Word: calculus
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Every time a 13-year-old in rural Peru or Tuvalu touches a keyboard, she bypasses the Industrial Revolution and rockets into the Information Age. She can network, learn calculus, study crop-growing techniques, or e-mail a hospital for advice on illness treatment. She can access a wealth of knowledge beyond the horizon fortune has aligned for her. But how much does it really help? Lately, efforts to bring computers to youth in developing areas have been assaulted as ineffective, or even worse—impulsively imperialistic. Last month, One Laptop per Child—an NGO aiming...
...isn’t there something more to art than what cold economic calculus reveals? Isn’t there something more that art does that can’t be quantified? Isn’t there a greater purpose that art serves...
...Iran and staged military maneuvers with Russia in the Caribbean. But Chávez, unlike U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, at least still lets U.S. oil firms have stakes in Venezuelan petro projects. And no one recalls any Venezuelan names on the list of 9/11 hijackers. Whatever the geopolitical calculus of Washington's coddling of Riyadh may be, Latin Americans still see the U.S. as giving Saudi Arabia's repressive monarchy a pass while reviling a democratically elected government in Venezuela. They see the same double standard at work in the U.S.'s maintaining an economic embargo on Cuba...
...Race didn’t figure into the calculus very significantly. There was of course the occasional yahoo who chased me off his lawn accusing me of being a traitor to my race. (And I was once asked by an older couple who nevertheless assured me they were voting Democrat whether I was the “right color for that job” when I announced myself as an Obama campaign worker.) But for most people, questions about religion or race were largely overshadowed by economic considerations...
Israel’s response is criticized as “disproportionate and inappropriate” because so many civilians in Gaza have, sadly, been killed in the operation. What this sort of calculus ignores, however, is the tens of millions of dollars Israel has invested in bomb shelters throughout the south, the early warning system it has installed, and the mass migration of Israelis from their homes to avoid the murderous rain of rockets falling daily from the sky. Civilian deaths are horrible and tragic, but to suggest that death ought to be the only measure...