Data, words, code
Shocked to see some fire in the Independent:
The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
By Joss Garman, who is apparently involved in Greenpeace and in Plane Stupid. I like him!
Heidegger talks about how incessant chatter of culture and other public discourse harms and makes understanding difficult, because of its inauthenticity or “groundlessness”, which he explains as talking about something “without previously making the thing one’s own”. [source]
The word you’re looking for, Martin, is grok
Der Spiegel, like everybody else, pulls apart Ban Ki-Moon
Jacob Heilbrunn, a commentator for the respected American journal Foreign Policy, called Ban “the world’s most dangerous Korean.” The moniker is a terrible insult, since by rights it belongs to Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s erratic dictator. But it’s also a gauge of the disappointment currently reigning in the United States. Heilbrunn fears the UN is rapidly becoming irrelevant under Ban’s stewardship. Ban’s sole achievement is having attained his post, Heilbrunn claims, calling the secretary-general a “nowhere man.”
Student protests: have there been an unusual number of them going on this year? I’ve seen next to nothing about them in the media, although from word-of-mouth they seem pretty damn huge:
In France, strikes effectively shut down the entire university system from February to May. That’s the longest student strike ever in France — longer than ’68, for instance.
And now, Austria and Germany are on the go. It started with with the occupation of the University of Vienna in late October. That sparked a large movement across Austria and Germany, which is claiming occupations of 80-odd univeristies. Today they’ve also been protesting at a meeting of state education ministers in Bonn — apparently with some success.
Obviously there’s always a low-level simmering of student protest, and it tends to be a dog-bites-man story that doesn’t much inconvenience anybody. The protesters are also monumentally incompetent at simplifying their message (which, very roughly, is about education becoming more driven by exams and money, to the detriment of actually learning anything). And I’m not convinced by attempts (common around here) to connect it to the protests in Greece and Iran; those aren’t really ‘student’ protests, no matter how prominent students are in them.
[this was going to be a post about going to the occupied Freie Universität yesterday, but I got sidetracked. Briefly, there was excellent music, and I got to re-meet my ex-housemate Lara — who, apart from being generally fantastic, has drawn the most wonderful picture of me. I will post photos, just as soon as I find somebody to take them for me :)]
Cutting the “too big to fail” knot: order that “no high-rolling investment bank can exceed 2% of GDP; no boring commercial bank can be bigger than 4% of GDP”
Le Monde points out that periods of recovery from recession are crucial in the growth, or decline, of inequality between districts. It is now that new businesses are created, or not, in depressed areas, and when they can most easily be nudged by state intervention.
C’est dans ces périodes, paradoxalement, que les écarts entre les territoires risquent de se creuser, entre ceux qui végètent et ceux qui rebondissent vite. Dans ces périodes, aussi, que le gouvernement, rassuré quant aux risques d’explosion sociale, peut être tenté de réduire les moyens, déjà limités, consacrés à la politique de la ville pour les redéployer sur d’autres priorités.
Le Monde points out that periods of recovery from recession are crucial in the growth, or decline, of inequality between districts. It is now that new businesses are created, or not, in depressed areas, and when they can most easily be nudged by state intervention.
C’est dans ces périodes, paradoxalement, que les écarts entre les territoires risquent de se creuser, entre ceux qui végètent et ceux qui rebondissent vite. Dans ces périodes, aussi, que le gouvernement, rassuré quant aux risques d’explosion sociale, peut être tenté de réduire les moyens, déjà limités, consacrés à la politique de la ville pour les redéployer sur d’autres priorités.