Energy, Climate, New Economic Thinking​

Category: Politics and Society

Tuition-Free College Could Cost Less Than You Think

Paying for college seems out of reach for many Americans, so the idea of free college has broad appeal. Several Democratic presidential candidates and members of Congress have endorsed it. New York Times

Why This Narrow Strait Next to Iran Is So Critical to the World’s Oil Supply

Twenty percent of the global oil supply flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow stretch of water that separates Persian Gulf countries like Iran, Iraq and Kuwait from the rest of the world. From May 15 to June 15, more than 1,000 tanker ships traveled the strait. Many were destined for places as far away as China and South Korea. New York Times

How A.I. Helped Improve Crowd Counting in Hong Kong Protests

Crowd estimates for Hong Kong’s large pro-democracy protests have been a point of contention for years. But for the first time in the march’s history, a group of researchers combined artificial intelligence and manual counting techniques to estimate the size of the crowd. New York Times

Big tech and the trade war

On May 15th America’s Commerce Department said that companies would need a special licence to deal with Huawei, China’s hardware giant, which it deemed a threat to American interests (it later said the order would not take full effect for 90 days). The Economist

Caught in the Trap – Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of Austria’s right-wing populist FPÖ party, met with a purported Russian multimillionaire on Ibiza in July 2017.

It’s an incredible video. It was created at the end of July 2017, three months before Austria’s general election that October. The video shows Strache, leader of the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), and fellow party member Johann Gudenus, deputy mayor of Vienna at the time, meeting with a woman in a luxurious holiday villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Süddeutsche Zeitung