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By Jack Shenker Shortly after midnight on Friday, 28 January 2011, someone in 26 Ramses Street, a nondescript 12-storey office building in downtown Cairo, turned off Egypt’s internet. No email, web access, WhatsApp or Skype. It didn’t matter. A few hours later,...
By Clive Sanford Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies have loyal followers who believe that the future of mediums of exchange and stores of value is in currency constructs that are outside the purview of governments and central banks. They also have confidence that the...
By David Benatar In 2006, I published a book called Better Never to Have Been. I argued that coming into existence is always a serious harm. People should never, under any circumstance, procreate – a position called ‘anti-natalism’. In response, readers wrote letters...
By Nicholas Tampio In early 2017, Scientific American published a symposium on the threat that "big nudging" poses to democracy. Big Data is the phenomena whereby governments and corporations collect and analyze information provided by measuring sensors and internet...
By Soledad Stoessel It may be a bit much to invoke Gustav Meyrink’s Golem – the indomitable clay creation that destroyed everything in its path, alive but soulless – but the lurching, paradoxical maneuvering of Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, does lend itself to...
By Ramiro Crespo After teasing the public for several weeks, president Lenin Moreno last week finally presented seven questions that will appear on a public referendum. There were some surprises. Momentum appears behind him as the opposition, including key leaders...
By Chris Hedges The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global...
By Thea Riofrancos On March 8, 2012, a few hundred marchers set out from Pangui, Ecuador, a town in the southeastern Amazon, near the construction site of the massive, open-pit Mirador Mine. Just days earlier, a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies had signed a...
By Judd Gregg The European Union has assessed a major fine against Google. In addition, the leaders of the European Union want to assess a large tax on the revenues of Amazon, Facebook and Google. France wants to tax all the social media platforms that are being used...
By Matt Weinberger One day, not too soon — but still sooner than you think — the smart phone will all but vanish, the way beepers and fax machines did before it. Make no mistake: We're still probably at least a decade away from any kind of meaningful shift away from...
Few webcam users master the theatrical elements of on-camera presence. Because of the camera’s in-your-face vantage point, subjects' noses and mouths appear too big while bad lighting puts them either in shadow or provides a dentist’s view of stained incisors and...
By Gaston Dorren Ah, for the days of fact-free linguistics! The pre-scientific era might have produced a lot of codswallop and hogwash, but how entertaining it is to look back upon. Scholars erred in ways that few modern linguists ever would. Today, their field of...
By the Amazon Defense Coalition After being caught paying a witness who lied to a U.S. federal court, Chevron is now trying to bankrupt the human rights attorney who helped indigenous groups win a $12 billion environmental judgment against the company for creating...
By Irene Torres Each year, malnutrition costs Ecuador the equivalent of 4.3% of its gross domestic product, as the resulting health burden and reduced potential productivity places an economic toll on society. That was the unsettling conclusion of the World Food...
By Franklin Foer Until recently, it was easy to define our most widely known corporations. Any third-grader could describe their essence. Exxon sells gas; McDonald’s makes hamburgers; Walmart is a place to buy stuff. This is no longer so. Today’s ascendant monopolies...
By Shelly Caref The most common conception of corruption is the theft of public money through unscrupulous methods. However, there are many other ways to deceive the public and one of the most notorious is the promotion of industrial chemical agriculture. Most people...
By Gregory Wilpert Venezuela is heading towards an increasingly dangerous situation, in which open civil war could become a real possibility. So far over 100 people have been killed as a result of street protests, most of these deaths are the fault of the protesters...
By Olivia Gass Ecuador’s new President, Lenín Moreno, is an unusual politician for more reasons than just his idiosyncratic first name. Moreno is a paraplegic who was shot during a robbery-gone-wrong in 1998. In the course of his convalescence, Moreno turned to...
A recent post on an expat social media forum suggested that if Ecuador's Social Security system (IESS) follows through with its rate hike for voluntary membership there will be a mass exodus of norte americanos from the country. Well, it turns out that those leaving...
By John Fund Venezuela’s crisis is a genuine nightmare, but it now also has elements of farce. The nation’s most famed political prisoner has been released to house arrest, and the attorney general who put him behind bars has changed sides and denounced the “state...
