Opinion (Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies): “How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners?

“Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable – odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live on.

“Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward. …

“New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they’re needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.

“Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability. The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.

“Consider Amazon’s ‘Mechanical Turk.’ Amazon calls it ‘a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.’

“In reality, it’s an Internet job board offering minimal pay for mindlessly-boring bite-sized chores. Computers can’t do them because they require some minimal judgment, so human beings do them for peanuts — say, writing a product description, for $3; or choosing the best of several photographs, for 30 cents; or deciphering handwriting, for 50 cents. Amazon takes a healthy cut of every transaction.

“This is the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.

“It was a way to shift risks and uncertainties onto the workers – work that might entail more hours than planned for, or was more stressful than expected.

“And a way to circumvent labor laws that set minimal standards for wages, hours, and working conditions. And that enabled employees to join together to bargain for better pay and benefits.

“The new on-demand work shifts risks entirely onto workers, and eliminates minimal standards completely.

“In effect, on-demand work is a reversion to the piece work of the nineteenth century – when workers had no power and no legal rights, took all the risks, and worked all hours for almost nothing.

“Amazon’s Mechanical Turks work for pennies, literally. Minimum wage? Time-and-a half for overtime? Amazon says it just connects buyers and sellers so it’s not responsible.

“Defenders of on-demand work emphasize its flexibility. Workers can put in whatever time they want, work around their schedules, fill in the downtime in their calendars. …

“An opportunity to make some extra bucks can seem mighty attractive in an economy whose median wage has been stagnant for thirty years and almost all of whose economic gains have been going to the top. …

“On this measure, the share-the-scraps economy is hurtling us backwards.”

My Comment: I have to repeat again that without connecting people through integral education, they will pointlessly and endlessly exploit each other until they return to the Stone Age. In store for us are sufferings that will show us a way out of this dead end where egoism drives us. But this is the path of suffering.

The path of Light is also possible—drawing the force of correction by our unity in integral education. As soon as we begin to implement it, we will immediately discover its remarkable properties in all aspects of our lives.
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In the News (from University of Colorado Boulder): “Living in bigger, denser settlements allowed the inhabitants of ancient cities to be more productive, just as is true for modern urbanites, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Santa Fe Institute.

“As modern cities grow, they obey certain rules. As the population increases, for example, the settled area becomes denser instead of sprawling outward. This allows people to live closer together, use infrastructure more intensively, interact more frequently, and as a result, produce more per person.

In a paper published last year, the research team—led by Scott Ortman, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder’s Department of Anthropology—found that this set of rules, known as urban scaling, appears to apply to ancient cities as well as modern ones. In that study, the researchers analyzed how artifacts were scattered and how houses were distributed to show that ancient cities also became denser as the population grew.

“Now, the researchers have expanded this work to show that inhabitants of ancient settlements also became more productive as the size and density of their settlements grew, just as in modern cities.”

My Comment: Humanity in its development goes through just two stages:

1. Egoistic: the unconscious selfish—the still, vegetative, and animate levels—then the conscious egoistic (the realization of evil).
2. Altruistic: ascent to it and development of it up to the point of the disappearance of our (apparent) world.

So far, we have not changed our nature from 1 to 2, so that no matter what we build, our lives are focused on the satisfaction of our animal (physical) needs, and there is no big difference in the forms of life at different times.
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Opinion (Sergey A. Karaganov, Russian political scientist, head of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy): “Having won the Cold War, Europe is gradually losing the world. It is entering the next stage of international relations not united and weak, standing before confrontation or worse, a major war.

“A great slogan about the ‘universal European home’ brings about a sarcastic smile. Is there a chance not to lose the world?

“Europe is not the centre of the world. This is a political entity, which only a part of the global system, where everyone is interrelated and is subject to mutual influence. Given the current lack of confidence, the prospect of existence of a single space seems illusory. In addition, the political influence of the United States is aimed at deepening the split of the EU.

“The last 25 years were wasted. Without a new ideas and a great goal, which will unite the nations of Europe, there will be separation according to the old and new boundaries.”

My Comment: This is predetermined by the plan of nature (the Creator) to bring people to unity by the path of suffering or awareness of the necessity.
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In the News (The Economist):  “’VIRTUE,’ according to George Bernard Shaw, ‘is insufficient temptation.’ But new research on the consumption patterns of the environmentally minded suggests that virtue and self-indulgence often go hand-in-hand.

“A recent paper by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. …

“A study from 2011 on water-conservation in Massachusetts shows how. In the experiment, some 150 apartments were divided into two groups. Half received water-saving tips and weekly estimates of their usage; the other half served as a control.

“The households that were urged to use less water did so: their consumption fell by an average of 6% compared with the control group. The hitch was that their electricity consumption rose by 5.6%. The moral licensing was so strong, in other words, that it more or less outweighed the original act of virtue.

“Moral licensing does not seem to occur when virtuous conduct is obligatory. In one study, participants imagined themselves doing community service. Then they were asked to pick between two rewards: an indulgent one (a pair of designer jeans) and a practical one (a vacuum cleaner). If they were told to imagine that they had been sentenced to community service for a driving violation, they were much less likely to choose the jeans than if they pictured themselves as volunteers. The best way to get people to do good, it seems, is to make them feel bad about themselves.”

My Comment: We are commanded to act either by nature (the path of suffering) or by Kabbalah (the path of Light) in order to realize the insignificance of our egoistic nature, from which, in this case, there is an opportunity to escape.
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The Huffington Post published my article: “The Simple (and Unwelcome) Solution to Anti-Semitism”

 
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Filed under: New Publications, News - No Comments →

In the News (from KM.ru): “The world is digging trenches, breaking down into regions, bristling with watch towers. The wall, designed to stop the invasion of the Altai armored cavalry from Russia, is being built by the Ukraine. Trenches are being dug on the border with Transnistria. Turkmenistan is building a wall along the border with Afghanistan to protect against ISIS and the Taliban.

“Iran thinks to fence itself off from Afghanistan and Pakistan for similar reasons. Saudi Arabia is building a giant wall on the border with Iraq and Yemen, fleeing from the infiltration of terrorists. Egypt is digging a trench, separating itself from Gaza. Israel has everything already built.

“All of this is similar to the symptoms of the collapsing of the project of globalization. The degeneration of modern international institutions: the UN, EU, IMF, WTO, etc. also points to this disease. The war of sanctions against Russia is raging. Soon we will forget what the term ‘globalization’ once meant.”

My Comment: Why is it so? Because the project of globalization was conceived egoistically, for profit, not for everyone’s joy. And until this goal is manifested as the main one, we will continue to roll down.
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In the News (Newsweek): “At the University of Texas at Austin, researchers surveyed hundreds of millennials to find out what psychological factors lead people to watch three or more TV episodes at a time. What they found was troubling—people who binge-watch are more likely to be depressed and lonely, two factors that are also in harmful binge behaviors such as eating and drinking.

“The authors, who concede that they too binge-watch, were correct: they discovered a correlation between binge-watching and loneliness, depression, and having self-regulation deficiency, which is an inability to control compulsions.

“For people who feel lonely or depressed, the authors suggest, binge-watching allows them to escape from negative feelings. And the more episodes someone watches, the longer that person can escape. Experts call this an avoidance coping strategy.

“Original programming on streaming sites seems made for binge-watching. Netflix has been dropping an entire season’s worth of new episodes at once since the American premiere of Lilyhammer in 2012; House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and Netflix version of Arrested Development all premiered the following year.

“The University of Texas researchers are joining a growing field of academia taking on entertainment. One study from last June suggested that binge-watching increases a viewer’s risk of early death. In September, a communication research expert told the Huffington Post that it’s hard to break from a marathon viewing because humans are hardwired to watch for changes in environments, including images on a computer screen.”

My Comment: In the near future,when people have more free time, this will be the only accepted pastime until suffering raises a person from the couch and throws him into the arms of others!

By disseminating the method of integral connection, we will prepare the environment, making it possible for all the people who spend time sitting on the couch to enter into this environment.
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In the News (from InoSMI): “Calls for the extermination of the Jews is a legitimate expression of criticizing the Jewish state. This statement, terrible in its meaning, was not announced by the Iranian leader and his allies in the organization ‘Hezbollah,’ and not even by the press service of the Hamas, but the spokesman for the prosecutor office in the Austrian city of Linz.

“Austria that gave rise to Hitler has reached a new level of insensitivity, cynicism and injustice. For the representative of the legal system, Israel is so unpleasant that the call for its destruction is considered as mere criticism, which it is quite legitimate.

“Accidental or deliberate statement of Barack Obama, as the US president, defined the Paris attack as an incident with the ‘accidental shooting at a group of people.’

“And the resourcefulness of the press service of the State Department seeks only to ensure that the anti-Semitic attack is not recognized, thus giving legality to the murder of people whose fault is that they are Jews. The US leader’s statement supports anti-Semitic sentiments, but based on the realities, it seems, they never disappeared.”

My Comment: Anti-Semitism is an imprint of the behavior of Jews: to the extent to which they fulfill their purpose, to lead the world to unity and adhesion with the Creator, to that extent, the world and the Creator treat us. And vice versa…
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In the News (The Independent): “The world has entered an era of ‘peak food’ production with an array of staples from corn and rice to wheat and chicken slowing in growth – with potentially disastrous consequences for feeding the planet.

“New research finds that the supply of 21 staples, such as eggs, meat, vegetables and soybeans is already beginning to run out of momentum, while the global population continues to soar.

“Peak production refers to the point at which the growth in a crop, animal, or other food source begins to slow down, rather than the point at which production actually declines. However, it is regarded as a key signal that the momentum is being lost and it is typically only a matter of time before production plateaus and, in some cases, begins to fall – although it is unclear how long the process could take.

“‘Just nine or 10 plants species feed the world. But we found there’s a peak for all these resources. Even renewable resources won’t last forever,’ said Ralf Seppelt, of the Helmholtz Centre.

“The simultaneous peaking of crops and livestock comes against a backdrop of a growing population, which is expected to reach nine billion by 2050, requiring the world to produce twice as much food by then as it does now, according to a separate study by the California Academy of Sciences.

“‘That trajectory [of needing to double food production] is not a given but more of a warning. It means we have to change how we eat and use food,’ said Jonathan Foley, the director of the California Academy of Sciences.”

My Comment: When there is overproduction of food in the world and the only problem is correct distribution, nature will drive us forward to the correction of our egoism by all possible means: hunger, climate, military, social, terrorist, family, and all the other problems. There will arise such problems, the existence of which we did not even suspect.
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In the News (Vokrug Sveta): “We consist of 90% bacteria. Examining skin under a microscope, it is easy to find whole communities of microorganisms. The same applies to the internal organs.

“The notion of people’s sterility is out of date, and our life takes place in symbiosis with different biological species.

“Our digestive system contains plenty of microorganisms, total weight up to 3 kilograms (6 lbs.). A community of bacteria within a human being consists of trillions of cells, and only 10% of them are human.

“The human genome contains 22,000 human genes encoding proteins for metabolic regulation, and adds a microbiome about eight million unique bacteria.

“The role of bacteria in the human body is to perform the basic operations for extracting energy from food, and in the case of external infection, both the person and bacteria become infected, working together to defend against the attack.

“Every square centimeter of our skin contains about a million microorganisms that resist the penetration of unwanted guests. Inside the human, bacterial flora not only grow with the body, but are also the major defender against exposure to toxins, viruses and pathogens.

“The human genome is known to be transmitted by the parents at the time of conception, and after conception is subject to change. Bacteria and microorganisms are acquired, also subject to change and mutation, and their composition may vary. This gives rise to the impression that the management of flora will allow a person to maintain health. A new type of study being developed by scientists is the deciphering of the communication links of bacteria and microorganisms, some of which have already been studied.”

My Comment: Bodily, we are animals, and if we achieve spirituality, we can talk about the human being only in a spiritual sense. Until we rise from the level of animate to the level of Adam (man), we are animals in the physical sense, the the moral sense, and in every sense.
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