[Peace-discuss] Notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

Here are some topics to consider discussing on NfN. Have a good show guys.




Labor/Exploitation: How we get the devices some of us have -- 
"Schoolchildren in China work overnight to produce Amazon Alexa devices"

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/aug/08/schoolchildren-in-china-work-overnight-to-produce-amazon-alexa-devices

So now we have more high-tech products that are abusing people from design, 
through manufacturing, all the way into intended ordinary use: Amazon's 
spybots (Alexa devices) are designed to listen to whatever is within 
microphone range and (judging by what Amazon contractors have access to) 
relay that to Amazon for storage and review (more on this below).

The Guardian wrote:
> Leaked documents show children as young as 16 recruited by Amazon
> supplier Foxconn work gruelling and illegal hours
>
> Hundreds of schoolchildren have been drafted in to make Amazon’s Alexa
> devices in China as part of a controversial and often illegal attempt to
> meet production targets, documents seen by the Guardian reveal.
> 
> Interviews with workers and leaked documents from Amazon’s supplier
> Foxconn show that many of the children have been required to work nights
> and overtime to produce the smart-speaker devices, in breach of Chinese
> labour laws.
> 
> According to the documents, the teenagers – drafted in from schools and
> technical colleges in and around the central southern city of Hengyang –
> are classified as “interns”, and their teachers are paid by the factory
> to accompany them. Teachers are asked to encourage uncooperative pupils
> to accept overtime work on top of regular shifts. Amazon supplier in
> China ‘will tackle illegal work practices’ Read more
> 
> Some of the pupils making Amazon’s Alexa-enabled Echo and Echo Dot
> devices along with Kindles have been required to work for more than two
> months to supplement staffing levels at the factory during peak
> production periods, researchers found. More than 1,000 pupils are
> employed, aged from 16 to 18.
> 
> Chinese factories are allowed to employ students aged 16 and older, but
> these schoolchildren are not allowed to work nights or overtime.
> 
> Foxconn, which also makes iPhones for Apple, admitted that students had
> been employed illegally and said it was taking immediate action to fix
> the situation.
> 
> The company said in a statement: “We have doubled the oversight and
> monitoring of the internship program with each relevant partner school
> to ensure that, under no circumstances, will interns [be] allowed to
> work overtime or nights.
> 
> “There have been instances in the past where lax oversight on the part
> of the local management team has allowed this to happen and, while the
> impacted interns were paid the additional wages associated with these
> shifts, this is not acceptable and we have taken immediate steps to
> ensure it will not be repeated.”

It is worth noting that Apple and Foxconn said similar things years ago 
when word got out that Foxconn's Chinese workers were manufacturing Apple's 
devices (such as iPhones) under grueling, inhumane, and illegal working 
conditions sometimes resulting in suicides. Apple later contracted 
manufacturing from Pegatron and reports were comparable.

See the Wikipedia article on "Foxconn suicides" 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides) for more on this including 
many entries where the description field reads "Threw himself from 
building" dating 2010-2013.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/steve-jobs/7796546/Foxconn-suicide-rate-is-lower-than-in-the-US-says-Apples-Steve-Jobs.html

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs' famous response to the Foxconn suicides in 
June 2010:
> "We are all over this," he told delegates at the D8 technology
> conference in California. "We look at everything at these companies, and
> I can tell you a few things that we know: Foxconn is not a sweatshop.
> 
> "It's a factory, but they have restaurants and movie theatres. They've
> had some suicides and attempted suicides. They have 400,000 people
> there. The rate is under what the US rate is, but it's still troubling."
One of the changes made in Foxconn factories: Foxconn's famed "suicide 
nets". Suicide nets are nets mounted on the outside of a factory building 
to slow a worker's descent after they fling themselves out of the 
building's windows in order to commit suicide.






Spying: "The cloud" is just someone else's computer. What does that mean 
for you when data describing you or data with recordings of you is "in the 
cloud"? It means you should expect more spying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6S9RAtnzPE -- Facebook had human 
contractors "reviewing users Messenger voice chats"
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/qvgpkv/microsoft-updates-privacy-policy-admits-humans-listen-to-cortana-skype 
-- "Microsoft Admits Humans Listen to Skype and Cortana in Privacy Policy 
Update"
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/amazon-and-google-are-listening-to-your-voice-recordings-heres-what-we-know/ 
-- "[Apple,] Amazon and Google are listening to your voice recordings."

Service providers spy on you.

If you hand your data over to another party, they'll spy on you. What they 
do with the data they glean is up to them. They don't owe you a report of 
what they collect, who collected it, how long they keep records, or what 
they do with those records.

If you want to avoid being spied upon, don't hand over data to others. This 
could mean that you will have to have the spine to reject a product or 
service precisely because you want to avoid the spying that comes with that 
product or service.

No matter how many interviews an organization's reps do, no matter what 
details they divulge you're still in the dark about what really happens 
because:

* they could be lying (by comission or omission).

Example from one the CNet article above:
> Amazon, Apple and Google have each now suspended human review of user
> audio recordings.

This is CNet speaking beyond their knowledge and the available evidence. It 
would have been better for CNet to have written "have each now claimed to 
suspend human review..." because that's what Amazon, Apple, and Google are 
claiming. The tech press is mostly corporate media; corporate media who are 
used to writing advertisements for the organizations they talk about, not 
encouraging the reader to think critically and skeptically based on 
available evidence.

* nothing they say is verifiable; no matter how willing and technically 
skilled you are, you lack the kind of access to their systems which you 
need in order to verify their claims, therefore all of their claims are 
unverifiable by you.

* their service could run on proprietary software that they can't fully 
control (such as a service running on Windows, MacOS, or any other 
proprietary software). This means service providers can't stand behind 
claims of how secure their service is because they can't fully control 
their own computers.

These reasons are also why we can only speculate when asked "why are they 
spying on us?" and why responses along the line of "I'm not doing anything 
interesting" fail to address the issue -- YOU don't determine what is 
interesting about you. Others determine this based on their needs in the 
moment. The NSA's slogan expresses the spies intention very well: "collect 
it all".

You can work around this to some degree by encrypting the data you send but 
that will only hide the data from intermediaries (your ISP, your phone 
company, etc.) if the receiver handles the data correctly, and even then 
only for a while. If the receiver leaks the data (on purpose or on 
accident), the unencrypted data (known as "the plaintext") gets out, 
becomes indexed, and becomes part of what others claim is true about you.

Eventually someone figures out a way to decrypt strong encryption, so the 
goal of encryption is to keep the plaintext out of the wrong hands while 
the people described in the plaintext are alive. Also, one has to be 
careful of proprietary software encryption because, for all we know, 
proprietary encryption is weaker than we need, or encrypting the data in a 
way where the proprietor can decrypt it without the user's knowledge or 
consent.

Proprietary software is always untrustworthy. No matter how technical or 
willing you are to review the program, you have no source code to work 
with, if you somehow discover the program does something bad you aren't 
allowed to improve the program (aka helping yourself), and you're not 
allowed to share an improved version with others (aka helping your 
community) even if you make an improved version.

The solution is to use software that respects your freedom to run, share, 
inspect, and modify the software known as free software (the word 'free' is 
a reference to freedom not price). Proprietary programs have backdoors in 
them that allow access before the data is encrypted; so even if a 
proprietary program has provably strong encryption which is used well to 
guard against third parties seeing the data, the data can still be read in 
full by leaking it before it is encrypted.






War: Aaron Maté: "Trump starves Venezuela, Democrats are silent"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37-PILH78Ys -- Aaron Maté on how compliant 
the Democratic Party is (including those who back the so-called 
"resistance" to Pres. Trump) as the Trump administration intensifies its 
anti-Venezuela sanctions via a new Executive Order.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-blocking-property-government-venezuela/ 
-- the latest published XO.

Economist Francisco Rodríguez claims that US sanctions against Venezuela 
will likely cause a famine in Venezuela and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Francisco Rodríguez: At this moment, given the information that we have, 
the most reasonable conclusion based on the data is that a famine is going 
to occur in Venezuela over the course of the next 12 months.

John Bolton wants Venezuelan President Maduro to withdraw allowing the US 
to launch new elections (which ostensibly would put the American stooge 
Juan Guaido in power). For now, continued increasing sanctions mean 
continued increasing suffering which will weaken the Venezuelan people:

> John Bolton: It worked in Panama, it worked in Nicaragua once[1], and it
> will work there again, and it will work in Venezuela and Cuba. United
> States has used similar and even more aggressive tools like these in
> Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Now Venezuela is part of this very
> exclusive club of rogue states.

[1] A reference to the 1980s terror war waged until the Nicaraguan people 
voted out the leftist Sandinista government.

Here's the overall tactic as described by former CIA agent John Stockwell 
in 1989:

> John Stockwell: The point is to put pressure on the targeted government
> by ripping apart the social and economic fabric of the country. Now
> that's words, you know, "social and economic fabric" -- that means
> making the people suffer as much as you can until the country plunges
> into chaos until at some point you can step in and impose your choice of
> governments on that country.

What do the Democrats have to do with this?

> Aaron Maté: Democrats Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Eliot Engel, Joe Biden,
> Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin and many more have all come
> out to endorse the Trump administration's coup attempt in Venezuela.
One could add to that list: Bernie Sanders who caucuses with Democrats. His 
tweet repeats CIA pro-coup language and views:

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1099380342018912257
> The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The 
> Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow 
> humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against 
> protesters.

Sanders claims to oppose a regime change war in Venezuela.

Aaron Maté reminds us that the Democrats are supporting the coup under 
Trump perhaps because that coup began under Obama -- continuing policy.

> Aaron Maté: A handful of Democrats including Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders,
> Tulsi Gabbard, and Ro Khanna, have opposed regime change in Venezuela.
> But even then, their opposition is tepid, qualified, and pretty rare.
> Just imagine if things were different: imagine how much harder it would
> be for Trump, Bolton, and Mike Pompeo to deny food and medicine to
> millions of Venezuelans if any of their critics in Congress or in the
> media would make this an issue. But that hasn't happened. Since this
> embargo was announced, Trump's critics in Congress and in the media have
> not even mentioned it. So really, the Trump administration is not just
> relying on a strategy here of making the Venezuelan people suffer, it is
> also reliant on the assumption that it won't face any domestic
> resistance for starving and besieging Venezuela. And so far that plan is
> working.





Climate: "Earth Stopped Getting Greener 20 Years Ago: Declining plant 
growth is linked toward decreasing air moisture tied to global warming"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-stopped-getting-greener-20-years-ago/

> The world is gradually becoming less green, scientists have found. Plant
> growth is declining all over the planet, and new research links the
> phenomenon to decreasing moisture in the air—a consequence of climate
> change.
> 
> The study published yesterday in Science Advances points to satellite
> observations that revealed expanding vegetation worldwide during much of
> the 1980s and 1990s. But then, about 20 years ago, the trend stopped.
> 
> Since then, more than half of the world’s vegetated landscapes have been
> experiencing a “browning” trend, or decrease in plant growth, according
> to the authors.
> 
> Climate records suggest the declines are associated with a metric known
> as vapor pressure deficit—that’s the difference between the amount of
> moisture the air actually holds versus the maximum amount of moisture it
> could be holding. A high deficit is sometimes referred to as an
> atmospheric drought.
> 
> Since the late 1990s, more than half of the world’s vegetated landscapes
> have experienced a growing deficit, or drying pattern.
> 
> Climate models indicate that vapor pressure deficit is likely to
> continue increasing as the world warms—a pattern that “might have a
> substantially negative impact on vegetation,” the authors write.
> 
> It’s not the first study to document the global decline in vegetation. A
> 2010 study in Science was among the first to demonstrate that the
> greening increases of the 1990s had stalled or reversed. That study also
> suggested that the declines were probably water-related.
> 
> That’s not to say every last corner of Earth is losing its vegetation.
> Some recent studies have revealed that parts of the Arctic are
> “greening” as the chilly landscape warms. And there’s increasing plant
> growth still happening in other regions of the world, as well.
> 
> But on a global scale, averaged across the entire planet, the trend is
> pointing downward.







Economy: CEO/worker pay gap widens, evidence of neoliberalism continues 
apace -- "CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978. Typical worker 
compensation has risen only 12% during that time."

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/

> What this report finds: The increased focus on growing inequality has
> led to an increased focus on CEO pay. Corporate boards running America’s
> largest public firms are giving top executives outsize compensation
> packages. Average pay of CEOs at the top 350 firms in 2018 was $17.2
> million—or $14.0 million using a more conservative measure. (Stock
> options make up a big part of CEO pay packages, and the conservative
> measure values the options when granted, versus when cashed in, or
> “realized.”) CEO compensation is very high relative to typical worker
> compensation (by a ratio of 278-to-1 or 221-to-1). In contrast, the
> CEO-to-typical-worker compensation ratio (options realized) was 20-to-1
> in 1965 and 58-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more—about five
> times as much—as other earners in the top 0.1%. From 1978 to 2018, CEO
> compensation grew by 1,007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized
> measure), far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage
> growth of very high earners (339.2%). In contrast, wages for the typical
> worker grew by just 11.9%.
> 
> Why it matters: Exorbitant CEO pay is a major contributor to rising
> inequality that we could safely do away with. CEOs are getting more
> because of their power to set pay, not because they are increasing
> productivity or possess specific, high-demand skills. This escalation of
> CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has
> fueled the growth of top 1.0% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving less of the
> fruits of economic growth for ordinary workers and widening the gap
> between very high earners and the bottom 90%. The economy would suffer
> no harm if CEOs were paid less (or taxed more).
> 
> How we can solve the problem: We need to enact policy solutions that
> would both reduce incentives for CEOs to extract economic concessions
> and limit their ability to do so. Such policies could include
> reinstating higher marginal income tax rates at the very top; setting
> corporate tax rates higher for firms that have higher ratios of
> CEO-to-worker compensation; establishing a luxury tax on compensation
> such that for every dollar in compensation over a set cap, a firm must
> pay a dollar in taxes; reforming corporate governance to give other
> stakeholders better tools to exercise countervailing power against CEOs’
> pay demands; and allowing greater use of “say on pay,” which allows a
> firm’s shareholders to vote on top executives’ compensation.





Lead poisoning sur la table: Notre Dame's fire put a lot of lead in the 
air. That lead is now settling around Paris. Lawsuits have ensued accusing 
the government of not warning citizens about the dangers of lead exposure 
early enough to take effective action to protect citizens (particularly 
children).

There is no safe amount of lead to ingest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6By828w5yo -- RT's report on the lead 
problem Paris now faces, footage of a few young locals denying that this is 
an issue, and test results of the area contradicting the Paris Mayor's 
claim that Paris is safe from lead.

Maybe former President Obama should visit Paris and give a speech like he 
did in Flint, Michigan. His speech and fake drinking a glass of Flint's 
poisoned water certainly cleared up that problem, right?

-J