexique #frontières #business #complexe_militaro-industriel
    ping @albertocampiphoto @daphne

    • The #GoFundMe Border Wall Is the Quintessential Trump-Era Grift

      In 2012, historian Rick Perlstein wrote a piece of essential reading for understanding modern conservatism, titled “The Long Con” and published by the Baffler. It ties the right’s penchant for absurd and obvious grifts to the conservative mind’s particular vulnerability to fear and lies:

      The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

      Lying, Perlstein said, is “what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound.” The lies—about abortion factories, ACORN, immigrants, etc.—fund the grifts, and the grifts prey on the psychology that makes the lies so successful.

      Perlstein’s piece is all I could think of when I saw last night’s CNN story about the border wall GoFundMe, which seemingly has actually produced Wall. According to CNN, the group We Build the Wall says it has produced a half-mile of border wall in New Mexico. CNN was invited to watch the construction, where Kris Kobach, who is general counsel for the group, spoke “over the clanking and beeping of construction equipment.”

      #Steve_Bannon, who is naturally involved with the group, told CNN that the wall connects existing fencing and had “tough terrain” that means it was left “off the government list.” The half-mile stretch of wall cost an “estimated $6 million to $8 million to build,” CNN reported.

      CNN also quoted #Jeff_Allen, who owns the property on which the fence was built, as saying: “I have fought illegals on this property for six years. I love my country and this is a step in protecting my country.” According to MSN, Allen partnered with United Constitutional Patriots to build the wall with We Build the Wall’s funding. UCP is the same militia that was seen on video detaining immigrants and misrepresenting themselves as Border Patrol; the Phoenix New Times reported on the “apparent ties” between the UCP and We Build the Wall earlier this month.

      This story is bursting at the seams with an all-star lineup of right-wing scammers. The GoFundMe itself, of course, has been rocked by scandal: After the effort raised $20 million, just $980 million short of the billion-dollar goal, GoFundMe said in January that the funds would be returned, since creator Brian Kolfage had originally pledged that “If for ANY reason we don’t reach our goal we will refund your donation.” But Kolfage quickly figured out how to keep the gravy train going, urging those who had donated to allow their donations to be redirected to a non-profit. Ultimately, $14 million of that $20 million figure was indeed rerouted by the idiots who donated it.

      That non-profit became #We_Build_The_Wall, and like all good conservative con jobs, it has the celebs of the fever swamp attached to it. Not only #Kris_Kobach, a tenacious liar who failed at proving voter fraud is a widespread problem—but also slightly washed-up figures like Bannon, Sheriff David Clarke, Curt Schilling, and Tom Tancredo. All the stars are here!

      How much sleazier could it get? Try this: the main contractor working at the site of New Wall, according to CNN, is Tommy Fisher. The Washington Post reported last week that Trump had “personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers” to give the contract for the border wall to the company owned by Fisher, a “GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News,” despite the fact that the Corps of Engineers previously said Fisher’s proposals didn’t meet their requirements.

      Of course, like all good schemes, the need for more money never ceases: On the Facebook page for the group, the announcement that Wall had been completed was accompanied with a plea for fans to “DONATE NOW to fund more walls! We have many more projects lined up!”

      So, what we have is: A tax-exempt non-profit raised $20 million by claiming it would be able to make the federal government build Wall by just giving it the money for it and then, when that didn’t happen, getting most of its donors to reroute that money; then it built a half-mile of wall on private land for as much as $8 million, which went to a firm of a Fox News star whom President Trump adores.

      Perlstein wrote in the aforementioned piece that it’s hard to “specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins,” since “the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself.” The con job was sold through fear: “Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.”

      The Trump era is the inartful, gaudy, brazen peak of this phenomenon. This time, instead of selling fake stem cell cures using the language of Invading Liberals, the grifters are just straight-up selling—for real American dollars—the promise of building a big wall to keep the monsters out.

      https://splinternews.com/the-gofundme-border-wall-is-the-quintessential-trump-er-1835062340

    • Company touted by Trump to build the wall has history of fines, violations

      President Donald Trump appears to have set his sights on a North Dakota construction firm with a checkered legal record to build portions of his signature border wall.
      The family-owned company, #Fisher_Sand_&_Gravel, claims it can build the wall cheaper and faster than competitors. It was among a handful of construction firms chosen to build prototypes of the President’s border wall in 2017 and is currently constructing portions of barrier on private land along the border in New Mexico using private donations.
      It also, however, has a history of red flags including more than $1 million in fines for environmental and tax violations. A decade ago, a former co-owner of the company pleaded guilty to tax fraud, and was sentenced to prison. The company also admitted to defrauding the federal government by impeding the IRS. The former executive, who’s a brother of the current company owner, is no longer associated with it.
      More than two years into his presidency, Trump is still fighting to build and pay for his border wall, a key campaign issue. After failing to get his requests for wall funding passed by a Republican-held Congress during his first two years in office, Trump has met resistance this year from a Democratic-controlled House. His attempt to circumvent Congress through a national emergency declaration has been challenged in the courts.
      On May 24, a federal district judge blocked the administration from using Defense Department funds to construct parts of the wall. The Trump administration has since appealed the block to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals and in the interim, asked the district court to allow building to continue pending appeal. The district court denied the administration’s request.
      Despite the uncertainty, construction firms have been competing to win multimillion-dollar contracts to build portions of wall, including Fisher Sand & Gravel.

      Asked by CNN to comment on the company’s history of environmental violations and legal issues, the company said in a statement: “The questions you are asking have nothing to do with the excellent product and work that Fisher is proposing with regard to protecting America’s southern border. The issues and situations in your email were resolved years ago. None of those matters are outstanding today.”
      Catching the President’s attention
      The company was founded in North Dakota in 1952 and operates in several states across the US. It’s enjoyed public support from North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer, who as a congressman invited the company’s CEO, Tommy Fisher, to Trump’s State of the Union address in 2018. Cramer has received campaign contributions from Fisher and his wife. A photo of the event shared by Fisher in a company newsletter shows Tommy Fisher shaking Trump’s hand.
      The Washington Post first reported the President’s interest in Fisher. According to the Post, the President has “aggressively” pushed for the Army Corps of Engineers to award a wall contract to Fisher.
      The President “immediately brought up Fisher” during a May 23 meeting in the Oval Office to discuss details of the border wall with various government officials, including that he wants it to be painted black and include French-style doors, according to the Post and confirmed by CNN.
      “The Army Corps of Engineers says about 450 miles of wall will be completed by the end of next year, and the only thing President Trump is pushing, is for the wall to be finished quickly so the American people have the safety and security they deserve,” said Hogan Gidley, White House deputy press secretary.
      A US government official familiar with the meeting tells CNN that the President has repeatedly mentioned the company in discussions he’s had about the wall with the head of the Army Corps of Engineers, Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite.
      Fisher has recently made efforts to raise its public profile, both by upping its lobbying efforts and through repeated appearances on conservative media by its CEO, Tommy Fisher.

      In the past two years, for example, the company’s congressional lobbying expenditures jumped significantly — from $5,000 in 2017 to $75,000 in 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit that tracks lobbying expenditures.

      When asked about Fisher Sand & Gravel’s lobbying, Don Larson, one of Fisher’s registered lobbyists, said: “I am working to help decision makers in Washington become familiar with the company and its outstanding capabilities.”
      Media Blitz
      As part of a media blitz on outlets including Fox News, SiriusXM Patriot and Breitbart News, Tommy Fisher has discussed his support for the border wall and pitched his company as the one to build it. In a March 5 appearance on Fox & Friends, Fisher said that his company could build 234 miles of border wall for $4.3 billion, compared to the $5.7 billion that the Trump administration has requested from Congress.
      Fisher claimed that his firm can work five-to-10 times faster than competitors as a result of its construction process.
      The President has also touted Fisher on Fox News. In an April interview in which he was asked about Fisher by Sean Hannity, Trump said the company was “recommended strongly by a great new senator, as you know, Kevin Cramer. And they’re real. But they have been bidding and so far they haven’t been meeting the bids. I thought they would.”
      Despite the President’s interest, the company has thus far been unsuccessful in obtaining a contract to build the border wall, beyond that of a prototype.

      Earlier this year, Fisher put its name in the running for border wall contracts worth nearly $1 billion. When it lost the bid to Barnard Construction Co. and SLSCO Ltd., Fisher protested the awards over claims that the process was biased. In response, the Army Corps canceled the award. But after a review of the process, the Army Corps combined the projects and granted it to a subsidiary of Barnard Construction, according to an agency spokesperson.
      It’s unclear whether the project will proceed, given the recent decision by a federal judge to block the use of Defense Department funds to build parts of the border wall and the administration’s appeal.
      Fisher, which has a pending lawsuit in the US Court of Federal Claims over the solicitation process, is listed by the Defense Department as being among firms eligible to compete for future border contracts.

      It has moved forward with a private group, We Build the Wall, that is building sections of barrier on private land in New Mexico using private money raised as part of a GoFundMe campaign. Kris Kobach, the former Kansas Secretary of State who is now general counsel for the group, said a half-mile stretch is nearly complete, at an estimated cost of $6 million to $8 million.

      In a statement, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said Fisher Industries has told them that the company has begun construction on private property along the border “in the approximate area of a USBP border barrier requirement that was not prioritized under current funding.”
      The spokesperson added: “It is not uncommon for vendors” to demonstrate their capabilities using “their own resources,” but the agency goes on to “encourage all interested vendors” to compete for border contracts “through established mechanisms to ensure any construction is carried out under relevant federal authorities and meets USBP operational requirements for border barrier.”
      In responses provided to CNN through Scott Sleight, an attorney working on behalf of the company, Fisher maintained that it’s “committed to working with all appropriate federal government officials and agencies to provide its expertise and experience to help secure America’s southern border.”
      The company says it has “developed a patent-pending bollard fence hanging system that [it] believes allows border fencing to be constructed faster than any contractor using common construction methods.” It also added: “Fisher has been concerned about the procurement procedures and evaluations done by the USACE to date, and hopes these issues can be remedied.”
      Relationship with Sen. Cramer
      A month after attending the 2018 State of the Union address with Cramer, Fisher and his wife, Candice each contributed the $5,400 maximum donation to Cramer’s campaign for the US Senate, Federal Election Commission records show.
      Fisher also donated to several Arizona Republicans in the 2018 election cycle, including giving the $5,400-maximum donation to Martha McSally’s campaign, records show.
      A recent video produced by Fisher Sand & Gravel demonstrating its ability to construct the wall includes a clip of Cramer at the controls of a track-hoe lifting sections of barrier wall into place, saying “this is just like XBOX, baby.” Cramer was joined at the demonstration by a handful of other Republican lawmakers from across the country.

      Cramer has been publicly critical of how the Army Corps has handled its border wall construction work, arguing that it has moved too slowly and expressing frustration over how it has dealt with Fisher. In an interview with a North Dakota TV station, Cramer said that he believes the corps “made a miscalculation in who they chose over Fisher” and that the company had been “skunked so to speak.” Cramer added that Fisher “remains a pre-qualified, high level, competitor.”

      In an interview with CNN, Cramer said that the company has come up in conversations he has had with administration officials, including the President and the head of the Army Corps, but while the senator said that he would “love if they got every inch of the project,” he added that he has “never advocated specifically for them.”
      "Every time someone comes to meet with me, whether it’s (Acting Defense Secretary) Shanahan, General Semonite, even with Donald Trump, they bring up Fisher Industries because they assume that’s my thing," Cramer said.
      “One of the things I’ve never done is said it should be Fisher,” Cramer said. “Now, I love Fisher. I’d love if they got every inch of the project. They’re my constituents, I don’t apologize for that. But my interest really is more in the bureaucratic process.”
      According to an administration official familiar with the situation, Cramer sent information about Fisher to the President’s son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, who then passed it along to the Army Corps of Engineers for their consideration. The source tells CNN that Kushner was not familiar with the company prior to getting information about them from Cramer.
      Cramer said he does recall passing along information about the company to Kushner, but that he did not know what Kushner did with the information.
      On May 24, Cramer told a North Dakota radio station that the President has asked him to examine the process of how federal border wall projects are awarded.
      “We’re going to do an entire audit,” Cramer said. “I’ve asked for the entire bid process, and all of the bid numbers.” Cramer told CNN the President said he wanted the wall built for the “lowest, best price, and it’s also quality, and that’s what any builder should want.”
      Asked about aspects of the company’s checkered legal record, Cramer said “that level of scrutiny is important, but I would hope the same scrutiny would be put on the Corps of Engineers.”
      Environmental violations
      Though its corporate headquarters are in North Dakota, Fisher has a sizable footprint in Arizona, where it operates an asphalt company as well as a drilling and blasting company. It’s there that the company has compiled an extensive track record of environmental violations.
      From 2007 to 2017, Fisher Sand & Gravel compiled more than 1,300 air-quality violations in Maricopa County, culminating in the third highest settlement ever received by the Maricopa County Air Quality Department, according to Bob Huhn, a department spokesperson. That’s a record number of violations for any air-quality settlement in the county, Huhn said. The settlement totaled more than $1 million, though the department received slightly less than that following negotiations, Huhn said.
      Most of the violations came from an asphalt plant that the company was running in south Phoenix that has since closed. While the plant was still running, the City of Phoenix filed 469 criminal charges against the company from August to October of 2009, according to a city spokesperson.
      According to a 2010 article in the Arizona Republic, Fisher reached an agreement with Phoenix officials to close the plant in 2010. As part of the deal, fines were reduced from $1.1 million to an estimated $243,000 and all criminal charges were reduced to civil charges.
      Mary Rose Wilcox was a member of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors at the time the city and county were fighting Fisher over the asphalt plant, which was located in her district. “They tried to persuade us they were good guys since they were a family-owned company. But they were spreading noxious fumes into a residential area,” Wilcox said. “We tried to work with them, but their violations were just so blatant.”
      Michael Pops, a community activist who lived in the area around the plant, remembers fighting with Fisher for six years before the plant finally shut down. “The impact they had on this community was devastating,” Pops said, adding many low-income residents living near the asphalt plant were sickened from the fumes the plant emitted.
      The company has also racked up more than 120 violations with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality from 2004 until as recently as last summer, according to the department.
      In 2011, Fisher agreed to a Consent Judgement with ADEQ over numerous air quality violations the company had committed. As part of that settlement, Fisher agreed to pay $125,000 in civil penalties, and that it would remain in compliance with state air quality standards. Within two years Fisher was found to be in violation of that agreement and was forced to pay an additional $500,000 in fines, according to the state’s attorney general’s office.
      Legal trouble
      Internally, the company has also confronted issues.
      In 2011, Fisher Sand & Gravel agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a sexual discrimination and retaliation suit filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The lawsuit charged that the company violated federal anti-discrimination laws when it “subjected two women workers to egregious verbal sexual harassment by a supervisor and then fired one of them after she repeatedly asked the supervisor to stop harassing her and complained to a job superintendent.”
      The settlement required Fisher to provide anti-discrimination training to its employees in New Mexico and review its policies on sexual harassment.
      Micheal Fisher, a former co-owner of Fisher and Tommy’s brother, was sentenced to prison in 2009 for tax fraud, according to the Justice Department. Fisher pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to defraud the United States by impeding the [Internal Revenue Service], four counts of aiding in the filing of false federal tax returns for FSG and four counts of filing false individual tax returns,” according to a Justice Department release.
      The company also admitted responsibility for defrauding the US by impeding the IRS, according to the DOJ. Citing a long standing policy of not commenting on the contracting process, the Army Corps declined to comment on whether Fisher’s history factored into its decision not to award Fisher a contract.

      https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/31/politics/fisher-sand-and-gravel-legal-history-border-wall/index.html

    • Private US-Mexico border wall ordered open by gov’t, fights back and is now closed again

      The privately funded portion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall is now fully secure and closed again after one of its gates had been ordered to remain open until disputes about waterway access could be resolved.

      “Our border wall & gate are secure again and we still have not had a single breach. I want to thank the IBWC for acting swiftly and we look forward to working with you on our future projects,” triple amputee Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage posted to Twitter on Tuesday night.

      Kolfage created We Build The Wall Inc., a nonprofit that is now backed by former Trump Administration Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. The group crowd-funded more than $22 million in order to privately build a border wall and then sell it to the U.S. government for $1.

      A portion of that wall has been constructed in Texas for between $6 and $8 million. The 1-mile-long wall is located on private property near El Paso, Texas, and Sunland Park, New Mexico.

      However, the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) had ordered a 33-foot gate within the private border wall to remain open – not locked and closed – over a waterway access issue, according to BuzzFeed News. The IBCW addresses waterway issues between the U.S. and Mexico.

      “This is normally done well in advance of a construction project,” IBWC spokesperson Lori Kuczmanski said. “They think they can build now and ask questions later, and that’s not how it works.”

      BuzzFeed reported that the IBWC said the gate “had blocked officials from accessing a levee and dam, and cut off public access to a historic monument known as Monument One, the first in a series of obelisks that mark the U.S.–Mexico border from El Paso to Tijuana.”

      By Tuesday night, the IBWC said the gate would remain locked at night and issued a statement.

      “The U.S. Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC) will lock the privately-owned gate on federal property at night effective immediately due to security concerns,” it said.

      The statement continues:

      The USIBWC is continuing to work with We Build the Wall regarding its permit request. Until this decision, the private gate was in a locked open position. We Build the Wall, a private organization, built a gate on federal land in Sunland Park, N.M., near El Paso, Texas, without authority, and then locked the gate closed on June 6, 2019. The private gate blocks a levee road owned by the U.S. Government. After repeated requests to unlock and open the private gate, the United States Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC), accompanied by two uniformed law enforcement officers from the Dona Ana County Sheriff’s Office, removed the private lock, opened the gate, and locked the gate open pending further discussions with We Build the Wall. The gate was also opened so that USIBWC employees can conduct maintenance and operations at American Dam.

      The USIBWC did not authorize the construction of the private gate on federal property as announced on We Build the Wall’s Twitter page. The USIBWC is not charged with securing other fences or gates as reported by We Build the Wall. The international border fences are not on USIBWC property. The USIBWC did not open any other gates in the El Paso area as erroneously reported. Other gates and the border fence are controlled by other federal agencies.

      When the proper documentation is received for the permit, USIBWC will continue to process the permit application.

      Before the statement had been released, Kolfage posted to Twitter.
      https://a

      mericanmilitarynews.com/2019/06/private-us-mexico-border-wall-ordered-open-by-intl-group-later-closed-locked-after-security-concerns/

  • La leçon de cinéma de John Boorman | ARTE
    Disponible du 01/08/2017 au 03/08/2020
    https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/073343-006-A/la-lecon-de-cinema-de-john-boorman

    Rencontre avec le cinéaste John Boorman animée par Michel Ciment et Bernard Benoliel, captée le 3 juin 2017 à la Cinémathèque Française à la suite de la projection du film « Deliverance » (1971).

    ““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““
    Dueling Banjos
    Defensa (Deliverance ; John Boorman, 1972)
    José Vicedo by José Vicedo
    17 julio 2018

    ¿Recordáis ese estupendo clásico que es Deliverance (Defensa en su título español)?
    En esta película de culto protagonizada por Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty y Ronny Cox, hay una escena mítica en la cual un joven redneck interpretado por Billy Redden toca el banjo, mientras el personaje encarnado por Cox intenta seguirle con la guitarra (podéis ver toda la -magistral- escena en el vídeo de arriba).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=326&v=5s73flj1t38

    Pues bien, lo que se escucha es nada menos que Dueling Banjos, una composición instrumental de Arthur «Guitar Boogie» Smith compuesta en 1955 para banjo bajo el título Feudin’ Banjos, y que incorpora riffs de Yankee Doodle. Smith la grabó para un banjo de cuatro cuerdas acompañado por el músico Don Reno en el banjo bluegrass de cinco cuerdas.
    Los arreglos de Dueling Banjos para la película los realizaron Eric Weissberg y Steve Mandell y se incluyeron en su banda sonora.​ La versión de Weissberg y Mandell alcanzó la posición número dos durante cuatro semanas en el Hot 100 de 1973, en todas ellas detrás del Killing Me Softly With His Song de Roberta Flack, y la primera posición durante dos semanas en el mismo año en la lista de música contemporánea para adultos. (...)

  • L’écologie peut-elle être nationale ?
    https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-grande-table-2eme-partie/lecologie-peut-elle-etre-nationale


    Ils ont de drôle de question sur france-cul, peut-être que Hervé Juvin et Olivia Gesbert eurent trouvé la réponse en descendant en canoë la rivière Chattooga, en Géorgie, dans le Sud des Etats-Unis, en 1972.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8t8uqEf6_A


    Eric Weissberg & Steve Mandell - Dueling Banjos ( Deliverance 1972 )
    https://www.telerama.fr/cinema/films/delivrance,4704.php
    Délivrance est diffusé ce soir sur France 5
    #radio #télévision #écologie

  • Indiedrome du 21/5/2019
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/indiedrome/indiedrome-du-21-5-2019

    Jos Smolders: For Rudy Carrera « Nowhere » (Cronica Electronica)

    Heather Leigh: Gold Teeth « Throne » (Editions Mego)

    Steve Hauschildt: Aroid « Dissolvi » (Ghostly International)

    Philip Corner: Finale - Violin, Cello, Piano (1958) « Extreemizms » (Unseen Worlds)

    Havard Volden: VIII « Space Happy » (Sofa)

    Havard Volden: IX « Space Happy » (Sofa)

    M. Geddes Gengras: Nave « Light Pipe » (Room 40)

    Lena Hessels: First « Billow » (Terp)

    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/indiedrome/indiedrome-du-21-5-2019_06699__1.mp3

  • The Terrifying Potential of the 5G Network | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/the-terrifying-potential-of-the-5g-network

    Two words explain the difference between our current wireless networks and 5G: speed and latency. 5G—if you believe the hype—is expected to be up to a hundred times faster. (A two-hour movie could be downloaded in less than four seconds.) That speed will reduce, and possibly eliminate, the delay—the latency—between instructing a computer to perform a command and its execution. This, again, if you believe the hype, will lead to a whole new Internet of Things, where everything from toasters to dog collars to dialysis pumps to running shoes will be connected. Remote robotic surgery will be routine, the military will develop hypersonic weapons, and autonomous vehicles will cruise safely along smart highways. The claims are extravagant, and the stakes are high. One estimate projects that 5G will pump twelve trillion dollars into the global economy by 2035, and add twenty-two million new jobs in the United States alone. This 5G world, we are told, will usher in a fourth industrial revolution.

    A totally connected world will also be especially susceptible to cyberattacks. Even before the introduction of 5G networks, hackers have breached the control center of a municipal dam system, stopped an Internet-connected car as it travelled down an interstate, and sabotaged home appliances. Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime. Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption. “5G is not just for refrigerators,” Spalding said. “It’s farm implements, it’s airplanes, it’s all kinds of different things that can actually kill people or that allow someone to reach into the network and direct those things to do what they want them to do. It’s a completely different threat that we’ve never experienced before.”

    Spalding’s solution, he told me, was to build the 5G network from scratch, incorporating cyber defenses into its design.

    There are very good reasons to keep a company that appears to be beholden to a government with a documented history of industrial cyber espionage, international data theft, and domestic spying out of global digital networks. But banning Huawei hardware will not secure those networks. Even in the absence of Huawei equipment, systems still may rely on software developed in China, and software can be reprogrammed remotely by malicious actors. And every device connected to the fifth-generation Internet will likely remain susceptible to hacking. According to James Baker, the former F.B.I. general counsel who runs the national-security program at the R Street Institute, “There’s a concern that those devices that are connected to the 5G network are not going to be very secure from a cyber perspective. That presents a huge vulnerability for the system, because those devices can be turned into bots, for example, and you can have a massive botnet that can be used to attack different parts of the network.”

    This past January, Tom Wheeler, who was the F.C.C. chairman during the Obama Administration, published an Op-Ed in the New York Times titled “If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn’t It Secure?” The Trump Administration had walked away from security efforts begun during Wheeler’s tenure at the F.C.C.; most notably, in recent negotiations over international standards, the U.S. eliminated a requirement that the technical specifications of 5G include cyber defense. “For the first time in history,” Wheeler wrote, “cybersecurity was being required as a forethought in the design of a new network standard—until the Trump F.C.C. repealed it.” The agency also rejected the notion that companies building and running American digital networks were responsible for overseeing their security. This might have been expected, but the current F.C.C. does not consider cybersecurity to be a part of its domain, either. “I certainly did when we were in office,” Wheeler told me. “But the Republicans who were on the commission at that point in time, and are still there, one being the chairman, opposed those activities as being overly regulatory.”

    Opening up new spectrum is crucial to achieving the super-fast speeds promised by 5G. Most American carriers are planning to migrate their services to a higher part of the spectrum, where the bands are big and broad and allow for colossal rivers of data to flow through them. (Some carriers are also working with lower-spectrum frequencies, where the speeds will not be as fast but likely more reliable.) Until recently, these high-frequency bands, which are called millimetre waves, were not available for Internet transmission, but advances in antenna technology have made it possible, at least in theory. In practice, millimetre waves are finicky: they can only travel short distances—about a thousand feet—and are impeded by walls, foliage, human bodies, and, apparently, rain.

    Deploying millions of wireless relays so close to one another and, therefore, to our bodies has elicited its own concerns. Two years ago, a hundred and eighty scientists and doctors from thirty-six countries appealed to the European Union for a moratorium on 5G adoption until the effects of the expected increase in low-level radiation were studied. In February, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, took both the F.C.C. and F.D.A. to task for pushing ahead with 5G without assessing its health risks. “We’re kind of flying blind here,” he concluded. A system built on millions of cell relays, antennas, and sensors also offers previously unthinkable surveillance potential. Telecom companies already sell location data to marketers, and law enforcement has used similar data to track protesters. 5G will catalogue exactly where someone has come from, where they are going, and what they are doing. “To give one made-up example,” Steve Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University, told the Wall Street Journal, “might a pollution sensor detect cigarette smoke or vaping, while a Bluetooth receiver picks up the identities of nearby phones? Insurance companies might be interested.” Paired with facial recognition and artificial intelligence, the data streams and location capabilities of 5G will make anonymity a historical artifact.

    To accommodate these limitations, 5G cellular relays will have to be installed inside buildings and on every city block, at least. Cell relays mounted on thirteen million utility poles, for example, will deliver 5G speeds to just over half of the American population, and cost around four hundred billion dollars to install. Rural communities will be out of luck—too many trees, too few people—despite the F.C.C.’s recently announced Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

    Deploying millions of wireless relays so close to one another and, therefore, to our bodies has elicited its own concerns. Two years ago, a hundred and eighty scientists and doctors from thirty-six countries appealed to the European Union for a moratorium on 5G adoption until the effects of the expected increase in low-level radiation were studied. In February, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, took both the F.C.C. and F.D.A. to task for pushing ahead with 5G without assessing its health risks. “We’re kind of flying blind here,” he concluded. A system built on millions of cell relays, antennas, and sensors also offers previously unthinkable surveillance potential. Telecom companies already sell location data to marketers, and law enforcement has used similar data to track protesters. 5G will catalogue exactly where someone has come from, where they are going, and what they are doing. “To give one made-up example,” Steve Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University, told the Wall Street Journal, “might a pollution sensor detect cigarette smoke or vaping, while a Bluetooth receiver picks up the identities of nearby phones? Insurance companies might be interested.” Paired with facial recognition and artificial intelligence, the data streams and location capabilities of 5G will make anonymity a historical artifact.

    #Surveillance #Santé #5G #Cybersécurité

  • Minimalisme vs Jazz vs Fluxus vs (sound) art
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/moacrealsloa/minimalisme-vs-jazz-vs-fluxus-vs-art

    There is of course a connection between Minimalisme vs Jazz vs Fluxus vs (sound) art :

    Terry Riley (with Chet Baker) : Music For The Gift (part V) (Music For The Gift - Cortical Foundation - 2000)

    Steve Reich : It’s Gonna Rain (part I and II) (Live / Electric Music - Columbia Masterworks - 1968)

    Joseph Beuys & Henning Christiansen : Op. 50 Requiem Of Art (Aus «Celtic») Fluxorum Organum II (Schottische Symphonie / Requiem Of Art - Edition Schellman - 1973)

    Bill Fontana : Landscape Sculpture With Fog Horns. Installation Version, 1981 (Landscape Sculpture With Fog Horns - KQED-FM - 1982)

    Steve Roden / In Between Noise : The Radio (The Radio - Sonoris - 1999)

    La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela : 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta ( 31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 (...)

    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/moacrealsloa/minimalisme-vs-jazz-vs-fluxus-vs-art_06625__1.mp3

  • Lunch with Alan Kay: how to become educated enough to invent the future
    http://onpk.net/index.php/2019/04/29/724-lunch-with-alan-kay-how-to-become-educated-enough-to-invent-the-future

    Steve Krouse évoque une longue discussion avec Alan Kay sur son blog : Also like Bob Barton, Alan spent most of the lunch very kindly intellectually destroying me, smacking me around, and pointing out how much more I have to learn in order to do good work. I have met only a handful of people...

    #Notes

  • Steve Bannon, le populiste qui fait trembler les élites, en Europe pour aider à remporter les Européennes (Le Figaro)
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/international/15933-steve-bannon-le-populiste-qui-fait-trembler-les-elites-en-europe-po

    Ses adversaires le décrivent comme l’ « idéologue le plus dangereux d’Amérique ». Après avoir contribué à faire gagner Donald Trump, Steve Bannon prétend aider les populistes européens à remporter une victoire historique lors des élections de mai prochain.

    L’ activiste dit « sulfureux » était interviewé par Le Figaro magazine. Le Figaro magazine. – Comment vous définissez-vous idéologiquement ? Comme un populiste ? Un nationaliste ? Un national-populiste ? Un conservateur ? Un national-conservateur ? Steve Bannon. – Je dirais que je suis à la fois populiste, nationaliste et souverainiste, avec une tendance traditionaliste dans la mesure où je défends la structure familiale et les valeurs traditionnelles. C’est le principe même du mouvement dont je fais partie que de réunir tous ces courants idéologiques. Je tiens (...)

    #En_vedette #Actualités_internationales #Actualités_Internationales

  • Apocalypse Now ?

    Le pays va-t-il se retourner contre les riches ? Contre l’innovation technologique ? Est-ce que ça va se transformer en désordre civil ? En tout cas, plus de 50 % des milliardaires de la Silicon Valley ont pris, d’une manière ou d’une autre, une assurance contre l’apocalypse.

    Tout aussi irrationnel, les mêmes qui font construire un mur de la honte pour se « proteger » des populations du Sud sont en train de coloniser la Nouvelle-Zélande :

    S’ils ne s’accordent pas sur la cause de cette apocalypse, beaucoup trouvent que la Nouvelle-Zélande est le meilleur endroit pour y faire face. Un pays qui ne connaît pas d’ennemi, a peu de chance d’être la cible d’une bombe nucléaire, et composé de nombreuses îles où s’isoler, avec de l’altitude pour faire face à la montée du niveau de la mer, de larges territoires inhabités, peu de pollution… Rien qu’en 2016, 13 000 riches américains y ont demandé un permis de construire. Le pays a dû restreindre par la loi la vente de logements à des étrangers, pour maîtriser la hausse des prix de l’immobilier.

    Ce sont aussi les mêmes qui, déplaçant les populations, détruisant lieux de vie indigènes et zones à défendre, se construisent des rêves d’autonomie :

    Mark Zuckerberg, PDG de Facebook, voit plus grand. Il a acheté un domaine dans le pacifique, sur une petite île au large de Hawaï. Il a payé les poignées de familles présentes sur ses terres, qui y cultivaient de la canne à sucre, pour partir. Il entend s’y faire bâtir une propriété et une ferme bio de 27 hectares, en autosuffisance totale. Un investissement à plus de cent millions de dollars pour assurer sa seule survie et celle de sa famille…

    Là où fleurissent les bunkers de milliardaires : https://www.humanite.fr/nouvelle-zelande-la-ou-fleurissent-les-bunkers-de-milliardaires-670945

    • Nouvelle-zélande. Là où fleurissent les bunkers de milliardaires | L’Humanité
      https://www.humanite.fr/nouvelle-zelande-la-ou-fleurissent-les-bunkers-de-milliardaires-670945


      La bonne nouvelle, c’est que maintenant, nous savons très exactement où trouver les responsables de ce merdier !

      De la Californie à Auckland, les entrepreneurs de la Silicon Valley construisent des abris par peur de la fin d’un monde qu’ils ont participé à créer.

      Les magnats de la Silicon Valley et autres startupers croient-ils sincèrement, comme ils aiment le répéter à longueur de conférences et de plateaux télé, que la technologie va sauver le monde ? La réponse se trouve certainement en Nouvelle-Zélande, où plusieurs dizaines d’entre eux achètent des terres pour se préparer à l’apocalypse. Un haut cadre de Facebook, qui venait de s’offrir quelques hectares boisés sur une île où il a fait installer des générateurs, panneaux solaires et un stock de munitions, le disait clairement à la BBC : « Notre société s’apprête à vivre des changements économiques et technologiques spectaculaires et je ne pense pas que les gens le réalisent. Mais nous, oui, la Silicon Valley vit dans le futur. Avec l’automatisation et l’intelligence artificielle, presque la moitié des emplois américains n’existeront plus dans vingt, trente ans. »
      Une assurance contre l’apocalypse pour les ultrariches

      Un drame social est à venir, qu’ils anticipent d’autant plus qu’ils commencent à avoir conscience qu’ils en sont la cause. Le milliardaire Reid Hoffman, fondateur de LinkedIn, s’interroge donc, dans le New Yorker : « Le pays va-t-il se retourner contre les riches ? Contre l’innovation technologique ? Est-ce que ça va se transformer en désordre civil ? En tout cas, plus de 50 % des milliardaires de la Silicon Valley ont pris, d’une manière ou d’une autre, une assurance contre l’apocalypse. » Pour eux, lorsque le peuple aussi s’en rendra compte et se demandera qui s’est enrichi à milliards en détruisant le travail et en creusant les inégalités, mieux vaudra pour les responsables être à plusieurs milliers de kilomètres de là. Et bien préparés.

      D’autres ultrariches craignent plutôt les bouleversements climatiques, le soulèvement des robots dominés par une intelligence artificielle hostile, Kim Jong-un, un virus… La preuve, il est 23 h 58 sur l’horloge de la fin du monde, tenue à l’heure par l’université de Chicago. S’ils ne s’accordent pas sur la cause de cette apocalypse, beaucoup trouvent que la Nouvelle-Zélande est le meilleur endroit pour y faire face. Un pays qui ne connaît pas d’ennemi, a peu de chance d’être la cible d’une bombe nucléaire, et composé de nombreuses îles où s’isoler, avec de l’altitude pour faire face à la montée du niveau de la mer, de larges territoires inhabités, peu de pollution… Rien qu’en 2016, 13 000 riches américains y ont demandé un permis de construire. Le pays a dû restreindre par la loi la vente de logements à des étrangers, pour maîtriser la hausse des prix de l’immobilier.

      Le milliardaire Peter Thiel, fondateur de PayPal et de Palantir, a lancé le mouvement en 2015, en achetant pour près de 12 millions d’euros une ferme et près de 200 hectares de terrain sur les rives du lac Wanaka, dans le sud de la Nouvelle-Zélande. Il y a fait construit une pièce ultrasécurisée. Avec quatre autres entrepreneurs de la Silicon Valley, dont Sam Altman, patron de Y Combinator, il garde toujours un avion prêt à s’envoler et à traverser 7 000 kilomètres au-dessus du Pacifique au moindre signe d’apocalypse ou de révolte sociale. L’un d’entre eux avoue même conserver dans son garage de San Francisco une moto et des armes, pour rejoindre au plus vite l’avion privé.

      Julian Robertson, milliardaire et président d’un fonds d’investissement californien, a, lui, choisi le lac voisin de Wakatipu. Une dizaine d’autres multimillionnaires californiens ont acheté des propriétés dans la région. Tandis que le financier Bill Foley et le réalisateur de Titanic, James Cameron, ont, eux, opté pour des villas sécurisées sur l’île plus au nord. Sept autres pontes de la Silicon Valley ont opté pour des bunkers blindés, construits à plus de trois mètres sous le sol, et localisables uniquement par GPS dans des grandes prairies de la Nouvelle-Zélande. Et cela au bénéfice d’une entreprise californienne, Terra Vivos, qui fait son beurre en proposant ses solutions contre l’apocalypse. L’entreprise avait déjà pu roder son produit d’appel, un grand bunker antiatomique médicalisé, avec cinéma, armurerie et cellules individuelles, à destination des nombreux Américains qui ont cru à la fin du monde pour le 21 décembre 2012, date de fin d’un calendrier maya. Elle le recycle aujourd’hui pour les cadres de la Silicon Valley qui ont moins de moyens que les hauts dirigeants, et propose des places autour de 35 000 euros par personne dans ces abris collectifs conçus pour trois cents à mille personnes.

      Le fondateur de Terra Vivos se frotte les mains depuis que, en 2017, le sujet privilégié des patrons réunis à Davos lors du forum économique mondial était la peur d’une « révolution ou d’un conflit social qui s’en prendrait au 1 % » le plus riche, raconte-t-il. Pour lui qui doit recycler ses bunkers antiatomiques dans les grandes étendues états-uniennes, la Nouvelle-Zélande n’est pas idéale puisqu’elle est sensible aux tsunamis, notamment en cas de chute de météorite… Mais, sentant l’air du temps, il a investi huit millions pour y bâtir un bunker de trois cents places.
      Le PDG de Facebook a payé les habitants d’une île pour partir

      Le discours prend et les patrons de la Silicon Valley s’arment. Si certains stockent du carburant et des munitions, un autre startuper préfère prendre des cours de tir à l’arc. Steve Huffman, le fondateur de Reddit, s’est fait opérer des yeux parce qu’en cas de désastre, il veut augmenter ses chances de survie sans lunettes ni lentilles de contact. Mark Zuckerberg, PDG de Facebook, voit plus grand. Il a acheté un domaine dans le pacifique, sur une petite île au large de Hawaï. Il a payé les poignées de familles présentes sur ses terres, qui y cultivaient de la canne à sucre, pour partir. Il entend s’y faire bâtir une propriété et une ferme bio de 27 hectares, en autosuffisance totale. Un investissement à plus de cent millions de dollars pour assurer sa seule survie et celle de sa famille… Comme quoi, « après moi le déluge » n’est pas qu’un proverbe, mais bien une philosophie de vie.

      #it_has_begun

  • 3 Women Changing The Way the World Thinks About Product Design
    https://hackernoon.com/3-women-changing-the-way-the-world-thinks-about-product-design-b40fc3802

    These entrepreneurs are nailing category design.By Christopher Lochhead, podcaster, best selling author, and 3X Silicon Valley CMOMost of us can’t go a single hour without reaching for our iPhones.But nobody even knew why they needed an iPhone until Steve Jobs told them. And he did it by creating a brand-new category: a touch-enabled “smartphone” that can connects to the internet and doubles as a media player.Rather than simply solving the problem of, “What should a phone be capable of?” Jobs redesigned the problem by showing us, then conditioning us, to equate smartphones with his product. He owned this niche. Today, it’s still the standard against which all other smartphones are measured — with over 1 billion iPhones sold and counting.To build lasting brands and products, legendary companies (...)

    #business #life #tech #entrepreneurship #marketing

  • Dans la #Silicon_Valley, le retour des #drogues #psychédéliques | Les Echos
    https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/dans-la-silicon-valley-le-retour-des-drogues-psychedeliques-1006461

    Tous les matins, c’est le même #rituel. « Je me lève, je bois un thé vert, je prends ma #dose, puis je médite un peu. Sous la douche, déjà, je commence à sentir les bénéfices, j’ai plein d’idées qui apparaissent. » Lové dans un fauteuil de l’hôtel Rosewood Sand Hill, le QG officieux de la crème de la Silicon Valley, à deux pas du siège de Facebook, l’entrepreneur #Cory_McCloud admet ne pas pouvoir fonctionner sans sa « microdose » de #LSD . « Je prends un dixième d’une dose normale, parfois deux dixièmes selon les jours, détaille ce quadra, qui a vendu, au tournant des années 2000, sa première start-up d’édition en ligne à Martin Eberhard, le cofondateur de Tesla. Je le fais de façon quasi quotidienne depuis plusieurs années. Avec le temps, j’ai optimisé mon protocole. Ca m’aide à concevoir des systèmes dans ma tête, à imaginer les architectures dont j’ai besoin pour mes projets. Il y a un effet ’Eureka’. 

    Certains estiment pourtant que le LSD a été à la Silicon Valley ce que la cocaïne a été à Wall Street. « L’iPhone n’aurait jamais existé sans LSD », assure Cory McCloud, qui cite, comme beaucoup d’autres, Steve Jobs. »

  • Si les gémissement de la #collapsologie de Servigne & Co vous soulent, il y a d’autres scientifiques qui prennent la crise écologique et la critique du capitalisme industriel un peu plus au sérieux. Heureusement !

    Lettre de chercheur.es aux jeunes et moins-jeunes, qui se sont mobilisé.es les 14, 15 et 16 mars

    https://lundi.am/Lettre-de-chercheur-es-aux-jeunes-et-moins-jeunes-qui-se-sont-mobilise-es-les

    Voir aussi leur Tribune du 5 mars 2019 dans le journal Le Monde :

    https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/03/05/climat-la-mobilisation-mondiale-du-15-mars-lancee-par-la-jeunesse-doit-nous-

    Climat : « La mobilisation mondiale du 15 mars, lancée par la jeunesse, doit nous interpeller et nous faire réagir »

    Dans une tribune au « Monde », un collectif d’universitaires, principalement toulousains, salue « l’entrée en résistance » des jeunes contre l’inaction climatique, mais adresse aussi ses critiques aux institutions de recherche elles-mêmes.

    Tribune . Des étudiants et des lycéens ont lancé un appel à la « grève mondiale pour le futur », le 15 mars, et à des actions reconductibles et amplifiées chaque vendredi. Nous, personnels de la recherche publique et de l’enseignement supérieur, sommes à leurs côtés et avec les enseignants qui auront choisi de les accompagner. Nous célébrons leur décision « d’entrer en résistance » face à l’inaction politique comme à l’aveuglement ou au consentement passif qui s’en satisfait.
    Par la recherche académique, nous avons un accès privilégié aux résultats très alarmants sur les bouleversements écologiques et les dérèglements globaux en cours, sans précédent. Nous savons aussi que ceux-ci résultent des activités d’une partie de l’humanité à travers des systèmes socio-économiques qui ont montré leur incapacité structurelle à prendre en compte le long terme et les limites environnementales. Désormais globalisé, ce cadre général produit une fuite en avant destructrice. Les tendances actuelles nous conduisent vers des conditions critiques, au point que d’ici quelques décennies à peine l’habitabilité de notre planète pourrait être compromise.
    Nos connaissances nous placent en position de témoins tristement privilégiés du gouffre toujours plus béant qui sépare le chemin que devraient suivre nos sociétés pour tenter de limiter la catastrophe – par une profonde transformation de nos modes de vie et les indispensables politiques de justice, de solidarité, de relocalisation et de résilience pouvant rendre ce tournant possible – et la trajectoire mortifère effectivement suivie. Dans la variété de nos disciplines, notre profession au service de la connaissance nous donne la responsabilité d’en tirer des conséquences pratiques et un engagement dans l’action.

    A l’image du déni généralisé

    Au cœur même de nos institutions (CNRS, instituts, universités…), nous devons constater que la transition écologique – dans ses dimensions les plus simples – est loin d’être intégrée dans les objectifs et les pratiques. Combien d’organismes de recherche en France ont-ils mis en place une véritable politique de réduction de leur empreinte environnementale ? Combien d’entre nous ont réellement changé leurs habitudes, par exemple, en limitant les déplacements en avion ?
    La plupart de nos laboratoires sont aujourd’hui incapables d’évaluer leur propre impact, ne serait-ce qu’en réalisant un bilan carbone complet, alors que c’est une obligation légale. Les modalités d’évaluation des projets comme des carrières encouragent les circulations tous azimuts, notamment les congrès et colloques internationaux sans aucune retenue. Le fait que les institutions mêmes qui produisent les résultats les plus alarmants sur l’état du système Terre, et les chercheuses et chercheurs qui tirent régulièrement la sonnette d’alarme, soient incapables de mettre en place les mesures pour limiter leur propre impact est à l’image du déni généralisé qui caractérise nos sociétés.
    L’inaction du milieu de la recherche académique et de ses institutions est révélatrice du défi devant lequel nous nous trouvons. Notre civilisation est celle des technosciences et la recherche est au cœur d’un projet de société toujours animé par la notion d’un inéluctable « progrès ». Si ce terme recouvre des réalités concrètes bénéfiques – quoique fort inégalement réparties –, il sert aussi à cautionner une fuite en avant continue, un processus de transformation auto-entretenu dont l’accélération est porteuse de régressions, d’impasses et d’illusions qui nous aveuglent. Alors que domine la logique économique capitaliste, l’idée même de progrès est aussi dévoyée quand elle se réduit à l’indice de « croissance » économique, quelles qu’en soient les conséquences néfastes, notamment à long terme.

    Illusoire et dangereuse idée

    La recherche est considérée comme un moteur d’innovation positive, source d’inspiration et de culture pour notre société. Elle semble pourtant trop souvent animée par l’illusoire et dangereuse idée d’expansion et de modernisation infinies, contribuant sans réflexivité à la quête effrénée de « nouveautés » et de coups d’éclat. Questionner la façon dont nous pratiquons la recherche aujourd’hui, c’est donc aussi interroger notre rapport au savoir et au monde.
    C’est toucher aux fondations de notre civilisation, ce qui nous effraie et nous tétanise jusqu’à rendre le sujet tabou. Dans l’imaginaire collectif, la soif de connaissance est un héritage direct des Lumières. En questionner les motivations, les priorités et surtout les applications reviendrait à renouer avec l’obscurantisme – beaucoup referment d’ailleurs par avance toute réflexion en brandissant le fantasme du « retour à la bougie » ou du « réveil de l’Inquisition »…
    De même, soulever le rapport entre la recherche et l’économie serait cautionné la récession, le chômage, les pénuries, voire refuser de « nourrir la planète ». A quoi s’ajoutent les effets de la désinformation pratiquée par de puissants lobbies (industriels et autres), défendant leurs intérêts au détriment d’une conception éclairée du bien commun.
    Pourtant, à l’aune de la rupture environnementale globale n’est-il pas urgent de dépasser ces blocages et de nous interroger ? Pourquoi, pour qui et à quel prix voulons-nous savoir ? Quelle inspiration et quelle culture voulons-nous transmettre aux générations futures pour leur permettre de vivre dignement sur notre planète ? Quelle innovation y contribuera et quelle autre s’en éloignera ?
    N’est-il pas absurde de continuer à accumuler des recherches ne tenant aucun compte de l’effondrement qui s’annonce ? Quelle valeur auront nos savoirs académiques si, demain, ils sont perdus ou inutilisables (régression technologique, pertes des supports, ressources et énergies indisponibles, monde chaotique, etc.) ou à l’extrême parce qu’il n’y aura plus personne pour s’y intéresser ?

    Fuite en avant

    Finalement, une recherche qui ne s’applique pas à elle-même des règles pour d’abord œuvrer à préserver le vivant et l’habitabilité de la Terre a-t-elle encore un sens ? Une partie de la population, dont bon nombre de scientifiques, répondra que ce sont justement les applications de la recherche telle qu’elle se pratique qui sauveront le monde, que le salut sera technologique : croissance verte, intelligence artificielle, transhumanisme, géo-ingénierie, conquête spatiale, etc.
    Qui peut encore sérieusement croire à ces affirmations au vu des trajectoires en cours et de l’urgence de la situation ? N’est-ce pas encore se bercer d’illusions dangereuses pour éviter de transformer nos cadres d’organisation et notre système socio-économique ? Une leçon de la modernité est que les promesses prométhéennes conduisent souvent à de nouveaux problèmes, parfois plus graves que ceux qu’elles prétendaient résoudre.
    De nouveaux risques (dérèglement climatique, contamination chimique généralisée, disparition des insectes, résistance aux antibiotiques, déchets radioactifs, explosion des maladies chroniques, etc.) deviennent de plus en plus difficiles à traiter, certains pouvant avoir des conséquences catastrophiques. Ces risques sont pourtant un fruit de la recherche, des progrès de la science appliquée, et entretiennent la fuite en avant technologique et énergétique, générant ainsi la spirale « énergie-complexité » décrite par l’anthropologue et historien américain Joseph Tainter.
    Les scientifiques sont donc aussi en partie les agents de transformations qui sont au cœur de la dynamique de destruction de notre planète. Ainsi, le défi de la transition écologique et sociale tient aux bouleversements profonds qu’elle nécessite et qui vont jusqu’à questionner les certitudes qui forment le socle de notre civilisation techno-industrielle.

    Propositions concrètes

    Pour permettre non seulement aux générations futures mais aussi aux nôtres de vivre dignement sur la planète, il ne s’agit pas seulement de réorienter la politique, les investissements ou la fiscalité, d’établir de nouvelles lois ou normes réglementaires, ni même de modifier nos institutions et nos pratiques quotidiennes. Il s’agit aussi de changer notre rapport au monde. Cette journée de mobilisation mondiale du 15 mars, lancée par la jeunesse, doit nous interpeller et nous faire réagir.
    Nous invitons tous nos collègues du monde de la recherche à contribuer à cette réflexion et à s’unir à travers des initiatives collectives. Les signataires de cette tribune s’engagent à œuvrer ensemble en ce sens, notamment autour de propositions concrètes. Les jeunes vont appeler tous les humains à « entrer en résistance » pour réorienter vraiment nos sociétés et arrêter d’anéantir l’avenir. Le défi est immense mais l’enjeu est plus grand encore. Chercheuses et chercheurs, nous avons le devoir de nous y engager avec toute la lucidité et la détermination exigée.

    Ce texte émane de l’ Atelier d’écologie politique de Toulouse https://atecopol.hypotheses.org

    Signataires :
    Simon Barbot, doctorant en océanographie, laboratoire d’études en géophysique et océanographie spatiales (LEGOS), UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier CNES-CLS ; Frédéric Boone, astronome adjoint, Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie (IRAP), UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier ; Julian Carrey, professeur en physique, laboratoire de physique et chimie des nano-objets (LPCNO), UMR CNRS-INSA, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier ; Jérémie Cavé, docteur en aménagement urbain, chercheur indépendant en écologie urbaine et chargé d’enseignement à Sciences Po Toulouse ; Claire Couly, docteure en ethnobiologie ; Marc Deconchat, DR INRA, agronome et écologue des paysages, laboratoire dynamique et écologie des paysages Agriforestiers (DYNAFOR), UMR INRA-INP-Ecole d’ingénieur de Purpan ; Fabienne Denoual, maîtresse de conférences en design, laboratoire lettres, langages et arts création, recherche, émergence, en arts, textes, images, spectacles (LLA-CRÉATIS), université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès ; Frédéric Durand, professeur en géographie, laboratoire interdisciplinaire solidarités, sociétés, territoires (LISST), UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès ; Michel Duru, DR INRA en environnement et agrologie, laboratoire agroécologie-innovations-territoires (AGIR), UMR INRA-INP-Toulouse-ENSFEA ; Steve Hagimont, ATER et docteur en histoire contemporaine, laboratoire France, Amérique, Espagne-sociétés, pouvoirs, acteurs (FRAMESPA), UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès ; Jean-Michel Hupé, CR CNRS en sciences cognitives, centre de recherche cerveau et cognition (CerCo), UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier ; Béatrice Jalenques-Vigouroux, maîtresse de conférences en sciences de l’information et de la communication, INSA ; Rachel Jouan, docteure vétérinaire, consultante en adaptation au changement climatique et engagement des acteurs ; Étienne-Pascal Journet, CR CNRS en biologie des interactions végétales et agronomie, laboratoire agroécologie-innovations-territoires (AGIR), UMR INRA-INP, Toulouse-ENSFEA ; Sébastien Lachaize, maître de conférences en physique et chimie, laboratoire de physique et chimie des nano-objets (LPCNO), UMR CNRS-INSA, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier ; Vanessa Léa, CR CNRS en archéologie, laboratoire TRACES, UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès & laboratoire d’écologie fonctionnelle et environnement (EcoLab), UMR CNRS INP, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier ; Tristan Loubes, doctorant en histoire environnementale, université Paris-Est-Marne-la-vallée (ACP) et université de Montréal ; Hervé Philippe, DR CNRS, station d’écologie théorique et expérimentale (SETE) de Moulis, UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier ; Gaël Plumecocq, CR INRA en économie, laboratoire agroécologie-innovations-territoires (AGIR), UMR INRA-INP-Toulouse-ENSFEA ; Julien Rebotier, CR CNRS en géographie, laboratoire interdisciplinaire solidarités, sociétés, territoires (LISST), UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès ; Béatrice Roure, docteure en bio-informatique, ingénieure de recherche indépendante en phylogénomique ; Roman Teisserenc, maître de conférences en bio-géochimie de l’environnement, laboratoire d’écologie fonctionnelle et environnement (ECOLAB), UMR CNRS-INP-ENSAT, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier ; Laure Teulières, maîtresse de conférences en histoire contemporaine, laboratoire France, Amérique, Espagne-sociétés, pouvoirs, acteurs (FRAMESPA), UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès ; Vincent Vlès, professeur en aménagement et urbanisme, centre d’étude et de recherche travail, organisation, pouvoir (CERTOP), UMR CNRS, université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier.

    Enfoncée, la start-up de l’#happy_collapse !

    #critique_techno, #écologie, #recherche_scientifique.

    @aude_v @rastapopoulos @sinehebdo @kamo

  • Pinkel Trinkel
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/moacrealsloa/pinkel-trinkel

    Playlist :

    Tod Dockstader & James Reichert : Movement 5 (Omniphony 1 - ReR Megacorp - 2002)

    Supersilent : 12.4 (12 - Rune Grammofon - 2014)

    AGF + Vladislav Delay : All Lies On Us (Explode - AGF Produktion - 2005)

    Whazt We Live : The Stone Heated Distance ( Trumpets - Black Saint - 1999)

    Steve Pittis : Metallic Cocaine Be Bop (Dedicated to William S. Burroughs - Dressed To Kill - 2000)

    Magma : Dondaï (To An Eternal Love) (Atthak - Eurodisc - 1978)

    Three Silver Mountain Reveries : Microphones In The Three (The Pretty Little Lightning Paw - Constellation - 2004)

    Hati : Barrels I (Works for Scrap Metal - Eter - 2007)

    Stefan Keune, Hans Schneider & Achim Krämer : Strzight From The Gut (The long And The Short Of It - Creative Sources - 2007)

    Chöying Drolma And Steve Tibbetts: Kangyi (...)

    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/moacrealsloa/pinkel-trinkel_06482__1.mp3

  • Podesta a envoyé un courriel au sujet d’un assassinat trois jours avant la mort suspecte du juge Scalia de la Cour suprême
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/international/15783-podesta-a-envoye-un-courriel-au-sujet-d-un-assassinat-trois-jours-a

    Le vrai personnel de Pundit, qui a servi dans diverses capacités et agences de renseignement pour les États-Unis, a été surpris ce matin en fouillant dans la base de données Wikileaks des courriels de John Podesta.

    Podesta, la présidente de la campagne d’Hillary Clinton, dans un courriel daté du 9 février 2016, fait référence à un assassinat. Utilisant le terme " travail mouillé ", Podesta a envoyé un courriel énigmatique au stratège démocrate et consultant poids lourd Steve Elmendorf. Le terme " travail humide " est un terme d’argot du renseignement d’origine russe. Défini comme l’assassinat d’une personnalité publique, d’un diplomate ou d’une personne d’importance politique.

    Elmendorf répondit à la mystérieuse référence de Podesta :

    "Je suis (...)

    #En_vedette #Actualités_internationales #Actualités_Internationales