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Los Angeles Times
10-08-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Food for all over security for some
My grandmother escaped the Warsaw ghetto after her first of four sisters died from hunger. She slipped through a few missing bricks in the wall that sealed the Jewish population away from their Aryan neighbors, where they were trapped in poverty and malnourishment and subject to Nazi plans for extermination. Scholars report that 92,000 Jews died of starvation in the ghetto before 300,000 were deported to camps. After escaping, my grandmother — just a teenager — snuck food to her family several times before the rest of her family died, and my grandmother stayed hungry for many years, as she survived the Holocaust on her own. 'When you hungry, you soul flies out,' Bubbe, as I called her, said in her testimony of survival. Bubbe is most tragically poetic in her descriptions of hunger, and she never forgot the way her sister died asking for a piece of bread, just a shtickle fun broyt. Bulging eyes and blue lips. My grandmother's relationship to food was forever marked by the ghost of hunger. Once she was living safely in the American suburbs, she was never without a loaf of rye bread in the freezer. My grandmother knew about the essential dignity of every human being. At the end of the war, when she was liberated by the Russians in the Polish city of Lukov, she noticed the German soldiers walking around without boots, and she felt sad for them. 'You see a person is hurt,' she said, 'you want to help.' How we respond to the needs of those around us — this is what forms the basis of our character. In drawing a book about my grandmother's story, I thought often about the psychologist Abraham Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs.' At the bottom of the pyramid is our basic physiology, our need for food and water, and above that our need for security and safety. Only when these needs are met, can we focus on higher planes, seeking belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization. It is only because my grandparents fought so hard, endured so much, for their bread that I am in a position to reflect on what my grandmother's struggle for survival means for my identity, my sense of meaning and my politics. Her legacy taught me that every group of people deserves to live free from hunger and fear of violence in their homes, that we all need bread and boots. She taught me that we should tell the stories, all stories, of exile and loss and persecution. She taught me to love and believe in America, and that the Jews of the world are safest in liberal democracies, with governments that grant equal opportunity for all in their jurisdiction. As I learned more about Jewish history, I came to believe that the long story of Jewish suffering resulted in an attempt to solve 'the Jewish Problem' by creating a Palestinian Problem, that the Israeli government has never sufficiently reckoned with its role in Palestinian persecution, and that the fate of Palestinians and Israelis is, consequently, forever linked, and therefore the only viable future for either peoples lies in the two learning to break bread together. I can more easily imagine this future because I — unlike my grandmother, unlike my Jewish cousins in Israel, and unlike all Palestinians living under occupation — have not feared for basic survival. But those who've lost more than I have share this vision. And I believe it's my duty, at the very least, to hold on to my imagination. But in the face of hunger, words and ideas begin to melt, then evaporate. Hunger is stupifying. The mounting starvation statistics in Gaza change daily, and they are all bad. In May, 5,000 children diagnosed with malnutrition. A 24-hour period with 19 deaths from starvation. At least 1,400 people have been killed in Gaza while trying to access food since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an opaquely funded American and Israeli organization that 25 experts have called an 'insult to the humanitarian enterprise and standards,' began dominating distribution of aid in the Gaza Strip, in the name of diverting food from Hamas. The blockade, the system of severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza, has halted the flow of food and medical supplies, and frequent breakdowns in telecommunications have severely challenged the efforts to distribute what aid does get in. Outside of Gaza, we are in a position to quibble about statistics and argue about what words we use to describe other people's suffering. Many scholars have called the constant killings, the reduction of Palestinian infrastructure to rubble and the systematic blockade of humanitarian aid a genocide. For many Jewish people with direct connections to the Holocaust, the story of genocide is so total, so unimaginable, it's hard to reconcile a word with such totemic power with something happening right now, in front of our eyes, on our phones. Yet some Jewish Holocaust survivors identify with the images of Gaza's destruction and feel compelled to use the strongest language available in condemnation. Others use the terms ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity, while some just want to call this a war. These distinctions matter; a designation of genocide would, theoretically, oblige the international community to act, with sanctions or criminal prosecution for those responsible. But this semantic dialogue can produce a kind of blank despair. Starving children make fine distinctions feel hollow. The Israeli government claims there is 'no starvation' in Gaza, even as officials have moved to address this starvation in response to international and internal pressure, with pauses in fighting and minimal air drops. Israel's defenders admit there is a starvation problem in Gaza, but blame Hamas and Hamas-infiltrated international organizations for looting humanitarian aid, a claim that has been widely debunked. The Israeli government says this is a war of defense. This is the logic that has led, for example, to the siege of Gaza's already limited clean water supply. We can acknowledge the violence, the constant fear and the deep disappointment both peoples have experienced for decades, without equating these experiences, all the while seeing the moral imperative clearly: Food and water for all must come before security for some, all of which must come before ideology. This formulation implies that those wielding the most resources, Israeli and American institutions, must be willing to sacrifice some security in the name of ensuring hungry people are fed. There's no future for Israelis or Palestinians in which one people's security comes before another people's basic physiological needs, in wartime or after. All of us attending to the news today are squinting through intergenerational memories. I've looked at pictures of starving Gazans and been swept back to the Polish ghetto I never lived in, watching a family member die. I've seen Jewish people I love walk freely down the streets of American cities and perceive menace in symbols of Palestinian liberation they don't understand. I've listened to panicked complaints from Jewish acquaintances about how loud the sirens are at protests in front of Israeli embassies. To them, perhaps the sirens feel like war planes. The thing about those of us living at the top of Maslow's hierarchy is that sometimes we fall through loopholes and touch the panic of basic survival, bringing our identities, and our politics, with us. We can have compassion for each other in these moments. But we must anchor ourselves with these facts: At this point, in Gaza, some people aren't eating. This is why so many around the world are crying out and risking their safety and their status to protest. Our intergenerational grief should lead us all to cry together, in the name of those most vulnerable. Artists and activists don't have perfect plans for solving the most complex political crises of our lifetimes, and we don't command armies or wield many resources. What we can do is cry. We can cry about what is deeply wrong with now, and we can use our imaginations to light the way forward. Where our imaginations fixate might guide our collective priorities. So I imagine the children of Palestine in my drawings. They are breaking bread with my grandmother's sisters, if only in my imagination. Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of 'Artificial: A Love Story' and 'Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir.'
Forbes
30-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Is The Law Of The Instrument Hindering Enterprise AI Investments?
Two recent studies found that many enterprises are currently experiencing mixed results with their AI initiatives and investments. For example, Accenture examined over 2,000 generative AI projects and consulted more than 3,000 C-level executives, finding that only 36% stated they have scaled their generative AI solutions, while only 13% of executives report having created 'significant enterprise-level value.' Meanwhile, IBM surveyed more than 2,000 CEOs globally and found that only 16% have successfully scaled their AI initiatives across the enterprise, and only 25% report that their AI initiatives have delivered the expected ROI over the past few years. The studies also suggest that there is a range of things that organizations have to get right if they are to be successful in harnessing the potential of generative AI. These include leadership alignment, enterprise strategy, data cleanliness and availability, the need for a modern technological infrastructure, the right internal skills and capabilities and the ability to manage large-scale change. However, the Accenture study also found that organizations with 'leaders who deeply understand generative AI' are six times more likely to achieve enterprise-level value from their AI investments. This finding, combined with all of the hype currently circulating in the market about generative AI, the capabilities of LLMs, and, now, agentic AI, led me to wonder if there is possibly another factor at play here: the Law of the Instrument. If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. The Law of the Instrument is a cognitive bias that occurs when we acquire a new skill or tool, leading us to over-rely on it and try to use it everywhere, even if it might not be the most suitable or effective solution. This law is widely attributed to Abraham Maslow, who in 1966 wrote in his book The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, "It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." These days, it is often shortened to something along the lines of, 'If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.' So, is it possible that generative AI is becoming the proverbial hammer? Perhaps. Prayag Narula, CEO and co-founder of HeyMarvin, an AI-native customer feedback repository, believes that "Companies often approach AI like it's a one-size-fits-all solution'. Instead, he believes that "the better approach is to stop expecting magic. Start with systematic listening, pattern identification, and then match the right tools to specific problems.' This type of approach, which leverages what generative AI excels at — namely, identifying relationships within multimodal datasets and then acting upon those insights — is very much aligned with the approach that Five9, a leading cloud contact centre and AI services provider, is taking with its clients. According to Five9's CPO, Ajay Awatramani, they are advising their clients to be led by their data rather than by the tools at their disposal. As a result, whenever they engage with a client, the first thing they do is to listen via their tools, resources, and prompt engines to the massive multimodal datasets that their clients have of the interactions they have with their customers. Beginning this way, Awatramani says, allows them to identify patterns in the data, such as common customer issues, reasons behind customer calls, or areas of frustration with their overall service experience. Once identified, some of these patterns lend themselves to self-service solutions, some to agent-assist solutions, while others may point to issues that go beyond the scope of the customer service leader, requiring a more strategic discussion with other parts of the business because, for example, the pattern that has been identified indicates the need for something like a new digital front end. This seems like an eminently sensible approach, as it leverages one of the key strengths of generative AI while also focusing on understanding the problem space before considering possible solutions. Moreover, this type of approach is likely to be easier to scale and to deliver a clear RoI as it ensures that companies avoid the Law of the Instrument and pick the right tool for the right job.
Time of India
21-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Haves' guide to the lives of have-yachts
Great wealth brings great isolation, and a siege mentality The most expensive car is worth only around $30mn and the most expensive watch, $55mn. If you're a billionaire, neither will make you stand out in a 'crowd' of 3,000-plus other billionaires, collectively worth over $16tn. But stand out you must, because 'esteem' or 'status' is the fourth rung of the human hierarchy of needs, as psychologist Abraham Maslow declared 82 years ago. You could buy a mansion, but the costliest on the market is worth some $300mn. On a good day, Elon Musk makes twice as much. Yachts are a better bet. The costliest is rumoured worth $4.8bn – just shy of Trump's net worth – and even relatively modest ones, like Jeff Bezos' $500mn 'Koru', cost many thousands of dollars per hour to maintain. There's no return on investment here, only loss, and if you're brave enough to bleed dollars without noticing, sociologists will now place you above the 'haves' as a 'have-yacht'. In his new book The Haves and Have-Yachts, New Yorker writer Evan Osnos dwells on this super-wealthy class and its quirks. In 2022, he'd written an article – The Floating World – focused on owners of 'gigayachts', that is yachts longer than 295ft, which already numbered around 100 then. But the book, which is a collection of his New Yorker essays on the super-wealthy – hence subtitled Dispatches on the Ultrarich – explores their attitudes, illustrated by actions. While Musk, possibly the wealthiest man in history, talks about settling Mars, other ultrarich have been making D-Day plans for Earth. Osnos writes about Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, who got eye surgery done at 33 to improve his odds of surviving a disaster. Antonio Garcia Martinez, who used to be product manager at Facebook, bought five acres of woods on an island, and installed generators and solar panels there. What raised eyebrows, though, was his decision to bring thousands of rounds of ammunition. 'I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now,' he told Osnos. This survivalist streak also drives yacht-buying, says Osnos. Billionaire Peter Thiel, whose name crops up regularly in connection with America's rightward swing, has been known to fund the Seasteading Institute, whose mission is to 'enable floating societies which will allow the next generation of pioneers to test new ideas for govt'. Their website mentions 'building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy.' Read together, 'new ideas for government' and 'political autonomy' suggest a real estate analogue of cryptocurrency. One of Osnos' essays, 'Ghost in the Machine', offers a peek inside the money-making empires of tech moguls. For example, when Facebook Live faced the problem of livestreamed suicides, its chief technology officer sent an internal memo: 'Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.' To ordinary mortals, who satisfy Maslow's fourth level of needs with a new bag or a pair of shoes, these ideas and attitudes may be troubling, but it's important to be acquainted with them, to understand the forces shaping our world. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
The Case Against Fixing the Grid (Again)
The lights went out on the Iberian Peninsula on April 28. Immediately afterwards, the experts chimed in, either providing a reason for the failure or a cure for what ails the Spanish grid, although, as of this writing almost two weeks later, nobody knows for sure what went wrong. The engineers favored the explanation that the Spanish grid had too many renewable power sources and renewables, as everyone knows, lack inertia. So, maybe the grid needed more gas-fired, coal-fired, nuclear power plants or a better connection to France. The Spanish prime minister shot back that Spain was not going to pull back from renewables and the inertial problem could be dealt with. Probably no country in Europe has so much solar potential and so little spare water for conventional generation than Spain. So somebody said something sensible. But that is not the point. Whenever the grid goes down, people try to fix it, by adding more safeguards, enlarging it, adding transmission, employing sensors, whatever. We think these improvers may have it wrong. Yes, the grid is an immensely complex, huge system—a wonder of modern technology— but the bigger and more complex it becomes, the more likely that a failure (or sabotage) will have major rather than minor consequences. They have been fixing the grid for decades (and enlarging markets to allow more competition) and the grid still breaks down. Consider this partial list of failures in the USA, since the Northeast Blackout of 1965, which first suggested to Americans that electricity service was not a sure thing. ( If we added in the non-US outages we'd fill pages.)OUTAGE YEAR EXPLANATION Northeast 1965 Protective relay incorrectly set at one station New York City 1977 Lightning West Coat 1987 High wind Western North America 1996 High demand North Central 1998 Lightning California 2000-2001 Deregulation Northeast 2003 Untrimmed tree limb Texas 2011 Generation outages during extreme cold weather Derecho 2012 Storm from Midwest to Atlantic Hurricane Sandy 2012 Storm on East Coast Puerto Rico 2017 Storm takes out entire system Texas 2021 Gas supply and generation not winterized California 2025 Wildfires All these fixes remind us of the comment by famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, 'It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.' In other words, maybe the grid itself is the problem, so fixing it does not rid us of the problem. Why continue to sink money into fixing the grid instead of finding another solution? First, engineering studies usually find that big solutions are cheaper than small solutions per unit of output. That is, no doubt true, as long as you don't count the costs to customers when the grid goes down or the project costs spectacularly more than expected. Second, system planners may focus more on the probability of untoward events than on the potential harm caused by extremely low probability but high damage events. (In the old days, planners didn't rely on sophisticated risk analyses. They had inviolable rules of thumb, such as the N-1 rule. The system had to be built to survive the loss of its largest component.) Third, we see a switch in goals from reliability (don't let the bad things happen), to resilience (get the system back on as quickly as possible). Finally, market proponents want big markets to achieve scale and ensure enough competition in the markets. All of this says don't look for solutions that might decentralize and distribute resources because that path will cause a lot of inconvenience (and possible financial losses) to those in the business. This may seem theoretical. After all, electric service has been rickety for years, and we've survived. True, but the grid faces new short-term challenges. Climate change will surely raise demand, as will data centers (that could go from zero to one-tenth of load within a few years). If the grid is to support data center needs without degrading service for everyone else, everyone else will have to pay to upgrade the grid (even if the data centers make their own power deals). The rest of us might be better off if the data business ran its own separate generation and transmission network. Back in the days when left-wing and anarchist graffiti artists had real style, one group painted this word of advice, 'If the answer is the system, you are asking the wrong question.' Since 1965, sixty years of improving and enlarging the grid, and the lights still go out. Maybe it's time to try something different? Or, maybe we should just get used to it? By Leonard Hyman and William Tilles for More Top Reads From this article on
