Seven weeks before we leave the EU… has anyone seen David Cameron?

Date: 10-02-2019
Source: The Guardian

David Cameron: ‘He’s rethinking all the decisions he made’

With Brexit weeks away, many see the former PM as the man who wrecked Britain. Cameron’s memoirs will reveal more but meanwhile, we ask his friends and former colleagues: where did it all go wrong and where does he go from here?

In the icy depths of late January, just as Theresa May was absorbing the latest parliamentary defeat for her Brexit plan, David Cameron landed in the sunshine of southern India. He had been hired to deliver a lecture on geopolitics, plus a few amusing cricket anecdotes, in Chennai, in honour of the late Indian entrepreneur KS Narayanan. The businessman was known in his home country for quitting while he was ahead, retiring at the height of his powers. Cameron, however, is better known for doing the opposite.

The official line is that the man who brought us Brexit, and then walked away whistling from his final farewell to the nation, has no regrets; that all will be explained in the memoirs he is due to publish later this year, and that meanwhile he is enjoying an agreeable retirement on the international speaking circuit. In private, it’s not that simple. He may be more sanguine about it than his old friend George Osborne, but Brexit has divided the Camerons’ social circle just as it has divided the country, and they have not been spared the backlash. One society hostess entertaining the couple recently had to ring fellow guests in advance, checking that they would be able to keep things civil; not all the responses were positive. Even his wife Samantha’s Instagram feed, devoted mainly to holiday snaps and puffs for her new fashion business, is occasionally invaded by passersby criticising her husband.

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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – we are the pawns

Date: 03-02-2019
Source: The Guardian

Tech companies want to control every aspect of what we do, for profit. A bold, important book identifies our new era of capitalism

The alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar. The smart thermostat in your bedroom, sensing your motion, turns on the hot water and reports your movements to a central database. News updates ping your phone, with your daily decision whether to click on them or not carefully monitored, and parameters adjusted accordingly. How far and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute, the contents of your text messages, the words you speak in your own home and your actions beneath all-seeing cameras, the contents of your shopping basket, your impulse purchases, your speculative searches and choices of dates and mates – all recorded, rendered as data, processed, analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages. The litany of appropriated experiences is repeated so often and so extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some dystopian imagining of the future, but the present.

 While insisting their technology is too complex to be legislated, companies spend billions lobbying against oversight

Originally intent on organising all human knowledge, Google ended up controlling all access to it; we do the searching, and are searched in turn.

‚Trauma packs‘ being stockpiled in UK over fears of no-deal Brexit

Exclusive: pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson fears border delays could disrupt flow of vital medical supplies

Daniel Boffey in Brussels,  guardian.com Thu 31 Jan 2019 13.09 GMT Last modified on Thu 31 Jan 2019 17.49 GMT

Emergency “trauma packs” flown into the UK during terrorist attacks are being stockpiled in Britain by the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson over concerns of a risk to life from border delays in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

The company said the move was being made due to the danger posed to the “routine and rapid” provision of the vital emergency equipment it provides to the NHS in times of emergency from a distribution plant in Belgium.

Hospitals do not generally keep large stocks of such emergency packs due to the risk of the devices or medicines contained within them running past their product shelf life.

The development highlights the dependence of the UK on frictionless movement of goods across the border. On Thursday, the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, admitted to the dangers posed by Brexit.

Where next? How to cope with Brexit uncertainty

Date: 27-01-2019
Source: The Guardian by Susie Orbach

Which way’s home?

As Brexit debates become ever more fractious, we are trapped in a cycle of anger, disbelief and impotence. Can psychotherapy help us find a way out?

Divorce, which is what Brexit is, takes a long time because it is serious. For divorce to work within a family, mediation is recommended. When a family breaks up with this much hostility its members rarely emerge unscathed.The escaping partner may be buoyed up by the hope of new adventures but the remaining partner is bequeathed with anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty.

On both sides of what we might term our national trauma, there is fury and hurt. It hasn’t gone away. In many ways it has heightened in the last fortnight, as the clock ticks down. There is fear and a sense of fragility, often masked by aggression and even bullying. It is easy for both parties in this traumatic break to exclude or ridicule the legitimacy of the other’s position.

The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world – without changing anything

Date: 26-01-2019
Source: The Guardian

Today’s titans of tech and finance want to solve the world’s problems, as long as the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and power. By Anand Giridharadas

A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America’s machine is broken. The same could be said of others around the world. And now many of the people who broke the progress machine are trying to sell us their services as repairmen.

When the fruits of change have fallen on the US in recent decades, the very fortunate have basketed almost all of them. For instance, the average pretax income of the top 10th of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1% has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001% has risen more than sevenfold – even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same. These familiar figures amount to three-and-a-half decades’ worth of wondrous, head-spinning change with zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans. Globally, over the same period, according to the World Inequality Report, the top 1% captured 27% of new income, while the bottom half of humanity – presently, more than 3 billion people – saw 12% of it.

Europe ‚coming apart before our eyes‘, say 30 top intellectuals

Date: 26-01-2019
Source: The Guardian

Group of historians and writers publish manifesto warning against rise of populism

Liberal values in Europe face a challenge “not seen since the 1930s”, leading intellectuals from 21 countries have said, as the UK lurches towards Brexit and nationalists look set to make sweeping gains in EU parliamentary elections.

The group of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates declared in a manifesto published in several newspapers, including the Guardian, that Europe as an idea was “coming apart before our eyes”.

“We must now will Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism,” the document reads. “We must rediscover political voluntarism or accept that resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”

Why we stopped trusting elites

Date: 12-01-2019
Source: The Guardian By William Davies

The credibility of establishment figures has been demolished by technological change and political upheavals. But it’s too late to turn back the clock.

For hundreds of years, modern societies have depended on something that is so ubiquitous, so ordinary, that we scarcely ever stop to notice it: trust. The fact that millions of people are able to believe the same things about reality is a remarkable achievement, but one that is more fragile than is often recognised.

At times when public institutions – including the media, government departments and professions – command widespread trust, we rarely question how they achieve this. And yet at the heart of successful liberal democracies lies a remarkable collective leap of faith: that when public officials, reporters, experts and politicians share a piece of information, they are presumed to be doing so in an honest fashion.

The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others. If this system is to work, there must be a basic modicum of trust that the small group will act on behalf of the much larger one, at least some of the time. As the past decade has made clear, nothing turns voters against liberalism more rapidly than the appearance of corruption: the suspicion, valid or otherwise, that politicians are exploiting their power for their own private interest.

Seven ways technology will change in 2019

Date: 05-01-2019
Source: The Guardian

App stores, Facebook, smartphone photography, even USB cables – they are all facing disruption this year

Facebook is in trouble after the UK parliament released its internal emails.

1 Silicon Valley’s cold war with the EU heats up

At the beginning of 2019, as at the start of 2018, Margrethe Vestager remains the most powerful woman in tech. The EU competition commissioner has the world’s biggest companies walking on tiptoe, afraid of her habit of enforcing competition law where the US authorities have refused to do so.

In 2018, Google was the subject of Vestager’s cold gaze, receiving multibillion fines for its anti-competitive practices around its Android operating system, its shopping service and Chrome browser. But in 2019, it’s likely to be someone else’s turn. The only question is who.

In the US, Amazon has been the odds-on favourite, thanks to a combination of a hostile president, a direct negative effect on commercial competitors and the rise of the doctrine of “hipster antitrust” (broadly arguing that monopolies can be harmful even if consumer welfare appears to be boosted). But in the EU, with a greater focus on privacy and data protection issues, Facebook looks vulnerable.

Japan shrinking as birthrate falls to lowest level in history

Date: 27-12-2018
Source: The Guardian

In 2018 there were 921,000 births and 1.37m deaths, with government efforts failing to encourage families to have more children

The birthrate in Japan fell to 1.43, well below the 2.08 required to keep the population stable.

Japan suffered its biggest population decline on record this year, according to new figures that underline the country’s losing battle to raise its birth rate.

The number of births fell to its lowest since records began more than a century ago, the health and welfare ministry said, soon after parliament approved an immigration bill that will pave the way for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers to address the worst labour shortage in decades.

Top Amazon boss privately advised US government on web portal worth billions to tech firm

Date: 26-12-2018
Source: The Guardian

Exclusive: Emails show how tech firm has tried to gain influence and potentially shape lucrative government contracts

The cozy behind-the-scenes lobbying by Amazon officials underscores how the company has quietly amassed an unrivalled position of power within the federal government.

A top Amazon executive privately advised the Trump administration on the launch of a new internet portal that is expected to generate billions of dollars for the technology company and give it a dominant role in how the US government buys everything from paper clips to office chairs.

Emails seen by the Guardian show that the Amazon executive Anne Rung communicated with a top official at the Government Services Authority (GSA) about the approach the government would take to create the new portal, even before the legislation that created it – known to its critics as the “Amazon amendment” – was signed into law late last year.

The 2017 correspondence between Rung – a former official in the Obama administration credited with transforming the federal government’s procurement policies before she joined Amazon – and Mary Davie at the GSA, offers new insights into how Amazon has used key former government officials it now employs – directly and as consultants – to gain influence and potentially shape lucrative government contracts.

Amazon and the Trump administration appear to have an antagonistic relationship because of the president’s frequent Twitter attacks on the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. But the behind-the-scenes lobbying by Amazon officials underscores how the company has quietly amassed an unrivalled position of power with the federal government.