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Conflicts in the US Between 1970s-2000s
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Conflicts in the US Between 1970s-2000s
In 1970’s America experienced changes that had a shift on the political belief in the country. The Conservatives emerged stronger although this was not a new idea in the US. John Adams has often been named as the father of conservatives. Conservatives felt that the government were required to provide necessary freedom in order to pursue goals. The conservatives believed that there was a certain way America had to be ruled. Liberals on the other hand were open to ideas that conservatives considered unorthodox Traditional America was built on values that mainly stemmed from the biblical teachings The ideology of liberals was that government ought to help people solve problems other than helping themselves. Effects of conservatism was maintaining of great American traditions that have helped in uniting the country (Schulman, pg. 68-102). They support moral absolutism, free trade, anti-communism, defense of western cultures from perceived threats of socialism and authoritarianism. Aside from change in political ideologies, there were many changes and conflict that occurred in America between the year 1970-2000s that would shape the history of America.
The first notable events would be the countrywide protests that were ongoing in America pressuring the government to end the war between the United States and the Northern Vietnamese forces. Vietnam War has often been referred to as the “living room war” in the united states because all media outlets provided adequate coverage even for people at home to understand the war. Richard Nixon during his campaign actually promised Americans that he would end the war immediately he assumed power. The war cause death of thousands of American troops. The war would come to an end in January 1973, when the warring nations signed Paris Peace Accords and by 1975, south and north Vietnam had united as a communist government. Vietnam was the first war that actually influenced domestic politics and also changed public perception of most Americans towards the government.
There was a conflict between the rise of liberals who posed threats to the conservative Americans. When Barry Goldwater who was a republican also referred to as Mr. Conservative was defeated many thought conservatisms would come to an end. However, this was not the case as conservatism ideas still prospered. Many historians attributed this to the rise of the black civil right movement who wanted better treatment. The liberals (democrats) championed for abolition of Jim Crow laws in the south, most southerners were unhappy and joined the republican party. Many viewed liberalism was no longer going to give the white mass of Americans the road to prosperity that they wanted and they thus had to look for other ways to do this. Christian conservatives also did fell threatened by liberals when the supreme court ruled that teachers could not conduct prayers or read the bible. To date, there are still differences between the conservatives and the liberal. The conservatives tend to believe that a healthy give-and-take in business and our economy will lead us to the same equal opportunity and equality for all, believing that bad business models will fail and good ones will succeed. Liberalism on the other hand has opened America into embracing new things that they did not believe before. This included advocating of social security to provide financial safety to retired people. They have also often supported policies that ae favorable to immigrants (Graham, pg. 1029).
Another conflict that contributed to the American history was the Persian Gulf War: August 2, 1990 Iraq tried to annex Kuwait. US feared that Hussein would attack Saudi Arabia which was considered a close ally to the US. President Bush condemned the invasion and claimed if nothing was done it would encourage such kinds of aggressions. In January 1991, the US army started pushing Iraqi military out of Kuwait (Gerbner pg.123). This would lead to a lot of problems between the United States and the Middle East the persist even today. 911 attack that happened in the US on September 11 was linked to the American invasion of Iraqi. Morning of September 11 2001, four airliners were hijacked by terrorist affiliated to Al-Qaida group. Two of the planes collided with twin towers in World Trade center while another on the pentagon in Washington. This is considered the deadliest attack in Americas history. This war refocused American attention to long term, fighting on terrorism.
Civil rights movement continued also to become stronger in the 1970s. The blacks continued their fight in ensuring that they get better treatment including representation in both the House of Representatives as well as the senate. The gay communities also started rallying their member into being acknowledged and received in the societies and challenging laws such as prohibition of same sex marriage that they saw was discriminatory to them. Gay was also often classified as a mental illness and the community was pressuring the American Psychiatric Association to stop doing so (Locke). Feminism also became quite popular where women like Betty Friedan were challenging the societies view on women as homemakers. Women wanted better treatment including being given same employment opportunities as women.
The conflicts that occurred between 1970s-2000s either in terms of ideas or physical war had an impact on the US economy. The economy was no longer as strong as it was as the post WW2 economy. There was stunted growth, rate of unemployment and increased and countries such as Japan and Russia were now thriving and posing threat to the United States. Reagan however tried to revive the economy by coming up with policies such as tax cuts which was not received well by many. By the time he left office unemployment rates had reduced by 5% and stock market had recovered from the crash. In the modern world a common problem that seems to still persist is the ideological differences between conservatives and can be seen even with slogan run by president Trump “Make America Great” as many believe this is not the America left by founding fathers. War between the Middle east countries including Iraqi and Afghanistan still continues and pose a threat to the US domestic security as most terroristic attacks are carried out with the grounds of US invasion of Iraq (Le Billion, pg. 109-137). Despite everything United States has come from far and most historic happening have helped Americans to build a better nation.
Works Cited
Graham, Jesse, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek. “Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations.” Journal of personality and social psychology 96.5 (2009): 1029
Gerbner, George. “Persian Gulf War.” DOCUMENT RESUME: 123.
Le Billon, Philippe, and Fouad El Khatib. “From free oil to ‘freedom oil’: Terrorism, war and US geopolitics in the Persian Gulf.” Geopolitics 9.1 (2004): 109-137.
Locke, Joseph L., and Ben Wright, editors. The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S History Textbook, Since. Vol. 2, STANFORD University Press, 2019
Schulman, Bruce J., and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. Rightward bound: Making America conservative in the 1970s. Harvard University Press, 2008.
Dawn of autonomous vehicles review and challenges ahead
Dawn of autonomous vehicles: review and challenges ahead
Unemployment
Unemployment is a major problem that can arise from automation advances. Autonomous vehicles will threaten the job of professional drivers (see e.g. CNBC (2016)) and change the required skills for workers linked to mobility systems. Taxi and other on-demand services drivers may be the first to experience this threat, as corporations already began driverless experiments. The UBER experiment in Pittsburgh is one such example. Truck drivers may come next, as the sedentary and predictable driving style makes it “a job ripe for disruption” (The Guardian, 2016a). Also, as will be discussed below, automation allows the efficient technique of platooning of heavy weight vehicles, whose fuel efficiency gains may further encourage trucking companies to go Autonomous vehicles. Even if the more demanding task of driving on national/municipal roads is, at a first stage, better done by a human driver, it is likely these become completely expendable as time goes on. Companies related to vehicle repair and maintenance may experience a reduction in demand for services, due to less accidents (see below)
Accident reduction and insurance premiums
About 90% of all accidents are due to human-error (Bengler et al. (2014)). AVs have the potential to drastically reduce accidents, as AV driving is not subject to distraction, bad driving behaviour, and slow human reaction times. Consequently, it is expected that AVs have lower insurance prices (The Guardian, 2016b). Insurance companies will have to face up to new challenges such as accident liability. Schroll (2015) suggests the elimination of liability for any accidents involving self-driving cars, and recommends the creation of a National Insurance Fund to pay for all damages resulting from those accidents. In addition, other risks will arise, which will need to be evaluated by these companies, such as cyber risk and system failures.
Technological barriers/developments
Prior to massification, AVs need to be able to operate competently in the heavily constrained 2D environment that is traffic, especially urban traffic. Reaching navigation proficiency in this environment is much more complex than in the case of airplanes, which is the main reason auto-pilot appeared for airplanes much sooner than for cars. AVs use various sensor’s systems and digital maps to scan their nearby environment. All information is combined in an on-board computer system that uses sophisticated algorithms to determine if the vehicle can move to a new position, in a continuous process which makes decisions many times per second. This navigation system must be reliable in all weather conditions and environments for that, there is still a lot of work to do. Vehicle map position must be precise and reliable in real-time, as well as environment information. Some situations have proved very challenging, mainly because technology is based on optical systems. For example: hidden lane markings, night-time, bad weather conditions, bridges, blinding light from the sun, obscured lights, unusual signage, four-way junctions, hand gestures, head nods and hand gestures, blocked GPS signal, etc. In addition AVs will need to be able to recognize and deal appropriately with unforeseen situations. Overcoming these situations reliably requires improving maps, sensors and computer algorithms. Deep learning systems (TechCrunch, 2016) may help dealing with unpredictable environments, as they can pass human-like decision making patterns to vehicles. This requires however a long learning period, which may delay time-to-market. Instead, some improvements can also be made to fix the infrastructure in order to be as predictable as possible (WIRED, 2016). In the quest for high-precision maps and GPS data, which are essential for AVs, the Japanese government and the European Union plan integration of their GPS satellite constellations (NIKKEY Asian Review, 2016). An alternative to GPS (or complement to it) was developed by a team of USA researchers, exploiting existing environmental signals such as cellular and Wi-Fi (TECH i.e., 2016). Detailed street-level maps of cities using vector-based graphics have also been developed (Road Show, 2016). With this technology, AVs determine their position by calculating their distance to known objects, instead of using GPS. Other technological developments include: software for vehicle guidance without GPS by Oxbotica (Popular Science, 2016); a localizing ground-penetrating radar (LGPR) that works well in all weather conditions, day and night, developed by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT News, 2016); LIDAR technology, which allows AVs drive in the dark as in daylight (Fortune, 2016) (electrek@, 2016). This technology has become increasingly cheaper and smaller (Autoevolution, 2016).
Legal, liability and ethical issues
Along with regulatory legislation on how AVs are to be used, the Highway Code and certification standards will need to be revised. The Gear 2030 (EC, 2016) presents a review of the EU legislation related to AVs, with special attention to the challenges that such vehicles will pose. Of particular importance is liability in accident cases. If an accident occurs, who is liable? The car’s owner, or the automaker? Some automakers (Mercedes, Volvo and Goggle) said they will accept responsibility and liability if their technology is at fault once it becomes commercially available (Jalopnik, 2015). Hevelke and Nida-Rümelin (2015) present a discussion about who should be held responsible for accidents of fully AVs from a moral standpoint. According to them, automakers’ responsibility should be limited to not obstruct AVs improvements. As to ethical problems, these may arise before imminent crashing, with algorithm behaviour having to decide which humans to endanger (Goodall, 2014). Cybersecurity and data privacy Like with all electronic devices, AV cybersecurity is a serious issue. In 2015 two hackers remotely took control of a Jeep Cherokee (WIRED, 2015) and this year a team of hackers did the same for a Tesla Model S (The Guardian, 2016c), raising fears that a large-scale attack could bring a city to a halt. As a result, some carmakers and service companies resorted to crowdsourcing, rewarding hackers who find bugs in their software. A set of automotive cybersecurity best practices was also published (AUTO-ISAC, 2016). AVs collect massive amounts of data as they operate, data which can be “foodstock” for business opportunities (Financial Post, 2016). Associated to this are data privacy and security issues. Authorities are becoming aware of these issues and draft regulations are starting to appear (DMV, 2015)
Conclusions and future:
The usually hard task of anticipating the future becomes even harder when a large change, such as the appearance of autonomous vehicles, is looming. Many consequences of their appearance are, at best, nebulous at the present stage, along with how deep they might reach. What seems to be consensual is the fact that AVs will bring, sooner or later, a paradigm change in transport. Whether this change will come from widespread adhesion to new car usufruct models, traffic efficiency, electric powering, other factors or any combination of former is not clear. Neither is what practical implications it will have on cities, especially if one considers that cities change due to many factors. This research summarised the possible impacts of AVs and the state-of-the-art with respect to academic research on the subject. It also argued that AVs can make alternative car usufruct models more affordable, possibly to an extent large enough that these can subsequently shape the city and traffic. However, technological hurdles must be surpassed before any of these come to fruition. Recent Tesla auto-pilot crashes prove even the more basic AV functions need vital upgrades, leaving harnessing of all AV potential still far away. An AV-based society requires a different collective mind-set. People will need time to adapt, and it is likely that some die-hards will never give-up being at the helm. Nevertheless, with big companies so committed to AV development, it is only a matter of time before some of the aforementioned impacts unveil. Some forecasts as to what the future may bring can be found in the recent work of (Litman, 2015). With research on AVs impacts still at its infancy, the field is ripe for exploring and modelling them in a quantitative way, anticipating their extent and side effects. Research on usufruct model changes, traffic demand and congestion, and how to best integrate AV with normal traffic rank on top of this to-do list, given their potential to shape the city and its urban way of life. Extending the study presented in this article in section 3 to more cities and countries may help estimate short- to mid-term regional penetration rates.
P O S I T I V E
STRENGTHS INTERNAL
Accident reduction
Cheaper insurance policies
Equity (mobility for all)
Increased traffic efficiency
Increased on-demand services
Reduced travel costs
Reduced parking demand
OPPORTUNITIES EXTERNAL
Change vehicle ownership paradigm
Use of smaller vehicles
Fosters use of electric vehicles
Requalification of parking space
Congestion reduction
Emissions reduction
N E G A T I V E
WEAKNESSES INTERNAL
Lack of regulation/certification
Reliance on technology
Costly technology
Technological issues to be solved
Legal & liability issues
Ethical issues
THREATS EXTERNAL
Unemployment
Urban expansion
Increased traffic demand
Data privacy
Data security
Reference: https://repositorioaberto.uab.pt/bitstream/10400.2/7050/1/driverless_postprint.pdf
Conflicts in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”
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Conflicts in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
In the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates, numerous conflicts are present. The main protagonist is Connie a character who experiences several conflicts with the other characters. The main types of conflicts evident are both external and internal conflicts.
External Conflicts
The external conflicts are numerous in the story. Some of these conflicts are; when Connie’s conflicts with her mother. According to the mother Connie is messy and cheap, and thus she criticizes her for keeping her room untidy. She is also seen to conflict with her sister. The conflict with her sister arises in that she regards her as being too “plain” and cannot see the need for being popular and “hip” (Oates, p.11). Connie sees her mother and sister being too traditional and therefore affecting her independence.
Internal Conflicts
Connie lacks time to clean her room due to mixed-up thoughts in her mind. While she is outside lying in the sun, she daydreams with sensual images. When it gets too hot, she goes inside where she turns the radio on “to mask out the quiet” (Oates, p.7). Also, Connie tends to experience her first somber nervousness on the arrival of Arnold Friend. She becomes worried when she looks at Friend’s car. These circumstances show Connie’s internal conflicts.
Works Cited
Oates, Joyce Carol, and Tobias Wolff. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?. Difusión, Centro de Investigación y Pubicaciones de Idiomas, 2013.