Reflectii

Observing today’s world and all conundrums of postmodernism, along with pluralism and the tyranny of choice, one can witness an “era of gaps”, where great lack of common denominators is a contemporary hazard. The situations redefine diligence and empowers individuals to act like agents of change, not solemnly passive receivers. “Now in the era of artificial intelligence, a new underreported challenge has emerged – when will humans become obsolete? If one believes that this question is yet another example of philosophical melodrama, it is important to consider that society will soon have to redefine what it considers to be life itself” (Bajrektarević, 2020).

About 10 years ago, two young radicals showed up on Marxmail and soon found themselves clashing with old fogies on the list.

One of them was the 19-year-old Bhaskar Sunkara who unsubbed from the list to get away from all the nasty digs against Barack Obama:

One-third of Pakistan is underwater. Record heat waves blanket the globe driving up temperatures beyond what humans can survive. Polar glaciers are melting much faster than scientists predicted. Droughts, fires and floods are ravaging the planet, forcing the displacement of tens of millions of people. And this is just the beginning.

“The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth … If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. The theory of our Constitution is that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market . . . The First Amendment itself ensures the right to respond to speech we do not like, and for good reason. Freedom of speech and thought flows not from the beneficence of the state but from the inalienable rights of the person … Society has the right and civic duty to engage in open, dynamic, rational discourse.”

– United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 724 (2012).

Toate societățile civilizate, în ultimele două secole mai ales și, în unele cazuri, de la Renaștere încoace, s-au îngrijit atent de educația membrilor lor. Educația este un set de teorii și de practici prin care se transmite experiența de viață a generațiilor adulte și cultura către generațiile de copii și tineri, încât aceștia să fie pregătiți pentru integrarea lor în comunitate.

The overall Consumer Price Index rose 0.1 percent in August, core was up 0.6 percent; up 8.3 percent and 6.3 percent year-over-year, respectively. Overall, the picture shows inflation persisting in a wide variety of areas where it seems that supply chain issues are being overcome. This is not a good story.

Executive summary

Disruption is a natural part of life. It can appear in many forms including natural disasters, economic crashes, and social conflicts. The world’s resiliency to disruptions, particularly natural disasters has greatly improved over the past few decades. This resiliency is, in large part, due to enhanced detection and warning capabilities enabled by extensive data sets and commercial analytics.

Notably, these data show less of a gap between the United States and China or the European Union, and greater representation of the European Union overall. Part of this gap originates from the narrower timeframe of the bug-bounty platform data. The datasets gathered by this paper from vendors show, consistently, US dominance of contributions in earlier years, followed by increasing representation of other countries—particularly China—as their IT sectors develop and the disclosure pipelines become more accessible to non-US researchers. Filtering this paper’s datasets for just 2021 reflects that shift, bringing parity to the United States and China points similar to that in the bug-bounty platform numbers, though the EU still lags. This might reflect selection bias in the countries with which the bug-bounty platform has developed strong relationships. Figure 1 shows the contributions tagged to the United States and China over time in the Apple dataset, illustrating the changes in composition over time.

The great Ludwig von Mises once said: “In essence, economic history is a record of failed government regulation because of an arrogant disregard for the laws of economic science.”

The current state of the economy is a consequence of the dirigist economic policies of all the governments of the last two decades, from Bush Jr. through the Biden administration. The current tossing and turning of the government between two threats they themselves have created – inflation and recession – is a clear confirmation of the indisputable correctness of von Mises’s assertion.

September is supposed to be a very critical month for the nearly 5.5 million people of Tigray region of Ethiopia affected by very severe food shortages, almost half of them on brink of starvation. If the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara are included then as many as 13 million people face a very difficult situation. The United Nations officials have been preparing to make their best effort possible for reaching critical food supplies as well as medicines and some other essentials to several remote settlements.