Two Scenarios for Sustainable Welfare: A Framework for an Eco-Social Contract

More nation states are now committing to zero net carbon by 2050 at the latest, which is encouraging, but none have faced up to the transformation of economies, societies and lives that this will entail. This article considers two scenarios for a fair transition to net zero, concentrating only on climate change, and discusses the implications for contemporary ‘welfare states’. The first is the Green New Deal framework coupled with a ‘social guarantee’. I argue that expanded public provision of essential goods and services would be a necessary component of this strategy. The second scenario goes further to counteract runaway private consumption by building a sufficiency economy with ceilings to income, wealth and consumption. This would require a further extension of state capacities and welfare state interventions. The article provides a framework for comparing and developing these two very different approaches.

Development, Citizenship, and the Bhakra–Nangal Dams in Postcolonial India, 1948–1952

Historians have done much to unpick the image of development in poor countries after the Second World War as a technocratic phenomenon driven by centralizing planners and advocates of modernization. Yet scholars have done less to ask how development interacted with other major aspects of decolonization, notably the transformation of colonial subjecthood to postcolonial citizenship. Using the case of the Bhakra–Nangal dam complex, constructed in northern India during the late 1940s to early 1950s, this article argues that a major development project impacted not just on economic growth and the extension of state power, but significantly influenced the integration of postcolonial India's diverse political territories. At the same time, ideas about development and citizenship both offered resources that technocrats and dam-displaced people alike could use to make arguments about the relationship between people, territory. and the state. Development was not a rarefied space that escaped politics while extending state power, but was entangled in the broader processes through which subjects of an empire became citizens of a postcolonial state.

Violence against Journalists

News has always been a sphere of conflict, and one finds violence at every point in the history of news. Although violence in general has been omnipresent, the forms that violence takes come and go, corresponding to rising and falling levels of general violence within and between societies (with war being the classic example), as well as changes in the social and political roles of the news media and developing norms for journalism. In periods of partisan journalism, for instance, attacks intensify with political conflict and aim to silence opinion writers; in periods of professionalized journalism supported by strong news organizations, attacks are often attempts to “hack” the news system so that it includes non-mainstream positions. In other words, violence is always meaningful, and usually strategic, even though it might seem like random irrational noise. Sometimes violence has been an extension of state media control; this is particularly the case in authoritarian systems, where violence supplements other forms of censorship. On the other hand, often it’s a way of contesting state authority, and it can be especially pronounced in post-authoritarian systems with a limited capacity for state protection of independent journalism. In other cases it involves conflicts that are not political in nature: in every period, violence has been a way of reacting to perceived slights on honor or reputation. Because it is such a diverse and shifting set of phenomena, it is useful to distinguish various common forms of violence against journalists.

Whole-Body Teleoperation and Shared Control of Redundant Robots with Applications to Aerial Manipulation

This paper introduces a passivity-based control framework for multi-task time-delayed bilateral teleoperation and shared control of kinematically-redundant robots. The proposed method can be seen as extension of state-of-the art hierarchical whole-body control as it allows for some of the tasks to be commanded by a remotely-located human operator through a haptic device while the others are autonomously performed. The operator is able to switch among tasks at any time without compromising the stability of the system. To enforce the passivity of the communication channel as well as to dissipate the energy generated by the null-space projectors used to enforce the hierarchy among the tasks, the Time-Domain Passivity Approach (TDPA) is applied. The efficacy of the approach is demonstrated through its application to the DLR Suspended Aerial Manipulator (SAM) in a real telemanipulation scenario with variable time delay, jitter, and package loss.

A Municipal Tail

This project examines municipal animal control in Los Angeles between 1880 and 1909. It traces the emergence of municipal animal control from the confluence of animal welfare reform and progressive state expansion. The animal welfare movement in the United States began in the Colonial Era, but soon reflected the influence of changing attitudes in Europe and the rise of anti-cruelty reform movements after the Civil War. As Americans sought to create a better world out of the ashes of that war, many looked towards animal welfare. This movement occurred first on the East Coast, beginning with Henry Bergh’s founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866, and reached Los Angeles by the end of the century. Many in that growing city viewed the dawn of the twentieth century with optimism, hoping for L.A.’s ascendancy into the ranks of the nation’s great metropolises. As a result, they began to look at the city’s problems through an increasingly progressive lens. Newspapers had covered the animal impoundment system’s brutality since the 1880s, but by the end of the century, they carried dramatic exposés of cruelties and corruption at the pound that emphasized connections to larger social issues. Citizens, including an impressive number of women, became activists for animal welfare. The municipal government responded by passing an ordinance that put animal control in the hands of the Humane Animal League, a private animal welfare organization. When the League failed to handle the city’s burgeoning animal population humanely and efficiently, the city assumed responsibility for animal control and created a municipal system. The emergence of municipal animal control in Los Angeles demonstrates a city turning to the extension of state power at the local level to create a more humane and efficient world for both its human and animal inhabitants.

On the Patrimony of the Romanian Orthodox Church during the Communist Regime. Some Aspects

The study examines the extension of state control over the assets of the Romanian Orthodox Church during the Communist period of Romanian history. The author examines the topic by separately presenting norms and measures applied to immovable, and then to movable assets which were nationalised or taken under state control based on various legislative measures and pretexts. In the study the process by which the land and immovable assets, both of an ecclesiastical use, and used for supporting educational and other church activities is examined. The measures taken against the land and forestry assets held by the Romanian Orthodox Church by way of its institutions (parishes, monasteries etc.) is presented, as well as the fate of some church buildings. The author also examines the various measures aimed at bringing movable assets of the Romanian Orthodox Church under state control, including by confiscation, and forced inclusion into museum collections.

Improving the Characteristics of Multi-Level LUT-Based Mealy FSMs

Contemporary digital systems include many varying sequential blocks. In the article, we discuss a case when Mealy finite state machines (FSMs) describe the behavior of sequential blocks. In many cases, the performance is the most important characteristic of an FSM circuit. In the article, we propose a method which allows increasing the operating frequency of multi-level look-up table (LUT)-based Mealy FSMs. The main idea of the proposed approach is to use together two methods of structural decomposition. They are: (1) the known method of transformation of codes of collections of outputs into FSM state codes and (2) a new method of extension of state codes. The proposed approach allows producing FPGA-based FSMs having three levels of logic combined through the system of regular interconnections. Each function for every level of logic was implemented using a single LUT. An example of the synthesis of Mealy FSM with the proposed architecture is shown. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed by the results of experimental studies based on standard benchmark FSMs. The research results show that FSM circuits based on the proposed approach have a higher operating frequency than can be obtained using other investigated methods. The maximum operating frequency is improved by an average of 3.18 to 12.57 percent. These improvements are accompanied by a small growth of LUT count.

Improving the System for Ensuring the Reliability of Savings Returns in the Russian Banking Sector

One of the most multifaceted and multidimensional socially significant categories in the development of the Russian savings system is its stability and relia-bility. In this regard, the study of ways to improve the system of guarantees of reliability of savings in the banking sector as one of the segments of the Russian savings system is an important tool in de-termining the directions of its further effective de-velopment. The paper assesses the main levels of implementation of the modern system of guarantees of the reliability of savings return in the banking sector, analyzes the world experience of building Deposit insurance systems, reveals the transfor-mation of insurance compensation in the historical perspective and methods of deducting contribu-tions to the Deposit insurance Fund. The directions of improving the efficiency of the Deposit insurance system are highlighted, namely: the use of strict measures to detect criminal mechanisms in Deposit insurance, strengthening control by bank superviso-ry authorities and banks’ creditors, improving finan-cial literacy of the population, expanding the boundaries of the Deposit insurance system in the extension of state guarantees to entities and funds trust management. The author’s mechanism for im-plementing guarantees of reliability of savings re-turns in the subsystem of banking institution is proposed.