This is possibly one of the best Substack blogs around. Father & Son - Prof Lawrence Freedman (War, Foreign Policy) & Sam (detailed UK policy analysis). It rises above the click-bait & quick takes - they write lengthy, thought out, detailed stuff.
This particular piece by Sam I almost filed away for later. But glad I made the time for it.
Air and light pollution are both scourges of modern life in many world cities. #AirPollution affects the brightness of the night sky, and #LightPollution at night may make daytime #AirQuality worse. Find out why addressing both issues makes good #PublicPolicy sense.
"Jennifer Pinsof, staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the technology has been used in too many nefarious circumstances to be trusted... There are several local and state-level regulations in place... to mitigate inappropriate data sharing. Police departments, for instance, are not supposed to share the license plate data with other states, nor with federal law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That, however, hasn’t stopped at least 73 departments throughout California from violating those rules...
"We found that many California law enforcement agencies share this data not just out of state but specifically with agencies in states that ban abortions, and those law enforcement agencies who now have access to this highly sensitive location data can use it to prosecute things that are crimes within their state but not within the state of California,” she said."
For one of the most devastating #PublicPolicy#crises of this century, half of the governments in this country have published no internal reflection.
Why the lack of reports? It could be that governments simply haven’t gotten around to it yet. The federal government recently tasked a panel of experts with a report reviewing the federal approach to #pandemic#science advice and #research coordination. It is set to be published in March.
"Collapsing councils are a microcosm of the British state’s failings: austerity, short-termism, Treasury myopia and decades of failure to solve the so-called wicked problems of policymaking, such as council tax, planning and our broken social care model. Every block in the Jenga tower appears to be wobbling"
Anoosh Chakelian writes about the dire straits local government is in.
Reporter Jenny Gold analyzed state Medi-Cal data for 2021. Her findings on health care access for kids in the California public insurance program are sobering:
🟡 60% of babies—and 75% of Black babies—did not get their recommended well-child visits in their first 15 months of life.
🟡 65% of 2-year-olds were not fully vaccinated, leaving them vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.
🟡 Half of children did not receive a lead screening by their second birthday.
He quoted Genesis in his #sermon — I’m sorry, his concurring opinion — in the AL ruling that turned #IVF on its head by defining #FrozenEmbryos as children.
“It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah & applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.’”
Did I say it wasn’t a sermon? It was definitely a sermon.
Brazilian #museums join the #Fediverse: "From a [#digitalmemory] #publicpolicy standpoint, creating an online social environment for disseminating information that is independent of centralized platforms is crucial for the sustainable functioning of information and knowledge networks of public interest."
“Everything would have been 180° different if Beau had lived — there’s no question,” said one close associate of the family who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private family matters. “I don’t think Hunter’s life goes off the rails. If Beau wasn’t president of the United States now, he’d be on his way to it. And Joe Biden would never have been president. He would be happily retired.”
He also created organizations to try to maintain a role in shaping #PublicPolicy: the #Biden Foundation, the Penn Biden Center for #Diplomacy & Global Engagement, the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware, the Biden #Cancer Initiative.
The efforts show clearly how Biden saw himself — seasoned #diplomat, #scholar of #government, global statesman. It’s an image that has been hard to sustain in the bruising world of the presidency.
But after some recent reading contrasting "social media" (eg the fediverse) with "recommendation media" (ie DataFarming platforms like FB), I suspect one problem with studies in this area is a lack of clear definitions. Resulting in, for example, recommendation media being given credit for the benefits of the net in general.
Overall, the two Professors spent the whole Open to Debate episode talking right past each other. One presenting in the style of an academic conference, the other in the style of a TV news interview, neither seeming to understand the purpose of a moderated public debate. Academics need to get much better at this if they want evidence taken seriously in #PublicPolicy.
The organisers could have helped by clearly defining "social media" for the purposes of the debate.
"America’s quest for global dominance primarily serves the interests of giant corporations that suppress labor movements worldwide.
While US politicians from both parties cover it in euphemism, the proper role they see for the working class in foreign policy is as fodder for factories and battlefields, valorized in rhetoric to obscure their exploitation.
“We’re gonna get yelled at to stay in our lane, and focus on our jobs or whatever, but we’ve waited for the Democrats forever to become this great institution of working people and peace throughout the world, and they suck. We no longer can trust the Democrats,” Vicente said."
The Children's Partnership has released a community outreach toolkit, ALL IN to Keep Kids Covered, designed to help schools, child care providers, and other child and family champions share information about the Medi-Cal renewal process with families.
#Algorithms#PublicPolicy#Technocracy: "The debacle of RAND’s firefighting algorithm reflected the fallacy described in Seeing Like a State on two levels simultaneously. First, the government, seeking out an objective assessment, tried to simplify urban fires into a set of variables that anyone within that bureaucracy could understand and, if necessary, justify. Second, RAND’s algorithm was going through that exact same process—manipulating measurements, shorn from their real-world context, and pushing them though a digital bureaucracy made of ones and zeroes.
The smartphone you’re reading this article on while sipping your morning coffee (or maybe you’re sitting on the toilet, no judgment, just happy you’re reading) has far more computing power than the mainframes that ran RAND’s 1970s firefighting algorithm. But the problems RAND’s approach embodied—the desire for high-level institutional clarity overwhelming fine-grained, context-based local knowledge—have only gotten worse."
On #climate#COP28: My fear is that getting international agreements in place is the easiest part of the problem. The hard bit will be the proverbial last-mile. People will have to change their behaviour in ways that are pro-environment. And for that, they will have to be more pro-social. It is here that things get stuck.
I recently read a toot about the burden of being a caregiver for a person with Alzheimer’s disease and can sympathize with their perspectives since I was once a caregiver for a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. My brother and I moved our parents into a retirement community when the symptoms of my father’s Alzheimer’s disease became too much for my mother to handle. My father had recently struck my sister-in-law. My mother lived in the assisted living part of the facility and my father moved into a memory care unit. My mother visited my dad almost daily. My brother and I visited him most weekends and took him out bowling or golfing. It was tiring and stressful—as working parents, my wife and I had two young children to drag along for those visits that occupied one day of most weekends. Yes, being a caregiver for a parent with Alzheimer’s was stressful for the 5-6 years the disease lasted until his death.
When we moved our father into the Alzheimer’s unit, he was too mentally incompetent to consent. My brother walked him through signing his name onto an admission form, letter by letter. Notably, no disability rights attorney or judge was there to object, to defend his civil rights. No disability rights advocates argued he would be better off homeless or imprisoned. I suspect this is how things work for most families that make the difficult choice to move an aging parent into such a place. My reason for bring up the absence of such bureaucratic impediments will be clearer a bit later in this thread.
My father lived in that memory care unit for the last 5 years of his life and my family was fortunate that he recognized us until about the last six weeks. On some days, he delusionally believed that he was back living in his childhood home with brothers and sister. On other days he was more in touch with reality. He probably would not have chosen to live the last years of his life in such a place. But he quickly got accustomed to it. When we returned from our bowling or golf outings with him, he willingly returned to his new home and waved goodbye with a smile on his face.
But even though potential harm from reality policing is neither abstract nor unlikely—a new study from a [#Harvard#PublicPolicy#researcher found that #LivePD cameras increase arrests for low-level “quality-of-life” offenses that ended up targeting lower-income communities by nearly 20 percent—they receive a fraction of the attention from #copaganda critics as scripted #police TV. ]