Toward the back of the line, wearing a long denim skirt and a red T-shirt, was a middle-aged woman with dark, lined skin and deep-set eyes. Her name was Yanira, and her son, she said, was a twenty-year-old with autism. He’d been arrested three days earlier, at home, where the two had been working throughout the pandemic, cleaning and reselling discarded plastic sleeves that hold bottles of hand sanitizer. Yanira rarely leaves him alone, but she had to run an errand. When she returned, thirty minutes later, the police had taken him away. “Sometimes he’ll wander into the street without his shoes,” she told me. “All the neighbors know him. But someone who doesn’t might think he’s a criminal, or crazy.” […]
Yanira’s son was one of six thousand people arrested in the first week. By the time I met her, the total had risen to about nine thousand. A month and a half later, it would reach thirty thousand. Bukele conceded that one per cent of the roundups might result in wrongful arrests, but the public could only take his word for that figure. “As we continue arresting more gangsters, more people are going to protest,” Bukele said. “Because there will always be a mother of a gangster, a family member, or a friend who isn’t going to like that we are cleansing that cancer.” […]
While the women waited outside El Penalito, another crowd was gathering, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. It consisted of investors and tech entrepreneurs, who were there to see Bukele, a keynote speaker at an annual Bitcoin conference. Last summer, he announced that El Salvador would be the first country in the world to accept bitcoin as legal tender. Within a few months, there were some two hundred special A.T.M.s set up across the country, and the government had launched an app, called the Chivo Wallet, on which each Salvadoran was given thirty dollars’ worth of bitcoin. At the conference, Bitcoiners, techno-utopians, and libertarians assembled to hear about a series of ambitious projects that Bukele had been promising ever since. […]
When Bukele was elected President, in 2019, he was the youngest head of state in Latin America and embodied a new national beginning. At his inauguration, his heavily pregnant wife stood beside him as he instructed crowds of ecstatic voters to raise a hand along with him after he swore the oath of office. Three of his recent predecessors had been either arrested or indicted, and all of them came from El Salvador’s two main political parties, which had governed without interruption for more than two decades. It had been a period of chronic poverty, violence, and mass emigration.
In July, 2020, Arica Waters, the only Black female cop on the island, was invited to a pool party. She was twenty-seven and had been hired five weeks before, as a seasonal employee without benefits. She was ebullient and quick to make friends. “Some people say, ‘Oh, Waters is a flirt,’ ” she told me, “but that’s just my personality. I’m a friendly person. I give out compliments. I like to hype people up.” Meri LeBlanc, a bouncer on the island, said that Waters was open about her sexual desires, freely expressing her attraction to women and men. “She wasn’t plain,” she said. “She wasn’t the square cut of what they thought a police officer should be.”
The party was hosted by Jeremy Berman, a detective in the department, who had a house on a private road overlooking Lake Erie. Berman’s wife and young son were there, but he seemed to be paying extra attention to Waters, who wore a long yellow sundress. In a text message to a friend, Waters wrote, “The rich ass dude definitely has a thing for me lolol.” […]
That night, lying in bed drinking Gatorade, Waters texted her friends that she had just had sex with the “richest person on this island.” She wrote, “He will give me whatever I want.” […]
She tried to process what had just happened through dozens of texts to her friends. Their interpretation of the encounter led her to modify her original assessment. She realized how beholden to Berman she had felt, given what she perceived as his power on the island. In a text to a friend, she described it as “sexual assault due to job title.” She felt like she’d been groomed. “Bottomline I need to get out of this department and go home,” she wrote. […]
Two days later, a Put-in-Bay officer texted Waters to ask if she was O.K. and then sent her a screenshot from the docket of the Ottawa County Court of Common Pleas. Waters read it repeatedly, confused. She had been indicted for the felony of “making false alarms”—for reporting an offense despite “knowing that such offense did not occur.” She faced up to eighteen months in prison. The charge had been brought by the office of Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio.
Waters was booked into the Ottawa County jail, where her department took many suspects. Her right to carry a firearm was immediately suspended. She was released that day under bond conditions that forbade her to leave the state, go to a bar, stay out past 10 p.m., or have contact with her victim. Next to the word “victim,” the court magistrate had written Jeremy Berman’s name by hand.
This week, the administration implemented sweeping export controls on China’s entire chip sector. […]
The actions are being described as an “economic war”, and the phrase is not hyperbole. The primary purpose of these export controls is not to protect U.S. industry or to stop the leakage of intellectual property to economic competitors. Their purpose is to kneecap China’s semiconductor industry — to slow down the country’s push for technological self-sufficiency.
That push has a lot to do with why the Biden administration went ahead and did this now instead of waiting. […]
High-tech companies relocating sales and operations out of China will also probably cause some of these companies’ suppliers and customers to follow suit. Economic agglomeration effects may soon act only within the world’s two great manufacturing blocs — one agglomeration in China and another in the developed world. From an economic standpoint, this is horribly inefficient, but in an era when war and the threat of war are stalking the globe, economic efficiency is hardly policymakers’ chief concern.
There is an easy to way to write this Article, and a hard way.
This weekend the easy way seemed within reach: I watched Meta’s Connect Keynote (I had early access in order to prepare for an interview with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella) and was, like apparently much of the Internet, extremely underwhelmed. Sure, the new Quest Pro looked cool, and I was very excited about the partnership with Microsoft (more on both in a moment); the presentation, though, was cringe, and seemed to lack any compelling demos of virtual reality.
What was particularly concerning was the entire first half of the keynote, which was primarily focused on consumer applications, including Horizon Worlds; Horizon Worlds was the the app The Verge reported was so buggy that Meta employees working on it barely used it, or more worryingly, was buggy because Meta employees couldn’t be bothered to dogfood it. The concerning part from the keynote was you could see why.
That was why this Article was going to be easy: writing that Meta’s metaverse wasn’t very compelling would slot right in to most people’s mental models, prompting likes and retweets instead of skeptical emails; arguing that Meta should focus on its core business would appeal to shareholders concerned about the money and attention devoted to a vision they feared was unrealistic. Stating that Zuckerberg got it wrong would provide comfortable distance from not just an interview subject but also a company that I have defended in its ongoing dispute with Apple over privacy and advertising.
Indeed, you can sense my skepticism in the most recent episode of Sharp Tech, which was recorded after seeing the video but before trying the Quest Pro. See, that was the turning point: I was really impressed, and that makes this Article much harder to write.
Brain waves have always felt like a mystery. You learn some psychology, some neuroscience, a bit of neuroanatomy. And then totally separate from all of this, you know that there are things called “brain waves” that get measured with an EEG. Why should the brain have waves? Are they involved in thinking or feeling or something? How do you do computation when your processors are firing in a rhythmic pattern dozens of times per second? Why don’t AIs have anything like brain waves? Should they?
I read Rhythms Of The Brain by Prof. Gyorgy Buzsaki to answer these questions. This is a tough book, probably more aimed at neuroscientists than laypeople, and I don’t claim to have gotten more than the most superficial understanding of it. But as far as I know it’s the only book on brain waves - and so our only option for solving the mystery. This review is my weak and confused attempt to transmit it, which I hope will encourage other people toward more successful efforts. […]
Andres thinks this is part of what’s behind “spiritual” or “mystical” experiences, where you suddenly feel like you’ve lost the boundaries of yourself and are at one with God and Nature and Everything. You’ve done something weird that’s slowed or sped up an oscillator somewhere, and it’s achieved synchrony with another oscillator it doesn’t usually communicate with. […]
All of this hints at some deep connection between brain waves, consciousness, and selfhood.
China has shackled itself to...this one mediocre guy. […]
I am not a China expert, nor would I ever pretend to be one. But last year I do think I managed to catch something important that a lot of people seem to have missed: Xi Jinping is not as competent of a helmsman as he’s made out to be. […]
The reason I think a lot of people missed this is that Xi has proven incredibly adept at taking control of the Chinese Communist Party. […]
An unspoken ancillary assumption in this story of Xi the Mighty, however, was that China could basically accomplish anything the CCP told it to. After all, the country had just finished three decades of some of the most rapid growth the world has ever seen, stunning observers with feats of production — towering megacities, high-speed trains, production capacity that rivaled the whole developed world put together. As long as the Party acted with one purpose, then China would act with one purpose, and if that purpose was Xi’s, well, that made Xi himself nigh-omnipotent. […]
But the strength of the system relied on the dispersed, distributed talents of tens of millions of party members.
By reorganizing the CCP as an extension of his person, Xi puts all that in jeopardy. Rewarding loyalty over competence degrades the quality of top personnel. Eliminating competing factions robs decisions of needed criticism and consensus. And centralizing power in the hands of one man mean that that man’s mistakes become national failures.
More than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the positively charged particle at the heart of every atom, physicists are still struggling to fully understand the proton.
High school physics teachers describe them as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge — the perfect foils for the negatively charged electrons that buzz around them. College students learn that the ball is actually a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks. But decades of research have revealed a deeper truth, one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images. […]
As the pursuit continues, the proton’s secrets keep tumbling out. Most recently, a monumental data analysis published in August found that the proton contains traces of particles called charm quarks that are heavier than the proton itself.
The proton “has been humbling to humans,” Williams said. “Every time you think you kind of have a handle on it, it throws you some curveballs.”
The 2022 prize is different. Yes, the famous Diamond-Dybvig model, and Bernanke’s work on financial macroeconomics, have generated substantial follow-on literatures. But their primary importance is in the here and now. Diamond and Dybvig developed a model of banking crises that — pretty much everyone now agrees — explains the basic reason why banks tend to collapse. And Bernanke showed how those collapses could bring down the real economy. Those insights were then successfully applied to save the economy from a second Great Depression in 2008-10 — in part by Bernanke himself. […]
To say that these bailouts made people angry would be something of an understatement; they seemed to reward the bad actors who had brought the crisis upon us in the first place. But it was absolutely the right thing to do, because if the U.S. had had 50% of its banks fail instead of 0.6%, a second Great Depression could easily have been a reality. And the reason we did it, even in the face of all that popular rage, has a lot to do with the fact that the most important economic policymaker in the country was Fed Chair Ben Bernanke.
“Nobel goes to Svante Pääbo for Neanderthal work,” is how a BBC headline writer described this year’s choice for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. For the New York Times, it was “Prize Awarded to Scientist Who Sequenced Neanderthal Genome.” And at the Guardian, “Swedish geneticist wins Nobel prize for Neanderthal research.”
All true. But notwithstanding this close focus on Pääbo’s research into Neanderthals, it’s important to note that his scientific contributions have shaped the entire field of paleogenetics, not just the study of Homo neanderthalensis. Indeed, his work has spanned all three known species of humans, one of which the world likely wouldn’t even know about but not for Pääbo and his research team.
As a graduate immunology student in the early 1980s, the young Swede performed molecular genetic analyses on 23 Egyptian mummies, one of which—a 2,400-year-old child specimen—proved to contain clonable DNA. The discovery yielded the first scientific paper ever published on the subject of DNA extracted from fossil tissues.
The revival of ancient Greek knowledge within Western Europe coincided with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 and the subsequent surge in Greek migration to Western Europe. Using a newly constructed dataset on Greek migrants in Europe, I show that a Greek presence around the year 1500 is positively associated with city growth in the sixteenth century. […] I find that a Greek presence is associated with larger numbers of published book editions in astronomy, mathematics, and medicine – fields in which ancient Greek and Byzantine scholars were especially advanced – as well as larger levels of upper-tail human capital. Finally, the results show that destination places for Greek migration became centers of innovation.
Raising corporation tax to 25% would take the effective rate to the highest it’s ever been in the UK, and one the highest in the developed world. That’s bad – but an unfunded tax cut is worse.
The Johnson government increased corporation tax from 19% to 25% from April 2023. The mini-Budget reversed this. What should happen now?
A common argument is that we’ve been cutting corporate tax for 25 years, it’s gone too far, and it’s time to go back to 25%. After all, the rate was 33% in the 80s, and is now 19%, so 25% is still a pretty good deal.
That argument is usually accompanied by this chart, showing the headline rate falling dramatically:
However, this is rather less persuasive if we look at the corporate tax actually paid – here’s an overlay showing UK corporation tax collected as a % of GDP:
Could it just be that corporate profits rose, so the declining rate multiplied by increased profits kept revenues broadly constant? […] Again we see that the plummeting headline rate does not lead to much, or perhaps any, reduction in the actual effective rate.
For the Journal of the American Revolution, Todd Andrlik compiled a list of the ages of the key participants in the Revolutionary War as of July 4, 1776. Many of them were surprisingly young:
Marquis de Lafayette, 18 James Monroe, 18 Gilbert Stuart, 20 Aaron Burr, 20 Alexander Hamilton, 21 Betsy Ross, 24 James Madison, 25
The redistribution of water is evident in these natural-color satellite images, which show colorful swirls of sediment that the storm stirred up in Florida’s coastal waters. The turquoise color is likely sediment that the storm Ian lifted from the seafloor as it neared the coast. Brown water closer to shore is likely colored by sediment from land, carried by rivers and runoff flowing into the ocean.
