“Sweden’s debt will shrink to 36.3 percent of GDP this year from 40.2 percent in 2007. In the U.K., the public debt burden will widen to 84 percent in 2011 from 44.4 percent, the European Commission estimates.”
Source : Bloomberg
Tag: Policy
Film Review: ‘Creativity and the Capitalist City’
“As Uitermark discusses in the upcoming podcast, one never sees overly anti-poor language in policy documents. Everything seems benign — a “banalization of injustice.” Many of these policies, incubator spaces and creative city concepts may promote economic growth, but with rising inequality and the clear reshaping of cities for certain classes, one has to read between the lines and look for what, and who, is missing.”
Source : Polis
#25 Collected Reading – Protest edition
Quote of the week
“The service of a good citizen is never useless : being heard and seen, he helps by his expression, a nod of his head, a stubborn silence, even his gait. ”
– Seneca
1.Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street
“The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
activism,culture,economics,Financial,global
Source :Dissenter.com
2. What’s behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?
“Some of these critiques are ludicrous. Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power — in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions — is destroying financial security for everyone else?”
activism,culture,economics,Financial,global
Source : Salon
3. Unequal Responsibility for Crime
“The case Mokhiber cited is not unique. In 1982 a study of America’s five hundred largest corporations reported that “23 percent of them had been convicted of a major crime or had paid more than $50,000 in penalties for serious misbehavior during the previous decade”
corporations,crime,politics,usa
Source :Truth Out
4. Freedom Riders Documentary PBS
“In 1908, journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that “no other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.” As bus travel became widespread in the South over the first half of the 20th century, it followed the same pattern”
culture, race, USA, nonviolence
Source : PBS
5. Israelis plan million-strong march as protesters call for social justice
“It is certainly one of the largest street protests we have experienced in Israel,” said Tamar Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute. “But what really makes it different is its heterogeneous nature. Normally protest is homogeneous. Diversity is as important as size.”
democracy,israel,policy,politics,protest
Source : The Guardian
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– Kaushik
#22 Collected Reading
Quote of the week
“It must be admitted, however, that life in More’s Utopia, as in most others, would be intolerably dull. Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect of all planned social systems, actual as well as imaginary.”
— History of Western Philosophy (Routledge Classics) – by Bertrand Russell
1.Why start-ups won’t save us from recession
“Now of course Hoffa is a union boss and he would say that, wouldn’t he. But the point he raises is nevertheless sobering. Not only is patriotism a completely outmoded concept for major technology companies, but so also is the idea that these corporations have any wider social responsibility to the societies which provide them with the skilled and educated people who make them so innovative and profitable. Welcome to Tom Friedman’s flat world.”
culture,economics,policy, usa
Source :The Guardian
2. Jelly batteries break the mould
“The Leeds-based researchers are promising that their jelly batteries are as safe as polymer batteries, perform like liquid-filled batteries, but are 10 to 20% the price of either..”
environment,innovation, uk
Source : BBC
3. The Perfect Stimulus: Free, Politically Viable, and Deficit-Reducing
“Why would the Treasury want more longer-term debt? Let’s think of an analogy. Imagine that you had two loans: a 30-year mortgage fixed at 3% and a 1-year loan at 0.5% that you have to roll over annually. Although that one-year loan is cheaper now, you know that in a couple of years it will cost you more than 3% to continue to roll it over — and your spending habit won’t allow you to pay it off. As a result, it makes sense to consolidate that short-term loan into your mortgage if you are able.”
culture,economics,policy,usa
Source :The Atlantic Magazine
4. UK joins nuclear fusion project
“We were thinking: ‘what would be a way forward, how could Europe define a strategic route for laser power production to take advantage of these developments?’ And that was the kernel of Hiper.”
environment,innovation,uk
Source : BBC
5. Mental Abacus Does Away With Words
“Now studies on a group of children trained to use a “mental abacus” suggest the technique frees mathematics from its usual dependence on language.”
Asia,Mathmatics,Method,thinking
Source : New Scientist
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– Kaushik
#21 Collected Reading
Quote of the week
“Brazil was the first country to pass a law guaranteeing a minimum income: in 2004, President Lula signed the law guaranteeing “an unconditional basic income, or citizenship income” for every Brazilian citizen or foreigner resident for five years or more. The payment will be of equal value, payable in monthly amounts and sufficient to cover “minimal expenses in food, housing, education and health care,” taking into account “the country’s level of development and budgetary possibilities.”
— Living in the End Times :by Slavoj Zizek
1.Sweden’s free school experiment
“Osterman also doesn’t believe it’s necessarily a bad thing. “We are becoming a school for ambitious immigrants,” he said.
But as I was leaving his school, one of his students, Mohammed Mahmoud, put it differently. “This is a school for criminals,” he declared, to laughter. “Nobody’s working in this school, because no one here has any future.”
education,sweden,policy,culture
Source :The Guardian
2. What Do You Want to Say You’ve Done?
“Instead, base your career decisions (at least in part) on what hope to say when you look back on your life. You may not always succeed, but are unlikely to look back with regret on those decisions that gave you the opportunity to reach your aspirations.”
culture,life
Source : Harvard Business Review
3. Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?
“I do not enjoy Facebook — I find it cloying and impossible — but I am there every day. Last year I watched a friend struggle through breast cancer treatment in front of hundreds of friends.”
media,culture,usa
Source :New York Magazine
4. UK riots were product of consumerism and will hit economy, says City broker
“The dominant ethos of ‘I buy, therefore I am’ needs to be challenged by a shift of emphasis from material to non-material values.”
capitalism,uk,riots,culture
Source : The Guardian
5. NYTimes: Where Pay for Chiefs Outstrips U.S. Taxes
“The authors of a new study said their findings suggested that current United States business policy was rewarding tax avoidance rather than innovation.”
economics,policy,tax rate,usa
Source : The New York Times
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– Kaushik
#20 Collected Reading – 5 View points on the London Riots
Quote of the week
“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force,” the 1945 conference declared, “then Africans as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom, even if force destroys them and the world.” The demand for freedom came alongside the demand for socialism: “We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for profit alone.”
-The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World – by Vijay Prashad
1.Everywhere is a target, everywhere is symbolic
“the riots and its crowd-logics that recalls the frenzy that characterises financial markets today. Indeed it’s a strange though not necessarily ironic coincidence that the Blackberry through its private messaging network, BBM, was it is claimed, the method of organising London’s riots allowing people to group and regroup with mystifying speed. Not so long ago, the Blackberry was the singular device that symbolised the world of modern business.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Networks
Source :Domus
2. Teens are left to their own devices as council axes all youth services
“It’s just the boredom,” she says. “Boredom causes trouble.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Economics
Source : The Guardian
3. Handmade hashtag. Impromptu bulletin board gives positive voice to riot-struck Londoners
“My immediate neighbour was drawn to the A4 sheet saying ‘we should be producers, not just consumers”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Community
Source :Eye Magazine
4. The year we realised our democratically elected leaders can no longer protect us
“The irony of all this is that outside Britain, Europe and the US, the great story of 2011 has been the Arab spring, as the people of Syria, Yemen and beyond have taken to the streets. It seems that just as those nations demand the tools of democracy, we are finding them rusting and blunt in our hands.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Democracy
Source : The Guardian
5. Thinking Allowed BBC Radio 4 – Liverpool Riots
“30 years ago riots broke out in Liverpool which lead to 160 arrests and 258 police officers needing hospital treatment. The four days of street battles, arson and looting lead to violent disturbances in many other British cities and have changed community relations and disorder policing in the country forever.”
Riots, Liverpool, Politics, Culture
Source : BBC Thinking Allowed
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
#19 Collected Reading
Quote of the week
“To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more create the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means : to pick out determing elements and combining them.”
-Karl Gerstner
1.What Jaron Lanier Thinks of Technology Now
“These arguments have proved popular. The book has received admiring reviews in the Times and (twice) in The New York Review of Books. In the months after “Gadget” was published, Lanier lectured at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, travelled to Seoul to speak at a major conference about innovation, and made Time’s list of the hundred “most influential people in the world.” At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin, in March of 2010, Lanier gave a talk, before which he asked his audience not to blog, text, or tweet while he was speaking. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been: “If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”
Technology, USA, Culture, Design
Source :The New Yorker
2. Blog Archive Better (and more) Social Bonuses
“While they were purchasing a gift for a teammate, they also became more interested in their teammate and were happier to help them further in multiple other ways.”
Business, USA, Culture, collaboration
Source : Dan Ariely
3. Handmade hashtag. Impromptu bulletin board gives positive voice to riot-struck Londoners
“My immediate neighbour was drawn to the A4 sheet saying ‘we should be producers, not just consumers’.”
Culture, Community, London, Public, Memorial
Source :Eye Magazine
4. Examining the Limitations of a Neoliberal Safety Net: Romney’s Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts
“rightfully in my humble opinion, ignore this because the government isn’t doing what the government is best at – absorbing risks. All the government is doing is setting the stage for the individual to confront the entirety of their economic risks by themselves.”
Economics, USA, Culture, Policy
Source : Rortybomb
5. The Motorcycle Gangs
“they know it—and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today’s society, the Hell’s Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.”
Gangs, Culture, Media, USA, politics
Source : The Nation
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
#18 Collected Reading
Quote of the week
“I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining,
but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a
happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it;”The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
by Benjamin Franklin
1.Facebook and Twitter fuel iPhone and Blackberry addiction, says Ofcom
“Of the new generation of smartphone users, 60% of teenagers classed themselves as “highly addicted” to their device, compared to 37% of adults.
Mobile, UK, Culture
Source :The Guardian
2. Israel’s secular middle class strikes back
“Israel’s school system is in the pits with class sizes of about 40; many Israeli women cannot afford going to work because childcare is very expensive; the public transport is that of a third-world country.”
Israel, Policy, Culture, Protest
Source : The Guardian
3. America’s First Great Global Warming Debate
“As a gentleman farmer in Virginia, Jefferson had long been obsessed with the weather; in fact, on July 1, 1776, just as he was finishing his work on the Declaration of Independence, he began keeping a temperature diary. Jefferson would take two readings a day for the next 50 years. He would also crunch the numbers every which way”
Environment, USA, Global, Culture, History
Source :Smithsonian Magazine
4. The Illusion of the Free Internet
“Since life expectancy in Nigeria is less than 50 years it is a fair assumption most people in Ogoniland have lived with chronic oil pollution throughout their lives,” the report says.”
Environment, USA, Global, Culture, History
Source : Slow Media.net
5. Why India Can’t Feed Her People
“As much as 40 per cent of all the fruits, vegetables and food grains grown in India never make it to the market. The country wastes more grain each year than Australia produces, and more fruits and vegetables than the U.K. consumes.”
India, Culture, Food, Policy
Source : The Star
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
#17 Collected Reading
Quote of the week
“When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: “Don’t think, don’t politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!” – Living in the End Times by Slavoj Zizek
1. Calling all Dickens detectives
“Week in week out, for over 20 years, Dickens was at the helm of two of the most successful weekly magazines available in the mid-Victorian era, working with a tiny team out of bare offices in Wellington Street”
Literature, UK, Dickens, Editorial, Curation
Source :The Guardian
2. Obama as Chess Master: ‘Think of Him as Bobby Fischer’
“Liberals: Obama will end two wars, ended DADT, created the CFPA, got $20b from BP in the face of strong opposition, saved Detroit, signed New START, and enacted universal healthcare – the defining goal of the liberal movement.”
Politics, Policy, USA,
Source : The Atlantic
3. Lost world: Scenes from North Korea’s closed society
“With few factories, the unpolluted air over Pyongyang is crisp and clear, though at dusk, with power stations struggling to crank out enough electricity to light up the streets, the city turns prison-grey. At night, dim 40-watt bulbs wink from apartments. The brightest-lit structures are the illuminated Kim portraits dotted throughout the city and the560ft Juche Tower, a monument to Kim Il-Sung’s deluded philosophy of self-reliance.”
Photography, Reporting, North Korea, Culture
Source : The independant
4. Niger delta oil spills clean-up will take 30 years, says UN
“Since life expectancy in Nigeria is less than 50 years it is a fair assumption most people in Ogoniland have lived with chronic oil pollution throughout their lives,” the report says.”
Environment, Nigeria, Policy, Global, Corporations
Source : The Guardian
5. The Hidden History Of Prison Labor
“Prison labor has already started to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In Florida, PRIDE has become one of the largest printing corporations in the state, its cheap labor having a significant impact upon smaller local printers. This scenario is playing out in states across the country.”
Prisons, USA, Policy, Work
Source : The Nation
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
#16 Collected Reading – Thinking about the present
Thinking about the present
A collection of thoughts around thinking, work and how to be in the present.
“Today is a gift.
That is why they call it the present.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt
1. Distraction
“Finally, it is generally agreed that no activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied – no rhetoric or liberal studies – since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak , crammed into it.” – Seneca
Distraction, Culture, Self
Source :On the Shortness of Life
2. Collective Rationality
“The commission gave me the a wonderful opportunity to test my favorite hypothesis about collective rationality, which is that if you put people of strongly opposing views in a room together, and infuse their discussion with data, background studies, and unhurried time for debate, it is possible to bridge seemingly irreconcilable positions among the members of the group.” – Jeffery Sachs
Thinking, Collaboration, Global, Facts
Source : The End of Poverty
3. Ithaca
“Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind
To arrive there is what you are destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for many years,
So you’re old by the time you reach the isle,
Wealthy with all you have gained on the way
And not expecting Ithaca to make you rich”-C.P Cavafy
Journey, Life, Culture
Source : The Age of Absurdity
4. Ego
“The man who can center his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist.” – Bertrand Russell
environment,global,policy
Source : The Conquest of Happiness
5. The Individual
“An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.” – Oscar Wilde
– Collected reading editorial note : This quote when taken on face value can seem silly. My interpretation of it is that individuals are not disconnected from society’s needs and as such understand them as part of their own reality. Therefore, by solving your own problems you also contribute to solving the issues of many fellow citizens through your own particular lens on culture.
Individuality, Creativity, Work
Source : The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
Collected Reading 