For years Poland has lacked a meaningful support system for refugees, and the new pseudo-autocratic state, led by the far-right Law and Justice party (PiS), is committed to an explicitly xenophobic platform. Life for foreigners has become increasingly complicated since the elections in October 2015. There has been a collapse of support for migrants, a rapid conflation of the terms ‘Muslim’, ‘refugee’ and ‘terrorist’.
.. Her home was vandalized the week of my visit. She’s learned to say as little as possible.
‘What made you decide to come to Poland?’ I ask.
‘There was an accident,’ she says.
‘What sort of accident?’
‘A car accident.’
‘Well, what happened?’
‘A Russian tank ran into our car.’
Several of her young children were inside the car at the time, she adds.
.. Poland happens to be one of the most homogenous countries on earth. Few places so large and populous can claim to be as unified in race, ethnicity, language, religion – you name it.
.. About 97 per cent of Poland’s population are ethnic Pole
.. Jewish and Roma communities may have suffered centuries of abuse, but we were an unwavering presence in Poland – until the Holocaust. Enclaves of Ukrainians and Lithuanians persisted right up until Stalin’s deportation orders. The country’s ethnic pluralism never recovered.
How a Machine Learns Prejudice
Artificial intelligence picks up bias from human creators—not from hard, cold logic
..If artificial intelligence takes over our lives, it probably won’t involve humans battling an army of robots that relentlessly apply Spock-like logic as they physically enslave us. Instead, the machine-learning algorithms that already let AI programs recommend a movie you’d like or recognize your friend’s face in a photo will likely be the same ones that one day deny you a loan, lead the police to your neighborhood or tell your doctor you need to go on a diet. And since humans create these algorithms, they’re just as prone to biases that could lead to bad decisions—and worse outcomes.
Picketty: Of productivity in France and in Germany
If we calculate the average labour productivity by dividing the GDP (the Gross Domestic Product, that is the total value of goods and services produced in a country in one year) by the total number of hours worked (by both salaried and non-salaried employees), we then find that France is at practically the same level as the United States and Germany, with an average productivity of approximately 55 Euros per hour worked in 2015, or more than 25% higher than the United Kingdom or Italy (roughly 42 Euros) and almost three times higher than in 1970 (less than the equivalent of 20 Euros in 2015; all figures are expressed in purchasing power parity and in 2015 Euros, that is after taking into account inflation and price levels in the different countries)
The Queen And Her Ants
What ants can teach humans about tyranny, co-operation, and the division of labour. “We know now that ants do not perform as specialised factory workers. Instead ants switch tasks. An ant’s role changes as it grows older and as changing conditions shift the colony’s needs. An ant that feeds the larvae one week might go out to get food the next. Yet in an ant colony, no one is in charge or tells another what to do. So what determines which ant does which task, and when ants switch roles?”