New York Times columnist Mark Bittman talks about taxing unhealthy foods. His article in the Times’ Sunday Review on July 24, “Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables,” looks at why it’s so difficult to market healthy foods successfully.
Tagged with “policy”
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Mark Bittman on Taxing Bad Food to Subsidize the Good
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Tim O’Reilly: Government 2.0
What can government learn from Google and the Web 2.0 explosion? Wikipedia, Amazon, Linux - the code behind every Google server - all derive their value from its users and their participation. How can government learn to harness this collective brain-power to solve our biggest challenges? Is ‘direct democracy’ no longer a dusty thousand year-old Greek ideal? TechGuru Tim O’Reilly discusses Gov 2.0.
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The Net Delusion: Does free information mean free people?
At the start of the twenty-first century we were promised that the internet would liberate the world. We could come together as never before, and from Iran’s ‘twitter revolution’ to Facebook ‘activism’, technological innovation would spread democracy to oppressed peoples everywhere. We couldn’t have been more wrong. Morozov destroys this myth, arguing that ‘internet freedom’ is an illusion, and that technology has failed to help protect people’s rights. Not only that – in many cases the internet is actually helping authoritarian regimes. From China to Russia to Iran, oppressive governments are using cyberspace to stifle dissent: planting clandestine propaganda, employing sophisticated digital censorship and using online surveillance. We are all being manipulated in more subtle ways too – becoming pacified by the net, instead of truly engaging. This event marks the publication of Evgeny Morozov’s new book The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World.
Tagged with social networks activism politics democracy policy freedom free speech
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Richard Rhodes, “Twilight of the Bombs”
http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/sep/21/twilight-bombs/
Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, and Arsenals of Folly completes his tetralogy on nuclear weapons with his new book, The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons.
A single weapon profoundly shaped world history for most of a century. Its disappearance can have equally profound effects
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Frank Gavin: Five Ways to Use History Well
Why do policy makers and historians shun each other? Gavin observed that policy people want actionable information, certainty, and simple explanations. Meanwhile historians revel in nuance, distrust simple explanations and also distrust power and those who seek it. Thus historians keep themselves irrelevant, and policy makers keep their process ignorant.
Gavin proposed five key concepts from history that can inform understanding and improve policy dramatically.
http://www.longnow.org/seminars/02010/jul/12/five-ways-use-history-well/
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Niall Ferguson: A Checkup on Global Financial Health
http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/06/niall-ferguson-a-checkup-on-global-financial
Bigfoot historian Niall Ferguson made his name with a fearless readiness to speak to history and our moment in it in the biggest terms.
If you want to talk about the rise and fall of empires – Roman, American, British, Soviet – Ferguson’s your man. Now he’s followed history right into the middle of a raging debate over whether we need more stimulus spending right now, or need to slam on the spending brakes to avoid a system collapse.
Ferguson’s a hit-the-brakes man. He dukes it out with Paul Krugman
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Radio Berkman 140: Three Trends of 2009
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2009/12/21/radio-berkman-140-three-trends-of-2009/
David Weinberger attended Supernova 2009 in San Francisco, where some of the biggest names in tech, business, government, and academia came together to talk past, present, and future of networks. He chatted with a number of those thought-leaders, and came away with three major threads for 2009 which might help guide our thinking as we go into 2010:
The Broadband Initiative The Growth of Real Time Web The Web and the Obama Administration
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Conversations With History: The Politics of Food
Host Harry Kreisler welcomes writer Michael Pollan for a discussion of the agricultural industrial complex that dominates consumer choices about what to eat. He explores the origins, evolution and consequences of this system for the nation’s health and environment. He highlights the role of science, journalism, and politics in the development of a diet that emphasizes nutrition over food. Pollan also sketches a reform agenda and speculates on how a movement might change America’s eating habits. He also talks about science writing, the rewards of gardening, and how students might prepare for the future.
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LIVE from the NYPL & The Aspen Institute Present: Capitalism and the Future
The President of the Aspen Institute, Walter Isaacson joined by Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money , Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google, and Nassim Taleb, scholar of randomness and risk and author of The Black Swan together will examine:
What will the American economic system look like in the months and years ahead?
Who are the innovators currently shaping the future?
What will be the role of business in that future?
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What Next? Surviving the 21st Century
The list of challenges facing the world is proliferating rapidly from climate change to nuclear proliferation and nobody seems to have much of a grip on what is going on. In this public dialogue hosted by Global Policy, a new innovative and interdisciplinary journal, Chris Patten and Professor David Held will discuss what we know in each of these areas and how progress can be made.
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