Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
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Some old-school clips of Germaine Greer, a ferociously brilliant person who has said some truly dumb things. Included in the first video of 1971 media appearances is some of her eviscerating righteousness from the Hegedus-Pennebaker film Town Bloody Hall. The second video contains a cut of her hanging out in 1972 with that group of feminists, Led Zeppelin.
Peter Diamandis, founder of Singularity University and author of Abundance, is a true believer in technology, one who sees a near-term future filled with nanobots, asteroid mining, transparency and immortality. He thinks tomorrow will be largely wonderful. Diamandis just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
(1) If abundance and amazing technology is our future, what will be the motivation for anyone to disconnect from Matrix-like, fully immersive, virtual worlds (where anything imaginable might be possible)? Also, considering that advanced alien civilizations probably reach the technological ability to create virtual reality like this before interstellar space travel, would this be a valid explanation for the Fermi Paradox?
(2) Being in medical school I am extremely interested in what being a physician will actually entail two decades from now. You have a unique perspective since you actually went to Harvard Medical School (and somehow started you own space company and university while attending) but decided not do your residency afterwards. If you were graduating today, what residency would you choose (i.e., has the greatest potential)?
Peter Diamandis:
(1) The human body is a collection of 10 trillion cells working together… i think we are heading towards the transformation of humanity being a collection of 9 billion human brains working together… towards a “Meta-INtelligence” where you can know the thoughts, feelings and knowledge of anyone. that’s where tech is driving us… As such, i don’t know that i would want to live outside of this, just like any one of your human cells has a disadvantage living outside of your body.
(2) Wow, Medicine is going to change ALOT. I can imagine a time in the near future where the patient is saying “NO WAY… I don’t want that human doctor doing the surgery, he/she makes mistakes… i only want the robot… its done 300,000 perfect surgeries in a row.”
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Question:
What exactly do you feel will be the greatest contribution in the next 4-5 decades in regards to both Earth-domestic technological advancements and in space exploration/colonization?
Peter Diamandis:
Over the next 30 – 40 years (not 40 – 50) humanity will establish itself in space, independent of Earth. We finally have the technology at hand to do this… and the wealth… and the will. That is HUGE. Millions of years from now, as people look back at these next few decades, it will be the moment in time that we broke away irreversibly and became a multiplanetary species. Not since lung fish crawled out of the oceans onto land has this happened!
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Question:
Do you feel that our potential to reach a future of abundance faces significant threats from these sorts of negative factors? (environmental damage and resource depletion, and the unrest that has potential to ferment in such conditions) Are there any areas that you feel need critical attention to avoid derailing a successful future?
Peter Diamandis:
I actually am an optimist about human nature and people usually do “bad things” in the shadows. As tech continues to drive towards MASSIVE Transparency, where you can’t hide, it will actually cause us to be safer in society and allow us to take action more quickly when things are heading in a negaive direction. Knowledge is the Bright light we need.
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Question:
A year ago someone brought up the question of abundance and its implication on labor. As technology takes over more complex tasks (via automation) less labor is needed. However, if we reach a critical point where labor needs decrease dramatically there is no economic population to purchase the output (as they would have no jobs). While total “abundance” is perhaps unreachable there has to be a tipping point where labor markets and automation balance each other out. Would you mind commenting on this concept, its implications and perhaps limitations? Thank You.
Peter Diamandis:
GREAT question…. There is a race to the bottom. What you say above is true. It is also true that were we spend our money… Health, education, energy etc is “Demonetizing” i.e. tech is making it effectively FREE, so we will need less money. ALSO, and ultimately we will partner with technology. I’m an engineer and i look at boundary conditions… the final result is nanotech.. and if i have a nanobot, i don’t need any money.•
Tags: Peter Diamandis
Even though it wasn’t particularly cost-efficient, early airplanes (or “aeroplanes”) were sometimes utilized to deliver newspapers. While physical textbooks are a questionable commodity in an age when the Encyclopedia Britannica can be put on the head of a pin, an Australian company is using drones to deliver them. From Emily Keeler in the Los Angeles Times:
“Imagine the book you need to ace the exam showing up at your door, care of your friendly neighborhood drone.
A textbook rental company is trying to mimic the instantaneous speed of e-book delivery for printed books by utilizing civil drones in Sydney, Australia. Zookal, a service that rents textbooks to university students, has partnered with Flirtey, an outfit specializing in unmanned aerial vehicles, to aerially deliver print books to customers within minutes after an order is placed.
The Age reports that the service uses the GPS coordinates of a user’s smartphone to make textbook deliveries, a win for cramming students who have left studying to the very last minute and and need to save all the time they can. After one of six Sydney drones has been dispatched, students will be able to track the realtime journey of their unmanned textbooks on a Google-powered map.”
Tags: Emily Keeler
Not to pick on Google today because as an outsider I’m fascinated by what the company is trying to accomplish, but they used to ask prospective employees ridiculous questions to make themselves feel special. But that company wasn’t the first to be criticized for such a practice: In 1921, Thomas Edison was taken to task for a similar thing. Here are 141 of the questions he asked applicants, per the New York Times:
Tags: Thomas Edison
In “What Is ‘Evil’ to Google?” Ian Bogost of the Atlantic tries to decipher the slippery moral code of the search giant that aspires to be so much more:
“All moral codes are grounded in something: a religious tradition, a philosophical doctrine, a cultural practice. Google’s take on virtue doesn’t reject such grounds so much as create a new one: the process of googlization itself. If anything, Google’s motto seems to have largely succeeded at reframing ‘evil’ to exclude all actions performed by Google.
There is a persistent idea that Internet technology companies embody an innocent populism. That the rational engineer is an earnest problem-solver, his fists striking tables instead of noses. But there’s something treacherous in believing that virtue and vice can be negotiated in the engineering of an email client or the creation of a spreadsheet—th
Companies like Google actually embody a particular notion of progress rather than populism, one that involves advancing their technology solutions as universal ones. Evil is vicious because it inhibits this progress. If Google has made a contribution to moral philosophy, it amounts to a devout faith in its own ability to preside over virtue and vice through engineering. The unwitting result: We’ve not only outsourced our email hosting and office suite provisioning to Google, but also our information ethics. Practically speaking, isn’t it just easier to let Google manage right and wrong?”
Tags: Ian Bogost
Future Vice President Spiro Agnew, who smiled once and chipped a tooth, being interviewed by John Chancellor in 1968 about the Chicago riots and his running mate’s refusal to address the protests. Considering our current political climate, these were the good old days.
Fun thing: Natasha Lyonne, the very talented actress, guested this week on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. She said her Jewish ancestors left Europe to escape Nazism, arrived without much money or prospects in America, and eventually bettered themselves through selling Spiro Agnew watches, which were apparently a popular novelty a little more than four decades ago.
Tags: John Chancellor, Marc Maron, Natasha Lyonne, Spiro Agnew
David Pogue, New York Times tech writer and Nova: Making Stuff host, just did an AMA on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
What was the first tech product that made you think “wow!”?
David Pogue:
If you really mean FIRST…
It was the Whistle Switch. Maybe 1974. I was nine. You could make this high hissy sound, either with your mouth or with a provided squeezy toy, to turn an appliance on or off. (Kind of like the Clapper.)
To me, it was magic. I eventually McGuyvered my entire bedroom, using the Whistle Switch to start a Rube Goldberg sequence involving a record player, Erector set motor, lights coming on, clothes folding by themselves…it was called “The Automatic Room,” and it was my masterpiece.
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Question:
In your opinion, which of these “big player” social networks will be the first to fail and why?
David Pogue:
Well, Google+ seems to have a rarefied audience of tech folks; I’m not sure it has a real chance at becoming, you know, Facebook.
And Instagram is awesome, but also an easily duplicated, easily incorporated feature; such photo sharing might eventually be built into other gadgets and networks. So basically, I’d say #4, #3, #2, and #1, in that order!
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Question:
What is an industry where tech hasn’t yet made an impact but you think will be impacted by it soon?
David Pogue:
There are examples all around us! Just look at Nest, whose Internet-connected, intelligent thermostat shook up the thermostat business (which hadn’t changed in 50 years)! Now they’re introducing a smoke alarm that will have the same effect!
We have much farther to go with cars/traffic/transportation. With groceries. With customized clothing shopping online. We’re at the Commodore 64 era with those!
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Question:
What technology company scares you the most and why?
David Pogue:
I guess the expected answer would have something to do with privacy. You know: “Facebook” or “Google” or “Apple,” because they’re tracking us all and selling our data for Evil Purposes.
Truth is, I’m probably more relaxed than most about privacy. We get a lot of really cool, great tech for free in exchange for our data. There are cases where data should be private (your past, your medical history, etc.), but I’m really not bothered if Stop ‘n’ Shop wants to see what I bought.
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Question:
If you had a choice, would you prefer a smartwatch or smartglasses (ala Google Glass)?
David Pogue:
The watch, for sure.
I think Google Glass has some profound social problems to overcome. When you’re talking to someone wearing them, you’re acutely uncomfortable. You know they could be filming you. It puts them in this artificially elevated social position, and it’s profoundly obnoxious.
Plus, they’ll be banned everywhere: movie theaters, courtrooms, stores, restaurants, sports events–anywhere that it’s uncool to hold a camera in front of your face now.•
Tags: David Pogue
“It is simply delicious.”
If we are to believe what journalism tells us, people in Albany during the 19th century visited slaughterhouses to drink the blood of freshly killed animals for its salubrious effects. From the September 18, 1881 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A reporter of the Albany Evening Journal who has visited the abattoirs in that city, writes as follows of the persons who gather there to drink blood:
Several people, as soon as the throat was cut with sleeves uprolled and grasping a glass, hurried over to the hanging carcass and holding the goblets in turn under the ruby stream, filled their glasses and then drank of the steaming liquid. One, a middle aged man, seemed old in the business, for he threw the contents of the glass off at one draught. Another threw some salt in his glass before drinking, while another could hardly make up his mind whether or not to drink it. At last he shut his eyes and then after three or four efforts succeeded in downing about half a glassful. The reporter approached one of the butchers after he had finished dressing the carcass on which he was at work, and asked, ‘Do the same persons come every day?’ ‘No, they come two or three times a week on the average,’ was the reply. ‘Do any women ever come?’ ‘Yes, there used to be one young girl, but the last I saw of her she seemed to be getting fleshy and has stopped coming altogether.’
“It is richer than the richest of cream.”
One of the invalids was then approached and asked, ‘How do you like blood drinking?’ ‘Well, I’ll tell you. At first when the doctor told me I would have to drink warm bullock’s blood or die, I told him that I preferred the latter, but I reconsidered my thought and came up to the slaughterhouse. I thought at first I could not touch it, and the sight of killing sickened me. But I soon overcame that feeling, and when I raised the first glass to my lips I spilt the contents over me. Next time I shut my eyes and drank it down. It tasted like rich milk, and if I kept my eyes shut, I would have not the known the difference.’ Another one of the drinkers was asked how it tasted. ‘How does it taste?’ said he. ‘It is richer than the richest of cream. It is simply delicious and a drink not to be compared with any potion extant. It is simply the elixir of life. You can feel its strength as it spreads through your veins. If it hadn’t been for its strengthening qualities I would have been dead three years ago.’”
Smartphones are embedded with improved technologies which will be useful in autonomous cars which will create other technologies useful in other souped-up tools, as the algorithms popularized on the Internet escape through the screen. The objects grow smarter whether or not we do. From “The Rapid Advance of Artificial Intelligence,” by John Markoff in the New York Times:
“The enormous amount of data being generated by inexpensive sensors has been a significant factor in altering the center of gravity of the computing world, he said, making it possible to use centralized computers in data centers — referred to as the cloud — to take artificial intelligence technologies like machine-learning and spread computer intelligence far beyond desktop computers.
Apple was the most successful early innovator in popularizing what is today described as ubiquitous computing. The idea, first proposed by Mark Weiser, a computer scientist with Xerox, involves embedding powerful microprocessor chips in everyday objects.
Steve Jobs, during his second tenure at Apple, was quick to understand the implications of the falling cost of computer intelligence. Taking advantage of it, he first created a digital music player, the iPod, and then transformed mobile communication with the iPhone. Now such innovation is rapidly accelerating into all consumer products.
‘The most important new computer maker in Silicon Valley isn’t a computer maker at all, it’s Tesla,’ the electric car manufacturer, said Paul Saffo, a managing director at Discern Analytics, a research firm based in San Francisco. ‘The car has become a node in the network and a computer in its own right. It’s a primitive robot that wraps around you.’ “
Tags: John Markoff, Mark Weiser, Paul Saffo
When he wasn’t playing Pong or chain-smoking himself into an early grave, Rod Serling was crafting paranoid visions that were perfectly if improbably suited for American living rooms. Here he is in 1959 speaking about the outset of his TV opus with Mike Wallace, who was still a decade from reaching his own small-screen apex.
Tags: Mike Wallace, Rod Serling
“Realistic penis.”
Ur answer is here! Realistic penis used to pass urine test. Email for details and pics.
Ross Andersen, excellent writer and Aeon Senior Editor, spent a night at Star Axis, artist Charles Ross’ secretive and still-to-be-completed desert installation and observatory in New Mexico. From “Embracing the Void“:
“I followed Ross and [Jill] O’Bryan in my car, down to the desert floor and then to the top of an adjacent mesa. We parked in front of their makeshift ranch house and headed inside, being careful to step around a six-foot rattlesnake that was sunbathing a few feet from the front door. O’Bryan showed me the bathroom, and explained how to work the manual pump toilet — hold the flush lever down for 20 seconds, then do it again — while Ross went to look for a book he wanted to show me, a collection of essays about quantum mechanics. He returned with the book, and the two of us flipped through it while he gave me a tour of his studio. Ross keeps a close eye on new research in physics, and sometimes enlists astronomers to help him at Star Axis. In the 1990s, Leroy Doggett of the US Naval Observatory measured the staircase’s first and last steps. And the week before I arrived, Ross had an astronomer out from the University of Washington to do the others. I asked him if these encounters with scientists enriched his work.
‘My interest in science is related to how mysterious it is,’ he told me. ‘I have found that if you get astronomers and physicists drunk enough, you can get them to admit that what’s going on in the quantum field is not a hair’s breadth from metaphysics. That tells me the world is not getting easier to decipher. The deeper they go with this stuff, the more mysterious it gets.’ “
Tags: Charles Ross, Jill O'Bryan, Ross Andersen
There’s now a large industry of writers and speakers telling you bullshit narratives about how you can think counter-intuitively, how you can see hidden patterns if you look through their eyes, how you too can become a creative thinker. Maddeningly, many of them do it supposedly supported by science and math. Taking aim with a cash register (just a Square is necessary, really) at the creative mind during the the dying days of the Industrial Revolution might be a good business model, but that doesn’t make it useful. From “TED Talks Are Lying to You,” Thomas Frank’s Salon essay about the sad state of the creative class and the lacking literature aimed at it:
“Those who urge us to ‘think different,’ in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.
That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.
And why was this worth noticing? Well, for one thing, because we’re talking about the literature of creativity, for Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one. So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition?
What our correspondent realized, in that flash of bathtub-generated insight, was that this literature isn’t about creativity in the first place. While it reiterates a handful of well-known tales — the favorite pop stars, the favorite artists, the favorite branding successes — it routinely ignores other creative milestones that loom large in the history of human civilization. After all, some of the most consistent innovators of the modern era have also been among its biggest monsters. He thought back, in particular, to the diabolical creativity of Nazi Germany, which was the first country to use ballistic missiles, jet fighter planes, assault rifles and countless other weapons. And yet nobody wanted to add Peenemünde, where the Germans developed the V-2 rocket during the 1940s, to the glorious list of creative hothouses that includes Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Belle Époque Paris and latter-day Austin, Texas. How much easier to tell us, one more time, how jazz bands work, how someone came up with the idea for the Slinky, or what shade of paint, when applied to the walls of your office, is most conducive to originality.”
Tags: Thomas Frank
In the long run, robots will be good for us, once the pain of displacement subsides and we have figured out a way to navigate the new normal. For instance: a solar plant that doesn’t produce many jobs but offers the promise of cheap, clean energy. From Diane Cardwell in the New York Times:
“RICHMOND, Calif. — In a dusty yard under a blistering August sun, Rover was hard at work, lifting 45-pound solar panels off a stack and installing them, one by one, into a concrete track. A few yards away, Rover’s companion, Spot, moved along a row of panels, washing away months of grit, then squeegeeing them dry.
But despite the heat and monotony — an alternative-energy version of lather-rinse-repeat — neither Rover nor Spot broke a sweat or uttered a complaint. They could have kept at it all day.
That is because they are robots, surprisingly low-tech machines that a start-up company called Alion Energy is betting can automate the installation and maintenance of large-scale solar farms.
Working in near secrecy until recently, the company, based in Richmond, Calif., is ready to use its machines in three projects in the next few months in California, Saudi Arabia and China. If all goes well, executives expect that they can help bring the price of solar electricity into line with that of natural gas by cutting the cost of building and maintaining large solar installations.”
Tags: Diane Cardwel
From Elizabeth Murphy’s Fast Company article about 23andMe, a company founded by Anne Wojcicki, which will conduct genetic testing at birth on your child for $99, beginning the self-quant analysis before the first word or step, arming you with information, so much information:
“Wojcicki is connected to the fabric of Silicon Valley, which has served her well. But her goals are global. ‘We’re not just looking to get a venture-capital return,’ Wojcicki says. ‘We set out with this company to revolutionize health care.’ On the same December day when she closed a $59 million round of financing, she dropped the price of 23andMe’s genetic testing from $299 to $99. While prices like that may not make taking control of one’s health a universal, democratic reality, they accelerate our society’s move in that direction. The end result could be a wholesale shift in the way we treat illness, a move away from our current diagnostic model to one based on prevention. That’s why, if Wojcicki gets it right, 23andMe could help change the health care industry as we know it. ‘At $99, we are opening the doors of access,’ she says. ‘Genetics is part of an entire path for how you’re going to live a healthier life.’
As 23andMe scales, its business model will shift. Right now it gets most of its revenue from the $99 that people like me pay in return for test-tube kits and the results we get back after we send off our spit-filled tubes. ‘The long game here is not to make money selling kits, although the kits are essential to get the base level data,’ says Patrick Chung, a 23andMe board member and partner at the venture-capital firm NEA. ‘Once you have the data, [the company] does actually become the Google of personalized health care.’ Genetic data on a massive scale is likely to be an extremely valuable commodity to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and even governments. This is where the real growth potential is.”
Tags: Anne Wojcicki, Elizabeth Murphy
From the October 4, 1897 New York Times:
“Keene, N.H.–Willie, the five-year-old son of Charles Paro of Troy, N.H., was killed yesterday through swallowing a bee. The insect stung him internally. The child died in great agony.”
Tags: Charles Paro, Willie Paro
In 1997, the cloning in Scotland of a sheep named Dolly was received with hyperbole and denunciation, as some envisioned a near-term future in which human doppelgangers would walk among us. In the short film “The Clone Named Dolly,” Nicholas Wade of the New York Times takes a sober look at the sensation and its aftermath. Watch here.
Tags: Nicholas Wade
Would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed in a chat that accompanied the excellent Frontline program, League of Denial, which examined the NFL’s obfuscation in regards to its concussion problem. I was especially dismayed by journalist Mark Fainaru-Wada’s answer to a question about what he and his brother, Steve Fainaru, hoped to accomplish with the program and their book: “I think our hope is that through the book and the film people will be more informed about the challenges the game faces and how it might deal with that.”
There’s a certain element of denial there as well. I think the honest answer would be that if you allow your children to play football, they may very well incur some brain damage, especially considering how prone their skulls are at that age. Any adult who plays college football or in the NFL is at great risk of brain damage. Anyone who buys a ticket to a game or who supports it in other ways is complicit in these injuries. Football, like boxing, can’t escape this problem which is embedded into the game, and equipment alterations or rule changes won’t eliminate it. It’s not merely a “challenge,” so let’s be honest about what we’re risking and what we’re supporting.
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Comment From Kristi Hofacker:
Why did frontline not mention all the advancements and changes of game regulations that have been put in place to decrease TBIs? People have been working to gain concussion awareness so they can further their movements to fix the problem. After the frontline special, people don’t want to help, they want to boycott football all together. Is that what you were trying to accomplish?
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Mark Fainaru-Wada:
First and foremost, we were absolutely not out to get people to boycott football. Steve and I are both huge football fans — he has season tix to the 49ers — and we love the sport. I think our goal was simply to trace what the league knew, when it knew it and to what extent it sought to tamp down the emerging science. There’s no question the league has made strides on this issue since it was hauled before Congress in 2009, and we note that to some degree in the film, although the commissioner is still not openly acknowledging a link. I think our hope is that through the book and the film people will be more informed about the challenges the game faces and how it might deal with that. Again, though, it’s a violent, brutal sport, which is one of the things many of us love about it, and not sure that can/should be changed. |
Tags: Mark Fainaru-Wada, Steve Fainaru
From the Economist obituary of General Vo Nguyen Giap, who drove well-funded foreign powers from Vietnam and lived to 102:
“Not that he was a populist, exactly. His father had been a lettré, a local scholar, as well as a farmer; he himself had a law degree. He was dapper, reviewing his troops in a white suit, trilby and club tie; even in a mountain cave, diminutive and smiling, he looked fresh as a flower. He wrote poetry, and his French was impeccable. The French, though, could see through that to the hatred that burned beneath, ever since the deaths of both his father and his first wife, after brutal torture, in French prisons. They called him ‘a volcano under snow.’
Nonetheless, he made an improbable soldier. He had no training, and would never have become a military commander, he said, if Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietminh forces and later of North Vietnam, had not decided it for him. He first met Ho (above, top right) in China, realised they had been to the same school, and idolised him, from his tufty beard to his white rubber sandals. He called him ‘Uncle’; Ho called him ‘beautiful as a girl.’ “
Tags: Vo Nguyen Giap
In the end matter of a New York Times profile of Johnny Knoxville’s bruised, aging balls, I read this:
“Dave Itzkoff is a reporter at The Times. His book, Mad as Hell, about the making of the movie Network, will be published in February.”
This news is exciting because of my feelings for that film, arguably America’s best film satire, and because Itzkoff is such a good reporter and graceful writer, one of the few journalists who can interest me in reading about popular culture. The following video is one I’ve previously posted in which Paddy Chayefsky appears on a talk show in the 1970s to discuss Network and the coming global, technocratic, interconnected culture.
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Paddy Chayefsky, that brilliant satirist, holding forth spectacularly on the Mike Douglas Show in 1969. It starts with polite chatter about the success of his script for Marty but quickly transitions into a much more serious and futuristic discussion. The writer is full of doom and gloom, of course, during the tumult of the Vietnam Era; his best-case scenario for humankind to live more peacefully is a computer-friendly “new society” that yields to globalization and technocracy, one in which citizens are merely producers and consumers, free of nationalism and disparate identity. Well, some of that came true. All the while, he wears a fun, red lei because one of his fellow guests is Hawaii Five-0 star Jack Lord. Gwen Verdon, Lionel Hampton and Cy Coleman share the panel.
Chayefsky joins the show at the 7:45 mark.
Tags: Dave Itzkoff, Paddy Chayefsky
If population concentrates as media and tools become increasingly decentralized, will regional authority outrank the national kind? Would a city-state set-up with public and private sectors vying to solve problems lead to improvements or greater inequalities–or doses of both? These are some of the hot topics in politics and development right now. The opening of “The End of the Nation State?” Parag Khanna’s New York Times Opinion piece:
“SINGAPORE — EVERY five years, the United States National Intelligence Council, which advises the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, publishes a report forecasting the long-term implications of global trends. Earlier this year it released its latest report, ‘Alternative Worlds,’ which included scenarios for how the world would look a generation from now.
One scenario, ‘Nonstate World,’ imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation had brought about a landscape where governments had given up on real reforms and had subcontracted many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.
The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for ‘Nonstate World,’ it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, ‘nonstate world’ describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.
A quick scan across the world reveals that where growth and innovation have been most successful, a hybrid public-private, domestic-foreign nexus lies beneath the miracle. These aren’t states; they’re ‘para-states’ — or, in one common parlance, ‘special economic zones.'”
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“Get the 9s and 10s you deserve.”
One of the more awful things about the current (and manufactured) American economic crisis is that it has nothing to do with economics. Republicans will say that they’re shutting down the government to force spending cuts to correct long-tern budget deficits. Except that there likely are no long-term budget deficits, and a little more government investment would probably make that certain. This conflict is driven rather by ideology; it’s about wanting to enact punitive measures against our most vulnerable people to teach them a lesson of some sort. The opening of “The Battle Over the US Budget Is the Wrong Fight,” a new Lawrence Summers piece in the Financial Times:
“This month Washington is consumed by the impasse over reopening the government and raising the debt limit. It seems likely that this episode, like the 1995-96 government shutdowns and the 2011 debt limit scare, will be remembered mainly by the people directly involved. But there is a chance future historians will see today’s crisis as the turning point when American democracy was to shown to be dysfunctional – an example to be avoided rather than emulated.
The tragedy is compounded by the fact that most of the substance being debated in the current crisis is only tangentially relevant to the main challenges and opportunities facing the country. This is the case with respect to the endless discussions about the precise timing of continuing resolutions and debt limit extensions, and to the proposals to change congressional staff healthcare packages and cut a medical device tax that represents only about 0.015 per cent of gross domestic product.
More fundamental is this: budget deficits are now a second-order problem relative to more pressing issues facing the US economy. Projections that there is a major deficit problem are highly uncertain. And policies that indirectly address deficit issues by focusing on growth are sounder economically and more plausible politically than the long-term budget deals with which much of the policy community is obsessed.”
Tags: Lawrence Summers
“On his lands there live men and women of striking physique and charm of face.”
A wealthy Russian man founded a Utopian farm in which beautiful people and only beautiful people were collected to be entered into arranged marriages in the hopes that perfection would be perpetuated. The opening of a September 18, 1904 New York Times article:
Reshetnikoff, a wealthy distiller of Northeast Russia, is a man with a fad. He believes that the human race, by judicious mating, can be brought to a state of physical perfection, and on his great estate near Perm he is doing what he can to prove his theory. Just as extreme speed and symmetry is developed by the breeder of horses, or as the horticulturist brings his plants and the florist his blooms to the highest possible degree of usefulness and beauty, it is his aim to give to the world a type of men and women who shall be flawless in strength and shapeliness.
Throughout all Russia he is known as the ‘man with a beauty farm.’ He is giving his time to the demonstration of his chosen task without stint, and spending his money with a freedom which would in itself insure notice. More than that, he has already proved to a large degree that he is justified in the stand he has taken, for on his lands there live men and women of striking physique and charm of face.
As a matter of fact the end for which he is striving is one which would probably be speeded by the thinking people of the world by every means in their power if it were not for an obstacle which others believe to be insurmountable and which he affects to ignore. This obstacle is affection. Since order was evolved from chaos and the waste places of the earth were populated, reason has entered but little into the matching of man and maid. The strong have loved the weak and the ugly have won the hearts of the beautiful. Those who have watched the work undertaken by the Russian distiller take these things into consideration in refusing actively to undertake the propagation of his cult. They know the futility of the fight he is making.
“Deformed and diseased persons are not permitted to find a home on the estate.”
The eyes of Europe were recently centered on the Reshetnikoff estate by a remarkable marriage arranged by him–a marriage which marks the passing of at least one milestone in the journey toward perfection which he has undertaken for the unbuilding of humanity. The bride and the bridegroom were ‘nurslings’ of his beauty farm, the first couple, both of whom had sprung from unions arranged by him.
That the bride was as nearly the ideal of physical womanhood as could be found by the most extended search, and that the bridegroom was as strong and handsome as could be desired, was admitted by all who saw them. But that their offspring would meekly accept at maturity the men or women selected as best qualified for the perpetuation of their strength and comeliness was not so readily granted.
“That is the weak link in M. Reshetnikoff’s chain,” said a scientist who is deeply interested in the ideal the distiller has set out to achieve. ‘His labor is doomed to be lost. Suppose a boy is born of this marriage who represents all that the patron of the parents hopes for. When that boy grows to be a man he is just as apt as not to choose a little, lop-sided woman for a wife as he is to select the kind of mate M. Reshetnikoff would have him take, and the care and thought which were embodied in him would be thrown away. The marriage is fortuitous. That is all. As long as there are men and women they will choose for themselves. His dream is Utopia, impossible of fulfillment.’
The Russian distiller has for many years attracted to his estate handsome giants of both sexes by means of concessions of lands and valuable privileges. Further grants of land encouraged them to enter the state of matrimony. All expenses of marriages are paid, and an annuity is given of $15 for every child born. In the event that marriages are arranged by the distiller, and the parties selected refuse to carry out the arrangements, they are deported. Deformed and diseased persons are not permitted to find a home on the estate.•
