More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Massachusetts). And for decades the party itself was a pluralistic amalgam of northern liberal Republicans and southern and western conservatives.
‘High-skilled immigrants will remain a critical asset for maintaining U.S. competitiveness in the global economy,’ wrote the authors of the study.”
“Ownership is the one thing that fixes more things so other things can be made easier to fix,”
When you are an owner, you care, you pay attention, you build stewardship, and you think about the future.
“In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.” Ownership focuses you on long-term thinking over short-term, and on strategy over tactics.
Ownership is also self-propulsive, which makes it an important ingredient for resilience.
if you want to solve a big problem, “you need to go from taking credit to sharing credit to multiplying credit. The systems that all work, multiply credit.” Multiplying credit is just another way of making everyone in the system feel ownership, and the by-product is both resilience and propulsion.
“arrow of history pointed to the centralization of political power and the nationalization of policy solutions”
The primary tools of politics at that time were seen as “the emerging national bureaucracy and the administrative state,” Marshall explained. That was quite logical in early twentieth-century America,
And then came the Great Depression and its aftermath.
The national government has grown so big bureaucratically that it is way too slow to keep up with the change in the pace of change. Meanwhile, states and many localities have grown more flexible and capable—living on the edge of the iceberg, they feel every change in temperature and wind first; they need to react quickly, and now they can.
“Power today flows out of Washington. Urban America—centers of economic and social dysfunction a generation ago—have now become the nation’s laboratories for public innovation.”
social sector to build resilient and prospering citizens who have the skills and institutional support to keep pace with the age of accelerations.
If Mother Nature had a political party—let’s call it the “Making the Future Work for Everybody” party—here are some of the policies I think would be part of her platform. Mother Nature has no problem being to the left of the left and to the right of the right at the same time
Trampolines that incentivize work—and the dignity, discipline, and learning that come from work—are the best mechanisms for sustainably lifting families out of poverty.
At the same time, she would make Common Core education standards the law of the land, to raise education benchmarks across the country, so high school graduates meet the higher skill levels that good jobs will increasingly demand.
On immigration, she would be for a very high wall with a very big gate.
To ensure that next-generation Internet services are developed in America, she would put in place new accelerated tax incentives and eliminate regulatory barriers to rapidly scale up the deployment of superfast bandwidth—for both wire line and wireless networks.
We need a tax system that specifically incentivizes the things we want—investment, work, and hiring—and shrinks the things we don’t want: carbon emissions, corporate tax avoidance, overregulation, climate change, and gun violence. We simply can’t afford them any longer.
The press release noted that “diabetes results in a person being unable to regulate levels of sugar in their blood, and increases the risk of heart and kidney disease, vision loss, and amputations … Using age-adjusted figures, they found that in the last 35 years, global diabetes among men has more than doubled—from 4.3% in 1980 to 9% in 2014—after adjusting for the effect of aging.
Meanwhile diabetes among women has risen from 5% in 1980 to 7.9% in 2014.” It added that “the largest cost to individual countries [was] in China ($170 billion), the US ($105 billion), and India ($73 billion).”
The PPI argues that “the natural accumulation of federal regulations over time imposes an unintended but significant cost to businesses and to economic growth. However, no effective process currently exists for retrospectively improving or removing regulations.”
Congressional approval would be required for the changes to take effect, but Congress would only be able to vote on the package as a whole without making any adjustments.”
On national security, she would ensure that our intelligence services have all the legally monitored latitude they need to confront today’s cyber-enabled terrorists—because if there’s one more 9/11, many voters will be ready to throw out all civil liberties. And with the world cleaving into zones of “order” and “disorder,” we’ll need to project more power to protect the former and stabilize the latter.
We need a dynamic, hybrid politics that is unafraid to combine ideas from across the traditional political spectrum and also to go above and beyond it.
Finally, I am talking about a politics that understands that in today’s world the big political divide “is not left versus right but open versus closed,” as the pollster Craig Charney puts it, and that therefore chooses open—openness to trade, immigration, and global flows, as opposed to closing them off.
“Is God in cyberspace?” I should start by responding: “That depends what your view of God is.”
The postbiblical view of God is that we make God present by our own choices and our own decisions. In the postbiblical view of God, in the Jewish tradition, God is always hidden, whether in cyberspace or in the neighborhood shopping mall, and to have God in the room with you, whether it’s a real room or a chat room, you have to bring Him there yourself by how you behave there, by the moral choices and mouse clicks you make.
“If you are my witness, I am the Lord. And if you are not my witness, I am not the Lord.” In other words, he explained, unless we bear witness to God’s presence by our own good deeds, He is not present.
And the reason this issue is most acute in cyberspace is that no one else is in charge there.
Cyberspace is where we are all connected and no one is in charge.
God celebrates a universe with such human freedom because He knows that the only way He is truly manifest in the world is not if He intervenes but if we all choose sanctity and morality in an environment where we are free to choose anything.
“In the postbiblical Jewish view of the world, you cannot be moral unless you are totally free. If you are not free, you are really not empowered, and if you are not empowered the choices that you make are not entirely your own. What God says about cyberspace is that you are really free there, and I hope you make the right choices, because if you do I will be present.”
“the danger is that we are unifying mankind in cyberspace but without God”—actually, without any value system, without any filters, without true governance.
“Every technology is used before it is completely understood,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New York Times Book Review on January 11, 2015. “There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is the right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose.”
In short, they were looking for moral innovation. And who can blame them?
The scalability of individual behavior is both a problem and a solution today. “Individual behavior can now have global consequences. My behavior scales to the world now—and the world scales to me.”
It used to take a person to kill a person. Then one person could kill ten people. Then one person could kill thousands. Now we are approaching a world where it is possible to imagine a single person, or small group, being able to kill everyone.
“We are the first generation to have the people, ideas, and resources to solve all of our greatest challenges,” argued Frank Fredericks, founder of World Faith, a global interfaith movement.
That is why I insist that as a species, we have never before stood at this moral fork in the road—where one of us could kill all of us and all of us could fix everything if we really decided to do so
“Advertisers don’t directly control where their ads are placed although they can specify the demographics they’d like to target.”
There probably aren’t a lot of beer drinkers among ISIS followers. Maybe the algorithm detected that a lot of young men were coming to
these sites and assumed there would be a lot of beer drinkers among them! However it happened, the advertisers were not aware or amused.
Even though companies can’t request specific videos for their ads, they can request certain demographics to target. It’s certainly a mystery, then, how ads for Bud Light, Toyota, and Swiffer ended up airing before videos produced by ISIS, because it’s safe to assume none of these companies chose to target extremist militants between the ages of 18 and 55 who want to incite terror on the world.
Or consider this story from Sydney, Australia. On December 24, 2015, the mobile taxi-booking app Uber had to apologize for instituting surge pricing during a terrorist incident at a café, in which three people plus the gunmen were killed during a sixteen-hour siege. BBCNews.com reported that after a gunman took over the café and people started fleeing from the area by foot and by car, Uber’s “surge pricing” algorithm “raised fares by as much as four times its normal rate.”
What all these stories have in common is that the algorithms were in charge—not people, not ethics, and certainly not God.
“Technology creates possibilities for new behaviors and experiences and connection,” he added, “but it takes human beings to make the behaviors principled, the experiences meaningful and connections deeper and rooted in shared values and aspirations.
there is no Moore’s law for human progress and moral development. That work is messy and there is no linear program for it.
They animate behaviors that produce trust and healthy interdependencies and “they inspire hope and resilience—they keep us leaning in, in the face of people behaving badly.”
“That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.” Or any other variant enshrined by your faith.
