Posted 2019-December-28, 17:05
johnu, on 2019-December-28, 16:25, said:
World's Richest Gain $1.2 Trillion in 2019 as Jeff Bezos Retains Crown
When you are talking about wealth disparity, and income disparity, there is this. 25% increase in wealth To be fair, much of it is stock market paper profits that could dive in value tomorrow, but much has been converted into real estate, various businesses, intellectual property, cash equivalents, etc.
Obviously not all are Americans, but for those that are, they wouldn't even notice a 2% wealth tax when their net wealth would still have increased 23% instead of 25%.
This thread continues to be useful to me in unexpected ways.
1. I had never heard of Kylie Jenner, of Kylie Cosmetics, or Ulta Beauty. My wife Becky has also never heard of Kylie Cosmetics but she did buy something from Ulta. She does not know if Ulta is the same thing as Ulta Beauty.
2. I live in D.C. so I was aware that the Nationals won the World Series. I have never heard Baby Shark ,doo-doo,doo doo, doo doo. I am very grateful for this.
3. I have no idea what a viral earworm is. Sounds like something that needs medical attention.
4. I do know who Jeff Bezos is. I have no idea what Blue Origin is. I didn't know that he got a divorce, Sorry about that Jeff. About Amazon. I remeber when Amazon was just getting started and there were all of these financial experts warning against investing any money in this stupid idea.
Perhaps I will post something with more substance later, don't hold your breath, but right now I am just stunned by the extent to which I have no idea of what's going on. In high school a teacher suggested that I write a term paper on Freud and I asked "Who's Freud?" I seem to be returning to that state.
From Brad Plumer and Coral Davenport at NYT:
WASHINGTON — In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts say, could reverberate for years.
Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.
But the erosion of science reaches well beyond the environment and climate: In San Francisco, a study of the effects of chemicals on pregnant women has stalled after federal funding abruptly ended. In Washington, D.C., a scientific committee that provided expertise in defending against invasive insects has been disbanded. In Kansas City, Mo., the hasty relocation of two agricultural agencies that fund crop science and study the economics of farming has led to an exodus of employees and delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in research.
“The disregard for expertise in the federal government is worse than it’s ever been,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, which has tracked more than 200 reports of Trump administration efforts to restrict or misuse science since 2017. “It’s pervasive.”
Hundreds of scientists, many of whom say they are dismayed at seeing their work undone, are departing.
Among them is Matthew Davis, a biologist whose research on the health risks of mercury to children underpinned the first rules cutting mercury emissions from coal power plants. But last year, with a new baby of his own, he was asked to help support a rollback of those same rules. “I am now part of defending this darker, dirtier future,” he said.
This year, after a decade at the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Davis left.
“Regulations come and go, but the thinning out of scientific capacity in the government will take a long time to get back,” said Joel Clement, a former top climate-policy expert at the Interior Department who quit in 2017 after being reassigned to a job collecting oil and gas royalties. He is now at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.
Mr. Trump has consistently said that government regulations have stifled businesses and thwarted some of the administration’s core goals, such as increasing fossil-fuel production. Many of the starkest confrontations with federal scientists have involved issues like environmental oversight and energy extraction — areas where industry groups have argued that regulators have gone too far in the past.
“Businesses are finally being freed of Washington’s overreach, and the American economy is flourishing as a result,” a White House statement said last year. Asked about the role of science in policymaking, officials from the White House declined to comment on the record.
The administration’s efforts to cut certain research projects also reflect a longstanding conservative position that some scientific work can be performed cost-effectively by the private sector, and taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to foot the bill. “Eliminating wasteful spending, some of which has nothing to do with studying the science at all, is smart management, not an attack on science,” two analysts at the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote in 2017 of the administration’s proposals to eliminate various climate change and clean energy programs.
awm, on 2019-December-28, 16:58, said:
If you invested in the S&P500 you would’ve gained about 25% on the year (between rise in the index and the dividends). This was an unusually good year for the market (for contrast, in 2018 you would’ve more or less broken even). Stock market valuations have a lot to do with the wealth of billionaires, but probably aren’t the driving factor behind wealth inequality. Although I’d support a small wealth tax (2% seems okay to me, 6% not so much) the real problem is getting wages to rise in line with productivity for the rest of the work force.
For average wealth folks, most of their wealth is tied up in their house (if they even own a house) which may have gone up around 5% on average (some areas may have gone up more, some areas had no increase or even negative growth). Most of their other "wealth", auto/truck, furniture, household goods are depreciating in value. And if they do have stock, a diversified portfolio would include a good percentage of fixed income type of investments that wouldn't come close to 25% increases.
Maybe the problem with average people is that they don't manage their money well, not that they need higher wages. Fernando Marcos accumulated maybe 10 billion dollars on an official salary of no more than $13,500 a year. His wife was reported to have had 3000 pairs of shoes which I believe was explained as due to using coupons and buying during sales.
A wealth tax seems to be an equitable solution to the fact that the tax code has been perverted so that billionaires pay a smaller overall tax rate than working class people.
Although I’d support a small wealth tax (2% seems okay to me, 6% not so much) the real problem is getting wages to rise in line with productivity for the rest of the work force.
According to Noah Smith (Feb 2019) at Bloomberg, wages have largely kept pace with productivity since 2010 which is not to suggest that the gap that opened in the 70s, 80s and early 90s is not a big problem that remains to be solved.
It sounds so reasonable for moderate Democratic politicians to find common ground with right fringe Republicans.
‘Nothing Less Than a Civil War’: These White Voters on the Far Right See Doom Without Trump
But this October morning was “Trumpstock,” a small festival celebrating the president. The speakers included the local Republican congressman, Paul Gosar, and lesser-known conservative personalities. There was a fringe 2020 Senate candidate in Arizona who ran a website that published sexually explicit photos of women without their consent; a pro-Trump rapper whose lyrics include a racist slur aimed at Barack Obama; and a North Carolina activist who once said of Muslims, “I will kill every one of them before they get to me.”
“They label us white nationalists, or white supremacists,” volunteered Guy Taiho Decker, who drove from California to attend the event. A right-wing protester, he has previously been arrested on charges of making terrorist threats.
“There’s no such thing as a white supremacist, just like there’s no such thing as a unicorn,” Mr. Decker said. “We’re patriots.”
Unfortunately, Democrats are more likely to get cooperation from these fringe groups than most elected Republicans in Congress.
From Ross Douthat at NYT:
Nothing much happened in America in the 2010s. The unemployment rate declined slowly but steadily; the stock market rose; people’s economic situation gradually improved. There were no terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11, no new land wars to rival Iraq and Vietnam. The country was relatively calm: Violent crime and illegal immigration trended downward, teenage delinquency diminished, teen birthrates fell and the out-of-wedlock birthrate stabilized.
In Washington, D.C., only two major pieces of legislation passed Congress, both of them predictable — a health insurance expansion under a Democratic president, a deficit-financed tax cut under a Republican. No enduring majorities were forged; control of government was divided for seven out of the 10 years. There were few bipartisan deals, even as the policy fads that came and went — education reform, deficit hawkishness — left underlying realities more or less the same. Inertia and inaction were the order of the day.
If this doesn’t sound like a complete description of the decade — well, it isn’t. It’s a provocation that leaves out a lot of important indicators (the opioid epidemic and the collapsing birthrate above all), that deliberately doesn’t mention populism, the Great Awokening or Donald Trump, and that ignores the feeling of crisis, the paranoia and mistrust and hysteria, that have pervaded our public life throughout the later 2010s.
But the provocation represents a truth that’s important for interpreting all that paranoia and polarization and mistrust — because even if you believe that the mood of crisis, the feeling that the liberal order might be cracking up, is the defining feature of the departing decade, you still have to reckon with why that feeling has crested so powerfully in a period surprisingly short on world-altering events.
Consider, by way of contrast, the prior decade to this one. Between 2000 and 2009, the United States experienced the Florida recount and the dot-com bust, suffered the worst attack on our shores since Pearl Harbor, launched two major foreign invasions, attempted and failed at the transformation of the Middle East and entered the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Meanwhile disruption was everywhere: Newspapers perished, partisan cable networks ascended, the smartphone took over the world, and the Amazon-Google-Facebook internet consolidated into something like its current shape.
Compared to this litany, the 2010s look a little uneventful, don’t they? Even if you declare Obamacare a big [expletive] deal and grant Trump’s election world-historical significance, even if you bring in European dramas like Brexit and the Syrian refugee crisis, even if you pretend self-driving cars are really happening (just as soon as they learn to drive in rain …) … even then, the last decade’s disruptions don’t quite measure up.
So why does the psychology of the 2010s, relative to the country’s mental situation in the Bush or Clinton era, feel so disappointed, distrustful, and deranged?
Let me suggest, as one possible answer, that we consider American history since the end of the Cold War as a three-act play. The first act, the 1990s, was a period of hubris, when we half-believed that we were entering a new age of domestic dynamism and global power — that our leaders deserved trust again, that the emerging digital age would be a blessing, that our innovators were on the threshold of great discoveries and our military was ready to spread liberty’s blessings round the world.
The 2000s, in turn, were an era of nemesis — when the most overstretched expressions of that ’90s hubris, from the Pets.com version of the new economy to the Bush doctrine to the exurban housing boom, all met their grimly-predestined fate. In one bust after another, in failed wars and Wall Street fiascos alike, the confidence of the Nineties collided with unavoidable realities, and Rudyard Kipling’s gods of the copybook headings made their inevitable return.
But as the 2000s ended, the revenges of reality had not yet been properly interpreted. The failed administration of George W. Bush was there as a scapegoat, Barack Obama was there to play the savior, and first liberals and then some ideological conservatives insisted that in fact everything would have been fine, the optimism of the 1990s indefinitely extended, if only Bush taken their preferred policy course instead.
Bush was, indeed, an unsuccessful president, but this conceit was false, and the gradually-unfolding revelation of its falseness made the 2010s an era of disillusionment, in which the knowledge we gained mattered more than the new events that we experienced. The sense of crisis, alienation and betrayal emerged more from backward glances than new disasters, reflecting newly-awakened — or awokened, if you prefer — readings of our recent history, our entire post-Cold War arc.
Thus, for instance, our Afghanistan and Libyan follies weren’t nearly as important or destructive as our Iraq debacle of the prior decade, but they were more revelatory — in the sense of demonstrating that humanitarian interventions and nation-building projects don’t work out any better with liberal technocrats in charge than under Cheneyites, that there wasn’t a simple “good war” waiting to be fought by smarter people once the Bush-era cowboy spirit went away.
Or again, the election of Trump probably wasn’t the moment of authoritarianism descending — but it was an important moment of exposure, which revealed things about race relations and class resentments and the rot in the Republican Party and the incompetence of our political class that inclined everybody to a darker view of the American situation than before.
Or yet again, what changed in our relationship to Silicon Valley in the 2010s wasn’t some new technology or business model, but our gradual realization of what those technologies and business models were doing to our minds, what they probably weren’t doing for social or economic progress, and how the internet might need to be resisted rather than just happily embraced.
Even the apparent trend toward secularization, the decade’s most notable religious shift, partially reflected a pattern in which Americans who had effectively ceased practicing Christianity years earlier finally made that disaffiliation official.
Meanwhile, in case after case the 2010s were a decade when cranks were proven right and the establishment wrong about developments from prior decades — about the wisdom of establishing Europe’s common currency, about the economic and political consequences of the turn-of-the-millennium opening to China, about the scale and scope of sexual abuse in elite institutions (not just the Catholic Church, though the cranks were right there, too).
In this sense the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was an appropriate capstone for the decade. Epstein’s worst crimes belonged to the 1990s and the 2000s rather than the 2010s, but the full revelations only arrived now, in the age of disillusionment, adding to the retrospective shadow cast across the entire political and journalistic class.
And that shadow feels deeper, in a way, because of the stability with which this essay opened. The 2010s were filled with angst and paranoia, they pushed people toward radicalism and reaction — but they didn’t generate very much effective social and political activity, beyond the populist middle finger and the progressive Twitter mob. They exposed the depth of problems without suggesting plausible solutions, and they didn’t produce movements or leaders equipped to translate disillusionment into programmatic action, despair into spiritual renewal, the crisis of institutions into structural reform.
It is this peculiar cultural predicament — the combination of disillusionment with stability, radicalization with stalemate, discontent and derangement with sterility and apathy — that I keep calling decadence. Whether it will last another 10 years is an open question; a catastrophe or a renaissance might be just around the corner. But as we usher out the 2010s, this decade of distrustful stability and prosperous despair, it has no rival as the presiding spirit of our age.
re: "The sense of crisis, alienation and betrayal emerged more from backward glances than new disasters" -- perhaps I'm overreacting but it feels like the countdown to the end of the world as we knew it before the advent of climate change has started and that the sense of crisis has everything to do with this and the absence of recognition and leadership needed to avoid even worst case scenarios.
y66, on 2019-December-29, 00:16, said:
I get the sense that this feels like Rome would have felt circa 28 B.C.E.
#14548 sharon j
Location:San Tan Valley Arizona
Interests:golf, boating, camping
I Live in the Phoenix area of Arizona. I have driven through the area where "Trumpstock" was held. As I drove through this area, I always wondered "what do these people do? I also wondered "why would you choose to live here?" There is no obvious source of employment nearby. There are no signs of farming (no water I imagine) or livestock (again no water or anything for the animals to graze on, I imagine). I read the wiki and it appears the area was sold in 2.5 acres parcels for $695.00 each, $10.00 down and $10.00 per month. (The wiki doesn't say when this happened) Perhaps they love the President so much because a "threat of Muslim and Latino immigrants" might want to take away their jobs? I don't know. But I would be very surprised if most of them don't need and receive public assistance. The very idea they think Trump cares about them makes me scratch my head and wonder why?
sharon j, on 2019-December-29, 13:09, said:
I like to think that I have a fair intuitive grasp of people from various backgrounds. I seem to get along with cops and with professors, for example, so there might be something to it. But the location you describe? Small town, isolated, in the desert? Prison industry? It's not me. And at some point I just have to walk away.
I once drove from Las Vegas to LA so maybe I drove through it or near it. It was long ago, maybe 50 years ago, but I do recall that a good part of the trip was very barren.
From Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson at NYT:
Why would a seemingly respectable, semiretired lion of the Washington establishment undermine the institutions he is sworn to uphold, incinerate his own reputation, and appear to willfully misrepresent the reports of special prosecutors and inspectors general, all to defend one of the most lawless and corrupt presidents in American history? And why has this particular attorney general appeared at this pivotal moment in our Republic?
A deeper understanding of William Barr is emerging, and it reveals something profound and disturbing about the evolution of conservatism in 21st-century America.
Some people have held that Mr. Barr is simply a partisan hack — willing to do whatever it takes to advance the interests of his own political party and its leadership. This view finds ample support in Mr. Barr’s own words. In a Nov. 15 speech at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington, he accused President Trump’s political opponents of “unprecedented abuse” and said they were “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.”
It is hardly the first time Mr. Barr stepped outside of long-established norms for the behavior of attorneys general. In his earlier stint as attorney general, during the George H.W. Bush presidency, Mr. Barr took on the role of helping to disappear the case against Reagan administration officials involved in the Iran-contra affair. The situation demonstrated that “powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office,” according to Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor in that case. According to some critics, Mr. Barr delivered the partisan goods then, as he is delivering them now.
Another view is that Mr. Barr is principally a defender of a certain interpretation of the Constitution that attributes maximum power to the executive. This view, too, finds ample support in Mr. Barr’s own words. In the speech to the Federalist Society, he said, “Since the mid-’60s, there has been a steady grinding down of the executive branch’s authority that accelerated after Watergate.” In July, when President Trump claimed, in remarks to a conservative student group, “I have an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” it is reasonable to suppose this is his CliffsNotes version of Mr. Barr’s ideology.
Both of these views are accurate enough. But at least since Mr. Barr’s infamous speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School, in which he blamed “secularists” for “moral chaos” and “immense suffering, wreckage and misery,” it has become clear that no understanding of William Barr can be complete without taking into account his views on the role of religion in society. For that, it is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion.
In Maryland, the department rushed to defend taxpayer funding for a religious school that says same-sex marriage is wrong. In Maine, it is defending parents suing over a state law that bans religious schools from obtaining taxpayer funding to promote their own sectarian doctrines. At his Department of Justice, Mr. Barr told law students at Notre Dame, “We keep an eye out for cases or events around the country where states are misapplying the establishment clause in a way that discriminates against people of faith.”
In these and other cases, Mr. Barr has embraced wholesale the “religious liberty” rhetoric of today’s Christian nationalist movement. When religious nationalists invoke “religious freedom,” it is typically code for religious privilege. The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.
This form of “religious liberty” seeks to foment the sense of persecution and paranoia of a collection of conservative religious groups that see themselves as on the cusp of losing their rightful position of dominance over American culture. It always singles out groups that can be blamed for society’s ills, and that may be subject to state-sanctioned discrimination and belittlement — L.G.B.T. Americans, secularists and Muslims are the favored targets, but others are available. The purpose of this “religious liberty” rhetoric is not just to secure a place of privilege, but also to justify public funding for the right kind of religion.
Mr. Barr has a long history of supporting just this type of “religious liberty.” At Notre Dame, he compared alleged violations of religious liberty with Roman emperors forcing Christian subjects to partake in pagan sacrifices. “The law is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values and to establish moral relativism as a new orthodoxy,” he said.
Barr watchers will know that this is nothing new. In a 1995 article he wrote for The Catholic Lawyer, which, as Emily Bazelon recently pointed out, appears to be something of a blueprint for his speech at Notre Dame, he complained that “we live in an increasingly militant, secular age” and expressed his grave concern that the law might force landlords to rent to unmarried couples. He implied that the idea that universities might treat “homosexual activist groups like any other student group” was intolerable.
This form of “religious liberty” is not a mere side issue for Mr. Barr, or for the other religious nationalists who have come to dominate the Republican Party. Mr. Barr has made this clear. All the problems of modernity — “the wreckage of the family,” “record levels of depression and mental illness,” “drug addiction” and “senseless violence” — stem from the loss of a strict interpretation of the Christian religion.
The great evildoers in the Notre Dame speech are nonbelievers who are apparently out on the streets ransacking everything that is good and holy. The solutions to society’s ills, Mr. Barr declared, come from faith. “Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct,” he said. “Religion helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline.” He added, “The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.”
Within this ideological framework, the ends justify the means. In this light, Mr. Barr’s hyperpartisanship is the symptom, not the malady. At Christian nationalist gatherings and strategy meetings, the Democratic Party and its supporters are routinely described as “demonic” and associated with “rulers of the darkness.” If you know that society is under dire existential threat from secularists, and you know that they have all found a home in the other party, every conceivable compromise with principles, every ethical breach, every back-room deal is not only justifiable but imperative. And as the vicious reaction to Christianity Today’s anti-Trump editorial demonstrates, any break with this partisan alignment will be instantly denounced as heresy.
It is equally clear that Mr. Barr’s maximalist interpretation of executive power in the Constitution is just an effect, rather than a cause, of his ideological commitments. In fact, it isn’t really an interpretation. It is simply an unfounded assertion that the president has what amount to monarchical powers. “George III would have loved it,” said Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine who once held Mr. Barr’s position as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, of Mr. Barr’s theory. It’s almost beside the point to note, as the conservative lawyers group Checks & Balances recently wrote, that Mr. Barr’s view of history “has no factual basis.”
Mr. Barr’s constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on his commitment to religious authoritarianism. And that, really, gets to the heart of the matter. If you know anything about America’s founders, you know they were passionately opposed to the idea of a religious monarchy. And this is the key to understanding the question, “What does Bill Barr want?”
The answer is that America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution — remember all that chatter during previous Republican administrations about “originalism” and “judicial restraint” — the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices.
Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence. He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus. Mr. Barr did not emerge in order to serve this one particular leader. On the contrary, Mr. Trump serves a movement that will cynically praise the Constitution in order to destroy it, and of which Mr. Barr has made himself a hero.
This guy is way scarier than Trump.
Who would have thought Christians would become the enemy, because they have such a great history of tolerance - if you discount a few small details like the Crusades and Inquisitions.
The great American tax ripoff of 2017 continues.
In Trumpworld, corporate malfeasance is just another word for job creation.
From Joe Nocera at Bloomberg:
Twenty years ago, writing in Fortune magazine, I dubbed the 1990s “the Nasdaq Decade.” And why not? Practically from the moment the browser company Netscape went public, the tech stocks that dominated the Nasdaq stock exchange only went up. Cisco Systems Inc. rose 125,000% in the 1990s. Dell Technologies Inc. was up 72,000%. Shares of EToys quadrupled on their first day of trading in 1999. The Nasdaq itself rose 685%.
But a few months after the decade ended, the internet bubble burst, and by 2002 the Nasdaq had declined 78%. The tech highfliers that had soared in the 1990s either went bankrupt or their valuations crashed back to earth.
Financially speaking, the 2010s have been characterized by corporate mergers, aggressive activist investors, out-of-control CEO pay and “maximizing shareholder value.” But more than anything, it has been a decade awash in private equity deals. I therefore dub it the private equity decade. And I’ll admit that I’m rooting for private equity to get a comeuppance similar to the one that took place in tech after the Nasdaq decade.
Private equity deals have been part of the financial landscape for decades, of course. Who can forget KKR’s $25 billion leveraged buyout (as they were called then) of RJR Nabisco in the late 1980s — a deal memorialized in the classic book “Barbarians at the Gate?” Indeed, some of the biggest private equity deals on record — TXU Energy, First Data, Alltel, Hilton Worldwide — took place in the frothy years before the 2008 financial crisis.
What was different in the 2010s was less the size of the deals as their proliferation. In 2009, private equity firms completed 1,927 deals worth $142 billion, according to the financial data firm Pitchbook. By 2018, there were 5,180 private equity deals worth $727 billion.
What has also become clear this decade is the high-minded rationale the private equity industry once used to justify its deals has largely evaporated. You don’t hear much anymore about how taking a company private will remove short-term incentives, impose necessary restructuring, yadda, yadda, yadda.
The main thing private equity has done this decade is to pile debt onto companies — imposing repayment costs while pulling out fees and dividends that have no bearing on what the private equity firm has actually done. Famously, Toys “R” Us went bankrupt because it was buried in private equity debt. So did Gymboree, Sports Authority, Linens ’n Things, and many others. In 2017, when the Limited announced it was shutting down its 250 stores — and throwing its employees out of work — the private equity firm that owned it, Sun Capital Partners Inc., reported to investors that it had nearly doubled its money, thanks to the dividends and fees it had paid itself.
One private equity skeptic, Daniel Rasmussen, conducted a study to see the effect private equity firms had on the companies they bought. Using a database of 390 deals with more than $700 billion in enterprise value, he found that:
Instead, he continued, there is a new paradigm for understanding the PE model:
As an industry, PE firms take control of businesses to increase debt and redirect spending from capital expenditures and other forms of investment toward paying down that debt. As a result, or in tandem, the growth of the business slows. That is a simple, structural change, not a grand shift in strategy or a change that really requires any expertise in management.
In other words, whatever larger purpose private equity might have once had, the 2010s exposed an industry that cared about lining its own pockets — often at the expense of the companies it bought. It has become dealmaking for its own sake.
It seems to me that there are two likely consequences for the devolution of private equity in this decade. The first is that when the business cycle finally turns, the consequences for the thousands of companies carrying private equity debt are likely to be severe. As increasing amounts of capital have chased deals this decade, purchase prices have increased drastically. Rasmussen reports that in 2013, private equity deals were done at an average of 8.9 times adjusted earnings. Today, that number has risen to 11 times adjusted earnings. That means the debt loads are becoming heavier.
The second consequence is political. If the Democrats take the Senate or the presidency — or both — the private equity model is going to be under sustained attack. Titans like Henry Kravis and Steve Schwarzman will be hauled before Congress and berated for the industry’s practices. Already, Elizabeth Warren has put forth a proposal to rein in private equity — she calls it the “Stop Wall Street Looting Act.” Among other things, it would give workers rights when a bankruptcy takes place and would put private equity firms “on the hook for the debts of companies they buy.”
One other thing: In this decade of growing income inequality, nothing symbolized the gap between the haves and the have-nots like private equity. When it can walk away enriched while companies it owns go bankrupt — is that really the way capitalism is supposed to work? Perhaps the 2020s will be the decade when it starts to work for everyone again.
Talk about finding hope again.
#14554 barmar
And remember when they said that the tax breaks would pay for themselves? They aren't.
From Joe Biden Confronts a Demagogue and a Dilemma by Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg:
The New York Times headline, dated December 27, was clear: “Joe Biden Says He’d Defy Subpoena to Testify in Trump’s Senate Trial.”
The New York Times headline, above an Associated Press story, dated the next day, December 28, was fuzzier: “Biden Leaves it Unclear if He Would Honor Senate Subpoena.”
One day later, December 29, the New York Times headline reached a possibly final — but who can say? — conclusion after the meandering journey of the preceding days: “Joe Biden Says He Would Comply With a Senate Subpoena, Reversing Course.”
The road to the White House may be winding, but that’s a lot of swerving.
President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he intends to keep smearing Biden, falsely alleging that the Democrat abused his power as vice president to insulate Biden’s son and his son’s Ukrainian employer from a criminal investigation. (That Trump still lacks a shred of evidence for this charge, months after deploying wide swaths of the executive branch to advance it, is strong indication that no evidence exists or ever will.) In addition to pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden, with the intent of spritzing his smear with a vapor of legitimacy, Trump has publicly requested that China investigate Biden as well.
To beat these scurrilous attacks, the former vice president needs more than consistent headlines; he needs a steady strategy. So here’s the question for armchair political strategists: Which one of the three distinct positions announced in the headlines above offers Biden the best chance of defanging Trump?
Answer: None of the above.
Yes, it’s a trick question. But more than that, it’s a democratic crisis. Biden bungled his response both to the smear and to the question of whether he would testify about it under oath. (Democrats must contest Republicans while also buttressing the Trump-battered rule of law; a legitimate Senate subpoena must be obeyed.) Trouble is, there is rarely a good way to respond to such smears, because the advantage almost invariably rests with the liar.
Whoever wins the Democratic nomination in 2020 will face some version of Trump’s attacks — like “crooked” Hillary and “corrupt” Biden — and will confront a similar quandary about responding. Ignore the smear and it spreads unchallenged. Engage and you generate hot embers to be fanned by an eager news media, which can generally be counted on to ignore even the most blatant bad faith by one of the disputants.
The asymmetry between a Democratic Party largely seeking to preserve democratic norms and government accountability and a GOP increasingly devoted to accumulating and exercising white Christian conservative power free of traditional legal or ethical constraint has been apparent for years. Books have been published. Academic papers have been written. Essays have detailed the danger. Yet bothsidesism, the unwillingness of mainstream arbiters to differentiate fact from fantasy or good faith argument from deliberate deception, persists.
The failure is more pronounced, and more perilous, when it comes to Trump, whose mental plumbing has leaked bad faith over a lifetime of personal corruption. Almost seven decades after Senator Joseph McCarthy slashed through the tapestry of American political culture, varying the number of communist spies he claimed to have found in the State Department in accord with the trajectory of the sun or the severity of his hangover, here we are — once again flummoxed by a demagogue so contemptuous of truth that he can’t be bothered to keep his lies straight.
Biden, and whomever Trump attacks next, cannot count on the news media to hold Trump accountable. And the proliferation of right-wing propaganda ensures that every emerging fact-based consensus will be targeted for destruction. McCarthy, who lacked a White House balcony from which to rally the nation’s dark side, had fewer political resources at hand than Trump has now yet still managed to be a “galvanizer of mobs,” as Richard Rovere called him.
Democratic candidates will have to get used to defending themselves with a sufficiently strong counterpunch that it puts Trump on the defensive. David Doak, a former Democratic strategist (and my one-time partner) Tweeted that Biden should agree to testify under oath before the Senate impeachment trial — provided Trump does likewise.
Trump, who instinctively kicks “for the groin” as McCarthy once did (Rovere again), lacks the courage or character to survive a bout of sworn public testimony. He’ll never agree to it. But in an asymmetrical political environment, in which non-demagogues pay a truth tax, Doak’s suggestion is the kind of defensive/offensive combo that a Democrat will have to level against Trump. It entails risk. But it beats three days of rhetorical wandering, seeking a safe passage that doesn’t exist against a man who will say anything, and frequently does.
Some people are prepared to say: "Here is who I am. If you like who I am, vote for me. If you do not like who I am, vote for the other guy."
Biden might have once had that trait. It's pretty clear he does not now have that trait.
There is a cost to making your position clear, people might not like your position. I think there is a bigger cost in having one position one day, another position the next day, and a third position the third day.
For some reason this rule does not apply to DT. Maybe it is the tweet mentality. Nobody expects a tweet to actually be a thought out statement. More like a burp.
From Adam Liptak at NYT:
WASHINGTON — As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. prepares to preside over the impeachment trial of President Trump, he issued pointed remarks on Tuesday in his year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary that seemed to be addressed, at least in part, to the president himself.
The two men have a history of friction, and Chief Justice Roberts used the normally mild report to denounce false information spread on social media and to warn against mob rule. Some passages could be read as a mission statement for the chief justice’s plans for the impeachment trial itself.
“We should reflect on our duty to judge without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity and dispatch,” he wrote in the report. “As the new year begins, and we turn to the tasks before us, we should each resolve to do our best to maintain the public’s trust that we are faithfully discharging our solemn obligation to equal justice under law.”
The nominal focus of the report was the importance of civics education, but even a casual reader could detect a timely subtext, one concerned with the foundational importance of the rule of law.
Chief Justice Roberts began his report, as is his custom, with a bit of history, recalling a riot at which John Jay, an author of the Federalist Papers and later the first chief justice, was struck in the head by a rock “thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor.”
Jay and his colleagues, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “ultimately succeeded in convincing the public of the virtues of the principles embodied in the Constitution.”
“Those principles leave no place for mob violence,” the chief justice wrote. “But in the ensuing years, we have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital. The judiciary has an important role to play in civic education.”
The report seemed to continue a conversation with Mr. Trump about the role of the courts.
In 2018, the two men had a sharp exchange, with Mr. Trump suggesting that federal judges carry out the wishes of the presidents who appointed them and Chief Justice Roberts defending the independence and integrity of the judicial branch.
The exchange started when Mr. Trump called a judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy “an Obama judge.” In response, the chief justice said the president had misunderstood the role of the federal courts in the constitutional system.
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Chief Justice Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
Mr. Trump took issue with the chief justice’s statement on Twitter. “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’” Mr. Trump wrote, “and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”
On Tuesday, the chief justice returned to his theme. “We should celebrate our strong and independent judiciary, a key source of national unity and stability,” he wrote. “But we should also remember that justice is not inevitable.”
The friction with the president has only added to the delicate spot the chief justice will find himself in when he takes on his constitutionally assigned duty to preside over Mr. Trump’s Senate trial. Mr. Trump has repeatedly pinned the future of his presidency on the trial, the details and timing of which have not been set.
Chief Justice Roberts’s report concentrated on the central role the judiciary has played in educating the public, notably by issuing accessible decisions, in both senses of the word.
“When judges render their judgments through written opinions that explain their reasoning, they advance public understanding of the law,” he wrote. “Chief Justice Earl Warren illustrated the power of a judicial decision as a teaching tool in Brown v. Board of Education, the great school desegregation case. His unanimous opinion on the most pressing issue of the era was a mere 11 pages — short enough that newspapers could publish all or almost all of it and every citizen could understand the court’s rationale. Today, federal courts post their opinions online, giving the public instant access to the reasoning behind the judgments that affect their lives.”
Current Supreme Court decisions in major cases are much longer than the ruling in Brown. Citizens United, the 2010 campaign finance decision, was 176 pages long, with roughly the same number of words as “The Great Gatsby.”
Chief Justice Roberts praised the many educational programs offered by federal courts across the nation in which students are invited to visit courthouses. He did not address the role that camera coverage of arguments at the Supreme Court, currently forbidden, could play in civics education.
The chief justice singled out, but did not name, a colleague, praising his exemplary educational work. “As just one example,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the current chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit has, over the past two decades, quietly volunteered as a tutor at a local elementary school, inspiring his court colleagues to join in the effort.”
That judge is Merrick B. Garland, who was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2016 but denied a hearing by Senate Republicans. Mr. Trump appointed Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to fill the vacancy.
That was an encouraging note to end the year on.
Posted 2020-January-01, 17:56
From Dan Charles at NPR:
In 2019, the federal government delivered an extraordinary financial aid package to America's farmers. Farm subsidies jumped to their highest level in fourteen years, most of them paid out without any action by Congress.
The money flowed to farms like Robert Henry's. When I visited in early July, many of his fields near New Madrid, Mo., had been flooded for months, preventing him from working in them. The soybeans that he did manage to grow had fallen in value; China wasn't buying them, in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs.
That's when the government stepped in. Some of the aid came from long-familiar programs. Government-subsidized crop insurance covered some of the losses from flooding. Other payments were unprecedented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture simply sent him a check to compensate him for the low prices resulting from the trade war.
"'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's my understanding, they're going to do it again."
Indeed, a few weeks later, the USDA announced another $16 billion in trade-related aid to farmers. It came on top of the previous year's $12 billion package, for a grand total of $28 billion in two years. About $19 billion of that money had been paid out by the end of 2019, and the rest will be paid in 2020.
"President Trump has great affection for America's farmers and ranchers. He knows that they're fighting the fight and that they're on the front lines," Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue told reporters while announcing the aid package.
The announcement aroused little controversy. "I was surprised that it didn't attract more attention," says Joe Glauber, the USDA's former chief economist, who's now a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Glauber says it deserves more attention, for a whole collection of reasons.
For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008. The auto industry bailout was fiercely debated in Congress. Yet the USDA created this new program out of thin air; it decided that an old law authorizing a USDA program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) already gave it the authority to spend this money.
"What's unique about this is, [it] didn't go through Congress," Glauber says. Some people have raised questions about whether using the CCC for this new purpose is legal.
Glauber sees a risk of "moral hazard" — a situation in which someone is shielded from the consequences of poor decisions. The decision to start the trade war was costly, he says, and the Trump Administration, by tapping the federal treasury, is avoiding the political fallout from that decision. "The sector that is hurt the most, and which would normally complain, all of a sudden it's assuaged by these payments. To me, that's a problem," he says.
Also, the payments are quite generous. According to studies by several independent economists, the USDA is paying farmers roughly twice as much as the actual harm that they suffered from the trade war. And the payments are based on production; the bigger the farm, the bigger the payments. Thousands of farmers got more than $100,000 each. According to an NPR analysis of USDA records of payments made through July 2019, 100,000 individuals collected just over 70 percent of the money.
Catherine Kling, an economist at Cornell University, says the government could at least have demanded some public benefits in exchange for that money. "I think it's a real lost opportunity," she says.
What farmers do with their land has a huge impact on water quality, wildlife and climate change, Kling says. The USDA has programs that pay farmers to help the environment, doing things like restoring wetlands.
The budget for those environmental programs is just a quarter of the size of this year's trade-related payments. So Kling's reaction to this year's farm bailout is, "Wow, [there are] so many things that money could get spent on that could really be beneficial to taxpayers, who are ultimately footing the bill."
On Capitol Hill, there has long been a quiet alliance between lawmakers who support farm subsidies and those who support food stamps, or SNAP. Together, they've supported the budget of the USDA, which runs both programs.
Events in 2019 tested that alliance, as the USDA helped farmers while restricting SNAP payments.
"They've already given out $19 billion to farmers, but they're cutting $5 billion from people in need!" says Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D-OH), who sits on the House Agriculture Committee. "I don't even know how to describe it except to say that it is cruel, it is unfair, and it is clearly designed to support the president's base, as he sees it, as opposed to those whom he sees as being undeserving."
The USDA has not yet announced whether it will deliver another round of trade-related payments to farmers in 2020.
For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008.
Isn't a big difference that the farmers needed this aid as a direct consequence of Trump's tariffs, while the financial crisis was not created by the government (except indirectly due to reduced oversight)?
barmar, on 2020-January-02, 11:04, said:
That's a fair point. However, it does not change the fact that tax payers are getting thricely screwed: by the tariffs on imported goods, by the taxes they pay to compensate farmers and at the polls by farmers who are happy to support our anti president as long as the cash keeps coming. Or that these payments are being made without explicit congressional approval.


View of Wikipedia & Museums: Community Curation
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Community Curation
Liam Wyatt
James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary in the "Scriptorium" built to compile the first edition.
Murray represents both the exclusivist and flattening approaches to curation as he received suggestions from the public but also held absolute editorial authority.
Picture by an unknown photographer.
This is the vision upon which Wikipedia is built, a born-digital project with a spirit straight from the European Age of Enlightenment. It was an age when there was a desire to see the world and understand everything in it; an age when collectors and classifiers built the great encyclopedias, dictionaries and museums that still play a central role in our cultures. It was also an age of polymath amateurs, working to shorten the shadow of ignorance just a little bit further. In the www
Imagine a world in which everyone has free access to the sum of human knowledge in their own language.
present day those amateurs are very much still at work and many go by the name of Wikipedians:
millions of Wikipedians, aggregating our cultural heritage piece by piece into a coherent but ever- changing text. However, the tension between knowledge professionals and interested amateurs remains. That tension and the unnecessary opposition of two groups with passion and conviction - one with the authority and one without - can be seen in debates over the term
"curation" and debates about what, if anything, professional curators and Wikipedians have in common. This essay presents three points of curatorial policy that differentiate Wikipedia from professional curation and argues that Wikipedia can be regarded as a meeting ground between the two groups - a place of "community curation".
In recent years "curation" has become a word with contested meaning. At one extreme is an exclusivist understanding that sees the curator as a focal point of cultural understanding, commanding deference as the museum-sensei. At the other extreme is a radical flattening of the term's connotations to the point of being merely synonymous with "selecting". This latter perspective is one that simplifies the art of building, conserving, researching and narrating a col- lection down to making a playlist. However, neither of these extremes is particularly helpful in envisaging successful museum projects which require community engagement - which museums are increasingly being asked to do.
How one feels about Wikipedia is probably indicative of where an individual stands on the issue
of defining the term "curator". The former (exclusivist) group might likely see Wikipedia as a well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful intrusion into the museum space - akin to the
proverbial large enthusiastic dog in the small cluttered room: every time it wags its tail it knocks over a piece of furniture. The latter (flattening) group might likely see Wikipedia as a playpen of the technorati with editorial rules and content guidelines designed to make participation by the interested amateur increasingly difficult.
Between these extreme viewpoints, perhaps unsurprisingly, lies a productive, mutually beneficial relationship. Such a relationship is built upon a collaborative understanding of the idea of curation. It respects expertise but demands engagement; it is focused neither on giving nor taking knowledge but on building a shared understanding.
Wikipedia is frequently described as a product of User-Generated Content (UGC) sitting alongside blogging, social-networking and video sharing websites. However, it is far better understood as a place of Community Curated Works (CCW) . For those in the cultural sector, 2
especially for the professional curator, this differentiation might explain why Wikipedia should be approached differently from other online outreach ventures that your organisation might be in- volved in. "Community" rather than "user" recognises that Wikipedia is more than merely a series of individuals, it is a movement. The individual Wikipedian is not merely a "user" of a cor- poration's infrastructure but also potentially the author, reader, reviewer and maintainer of every aspect of the project content, code and community. "Curated" rather than "generated"
emphasises that Wikipedians not only add new content but also delete and merge, poke and prod content to build a better encyclopedia and not merely a larger one. "Works" rather than "content"
signifies that content on Wikipedia is not just a collection of discrete pages but a coherent whole.
No one page should stay orphaned from or compete with the rest (either through links, editorial style or content) but should increase the depth and breadth of the larger work.
If Wikipedia were a museum it would be part catalogue, part exhibition, all community curation.
Moreover, it has a global breadth and depth of content and an audience of massive scale. That these stars should align for a free, non-profit, knowledge-sharing project makes Wikipedia a per- fect place for curators to look when investigating ways to engage with "the people formerly known as the audience" . 3
That said, it is not altogether self-evident how to engage with Wikipedia even with the best will in the world. Like any collaborative product the documentation is not consistent (let alone complete!) and the rules are not fixed. Further, like any open community, there is no application form to join. For any risk-averse cultural institution this is daunting but it also opens up many opportunities for those willing to invest the time in building a relationship with the Wikipedia community. There may be no neat listing of what you can do, but equally there is no fixed list of what you cannot do. It is a negotiated relationship either way and the possibilities are quite broad and often unexpected.
Well designed GLAM-Wikimedia collaborations in the past have gone further than achieving 4
their stated aims. In some cases, they have led to other, largely unanticipated, positive outcomes.
In 2008 the German Bundesarchiv decided after long negotiations to release copyright in the medium resolution digitised version of thousands of images and to upload those to Wikimedia Commons with attribution back to the originals in their online catalogue . The project's explicit 5
purpose was to increase use and awareness of their little-known photographic collection (through incorporation into relevant Wikipedia articles) and to assist in the task of categorising the subject matter of the images - a dauntingly large and hitherto incomplete task. This project was well designed as it married the advantages of the archive (the collection, its associated records and the expertise) with the advantages of Wikipedia (the encyclopedia, its breadth and depth and the community). Within the year the stated purpose had been largely completed with great success. For example the Bundesarchiv's portraits of political leaders had become the headline images for their respective biographies across dozens of Wikipedia language editions and the collection as a whole had been categorised into extremely fine details such as "Category: Public Relations in Forestry in the GDR" and "Category: Black and White Photographic Portraits of Politicians" - categories that are easily imported back to the original collection record. Achieving these intended outcomes was noteworthy enough, but the unintended ones turned out to be even more remarkable ...
By 2011 the images have been added to 65 thousand different articles in over 200 language editions with combined pageviews of more than 100 million per month . Not only were these the 6
expected articles (such as the aforementioned biographies) but Bundesarchiv images had begun to be used as illustrations for such disparate subjects as "Random Access Memory", "Magnesium"
and even "Leprosy"! Photographs such as these illustrate subjects, not merely objects, giving
less expected, but more valuable, were the copious suggestions for improving metadata - the high number matched by the gloriously pedantic detail of some - a cataloguer's dream . Of course, this 7
meant that the previous problem of too little interest in the collection was replaced by the opposite (but welcome) problem of too much interest.
them a far wider audience and varied con- textualisation.
The Bundesarchiv has had its images used more widely due to their being the first to provide access. Multimedia (particularly photographs) used in Wikipedia articles are often make-do solutions, chosen from the limited range of options available under an appropriate co- pyright license to illustrate the given subject.
Good quality historical multimedia is espe- cially scarce, so any professional or historical multimedia shared by a cultural institution is very likely to quickly become the default illustration on the encyclopedia. Multimedia offered subsequently from other institutions would need not only to prove its relevance to the article but also that it was superior to the existing image in illustrating the subject at hand. Thus, there is a significant first-mover advantage in sharing good quality historical multimedia.
Due to this marked increase in collection vi- sibility, the clickthrough statistics to the Bun- desarchiv website instantly jumped, producing a corresponding spike in high-resolution ima- ge sales. Moreover, this was no short-lived trend. Statistics for Wikipedia pageviews, Bun- desarchiv clickthroughs and high-resolution image sales have continued to grow ever since putting paid to the oft-cited fear, "if people can see it over there, they won't bother visiting the institution's website". Instead, the in- creased visibility "out there" led to a marked increase in the relevance, visitation and sales revenue of the Bundesarchiv's own site. Even less
Picture by Thomas Uhlemann.
Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-1988-0719-38 One of the images donated by the Bundesarchiv.
Now seen thousands of times a day including in the article "Rock music".
Even within the relatively tight framework of GLAM-Wikimedia photographic collaboration there are many ways of modifying the project to elicit specific outcomes. The Tropenmusem of Amsterdam has embarked on a project over the last few years that leverages the uniquely global nature of Wikipedia. By sharing its collection of images of early 20 Century Javanese culture, th
the Indonesian Wikipedia community has set about identifying locations and identifying information that was not known to the curators as well as translating the museum's captions . 8
Some Wikipedia-generated captions have even made it to the museum walls during recent exhibitions. Such a collaboration is both an effective route to lowering the cost of time- consuming work as well as a means of engaging the society from which the collection items originated. In an institution with a collection that spans cultures, these outcomes can be achieved in ways that are neither patronising nor exploitative.
For Wikipedia, the desired outcome of any project is always the same - to increase the scope, reach and quality of "free knowledge". Wikipedia itself is a staunchly non-commercial project so it would seem incongruous that collaborative projects often founder before they begin because of concerns over copyright and the fact that Wikipedia cannot accept any content which restricts commercial re-use. The reason Wikipedia appears to be so pernickety about copyright is that it tries to adhere to the principle that anyone can view the content for no cost and also that they may do whatever they want with the contents. This dual freedom - known as "Gratis & Libre" - is fundamental to the "free knowledge" mission of the community and it is why no content that is
"for Wikipedia only", "non-commercial" or "non-derivative" may be used. The only restrictions placed upon any re-use of Wikipedia's texts is that it be attributed and that any changes be shared under the same terms. This very essay includes sections of text incorporated from the policy page
A plantation in Suriname.
Watercolor. Painted by G.P.H. Zimmermann.
One of the images used in a 2010 Tropenmuseum exhibition "Art of Survival: Maroon culture of Suriname"
that was first digitally restored and provided with multilingual captions on Wikimedia commons.
"Wikipedia: Advice for the Cultural Sector" and the whole of it (as it legally must be) is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (CC-By-SA) . Therefore you are 9
free to use this very essay in any way you chose so long as you abide by those two criteria. Most importantly, the Share-Alike clause ensures that what is shared freely once stays free forever and that any other works into which this free-content is integrated become free themselves - hence its nickname as "the viral clause".
There are a few other key policies that differentiate Wikipedia from normal curatorial practice and they bear noting. These are the "three N's" - notability, neutrality and no original research . 10
Unlike the aforementioned stance on copyright which is key to the mission of sharing free knowledge, these three policies are instrumentalist ones borne out of necessity. They enable the theory of a mass-collaboration encyclopedia to turn into reality. It is through these policies that Wikipedia addresses the most common criticisms against it - that it is "anti-expert" or "anyone could just write anything".
Wikipedia is a subject-centric encyclopedia: cultural institutions are object-centric. Their res- pective criteria for growth in their collections are notability and significance. That is, in Wikipedian usage the word "notable" is a term of art meaning that the subject at hand warrants an article in its own right. It is determined by the existence of reliable third-party sources to verify any statements of fact. "Notability" should not be confused with the term "significance" as used by professional curators for whom it expresses the preservation value of an object. However, even though there could be a "statement of significance" for every item in a collection, this does not mean that Wikipedia should have an article about each and every item. For example, an ancient coin is an object and a museum must make an assessment to determine its significance and worthiness for accessioning. However, for Wikipedia, even if the coin is a good representation of its type, it may not in itself be "notable" unless there is significant coverage from reliable sources about that specific ancient coin. On the other hand, the subject of that coin's denomination would be notable, and Wikipedia will have an article about that, whilst the museum would not.
Highly significant headline objects in any major cultural collection are also likely to be notable (and therefore worthy of their own Wikipedia article) but there is no direct correlation between the two measures. Indeed, there are copious Wikipedia articles about subjects which would not be considered to have any wider significance at all. Examples include the myriad articles about sporting statistics and individual asteroids or proteins. Whilst it may seem perverse that these topics are considered worthy of stand-alone articles yet many significant objects accessioned into cultural institutions are not, this is merely the consequence of the fact that there are detailed, structured and easily discoverable publications made for each individual subject by recognised experts in the respective fields. Just as notability is not synonymous with significance, equally, non-notability is not synonymous with insignificance. Information about a non-notable subject could perhaps be included as a section of a higher-order article in the encyclopedia.
"Neutrality" is the second key editorial principle that differentiates Wikipedia from the cultural sector. Whilst the encyclopedia attempts in all ways possible to maintain neutrality, by virtue of its position as an official arbiter of cultural heritage, the cultural sector is obliged to make wwwwwwww
judgements and tell narratives on behalf of society at large - a process that is inherently non- neutral. Yet, it is this specific divergence that forms the greatest bond of dependency between Wikipedia and the cultural sector. Wikipedia is dependent upon verifiable reliable sources for its information and it is the publication of that information by cultural organisations (most especially the scholarly research about that information) that grounds Wikipedia in reality.
"If anyone can edit, what's stopping people taking my knowledge and just replacing it with their own opinions?" is a very common concern raised by experts and is it precisely the one that the editorial principle of neutrality is designed to address. In practice, the opposite problem is more common - what happens when the editing public make the expert's information better? In Wikipedian usage the word neutral is shorthand for "neutral point of view" or "NPOV". The neutral point of view neither sympathises nor disparages its subject; endorses nor opposes specific perspectives. It is not a lack of viewpoint, but is rather a specific, editorially neutral, point of view. Professional curators have gone to much effort in the last few decades to make descriptions and publications engaging and embracing the controversies surrounding an object.
This is in contradistinction to past practice of writing simple, uncontroversial (even bland) item descriptions. By insisting on "neutrality" Wikipedia is not asking for enforced simplicity or an avoidance of controversial topics but is rather asking for opposing views (and the editors that hold them) to co-operate to produce a single, as-close-as-we-can-get-to-neutral understanding of a subject that uses reliable sources to verify all claims. For example, Wikipedia's article on the theory of evolution includes a well referenced section on social and cultural responses and therefore also discusses the theory of creationism. The two ideas are not separate articles written by opposing viewers but integrated topics written by encyclopedists.
The final point that differentiates Wikipedia most directly from the cultural sector is the editorial policy of no original research (also known as “NOR”). As primary sites of cultural inquiry, cultural institutions are accustomed to research being undertaken using their collections. Indeed, the level of research output is a measure of their success. Research not only sheds new light on hitherto unloved sections of a collection but is crucial for driving social debate. This process is therefore one of necessary elitism as it requires acquired, analytical skill, scholarship, expertise and earned respect to draw conclusions that are insightful and reliable. However in Wikipedia, where any one person can modify any other's work, the opposite paradigm holds. The real-world credentials of the author are deliberately ignored and the focus is purely on the quality of the output. Of course, the model of blind peer review is common in research as a way of proving the quality of a work independent of the author, but that system still relies on a structure of experts and reputation-driven publications. This is not to suggest that this is a bad thing, indeed it is an extremely good thing, but as “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit” Wikipedia cannot make use of that model. Instead, Wikipedia enforces the dual principles of "Verifiability" and “no original research” in effect to outsource truth .11
All facts included in Wikipedia must be verified to a reliable third party source - the more controversial the statement the more sources are required. Naturally, the definition of "reliable" is highly contestable but this is a contestation that occurs in every professional discipline already and is not unique to Wikipedia. The principal advantage of this "outsourcing" system is that it
Hoxne_Hoard.
Some of the Roman spoons from the "Hoxne Hoard" held at the British Museum being shown to Wikipedians during a behind-the-scenes tour. Whilst the individual spoons are not notable, the article about the Hoard as a collection is now arguably the best in the entire encyclopedia. Picture by Fae
obviates all discussions about which editor is more correct than the other because the criterion for including facts is always verifiability - not truth. Experts dipping their toe into the waters of Wikipedia often feel affronted when their offer to write their latest research directly in the encyclopedia is rebuffed with cries of “show us your footnotes”. Yet it is clear that without NOR any theory is just as valid as any other and the viability of the collaborative project would degenerate rapidly into bickering of whose version of a truth can garner more popular votes.
However with the NOR guideline the published research output from cultural institutions becomes absolutely crucial for Wikipedia as a source of reliable references. Far from competing with experts and research publications Wikipedia (after all, a tertiary source) is dependent upon the authoritative voice of cultural institutions to provide citations. Wikipedia's use of this information in turn drives traffic back to the original materials and institutions from whence it came. This cycle draws more people into the deep collections records of cultural institutions than ever before.
Wikipedia is like nothing that has ever gone before it and yet it is a direct successor to the enlightenment tradition of naming, classifying and describing the universe. This essay has itself tried to shed some light on some of those historical correspondences and policy parallels. Whilst very complex, often confusing and constantly changing, it is one of the most important cultural resources ever developed. Wikipedia and the cultural sector are often doing the same thing, for the same reason, in the same medium and for the same audience. Why not do it together?
For more information on how cultural organisations can work with Wikipedia, visit www.glamwiki.org
1. CC-By-SA
2. This differentiation was first elaborated by former Wikimedia Australia president Brianna Laugher in 2008 3. A phrase articulated by Jay Rosen in 2006
4. GLAM is the acronym used by Wikipedians to describe the professional cultural sector - Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (and sometimes covering related fields of broadcasting or education). Wikimedia, as opposed to Wikipedia, refers to the gamut of sister-projects (and their respective communities) alongside Wikipedia including Wikimedia Commons, WikiBooks, Wiktionary....
5. More information about this project is at
6. Whilst this data is publicly available, it is quite obscure to find.
7. The “Error reports” page can be seen at .
Most commentary is in German.
8. The homepage of this project is
9. The advice page can be found at and the full legal information about
this copyright license can be found at
10. The full policies for these can be read at www.//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:N, www.//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV and
11. This policy can be seen at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/137/community-curated-works-ccw http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bundesarchiv
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/glamorous.php?doit=1&category=Images+from+the+German+Federal+Archive&use_g lobalusage=1&ns0=1&depth=9
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/baglama.php?group=Images+from+the+German+Federal+Archive&date=201105 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bundesarchiv/Error_reports http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Tropenmuseum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
The 7 conference of Wikimania 2011, Haifa, Israel. Attendees from all over the world passionate about working together th
to share knowledge freely. Picture by Wikimedia Israel's photostream
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Wikipedia and the Myth of Universality
Crafters of "universal" knowledge organiza- tion systems have consistently aimed to facilitate access to vast information resources across cultural and political borders in
View of Part Objects and Their Location
The references used in the implementation of an Address list are qualified by Address and they reference the Address part object of the objects, and not the whole Person
View of Technology Meets Postmodern Epistemology: The Discourse of Hebrew Wikipe...
In this study we analyze deletion discussion pages on the Hebrew Wikipedia in order to examine the ways in which definitions of “worthy”
View of ADIEU WIKIPEDIA: UNDERSTANDING THE ETHICS OF WIKIPEDIA AFTER GAMERGATE
Wales, in a series of tweets written in September 2014 (during the thick of edit warring on the gamergate article) compared the conflict to “a controversy at Wikipedia about a breed
View of 410 Gone - Infocide in Open Content Communities
I then explore the complexities of infocide in open content communities (e.g., Python, Wikipedia, Ruby, Debian and Ubuntu) with respect to reasons, enactment, and community
“The sum of all human knowledge”: A systematic review of scholarly research on t...
comprehensiveness, currency, readability, and reliability aspects of content quality, as well as featured articles (Wikipedia articles identified by the community as high-quality)..
Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders: A systematic review of scholarly researc...
presented summaries of scholarly studies grouped according to topics covering the ranking and popularity of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as a knowledge source for news, health information, and
HPR news
What has, however, also become clear over many years of research in that area is that the way people conceive of their own personal risk is highly complex and often very different from
but in ancient Persian; and consequently that all their words and forms cannot justly be expected to agree altogether with Zend: but that there should be,
Aalborg Universitet The Global Energy Challenge A Contextual Framework Connolly,...
As well as the inevitable decline of fossil fuel production, there are also significant issues regarding the location of reserves. In particular, oil and gas
Citations in Wikipedia
Finn ˚ Arup Nielsen h-index (8 May 2017):. h
Sexual Harassment in Higher Education Experiences and Perceptions among Students...
Interestingly, for the same categories in which women are more likely to experience situations of (potential) sexual harassment, people who report their nationality to be
The Book Out of Bounds: Essays Presented to Lars Ole Sauerberg
Frye and the Opposition between Popular Literature and Bestsellers
Sexual Harassment in Higher Education - Experiences and Perceptions among Studen...
The Development of Gender-Responsive Indicators: Towards a Participatory Approac...
Hvilken Oversættelse! Hvilken Galskab! Translating the poetry of Grundtvig
Foreword : Wikipedia and the Sum of All Human Information
Wikipedians' Knowledge and Moral Duties
Aquatic Environment 2004State and trends – technical summaryNERI Technical Repor...
Part I: Self-Reference


Monthly Archives: January, 2023
Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi's collaboration in Rajkumar Hirani's Munna Bhai M.B.B.S and Lage Raho Munna Bhai was highly successful and the characters of Munna and Circuit continue to be beloved by audiences. The two actors will once again...
Sriti Jha and Shabir Ahluwalia captivated audiences with their chemistry in Kumkum Bhagya nine years ago. The ZEE TV show has been consistently popular since its premiere. Currently, Mugdha Chaphekar and Krishna Kaul are the lead actors in the...
Bollywood actor Vicky Kaushal has expressed interest in performing in a historical film. He previously committed to projects such as Takht and The Immortal Ashwatthama, but they have been delayed. In the meantime, Vicky has signed another historical biopic...
In the 1990s, Rajkumar Santoshi and Sunny Deol formed a successful partnership with films like Ghayal, Damini, and Ghatak achieving iconic status. Despite attempting to collaborate again in the past, the two were unable to do so until 27...
The fifth season of Cobra Kai premiered on Netflix in September 2022 and it has been announced that the series will return for another season. However, amid the excitement of the fans, the upcoming sixth season of Cobra Kai...
The highly praised cult favourite, Laal Rang, starring Randeep Hooda, is making a comeback on the big screen with its sequel Laal Rang 2: Khoon Chusva. Randeep Hooda, the actor, announced on Friday that he will be reprising his...
Zwigato, starring Kapil Sharma, set to hit theatres on March 17, 2023; Read more
The release date for the highly-awaited film Zwigato, featuring Kapil Sharma and Shahana Goswami, has been announced by Applause Entertainment and Nandita Das Initiatives. The movie will be in theatres on March 17, 2023. Zwigato takes audiences to the lesser-explored...
Rakhi Sawant arrested in Mumbai following complaint by Sherlyn Chopra
On Thursday, Mumbai police arrested actor Rakhi Sawant following a complaint filed by model-actor Sherlyn Chopra. Chopra's complaint alleged that Sawant had made and distributed inappropriate videos and photos of her without her consent. An FIR was registered against...
Salman Khan to have a 20-minute extended cameo in SRK’s Pathaan? Find out
The upcoming Hindi film Pathaan, starring Shah Rukh Khan, is generating a lot of excitement in the film industry. As YRF is launching their spy universe with this film, it is expected that characters from the Tiger franchise and...
Ali Fazal to star in psychological thriller ‘The Underbug,’ premiering at Slamdance Film Festival
Ali Fazal continues to take on diverse film roles, with another unique project in the pipeline. He will star in the psychological thriller The Underbug, directed by Shujaat Saudagar and also featuring Hussain Dalal in a lead role, among...


UN General Assembly Down The Memory Lane
NEW YORK - Marking the 70th anniversary of the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on 11 January 2016, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the body has truly become the “Parliament for all people.”
In fact, before there was a UN Secretary-General, a Security Council or an iconic Headquarters in New York, there was the General Assembly, the most representative body ever of world nations, meeting for the first time in a London hall facing Westminster Abbey, the 1,000-year-old coronation site of Britain’s kings and queens.
It was here on 10 January 1946 that representatives of the then 51 Member States came together in Westminster Central Hall, a Methodist church and conference centre, before a semi-circular dais beneath the now famous UN emblem of a world map as seen from above the North Pole, flanked by olive wreaths – affixed back to front on the wall.
What a difference seven decades make.
Now, Heads of State and Government from 193 nations gather in the majestic, newly renovated General Assembly Hall at UN Headquarters in New York at the beginning of the new session in September each year against a gold-leafed background, beneath that equally gleaming emblem – this time the right way round.
UN News says in a feature: This Hall has echoed with the soaring rhetoric of monarchs, presidents, popes and prime ministers. It has also resounded to more doubtfully memorable interventions.
On 12 October 1961, the echo was the sound of Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on his desk when the Philippines delegate accused his country of swallowing up Eastern Europe.
On 20 September 2006, then Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, taking the podium a day after United States President George W. Bush, announced that it still smelt of sulphur because “the devil came here yesterday.” He made the sign of the cross, clasped his hands as if in prayer, and looked briefly upwards as though to invoke God, eliciting giggles from some delegations.
In 1977 and 1978, Sir Eric Gairy, Prime Minister of the Caribbean island nation of Grenada had flying saucers, officially called unidentified flying objects (UFOs), put on the Assembly’s agenda.
On 23 September 2009, Libya’s then leader Muammar Ghaddafi extended his allotted 15-minute speech time to one hour and 40 minutes of diatribe, during which he tore up the UN Charter on this self-same podium.
And for 22 years after the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had taken control of Beijing and its then 700 million or more people, the UN still recognized the Taiwan-based Republic of China, with less than a fiftieth of that population, as the representative of the Chinese people and holder of UN Security Council permanent membership – until the General Assembly on 25 October 1971 passed Resolution 2758 giving recognition to the PRC.
Commemorating the UNGA’s 70th anniversary, Ban told UN officials on 11 January: “The resolutions adopted by the General Assembly may not all be acted on right away. Yet they stand as our common position on the most pressing issues of our times.”
“These resolutions tell the story of our resolve. They reflect our conviction that the countries of the world coming together can do far more collectively than they ever could alone. Each delegate who speaks, each vote that is cast, every gavel that opens a new meeting adds a little more hope to the world,” said the Secretary-General. [International Press Syndicate – 11 January 2016]
Photo: A view of the delegations gathered for the first session of the UN General Assembly when it opened on 10 January 1946 at Central Hall in London, United Kingdom. UN Photo/Marcel Bolomey
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