This week… Oy! Reading schmeading:

• The death of Christianity in the U.S. — Miguel De La Torre in Baptist News Global: The Evangelicals’ Jesus is satanic, and those who hustle this demon are “false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve” (2 Cor. 11:13-15, NIV). You might wonder if my condemnation is too harsh. It is not, for the Spirit of the Lord has convicted me to shout from the mountaintop how God’s precious children are being devoured by the hatred and bigotry of those who have positioned themselves as the voice of God in America.
• Austerity is an Algorithm — Gillian Terzis in Logic: Things changed in December 2016, when the government announced that the system had undergone full automation. Humans would no longer investigate anomalies in earnings. Instead, debt notices would be automatically generated when inconsistencies were detected. The government’s rationale for automating the process was telling. “Our aim is to ensure that people get what they are entitled to—no more and no less,” read the press release. “And to crack down hard when people deliberately defraud the system.” The result was a disaster. I’ve had friends who’ve received an innocuous email urging them to check their MyGov account—an online portal available to Australian citizens with an internet connection to access a variety of government services—only to log in and find they’re hundreds or thousands of dollars in arrears, supposedly because they didn’t accurately report their income. Some received threats from private debt collectors, who told them their wages would be seized if they didn’t submit to a payment plan. Those who wanted to contest their debts had to lodge a formal complaint, and were subjected to hours of Mozart’s Divertimento in F Major before they could talk to a case worker. Others tried taking their concerns directly to the Centrelink agency on Twitter, where they were directed to calling Lifeline, a 24-hour hotline for crisis support and suicide prevention.
• A Eulogy for the Headphone Jack — Charlie Hoey in Medium: Sound cards happen to carry sound most of the time, but they are perfectly happy measuring any AC voltage from -2 to +2 volts at 48,000 times per second with 16 bits of accuracy. […] To any headphone jack, all audio is raw in the sense that it exists as a series of voltages that ultimately began as measurements by some tool, like a microphone or an electric guitar pickup or an EKG. There is no encryption or rights management, no special encoding or secret keys. […] Smartphone manufacturers are broadly eliminating headphone jacks going forward, replacing them with wireless headphones or BlueTooth. We’re going to all lose touch with something, and to me it feels like something important.
• Australians pay more for education than the OECD average – but is it worth it? — Megan O'Connell in the Conversation, with obligatory Goodhart's Law warning. It would be interesting to see how the ratio of public to private spending correlates with the range of courses on offer: Australians value education, so when looking at the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2017 report, it’s not surprising to see we spend more on education than average among comparable nations. However, it’s worth noting where the money comes from. A closer look at the data shows public funding for education in Australia is much less than the OECD average, with private funders (including families and students) footing the rest of the bill. When combining both public and private funding sources, our overall spending on education is 5.8% of GDP from primary to tertiary levels. As our Federal Education Minister has been quick to note, this is more than the OECD average of 5.2%. However, when looking at public expenditure, Australia, at 3.9% of GDP, is well below most OECD countries.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The costs of a casual job are now outweighing any pay benefits — Joshua Healy and Daniel Nicholson: One in four Australian employees today is a casual worker. Among younger workers (15-24 year olds) the numbers are higher still: more than half of them are casuals. These jobs come without some of the benefits of permanent employment, such as paid annual holiday leave and sick leave. In exchange for giving up these entitlements, casual workers are supposed to receive a higher hourly rate of pay – known as a casual “loading”. But the costs of casual work are now outweighing the benefits in wages.
• 'The S-word': how young Americans fell in love with socialism — Chris McGreal in the Guardian: Americans who came of age during the cold war saw socialism being characterized as the close cousin of Soviet communism, and state-run healthcare as a first step to the gulags. There are still those attempting to keep the old scare stories alive. It was the old cold war warriors who helped detoxify socialism for younger Americans when the Tea Party and Fox News painted Obama – a president who recapitalised the banks without saving the homes of families in foreclosure – as a socialist for his relatively modest changes to the healthcare system. Then came Sanders.
• How Orwell used wartime rationing to argue for global justice — Bruce Robbins in Aeon: There could be no anti-fascist solidarity unless the exploited Indians could believe that a more just distribution of the world’s resources was possible – that global inequality could be changed. The popularity of rationing proved that, with the right incentive, the citizens of the more prosperous countries were willing to live on less. If this had happened in wartime, it might also happen in peacetime. There were other ways to divide the pie. No law of nature or economics pegged British consumption and Indian consumption at a 12-to-one ratio forever.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The U.S. Spy Hub in the Heart of Australia — Ryan Gallagher for the Intercept and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Emily Howie, director of advocacy and research at Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre, said the Australian government needs to provide “accountability and transparency” on its role in U.S. drone operations. “The legal problem that’s created by drone strikes is that there may very well be violations of the laws of armed conflict … and that Australia may be involved in those potential war crimes through the facility at Pine Gap,” Howie said. “The first thing that we need from the Australian government is for it to come clean about exactly what Australians are doing inside the Pine Gap facility in terms of coordinating with the United States on the targeting using drones.”
• Marketising Social Care: Why we need to talk about the NDIS — Fiona Macdonald in Arena: As the Productivity Commission continues to look for new ways to introduce ‘greater user choice, competition and contestability’ in human services, the marketisation of social care in Australia proceeds apace. Here, as in the other liberal states (the United States, Canada and Britain) and in many European countries, care provisions for children, the elderly, the ill and people with disabilities are increasingly likely to be commodities purchased by consumers through markets. We are in the middle of the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and just this year Consumer-Directed Care (CDC) has been introduced in home care for the aged. Yet there has been relatively little public discussion about the likely downsides of these latest moves to marketise social care in Australia. The provision of care through ‘cash-for-care’ or voucher schemes—involving the allocation of public funding to individual care users to purchase their care services on the market—is increasingly widespread. While lauded by proponents as empowering—by placing control in the hands of care users—and seen as increasing efficiency, the construction of care markets in which individuals are care ‘consumers’ does not necessarily produce good outcomes for people requiring care. At the same time, marketised care economies are mostly built on large workforces of low-paid workers in insecure work with poor working conditions. The mixed origins of cash-for-care schemes provide an indication of why, despite these problems, they have some appeal for consumer and care-user advocates
• Social Security: Still The Most Efficient Way To Provide Retirement Income — Dean Baker in the Huffington Post: A big part of the benefit of Social Security is that it is very efficient. The administrative costs of the retirement portion of the program are just 0.4 percent of what is paid out in benefits each year. By comparison, the costs of even relatively well-run privatized systems, like those in Chile or the United Kingdom, are 10-15 percent of benefits. That difference would amount to $80 billion a year (close to $1 trillion over a ten-year budget horizon) being paid out to the financial industry instead of to retirees.
• Trump Sends More Troops Into The Afghanistan Meatgrinder — Ted Rall:
  
• The Taliban Tried to Surrender and the U.S. Rebuffed Them. Now Here We Are. — Ryan Grim at the Intercept: For centuries in Afghanistan, when a rival force had come to power, the defeated one would put down their weapons and be integrated into the new power structure — obviously with much less power, or none at all. That’s how you do with neighbors you have to continue to live with. This isn’t a football game, where the teams go to different cities when it’s over. That may be hard for us to remember, because the U.S. hasn’t fought a protracted war on its own soil since the Civil War. So when the Taliban came to surrender, the U.S. turned them down repeatedly, in a series of arrogant blunders spelled out in Anand Gopal’s investigative treatment of the Afghanistan war, “No Good Men Among the Living.” Only full annihilation was enough for the Bush administration. They wanted more terrorists in body bags. The problem was that the Taliban had stopped fighting, having either fled to Pakistan or melted back into civilian life. Al Qaeda, for its part, was down to a handful of members. So how do you kill terrorists if there aren’t any?
• Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads — Julia Angwin, Noam Scheiber, and Ariana Tobin for ProPublica and the New York Times: Verizon is among dozens of the nation's leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups, an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found. The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers. Several experts questioned whether the practice is in keeping with the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment. Many jurisdictions make it a crime to “aid” or “abet” age discrimination, a provision that could apply to companies like Facebook that distribute job ads.
• 55 Ways Donald Trump Structurally Changed America in 2017 — Nick Tabor, New York Magazine: […] given that the congressional year has otherwise been marked by turmoil and inaction, and given the high staff turnover and the parade of scandals at the White House, it’s been easy to miss what this administration has already done. In the background, Donald Trump’s Cabinet members and their collaborators have been working hard to deliver on Steve Bannon’s vision of dismantling the “regulatory state.” With Trump’s blessing, they have made drastic, structural changes on education, immigration, environmental protections, broadcasting and internet laws, and rules of military engagement, among other issues. Most often the changes have taken direct aim at Obama’s legacy, but some apply to regulations and programs that date back decades.
• Who is Reality Winner? — Kerry Howley in New York Magazine: Ronald was intellectually engaged, though never, during his marriage, employed, and Reality’s parents separated in 1999, when she was 8. Two years later, when the Towers fell, Ronald held long, intense conversations about geopolitics with his daughters. He was careful to distinguish for them the religion of Islam from the ideologies that fueled terrorism. “I learned,” says Reality, “that the fastest route to conflict resolution is understanding.” She credits her father with her interest in Arabic, which she began studying seriously, outside school and of her own accord, at 17. It was this interest in languages that eventually drew her into a security state, unimaginable before 9/11, that she chose to betray. Fifteen years after those first conversations with her father, Reality’s interest in Arabic would be turned against her in a Georgia courtroom, taken as evidence that she sympathized with the nation’s most feared enemies.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The loanable funds hoax — Lars P. Syll: The age-old belief that Central Banks control the money supply has more an more come to be questioned and replaced by an ‘endogenous’ money view, and I think the same will happen to the view that Central Banks determine “the” rate of interest.
• Have We Learned Our Lessons from the Financial Crisis? Rewriting History Is Not a Good Sign — Dean Baker: As I have argued elsewhere, it is convenient for economists to blame the financial crisis rather than the bubble, because finance can be complicated. After all, who knew that AIG had written $600 billion worth of credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities? On the other hand, the bubble was pretty simple. We had an unprecedented nationwide run-up in house prices with no plausible explanation in the fundamentals of the housing market. Rents were going nowhere and vacancy rates were already at record highs before the crash. And the bubble was clearly driving the economy. Residential construction was at a record high as a share of GDP and consumption boomed based on the bubble generated housing wealth. When the bubble burst, there was no source of demand that could replace the lost construction and consumption, which is the story of the Great Recession.
• Sometimes giving a person a choice is an act of terrible cruelty — Lisa Tessman in Aeon: Sometimes, it’s pure bad luck that puts someone in the position of having to choose between wrongdoings. However, much of the time, choice doesn’t take place in contexts that are shaped entirely accidentally. It takes place in social contexts. Social structures, policies, or institutions can produce outcomes that favour some groups of people over others in part by shaping what kinds of choices people get to – or have to – face. Members of some social groups might face mostly bad choices, in the sense that their choices are between alternatives, all of which are disadvantageous to them. But there’s another sense in which the choices might be bad: these might be choices between alternatives, all of which make them fail in their responsibilities to others. The American Health Care Act, which was considered in the United States House and Senate, would have created moral dilemmas by offering people without high incomes – especially if they were also women, or old or sick – a range of bad options. It would have forced some parents to make choices between two equally unthinkable options, such as the ‘choice’ to sacrifice one child’s health care for another’s.