Excerpts

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“Capitalism, Access To Technology And Education Also Seems To Correlate With A Corrosion Of Religiosity In Some Populations”

December 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I would guess that as long as there is fear and pain and suffering, there will be religion of some sort, but perhaps it will take a less-amorphous shape? As Jaron Lanier crystallized in a recent Edge essay, religious fervor can be repurposed in a more algorithmic age. With faith in traditional gods on the decline globally. Rachel Nuwer of the BBC wonders whether the withering will lead to death. The opening:

“A growing number of people, millions worldwide, say they believe that life definitively ends at death – that there is no God, no afterlife and no divine plan. And it’s an outlook that could be gaining momentum – despite its lack of cheer. In some countries, openly acknowledged atheism has never been more popular.

‘There’s absolutely more atheists around today than ever before, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of humanity,’ says Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and author of Living the Secular Life. According to a Gallup International survey of more than 50,000 people in 57 countries, the number of individuals claiming to be religious fell from 77% to 68% between 2005 and 2011, while those who self-identified as atheist rose by 3% – bringing the world’s estimated proportion of adamant non-believers to 13%.

While atheists certainly are not the majority, could it be that these figures are a harbinger of things to come? Assuming global trends continue might religion someday disappear entirely?

It’s impossible to predict the future, but examining what we know about religion – including why it evolved in the first place, and why some people chose to believe in it and others abandon it – can hint at how our relationship with the divine might play out in decades or centuries to come. 

Scholars are still trying to tease out the complex factors that drive an individual or a nation toward atheism, but there are a few commonalities. Part of religion’s appeal is that it offers security in an uncertain world. So not surprisingly, nations that report the highest rates of atheism tend to be those that provide their citizens with relatively high economic, political and existential stability. ‘Security in society seems to diminish religious belief,’ Zuckerman says. Capitalism, access to technology and education also seems to correlate with a corrosion of religiosity in some populations, he adds.”

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“Red Klotz Made Losing His Life’s Work”

December 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

“You are what the scoreboard says you are,” pronounced Bill Parcells in a moment of Zen neatness, but it isn’t always so. In the case of the perfectly named Washington Generals basketball coach Red Klotz, losing was winning, serving as he did as the leader of the long-running, sad-sack opposition to the Harlem Globetrotters. In an excellent edition of “The Lives They Lived” in the New York Times Magazine, Sam Dolnick pays tribute to the late coach’s lonely victory. An excerpt:

“He was a 5-foot-7 dynamo with a sly grin and a textbook set shot. In his prime, he was one of the best shooters in the country and a member of the championship-winning Baltimore Bullets in the late ’40s.

But Red Klotz made losing his life’s work.

He was the owner, manager, coach, mascot and chauffeur (in a used green DeSoto) of the Washington Generals, a team he created to lose, night in and night out, to the Harlem Globetrotters. He also cast himself as the Generals’ star point guard, a snowy-haired old man in kneepads still sinking set shots well into his 60s.

The Generals would become the sorriest team in the history of sports — 14,000 losses and counting — but from the beginning theirs was a single-minded, almost existential mission, as ineluctable as mortality. To be born is to die; to be a General is to lose. Over the years, Klotz’s Generals lost in the Egyptian desert and on N.B.A. floors, at Disney World and the Attica Correctional Facility, in a Simpsons episode and in Hong Kong. They lost in front of Nikita Khrushchev and Barack Obama.

They should have lost on Jan. 5, 1971, too, inside a rickety gym in Martin, Tenn. They limped into town with a losing streak at 2,495 games. No one expected the night to end in any other way than with loss No. 2,496.

But the Globetrotters were off their game. Meadowlark Lemon, one of the team’s stars, couldn’t make a shot. The Generals, meanwhile, a collection of former collegians playing as the New Jersey Reds that night — one of several phony names used to give the impression that multiple hapless teams chased the Globetrotters around the court (and the country) — couldn’t miss.

The Generals were up 12 with just two minutes to go.

With seven seconds left, the universe regained its balance: Lemon scored to give the Globetrotters a 99-98 lead. Then Klotz answered from some 20 feet out: 100-99, Generals.

All part of the show . . . right? Surely the Generals knew the script: Let the Globetrotters make a last-second basket to win the game.

On cue, Lemon shot. Lemon missed. The game was over. The Generals — the Generals! — had won.

The sold-out crowd sat silent, stunned. For a brief moment in a small town in northern Tennessee, to be born was not to die. Then the booing began. People had not paid to see the Globetrotters lose.

In his book on the Globetrotters, Ben Green called the game a blow to American confidence, putting it alongside Lt. William Calley’s conviction in the My Lai massacre and the publication of the Pentagon Papers.”

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“Once A Car Encounters A Surprise Change To The Road, It Will Report The Problem With The Map”

December 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a new blog post, Google driverless-auto consultant Brad Templeton explains one of the most challenging obstacles robocars will have to circumvent: ever-changing highways and byways. An excerpt:

“The road has changed

Let’s get to the big issue — the map is wrong, usually because construction has changed it.

First of all, we must understand that the sensors always disagree with the map, because the sensors are showing all the other cars and pedestrians etc. Any car has to be able to perceive these and drive so as not to hit them. If a traffic cone, ‘road closed’ sign or flagman appears in the road, a car is not going to just plow into them because they are not on the map! The car already knows where not to go, the question is where it should go when the lanes have changed.

Even vehicles not rated to drive any road without a map can probably still do basic navigation and stay within their lane markers without a map. For the 10,000 miles of driving you do in a year, you need a car that does that 99.99999% of the time (for which you want a map) but it may be acceptable to have a car that’s only 99.9% able to do that for the occasional mile of restriped road. Indeed, when there are other, human-driven cars on the road, a very good strategy is just to follow them — follow one in front, and watch cars to the side. If the car has a clear path following new lane markers or other cars, it can do so.

Google, for example, has shown videos of their vehicle detecting traffic cones and changing lanes to obey the cones. That’s today — it is only going to get better at this.

But not all the time. There will be times when the lanes are unclear (sometimes the old lanes are still visible or the new ones are not well marked.) If there are no other cars to follow, there are also no other cars to hit, and no other traffic to block.

Still, there will be times when the car is not sure of where to go, and will need help. Of course, if there is a passenger in the car, as there would be most of the time, that passenger can help. They don’t need to be a licenced driver, they just need to be somebody who can point on the screen and tell the car which of the possible paths it is considering is the right one. Or guide it with something like a joystick — not physically driving but just guiding the car as to where to go, where to turn.

If the car is empty, and has a network connection, it can send a picture, 3-D scan and low-res video to a remote help station, where a person can draw a path for the car to go for its next 100 meters, and keep doing that. Not steering the car but helping it solve the problem of ‘where is my lane?’ The car will be cautious and stop or pull over for any situation where it is not sure of where to go, and the human just helps it get over that, and confirms where it is safe to go.

If the car is unmanned and has no network connection of any kind, and can’t figure out the road, then it will pull over, or worst case, stop and wait for a human to come and help. Is that acceptable? Turns out it probably is, due to one big factor:

This only applies to the first car to encounter an unplanned, unreported construction zone

We all drive construction zones every day. But it’s much more rare that we are the first car to drive the construction zone as they are setting it up. And most of the rules I describe above are only for the first connected car to encounter a surprise change to the road. In other words, it’s not going to happen very often. Once a car encounters a surprise change to the road, it will report the problem with the map. Immediately all other cars will know about the zone.”

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“If AI Becomes An Existential Threat, It Won’t Be The First One”

December 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Sadly, Ray Kurzweil is going to die sometime this century, as are you and I. We’re not going to experience immortality of the flesh or have our consciousnesses downloaded into a mainframe. Those amazing options he thinks are near will be enjoyed, perhaps, by people in the future, not us. But I agree with Kurzweil that while AI may become an existential threat, I don’t think that’s necessarily a deal breaker. Without advanced AI and exponential growth of other technologies our species is doomed sooner than later, so let’s go forth boldly if cautiously. From Kurzweil in Time:

“Stephen Hawking, the pre-eminent physicist, recently warned that artificial intelligence (AI), once it sur­passes human intelligence, could pose a threat to the existence of human civilization. Elon Musk, the pioneer of digital money, private spaceflight and electric cars, has voiced similar concerns.

If AI becomes an existential threat, it won’t be the first one. Humanity was introduced to existential risk when I was a child sitting under my desk during the civil-­defense drills of the 1950s. Since then we have encountered comparable specters, like the possibility of a bioterrorist creating a new virus for which humankind has no defense. Technology has always been a double-edged sword, since fire kept us warm but also burned down our villages.

The typical dystopian futurist movie has one or two individuals or groups fighting for control of ‘the AI.’ Or we see the AI battling the humans for world domination. But this is not how AI is being integrated into the world today. AI is not in one or two hands; it’s in 1 billion or 2 billion hands. A kid in Africa with a smartphone has more intelligent access to knowledge than the President of the United States had 20 years ago. As AI continues to get smarter, its use will only grow. Virtually every­one’s mental capabilities will be enhanced by it within a decade.

We will still have conflicts among groups of people, each enhanced by AI. That is already the case. But we can take some comfort from a profound, exponential decrease in violence, as documented in Steven Pinker’s 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. According to Pinker, although the statistics vary somewhat from location to location, the rate of death in war is down hundredsfold compared with six centuries ago. Since that time, murders have declined tensfold. People are surprised by this. The impression that violence is on the rise results from another trend: exponentially better information about what is wrong with the world—­another development aided by AI.

There are strategies we can deploy to keep emerging technologies like AI safe. Consider biotechnology, which is perhaps a couple of decades ahead of AI. A meeting called the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA was organized in 1975 to ­assess its potential dangers and devise a strategy to keep the field safe. The resulting guidelines, which have been revised by the industry since then, have worked very well: there have been no significant problems, accidental or intentional, for the past 39 years. We are now seeing major ad­vances in medical treatments reaching clinical practice and thus far none of the anticipated problems.”

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“He Defends His Radicalism, Arguing That A Global Wealth Tax Makes ‘Property Temporary, Rather Than Permanent'”

December 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Guardian article, Owen Jones interviews French economist Thomas Piketty, who labels François Hollande’s tenure a “disaster,” discusses the incredible inequity of Middle Eastern finances and comments on the virtues of both the free market and of revolution. An excerpt: 

“The west’s general relationship with the Middle East – ‘the most unequal region in the world,’ he says – is one that troubles him, not least because it exposes grotesque inequalities. ‘Take Egypt: the total budget for education for 100 million people is 100 times less than the oil revenue for a few dozen people in Qatar. And then in London and in Paris we are happy to have these people buying football clubs and buying apartments, and then we are surprised that the youths in the Middle East don’t take very seriously our democracy and social justice.’

Although some on the right have assailed him as a dangerous red, I put it to him that he is not as radical as he is portrayed. He has written that he was ‘vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anti-capitalism’; he opposed the introduction of a 35-hour week in France, and the Wall Street Journal even called him ‘a neoliberal economist who sees many virtues in market forces but favours government redistribution to smooth out some of the market’s excesses.’ He looks bemused. ‘I don’t live in the cold war. Some people maybe still live in the cold war, but this is their problem, not mine.’ He unashamedly believes in ‘market forces.’ arguing there is no ‘war of religion’ between left and right in the modern era. But he defends his radicalism, arguing that a global wealth tax makes ‘property temporary, rather than permanent,’ which he describes as ‘a permanent revolution, a very substantial change to the traditional capitalist system.’

Though Piketty supported François Hollande’s presidential bid in 2012, he is contemptuous of the French president. ‘He’s been a disaster,’ is his unequivocal response, clarifying that he was ‘more against Sarkozy than [he] was for Hollande.'”

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“Why Do People Feel So Rushed?”

December 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

People of industrial and post-industrial societies have more leisure time than ever before, though it often doesn’t seem like it. If the future eventually brings us three-day workweeks, will we still feel harried? And has it something to do with the way we’ve monetized time? From “Why Is Everyone So Busy?” in the Economist:

“THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. ‘Our grandchildren,’ reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around ‘three hours a day’—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?

This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a ‘perennial time-scarcity problem’ afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail—sometimes all at once.

Why do people feel so rushed? Part of this is a perception problem. On average, people in rich countries have more leisure time than they used to. This is particularly true in Europe, but even in America leisure time has been inching up since 1965, when formal national time-use surveys began. American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago—a fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks. Women’s paid work has risen a lot over this period, but their time in unpaid work, like cooking and cleaning, has fallen even more dramatically, thanks in part to dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves and other modern conveniences, and also to the fact that men shift themselves a little more around the house than they used to.

The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.”

“I Selected Cumin, Horseradish And Sausage And Sat Back To See What The Computer Could Cook Up”

December 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not that personal computers had zero utility before the Internet, but it was sort of like designing a Bugatti solely for the purpose of parallel parking, no paved streets or highways or racetracks yet in sight. The Micro Cookbook, for instance, was software intended to make meals a snap, but it didn’t quite live up to its promise. From a 1984 New York Times article by Erik Sandberg-Diment:

The Micro Cookbook promises a lot on its cover, from the adjusting of recipes for a variable number of servings to nutrition and calorie and food-buying guidelines. On the subject of inventory control in the larder, it delivers a fillip of particular interest to hosts like me who reside in the hinterlands, and to those prone to entertain company after grocers’ hours. “Tell your computer what ingredients you have,” the cover instructs, “and Micro Cookbook will give you all the recipes you need to surprise your favorite guests.” It would be interesting to see if the computer could solve my pre-dawn predicament.

There are two disks to the Micro Cookbook. First the software disk, which runs the program, is fed to the computer. Once that has been ingested, the recipe disk is inserted into the disk drive. The Micro Cookbook is menu-driven, which is not a pun, but computerese for a type of program in which the computer, instead of asking questions, simply presents a lot of choices, from among which the operator makes his selection by filling in the blanks on the screen. The main menu in this case presented me with a number of alternatives. I could be shown the recipe index, an ingredients index, a breakdown of recipes into categories such as “French,” “dessert” and “meatless,” and so on. Submenus could be called up to show actual recipes on the screen, to interpret terminology, and even to print out (if you have a printer) a shopping list for any given recipe.

After experimenting for a while with the various alternatives, none of which I found enthralling enough to distract me from my original goal, I returned to the fillip that had attracted my attention in the first place, mainly, finding something interesting to concoct from the particular ingredients on hand. I entered my choice: “Select from ingredient list.” The screen lit up with a catalogue of ingredients ranging from stew beef to cheddar cheese – white sauce, cognac, pignoli, Bisquick, kasha, white raisins, tortillas and some 150 others being thrown together between these two entries with less organization than that to be found in our Fibber McGee kitchen pantry. Matching what I had on hand with the screen representations, I selected cumin, horseradish and sausage and sat back to see what the computer could cook up.

The word “sausage” didn’t quite fit into the space allowed. But since it was short only the “e,” and since in many programs of this type the software is designed to work with the first half or the first two-thirds of the word, I didn’t give that problem much thought. However, in this case it didn’t work, or maybe the program found the combination of sausage with cumin and horseradish not to its taste. Whatever the case, I was greeted by a rude raspberry emanating from the program: “Serious error … Terminating!” and terminate it did, just like that, everything stopped dead in its tracks and the computer shut down. I checked the “Error Messages” section of the manual, but it would admit to nothing so impolite as terminating.

That meant I had to reload first the software disk and then the recipe disk. Meanwhile, I was becoming really hungry. I entered only the cumin this time, to be on the safe side. “Swiss cheese salad red sauce,” responded the computer, while the video screen asked me to type in which recipe I desired. Since the intriguing, if mysterious Swiss cheese salad red sauce appeared to be my only choice, that’s what I typed in. However, not wanting to take any chances, before I pressed the return key to actually enter the command, I checked the fridge to be sure that there was some Swiss cheese around. I didn’t want to be hit with another termination.

As it turned out, all I could type into the line allotted this time was Swiss cheese salad red. You guessed it–when I entered the command into the computer, the program terminated me once more.•

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“Far From Helping An Incipient Opposition, The United States’ Embargo May Well Have The Opposite Effect”

December 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Cuban embargo was a bust, financially and politically. Of course, the idea now being bandied about, that trade and cultural exchange with America will reform a nation with dicey leadership, certainly is in ignorance of the facts, as Russia has proven. Such strategies must be decided on a case-by-case basis, and it certainly would seem that openness is currently the right tack to take with Cuba.

One interesting footnote: In retrospect, Cuba’s inscrutable decision last month allowing 19-year-old baseball prodigy Yoan Moncada to freely leave the island may have quietly announced the new relationship with the U.S. before President Obama did.

The opening of a 1960 Economist article which measured the then-new embargo just right:

“If Hurricane Nikita has subsided, the Fidel squall blows gustily. On Wednes­day, the foundering relationship between the United States and Cuba was all but swamped by the State Department’s announcement of the prohibition of exports to Cuba. Briefly, the embargo, which has been hinted at for some weeks, will affect all exports except medicines and some food. Cuba’s purchases from the United States have lately amounted to something less than $300 million a year. This is roughly half what they were before the revolution; and one of the ways in which the State Department justifies the ban is that Cuba has discriminated against American goods. If every dollar-short country that has discriminated against American goods had been treated in this way, the United States would not have much trade left.

The embargo is bound to have two immediate and harmful results: it to offend a great many Latin Americans who, however much they disapprove of Castro, dislike even more the use of economic pressure for political ends. It will also, as Mr Mueller, the US Secretary of Commerce seemed to admit on Wednesday, push Cuba further into Moscow’s arms. Its utility will depend on the soundness of the State Department’s conviction that if Cuba is squeezed hard enough, Dr Castro will be forced out by his own people. Certainly, in the last few weeks, internal opposition to the regime has grown more active. Small groups of guerrilla fighters in central and eastern Cuba have been captured, and a number of rebels, among them three Americans, have been executed after military trials. But far from helping an incipient opposition, the United States’ embargo may well have the opposite effect. Dr Castro’s supporters are already in an embattled frame of mind, which an atmosphere of siege can only stiffen.”

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“[It] Can Provide Accurate Images Of A Car’s Surroundings At A Reasonable Cost”

December 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Google, which knows the real money in the potential driverless-auto sector is in the software, wants to bring 1.0 to market in the next five years with the help of Big Auto. If the timeline the company has laid down is to be realized, the cars will need to be able to “see” to overcome current infrastructure and mapping limitations. From Joseph B. White and Rolfe Winkler at WSJ:

“The biggest challenges for Google’s efforts involve software, not hardware, [Chris] Urmson said. Google is confident, for instance, that it has laser radar technology, or LIDAR, that can provide accurate images of a car’s surroundings at a reasonable cost, he said. …

There are also some important differences between the strategy Google is pursuing to develop and bring its technology to drivers and the way auto makers are approaching automated driving.

Google wants to develop a fully automated car that doesn’t require any input from the driver. Mr. Urmson said it is difficult to get a driver who isn’t paying attention to the road to suddenly—and safely—retake the wheel. Further, he said, a partially automated car ‘doesn’t help a blind man get lunch or help an aging widow get to her social events.’

This is why Google is developing designs that would entail no steering wheel. For now, Mr. Urmson said his team is working on vehicles that would operate at speeds below 25 miles an hour—which would qualify Google’s car as a neighborhood electric vehicle that doesn’t have to be equipped with air bags or meet certain other safety standards required of conventional cars.

One scenario for such vehicles would be to position them in a city’s central business district and allow people to summon the cars with a smartphone app, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a recent report. Mr. Urmson said that is one avenue the company could pursue.”

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“Since Aliens Are Not Available, Santa Claus Will Have To Do.”

December 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Christmas is cancelled this year, but what if it were permanently abolished, what would that mean for the economy? At the Financial Times, Tim Harford wonders about such a scenario. An excerpt:

“Imagine that this Christmas day, the Queen, the Pope and even Oprah Winfrey announced that Christmas would be a purely religious occasion from 2015 onwards. There would be no presents and no feasting. If people respected this declaration, about $75bn-$100bn of extra consumer spending in the US alone would simply not materialise next December. What then?

One possibility is that the economy would be just fine. This is the classical view of macroeconomics: nothing significant would change after the abolition of Christmas. We would retain the same labour force and the same skills, the same factories and the same power stations, the same financial sector and the same logistics networks. The capacity of the economy to produce goods and services would be undiminished, and after a period of adjustment, during which tinsel factories would be retooled and Christmas tree plantations replanted, all would be well.

What would replace nearly $100bn of seasonal consumer spending? Nothing noticeable, but the replacement would happen just the same. The productive capacity freed up by the disappearance of Christmas could be turned to other uses; prices would fall just enough to tempt us to spend our money at other times of the year. Indeed, cancelling Christmas might even provide a modest boost to our prosperity in the longer term, as bunching up all that spending into a few short weeks strains factories and supply chains. Smoothing out our spending would be more efficient.

This classical view of how the economy works is also the view taken by Mr Osborne, the UK chancellor, and by Republicans in the US. Their view is that government stimulus spending does not work; cut it back, they argue, and the economy would adjust as the private sector took up the slack.

On the other side of the debate stands Mr [Ed] Balls, the UK’s shadow chancellor, as well as American stimulus proponents such as Mr [Paul] Krugman and Lawrence Summers. Mr Krugman once commented that panic about an attack from aliens would help the economy because it would get the government spending money again. Since aliens are not available, Santa Claus will have to do.

This Keynesian view of how the economy works differs from the classical view in one crucial way: it argues that supply does not always and automatically create demand. When Christmas is abolished (or a financial crisis devastates people’s confidence and their spending power), consumers will plan to spend less. And if consumers plan to spend less, price adjustments may not induce them to change their minds; the price adjustments may not even happen. If Christmas spending disappears, it may take many years for the economy to replace it. Those factories will still be there and the workers will remain available — but they will stand idle.

Who is right?”

 

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“We’re An Empire Now, And When We Act, We Create Our Own Reality”

December 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

As The Colbert Report fades to black on Comedy Central, it’s a good time to recall that the year before “truthiness” laughingly made its way into the lexicon in 2005, Ron Suskind introduced the concept into the American consciousness in one of the best pieces of political journalism in memory, his jaw-dropping New York Times Magazine article, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” So inconceivable was the story’s idea that our government was being run by something other than a “reality-based community,” that those in power were operating in willful denial of facts, that many questioned Suskind’s work, but it all, sadly, turned out to be true, so true. Two excerpts follow.

______________________________

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ”Look, I want your vote. I’m not going to debate it with you.” When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ”Look, I’m not going to debate it with you.”

The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised. ”If you operate in a certain way — by saying this is how I want to justify what I’ve already decided to do, and I don’t care how you pull it off — you guarantee that you’ll get faulty, one-sided information,” Paul O’Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ”You don’t have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.”

In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in ”Plan of Attack”: ”Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will. . . . I’m surely not going to justify the war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as possible.”

Machiavelli’s oft-cited line about the adequacy of the perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence — true confidence — be willed? Or must it be earned?

George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history’s great confidence men.

______________________________

There is one story about Bush’s particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record.

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ”road map” for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

”I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,” Bush said. ”They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.”

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ”Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.” Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ”No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.”

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.”•

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“Cala-Fucking-Trava! What A Waste.”

December 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not easy to imagine a thing more gorgeous than Santiago Calatrava’s original 2004 design for Manhattan’s post 9/11 transportation hub–a cloud-like construction that could make you forget all about the rain–but it was from the start a promise that could not be completely kept, a dream demanding downsizing. Still beautiful, but more modest and twice costlier than planned. But wishing too hard can’t be the only cause of enmity directed at the architect by peers, press and some clients, can it? Why does he rile so many? The following is the opening of Karrie Jacobs’ Fast Company feature, “Santiago Calatrava: The World’s Most Hated Architect?“

___________________________

At a recent symposium featuring the renowned architects Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman, talk turns to fellow architect Santiago Calatrava.

“Cala-fucking-trava! What a waste,” says Graves, a founding father of Postmodernism and the man who brought high design to Target. Then he does his best Calatrava impression: “‘I will make wings for you and this subway station will cost $4 billion dollars.'” 

Eisenman, best known for the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, chimes in: “When Calatrava came to Yale, he got up after a long introduction. He said: ‘I’m going to draw.’ He had a camera over a drawing board. He turned on music. And he drew for a whole hour. He turned the music off and walked off the stage.”

“Such arrogance,” Graves says.

It’s rare to hear important figures in architecture publicly attack a colleague with such undisguised venom. But, where Calatrava is concerned, it is open season.

The Spanish architect built his reputation on a series of graceful harp-like bridges—Seville’s Puente de Alamillofor instance—that transformed engineering into an art form. But now he is better known for his design of the wildly overbudget and behind schedule World Trade Center Transportation Hub (due to open by late 2015). Last year, the New York Times ran a feature-length takedown of him, enumerating every disaster—the slippery bridge in Bilbao, the flood-prone opera house in Valencia, the over-budget bridges in the Netherlands. The name of one website cited in the piece: “Calatrava bleeds you dry.”

In a recent interview at Calatrava’s Park Avenue townhouse in New York, I asked the architect why he thought he was getting such awful press. “Because you have to suffer,” he replied. “There is so much vulgarity in the everyday, that when somebody has the pretension to do something extraordinary for the community, then you have to suffer.” And suffer he does. On paper, his projects seem like worst-case scenarios, architecture as extravagance, the Versailles School of infrastructure. But then, every so often, you set foot in one of Calatrava’s works.•

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“He Feared I Might Organize A Revolution. You Know, I Didn’t Have That Kind Of Idea Then. But I Do Now.”

December 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Russian oligarchs are generally thought to tacitly approve of Vladimir Putin despite his devastating recent impact on the economy, having been so enriched by his chronic kleptocracy, but that’s not necessarily so of former oligarchs. Once one of the wealthiest people in the world, the erstwhile oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 on charges of fraud and later jailed for nine years. It may be difficult to imagine big business in post-Soviet Russia free of fraud, but Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment was clearly motivated by Putin’s political gamesmanship. Now a free man with a much-diminished-but-still-impressive bankroll, the petrol plutocrat these days identifies more with his recent political-prisoner status and speaks openly of Putin’s ouster. From Neil Buckley at the Financial Times:

“Then he makes a startling admission, telling me that before his arrest, he had — as was rumoured at the time — held talks with deputies from Putin’s ruling United Russia party and other political groups about constitutional changes were Putin to step down as president in 2008, at the end of his second term. The idea was to make it ‘safe’ for Putin to leave office, by reducing the power of any future president and increasing that of parliament. Khodorkovsky, who was briefly a deputy energy minister in the Yeltsin era, says the politicians he was talking to suggested that he should be interim prime minister, to conduct that reform. As he tells it, he was ready to do so, if the next president wanted him.

Did Putin know about this? Was this why he was arrested?

‘Putin knew, but I don’t know if [my arrest] was because of this. It was a whole set of reasons. Of course, he was afraid. He feared I might organise a revolution. You know, I didn’t have that kind of idea then. But I do now.’

He is not planning an actual revolution, he quickly adds: his supporters in Russia do not want it, and it would be dangerous since the country is not, he believes, ready for political change.

Russia is, however, undergoing a severe economic crisis. Combined with a plunging oil price, western sanctions in response to Russian intervention in Ukraine have helped bring about a rapidly devaluing rouble, rising inflation and recession. Some suggest that Putin, despite Ukraine-boosted approval ratings, could fall victim to the problems.

A few days after our conversation, the Russian currency goes into an even more serious meltdown. But Khodorkovsky cautions against over-estimating the impact of the crisis, saying Russia’s reserves should be sufficient to get through its difficulties. A popular uprising is possible but unlikely; the street protests of 2011 proved shortlived.

‘Economic crisis won’t decide anything by itself, unless society understands that there’s an alternative,’ he says. ‘And that’s what we’re trying to show people.’

If things continue to deteriorate, the Russian president could, says Khodorkovsky, be forced from power in various ways, including a palace coup by his entourage. ‘We don’t know of a single authoritarian regime that is eternal, still less one that’s not based on any ideology. There’s the question of whether we’ll live to see this or not, but there’s a chance we will.’ He laughs.”

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“I Look At Barbra. She’s Not Listening.”

December 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

The less-important fallout of the recent Sony hack has been the trove of hilariously bitchy comments about this actor or that one by producers and executives who seem to have only one foot in the editing suite, the other lodged in a sandbox. Apart from those with bigoted overtones, none of the messages should have seen the light of day. It’s unfair and an invasion of privacy. But, you know, wow. 

Of course, it’s nothing new. In 1976, the exasperated filmmaker and erstwhile journalist Frank Pierson needed no cyberterrorists to reveal the mishegoss that was the making of A Star Is Born, gleefully “hacking” himself for “My Battles with Barbra and Jon,” an article he penned for New West magazine. Amazingly, it was published before the film premiered. That is something that is not done now in Hollywood, and was it not done then, but Pierson did it, much to the chagrin of star Barbra Streisand and her husband/producer Jon Peters, a notoriously difficult duo, and Kris Kristofferson, who went the Method route for his character of an erratic rock star with substance-abuse issues. An excerpt about the fraught filming of the centerpiece stadium scene:

It is three weeks before the outdoor rock concert, for which we’ve rented a vast football stadium in Phoenix. The scene will run at most five to eight minutes on screen. The action involves Kris showing off to Barbra by taking her onstage at a huge concert. Drunk and coked up, he abandons the music and, trying to ride a motorcycle onstage, loses control and zooms off into the audience. It is the last straw and will ruin his career. We must fill the stadium, which takes some 40,000 or 50,000 people. It is essential to get some feeling on screen of the weight and size and pressure in the lives of rock musicians. Jon has been full of mad schemes. Now, only three weeks away from shooting, the planned all-day live concert turns out to be nonexistent. This is a disaster of such magnitude that I cannot think about it. All I can do is shoot whatever is there the day we arrive.

The action I have planned is detailed in sketches. Barbra and Jon want to see them. “This is the heart of the picture, this is the action part for people like me!” Jon says, bouncing around the office. He acts out his idea of how to do it. He wants to hire Evel Knievel for $25,000, construct a jumping ramp so Knievel, doubling for Kris, will drive the bike off the stage through the paying customers for a hundred yards, scattering them like bowling pins, and, hitting the ramp, fly into the air from the audience 150 feet back over the stage and crash into the instruments. The stunt of the century. Something nobody who sees this picture will ever forget. “For people like me, who like action. We got to set some action, some excitement into this picture.” He is pacing about feverishly. I look at Barbra. She’s not listening. “Listen, where are the close-ups?” she asks. “There are never any close-ups in this picture. When I worked with Willy Wyler, we had close-ups in every scene.”

I call her attention to some of the more recent close-ups, forgetting my decision not to discuss these things with her. Soon we are embroiled in exactly how close up a close-up really has to be to be called a close-up. Jon studies the storyboard for the stunt. “This is shit,” he says.

We have no concert, I remind him. Let’s get the concert organized before we worry over the stunt. Promoter Bill Graham is hired to get together a concert. After a month of Jon’s waffling about, Graham has it all nailed down in a few days, together with a schedule that allots me four hours on stage with camera, in two two-hour sessions. Peter Frampton is the topliner. We are selling tickets at $3.50 apiece. We might even make money. “I’m paying him a fortune.” Jon crows, “but he’s worth it. He’s tough, he’s like me, he’s a street fighter.”

Evel Knievel has been forgotten.

We look at a first assembly of major scenes, the recreation of the Leon Russell piano incident. Kris croaks the lyrics to her music with a boyish delight. He sounds as if the music and the words had only that moment occurred to him. He is perfect. She is magical. Words are no good for it; the scene simply makes you feel wonderful. Barbra is crying. “It’s better than my dreams!” she says. And then she turns to Peter Zinner, the editor. “But Peter! You used the wrong take! Why did you do that? That was a mistake!” We patiently explain the difficulties of cutting, how sometimes you have to sacrifice a marginally better take in order to get a better rhythm, or to be able to use some other piece that is essentially better. She is unconvinced.

“When I get the film,” she says to me later, “will he do it my way?”

I check. Barbra’s companies own the negative. She has final cut on the film. Barbra is preoccupied with a press party Warners is giving, flying in reporters and photographers from all over the country for a conference, a luncheon press party on the set and the outdoor rock concert the next day.

Kris, uptight about press, worried over his music, is tense, angry over her interference. His new record has just come out and been panned by Rolling Stone and most everyone else. He’s drinking tequila washed down with cold beer.

Barbra rehearses with the band on her numbers and uses up Kris’s time, so he has no rehearsal. Coldly furious, he refuses to come out of his trailer. “Goddamnit!” he says. “I’ve got to go out and play it in front of 60.000 people, but she doesn’t give a damn.”

Barbra and I are trying to explain a minor change; we agree for once, but Kris has had all he can handle. He doesn’t want to be told what to do with his music. He explodes. Barbra explodes. The mikes are open: they are screaming at each other over a sound system that draws complaints from five miles away. The press is delighted. This is what they came for. Sulks in trailers. Jon Peters threatening Kris. Kris talking tougher. The director knocking on trailer doors, playing Kissinger. Notable quotes. Quotable notables. You read about it in Time.

Now our differences have become news events. It heightens the tension, and the feeling of being perpetually misunderstood. These clashes happen on all pictures: they become part of the creative process from which the picture emerges. They are unavoidable. And the press is uncontrollable and mischievous. They know a good story when they see one, but we wish they’d check their facts.

At seven o’clock in the morning, the dawn brushes the crowd with blood orange. They are there. By mid-morning some 55,000 curiously clean and docile people are listening to the opening acts. It is overwhelming. The sheer size and sound of the crowd reduce our conflicts and tensions to a proper perspective. But the communications are incredibly difficult. I have a schedule of shots in mind: I run from setup to setup. At the morning break, the two-hour session during which we have the stage, I face horror: The props and set dressing for our action have all been pushed back and replaced with instruments and amps and paraphernalia of the various acts onstage. The first hour of our allotted two is wasted moving furniture to match what I’ve already shot.

The crowd is mercurial. Fifty-five thousand strong, they scream and chant: “No more filming, no more filming!” though we haven’t even begun. We make the shot. Things break, a plug-in wire for Kris’s guitar is too short, nothing works. Nobody can hear. The noise, the pandemonium, the incipient panic are all but overwhelming. I remember the advice of a London bobby about facing crowds and one’s own tendency to panic: Imagine a piano wire attached to the inside of one’s skull, stretched tight all the way through the body and down to the center of the earth. Nothing can move you. Zen.•

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“Let Us Go Forward And Win Glory”

December 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Neither Mussolini nor Michael Jackson died for their art, but for something else. They each used every tool and talent to build something which would outlast them. They hungered for enduring fame, to be perched in a pantheon. But why did they care about their legends outliving them? Why does anyone? Notoriety has its privileges during life, but the bigger payoff is one that can’t be enjoyed by those who “possess” it. It’s the gift that can never really be opened.

Two passages about fame, the first from Zia Haider Rahman’s panoramic novel, In the Light of What We Know, the second the opening of “Everlasting Glory,” a customarily excellent piece by Stephen Cave at Aeon.

_______________________________

From Rahman:

“The whole thing is too abstract, continued Zafar, this business of our lives standing for something else. All we know is that we don’t want it to stand for nothing. So we dive headlong into becoming heroes, becoming the big swinging dick on Wall Street or the rock star or the hot-shot human rights lawyer. Which is about making our lives stand for something that our intelligence can grasp, saving us from what we fear might be true–or what we would fear if we gave ourselves the chance–namely, that we’re accidental pieces of flesh, mutton without meaning.”

_______________________________

From Cave:

“Glaucus was no coward. He had killed four men, and that was no easy matter when they were charging at him through the dust and din, waving sharp swords and screaming. In those days, it wasn’t just a matter of pulling a trigger or pressing a button. You had to push your spear hard through armour and bone, and watch as their eyes first pleaded, then grew large, then went out.

At the same time, though, Glaucus wasn’t entirely sure about this business of killing and dying. At the head of the Trojan allies gathering to storm the Greek camp, he hesitated. His cousin and commander, Sarpedon, king of Lycia, saw his hesitation, turned to him and said: ‘My good friend, if, when we were once out of this war, we could escape old age and death for ever, I should neither press myself forward in battle nor bid you do so. But death in 10,000 forms hangs ever over our heads, and no man can elude him; therefore let us go forward and win glory.’

So together they led the Lycian division in a charge at the Greek barricades, causing panic among the defenders. But the Greeks had their own heroes out to win glory: the giant Ajax came running to rally his comrades, accompanied by his brother Teucer the archer, who promptly shot Glaucus in the arm as he was mounting the rampart. Our hero was forced to withdraw from the battle, his bid for glory thwarted.

Only later, when the tide of war had changed and the Greeks were on the offensive, did Glaucus have a second chance. Achilles, the greatest warrior of them all, had led a charge deep into Troy; a fierce fight then raged over the body of his companion Patroclus, who had been wearing Achilles’ god-forged armour, and Glaucus led the Trojan side. But again the mighty Ajax stood in his way, and this time ended the young Lycian’s glory seeking for good.

You might not have heard of Glaucus. His was, after all, only a bit part in the drama of the Trojan war. He was valiant enough, but failed in both his attempts to win a place on the A-list of heroic celebrity. This might make him seem rather pitiable (and we haven’t even mentioned the episode when ‘Zeus took his wits’ and Glaucus swapped his golden armour for another warrior’s outfit of mere bronze). But if we are tempted to pity him, then we haven’t listened closely enough to his friend Sarpedon: if Glaucus had not fought at Troy, would he have ‘escaped old age and death for ever’? Of course not; no one does. But through his valorous – if slightly ineffectual – exploits, here I am writing about him 3,000 years later. That was the prize for which he fought. He won.

The idea that fame is a kind of immortality is an ancient one that shows no sign of losing its attraction. But why? What good does it do the dead to be famous?”

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“The Developers Estimate An Up-And-Running Hyperloop In Just 10 Years”

December 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Complicated things scheduled to arrive in a decade or so almost never do, and Elon Musk’s Hyperloop tube-transport idea is likely no exception. But it seems real progress is being made. From Rex Santus at Mashable:

“Tesla Motors CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s idea for the Hyperloop is one that sounded a bit like fantasy to some.

But it appears that there’s progress being made on the potentially game-changing transit system: The developers estimate an up-and-running Hyperloop in just 10 years.

Of course, there’s still plenty of work to do. On Friday, the brains behind bringing Hyperloop to reality released a 68-page white paper outlining progress on the land travel system, which transports people in pods that move as fast as 800 mph. Since then, it’s not so much in Musk’s hands as it is Dirk Ahlborn’s. He’s the CEO and cofounder of JumpStartFund, the startupoverseeing Hyperloop with Musk’s approval.

The paper includes new renderings, showing pods with a improved geometry and design. The front end is circular for better aerodynamics. And people now sit in capsules that are then loaded into outer shells. There will be tickets for the rich and the poor, too, of course, with freight, economy and business classes.

Originally, Hyperloop was slated to travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ahlborn said that he believes the LA-San Francisco route could be built for $7 billion, up to $16 billion. The plan is expanding, too. But the ultimate goal is to create a vast network for Hyperloop, so that travelers could go from Houston to Phoenix, New York to Salt Lake City — all faster than air travel.”

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“Some Freelance Jobs Are Really Cheap Forms Of Direct Employment”

December 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Peer Economy, great for inventory-less intermediaries and (sometimes) consumers, is less wonderful for workers. “Independent contractor” and “freelancer” are often just descriptives for those without security or benefits. When service is cheap and convenient, someone is likely being cheapened and inconvenienced. Since this popular new part of the economy isn’t going to be outlawed (nor should it, really), political answers are required. From John Gapper at Financial Times:

“The growth of the freelance economy brings two challenges.

First, some freelance jobs are really cheap forms of direct employment. Companies call workers ‘independent contractor’ to avoid paying employment taxes and indirect benefits while treating them as employees — they must wear uniforms, obey rules and so on. Many are low-paid workers, such as delivery drivers or warehouse stackers.

This is legally dubious, since many countries impose laws against sham self-employment. In August, the US Appeals Court ruled against FedEx for classifying delivery drivers in California as contractors when they were in effect direct employees. One judge quoted Abraham Lincoln’s quip that calling a dog’s tail a leg does not turn the animal into a five-legged dog.

Many sharing-economy companies, including Uber, classify the providers of their services as contractors and insist on them, for example, driving their own cars. Some Uber drivers in the US have mounted a legal challenge but the sharing economy is too new for the principle to have been tested.

Second, even if workers are self-employed, the company or platform that routes work and orders to them could choose to offer more than the minimum benefits. Employers traditionally provide health and pension plans, as well as training, to create a productive, reliable workforce. It is more expensive but, if it pays off in the standard of service they offer, then it will help them to beat lower-quality competitors.

If companies abdicate the role, then society needs to devise other ways to offer long-term support and security to the self-employed.”

 

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“The Ability To Steal Gossipy Emails From A Computer Network Is Not The Same As Being Able To Carry Out 9/11-Style Attacks”

December 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In addition to wealth inequality in America, there also seems to be haves and have-nots in terms of courage. Ever since 9/11, we’ve wanted to be swaddled and protected, and sure, we should be vigilant, but how about those of us who are civilians show some degree of the bravery we ask of members of our military? Our fears led us into wrong-minded war in Iraq, horrid torture and a surveillance state. How has that made us any better?

Sony’s capitulation to cyberterrorists is the latest confounding example of our state of panic. From Jason Koebler’s Vice interview with security expert Peter W. Singer:

“Question: 

Let’s just cut to the chase—Are these hackers terrorists? Are they cyberterrorists?

Peter W. Singer: ​

There’s two layers to it now. There’s the definition of terrorism and the reaction to it, which has been a combination of being both insipid and encouraging to future acts.

The first is what has already happened. Sony has labeled what happened to it as cyberterrorism and various media ​have also described it as cyber terrorism. The reality is having your scripts posted online does not constitute a terrorist act. The FBI describes it as an ‘act that results in violence.’ Losing your next James Bond movie script that talks about violence is not the same thing as an act of violence.

What has happened to Sony already does not meet the definition. They’re saying ‘This is an act of war.’ We’re not going to war with North Korea over this act just because Angelina Jolie is now mad at a Sony executive. Acts of war have a different standard.

Literally, we are in the realm of beyond stupid with this.

Question:

And then we have the actual threats of violence.

Peter W. Singer: ​

​This same group threatened yesterday 9/11-style incidents at any movie theatre that chose to show the movie. Here, we need to distinguish between threat and capability—the ability to steal gossipy emails from a not-so-great protected computer network is not the same thing as being able to carry out physical, 9/11-style attacks in 18,000 locations simultaneously. I can’t believe I’m saying this. I can’t believe I have to say this.

This group has not shown the capability to do that. Sony is rueing any association it has with the movie right now. We are not in the realm of 9/11. Did movie chains look at the reality of the threat? Or did the movie theater chains utterly cave in? This is beyond the wildest dreams of these attackers.”

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“Mayer’s Largest Management Problem, However, Related To The Start-up Culture She Had Tried To Instill”

December 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Like Pittsburgh, Yahoo needed to downsize. Whether it’s steel or silicon, dotage comes for all, re-scaling required. But the search giant in steep decline doubled down, trying to regain its Web 1.0 glory by hiring Marissa Mayer away from Google in 2012 to be its new CEO. For two years, she’s shuttered profitable properties and hatched haute ones that can’t pay their way, made questionable acquisitions and some terrible hires. The company, separated from its pre-Mayer acquisition of a large chunk of Alibaba, is nearly valueless. While Google wants to be everything, Yahoo still doesn’t know what it wants to be (search? content? mobile?). Mayer hopes for more time to pull a Jobs, but her job security is on the wane. From Nicholas Carlson’s brutally frank New York Time Magazine article about the beleaguered company:

“Mayer’s largest management problem, however, related to the start-up culture she had tried to instill. Early on, she banned working from home. This policy affected only 164 employees, but it was initiated months after she constructed an elaborate nursery in her office suite so that her son, Macallister, and his nanny could accompany her to work each day. Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score.

One of the uglier parts of the process was a series of quarterly ‘calibration meetings,’ in which managers would gather with their bosses and review all the employees under their supervision. In practice, the managers would use these meetings to conjure reasons that certain staff members should get negative reviews. Sometimes the reason would be political or superficial. Mayer herself attended calibration meetings where these kinds of arbitrary judgments occurred. The senior executives who reported to Mayer would join her in a meeting at Phish Food and hold up spreadsheets of names and ratings. During the revamping of Yahoo Mail, for instance, Kathy Savitt, the C.M.O., noted that Vivek Sharma was bothering her. ‘He just annoys me,’ she said during the meeting. ‘I don’t want to be around him.’ Sharma’s rating was reduced. Shortly after Yahoo Mail went live, he departed for Disney. (Savitt disputes this account.)

As concerns with Q.P.R.s escalated, employees asked if an entire F.Y.I. could be devoted to anonymous questions on the topic. One November afternoon, Mayer took the stage at URL’s as hundreds of Yahoo employees packed the cafeteria. Mayer explained that she had sifted through the various questions on the internal network, but she wanted to begin instead with something else. Mayer composed herself and began reading from a book, Bobbie Had a Nickel, about a little boy who gets a nickel and considers all the ways he can spend it.

‘Bobbie had a nickel all his very own,’ Mayer read. ‘Should he buy some candy or an ice cream cone?’

Mayer paused to show everyone the illustrations of a little boy in red hair and blue shorts choosing between ice cream and candy. ‘Should he buy a bubble pipe?’ she continued. ‘Or a boat of wood?’ At the end of the book, Bobby decides to spend his nickel on a carousel ride. Mayer would later explain that the book symbolized how much she valued her roving experiences thus far at Yahoo. But few in the room seemed to understand the connection. By the time she closed the book, URL’s had gone completely silent.”

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“When It Comes To Overall Fragility, Countries Can Vary”

December 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Things fall apart, sure, but which nations are most likely to? In “The Calm Before the Storm,” a Foreign Affairs piece by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton, the authors use five criteria to assess which states are most likely to crumble: a centralized governing system, an undiversified economy, excessive debt and leverage, a lack of political variability, and no history of surviving past shocks. (I wonder further if kleptocracy has had historical influence on such upheavals.) It’s an interesting thought experiment, though I think it only works as a rough outline. I mean, our new friend Cuba has long been on the wrong side of a number of those measurements, but that country hasn’t cratered. An excerpt:

When it comes to overall fragility, countries can vary from exhibiting no signs of fragility to being very fragile.


Saudi Arabia is an easy call: it is extremely dependent on oil, has no political variability, and is highly centralized. Its oil wealth and powerful government have papered over the splits between its ethnoreligious units, with the Shiite minority living where the oil is. For the same reason, Bahrain should be considered extremely fragile, mainly on account of its repressed Shiite majority.


Egypt should also be considered fragile, given its only slight and cosmetic recovery from the chaos of the revolution and its highly centralized (and bureaucratic) government. So should Venezuela, which has a highly centralized political system, little political variability, an oil-based economy, and no record of surviving a massive shock. Some of the same problems apply to Russia. It remains highly dependent on oil and gas production and has a highly centralized political system. Its one redeeming factor is that it surmounted the difficult transition from the Soviet era. For that reason, it probably lies somewhere between moderately fragile and fragile.
 …

Then there is the China puzzle. China’s stunning economic growth makes its future hard to assess. The country has recuperated remarkably well from the major shocks of the Maoist period. That era, however, ended nearly four decades ago, and so the recovery is hardly a recent comeback and thus less certain to protect against future shocks. What’s more, China’s political system is highly centralized, its economy is dependent on exports to the West, and its government has been on a borrowing binge as of late, making the country more vulnerable to slowdowns in both domestic and foreign growth. Are the gains from past turmoil big enough to offset the weakness from debt and centralization? The most likely answer is no—that what gains China has accrued by learning from trauma are dwarfed by its burdens. With each passing year, those lessons recede further into the past, and the prospects of a Black Swan of Beijing loom larger. But the sooner that event happens, the better China will emerge in the long run.•

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“The Airpocalypse Has Arrived”

December 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

China now has the world’s largest economy, but it came at a steep price: Inhaling has become a danger, the atmosphere so toxic. The architecture has begun to alter to accommodate this new reality, bubbles and domes dotting downtowns which seem like parts of Martian cities only survivable under cover. The opening of Oliver Wainwright’s Guardian report “Inside Beijing’s Airpocalypse“:

“The scene could be straight from a science-fiction film: a vision of everyday life, but with one jarring difference that makes you realise you’re on another planet, or in a distant future era.

A sports class is in full swing on the outskirts of Beijing. Herds of children charge after a football on an artificial pitch, criss-crossed with colourful markings and illuminated in high definition by the glare of bright white floodlights. It all seems normal enough – except for the fact that this familiar playground scene is taking place beneath a gigantic inflatable dome.

‘It’s a bit of a change having to go through an airlock on the way to class,’ says Travis Washko, director of sports at the British School of Beijing. ‘But the kids love it, and parents can now rest assured their children are playing in a safe environment.’

The reason for the dome becomes apparent when you step outside. A grey blanket hangs in the sky, swamping the surroundings in a de-saturated haze and almost obscuring the buildings across the street. A red flag hangs above the school’s main entrance to warn it’s a no-go day: stay indoors at all costs. The airpocalypse has arrived.

Beijing’s air quality has long been a cause of concern, but the effects of its extreme levels of pollution on daily life can now be seen in physical changes to the architecture of the city. Buildings and spaces are being reconfigured and daily routines modified to allow normal life to go on beneath the toxic shroud.”

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“Extremely Short Exposures To A Relatively Simple Computer Program Could Induce Powerful Delusional Thinking In Quite Normal People”

December 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the podcast conversation between Russ Roberts and Gary Marcus, the latter mentions the 1960s computer “psychotherapist” Eliza. Here’s a repost from a year ago about the pre-Siri shrink.

The real shift in our time isn’t only that we’ve stopped worrying about surveillance, exhibitionism and a lack of privacy, but that we’ve embraced these things–demanded them, even. There must have been something lacking in our lives, something gone unfulfilled. But is this intimacy with technology and the sense of connection and friendship and relationship that attends it–often merely a likeness of love–an evolutionary correction or merely a desperate swipe in the wrong direction?

The opening of Brian Christian’s New Yorker piece about Spike Jonze’s Her, a film about love in the time of simulacra, in which a near-future man is wowed by a “woman” who seems to him like more than just another pretty interface:

“In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., wrote a computer program called Eliza, which was designed to engage in casual conversation with anybody who sat down to type with it. Eliza worked by latching on to keywords in the user’s dialogue and then, in a kind of automated Mad Libs, slotted them into open-ended responses, in the manner of a so-called non-directive therapist. (Weizenbaum wrote that Eliza’s script, which he called Doctor, was a parody of the method of the psychologist Carl Rogers.) ‘I’m depressed,’ a user might type. ‘I’m sorry to hear you are depressed,’ Eliza would respond.

Eliza was a milestone in computer understanding of natural language. Yet Weizenbaum was more concerned with how users seemed to form an emotional relationship with the program, which consisted of nothing more than a few hundred lines of code. ‘I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it,’ he wrote. ‘Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.’ He continued, ‘What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.’

The idea that people might be unable to distinguish a conversation with a person from a conversation with a machine is rooted in the earliest days of artificial-intelligence research.”

“Slowly The Loving Atmosphere Gave Way To Cruelty”

December 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

New West, the magazine that Clay Felker launched as the Left Coast sister to New York, managed to survive only a few years, but it made its mark. A 1977 exposé by Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy, “Inside Peoples Temple,” about the Rev. Jim Jones, which alleged all manner of abuses by the preacher, drove him and some of his followers to relocate from California to Guyana, where the real madness began. I didn’t realize until reading this piece what pull Jones had among San Francisco politicos. An excerpt about a family that quit the church.

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“After Elmer and Deanna Mertle joined the temple in Ukiah in Novem­ber, 1969, he quit his job as a chemical technician for Standard Oil Company, sold the family’s house in Hayward and moved up to Redwood Valley. Eventually five of the Mertle’s children by previous marriages joined them there.

“When we first went up [to Redwood Valley], Jim Jones was a very compassionate person,” says Deanna. “He taught us to be compassionate to old people, to be tender to the children.”

But slowly the loving atmosphere gave way to cruelty and physical punishments. Elmer said, “The first forms of punishment were mental, where they would get up and totally disgrace and humiliate the person in front of the whole congregation. . . . Jim would then come over and put his arms around the person and say, ‘I realize that you went through a lot, but it was for the cause. Father loves you and you’re a stronger person now. I can trust you more now that you’ve gone through and accepted this discipline.’”

The physical punishment increased too. Both the Mertles claim they received public spankings as early as 1972 – but they were hit with a belt only “about three times.” Eventually, they said, the belt was replaced by a paddle and then by a large board dubbed “the board of education,” and the number of times adults and finally children were struck increased to 12, 25, 50 and even 100 times in a row. Temple nurses treated the injured.

At first, the Mertles rationalized the beatings. “The [punished] child or adult would always say, ’Thank you, Father,” and then Jim would point out the week how much better they were. In our minds we rationalized … that Jim must be doing the right thing because these people were testifying that the beatings had caused their life to make a reversal in the right direction.”

Then one night the Mertles’ daughter Linda was called up for discipline because she had hugged and kissed a woman friend she hadn’t seen in a long time. The woman was reputed to be a lesbian. The Mertles stood among the congregation of 600 or 700 while their daughter, who was then sixteen, was hit on her buttocks 75 times. “She was beaten so severely,” said Elmer, “that the kids said her butt looked like hamburger.”

Linda, who is now eighteen, confirms that she was beaten: “I couldn’t sit down for at least a week and a half.”

The Mertles stayed in the church for more than a year after that public beating. “We had nothing on the outside to get started in,” says Elmer. “We had given [the church] all our money. We had given all of our property. We had given up our jobs.”

Today the Mertles live in Berkeley. According to an affidavit they signed last October in the presence of attorney Harriet Thayer, they changed their names legally to Al and Jeanne Mills because, at the church’s instruction, “we had signed blank sheets of paper, which could be used for any imaginable purpose, signed power of attorney papers, and written many unusual and incriminating statements [about themselves], all of which were untrue.”•

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“I Do Think Eventually We Will Have Machines That Have The Flexibility Of Human Intelligence”

December 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Google’s translated text isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than I could do. Of course, those algorithms aren’t conscious of their accomplishment, while I’m aware of my shortcoming. Erasing that distinction isn’t a bridge too far, but it’s going to take a long time to cross. EconTalk host Russ Roberts did an excellent podcast this week with cognitive scientist Gary Marcus about the future of AI. A couple of excerpts follow.

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Russ Roberts:

Now, to be fair to AI and those who work on it, I think, I don’t know who, someone made the observation but it’s a thoughtful observation that any time we make progress–well, let me back up. People say, ‘Well, computers can do this now, but they’ll never be able to do xyz.’ Then, when they learn to do xyz, they say, ‘Well, of course. That’s just an easy problem. But they’ll never be able to do what you’ve just said’–say–‘understand the question.’ So, we’ve made a lot of progress, right, in a certain dimension. Google Translate is one example. Siri is another example. Wayz, is a really remarkable, direction-generating GPS (Global Positioning System) thing for helping you drive. They seem sort of smart. But as you point out, they are very narrowly smart. And they are not really smart. They are idiot savants. But one view says the glass is half full; we’ve made a lot of progress. And we should be optimistic about where we’ll head in the future. Is it just a matter of time?

Gary Marcus:

Um, I think it probably is a matter of time. It’s a question of whether are we talking decades or centuries. Kurzweil has talked about having AI in about 15 years from now. A true artificial intelligence. And that’s not going to happen. It might happen in the century. It might happen somewhere in between. I don’t think that it’s in principle an impossible problem. I don’t think that anybody in the AI community would argue that we are never going to get there. I think there have been some philosophers who have made that argument, but I don’t think that the philosophers have made that argument in a compelling way. I do think eventually we will have machines that have the flexibility of human intelligence. Going back to something else that you said, I don’t think it’s actually the case that goalposts are shifting as much as you might think. So, it is true that there is this old thing that whatever used to be called AI is now just called engineering, once we can do it.

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Russ Roberts:

Given all of that, why are people so obsessed right now–this week, almost, it feels like–with the threat of super AI, or real AI, or whatever you want to call it, the Musk, Hawking, Bostrom worries? We haven’t made any progress–much. We’re not anywhere close to understanding how the brain actually works. We are not close to creating a machine that can think, that can learn, that can improve itself–which is what everybody’s worried about or excited about, depending on their perspective, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. But, why do you think there’s this sudden uptick, spike in focusing on the potential and threat of it right now?

Gary Marcus:

Well, I don’t have a full explanation for why people are worried now. I actually think we should be worried. I don’t understand exactly why there was such a shift in the public view. So, I wanted to write about this for The New Yorker a couple of years ago, and my editor thought, ‘Don’t write this. You have this reputation as this sober scientist who understands where things are. This is going to sound like Science Fiction. It will not be good for your reputation.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think it’s really important and I’d like to write about it anyway.’ We had some back and forth, and I was able to write some about it–not as much as I wanted. And now, yeah, everybody is talking about it. I don’t know if it’s because Bostrom’s book is coming out or because people, there’s been a bunch of hyping, AI stories make AI seem closer than it is, so it’s more salient to people. I’m not actually sure what the explanation is. All that said, here’s why I think we should still be worried about it. If you talk to people in the field I think they’ll actually agree with me that nothing too exciting is going to happen in the next decade. There will be progress and so forth and we’re all looking forward to the progress. But nobody thinks that 10 years from now we’re going to have a machine like HAL in 2001. However, nobody really knows downstream how to control the machines. So, the more autonomy that machines have, the more dangerous they are. So, if I have an Angry Birds App on my phone, I’m not hooked up to the Internet, the worst that’s going to happen if there’s some coding error maybe the phone crashes. Not a big deal. But if I hook up a program to the stock market, it might lose me a couple hundred million dollars very quickly–if I had enough invested in the market, which I don’t. But some company did in fact lose a hundred million dollars in a few minutes a couple of years ago, because a program with a bug that is hooked up and empowered can do a lot of harm. I mean, in that case it’s only economic harm; and [?] maybe the company went out of business–I forget. But nobody died. But then you raise things another level: If machines can control the trains–which they can–and so forth, then machines that either deliberately or unintentionally or maybe we don’t even want to talk about intentions: if they cause damage, can cause real damage. And I think it’s a reasonable expectation that machines will be assigned more and more control over things. And they will be able to do more and more sophisticated things over time. And right now, we don’t even have a theory about how to regulate that. Now, anybody can build any kind of computer program they want. There’s very little regulation. There’s some, but very little regulation. It’s kind of, in little ways, like the Wild West. And nobody has a theory about what would be better. So, what worries me is that there is at least potential risk. I’m not sure it’s as bad as like, Hawking, said. Hawking seemed to think like it’s like night follows day: They are going to get smarter than us; they’re not going to have any room for us; bye-bye humanity. And I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The world being machines eventually that are smarter than us, I take that for granted. But they may not care about us, they might not wish to do us harm–you know, computers have gotten smarter and smarter but they haven’t shown any interest in our property, for example, our health, or whatever. So far, computers have been indifferent to us.•

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“Human Interaction May Become A Luxury”

December 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The main cost of our connected world, after the new rules of privacy, is the way it’s changed human interaction, replacing actualities with avatars, making reality less real. Nothing indicates we won’t continue down this road. Another excerpt follows from the Pew Research report “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs.

How will we interact with each other?

Vytautas Butrimas, the chief adviser to a major government’s ministry, expects technological advances to increase the distance between people: “AI and robotics will change the way we interact with other members of society. The tendency will be toward more social isolation and fewer human-to-human contacts taking place. Just look at what is happening at our airport waiting lounges. People sit next to each other but the interaction is not taking place with the neighbor sitting nearby but with a device communicating to some other device. The world will be more bureaucratic and ‘cold’ in 2025 than it is today.”

On the other hand, a self-employed writer, researcher, and consultant wrote, “I expect there will need to be a ‘human please’ option on most commercial and transport interfaces as there are always unpredictable elements. I also expect that consumers will demand tech-free places like restaurants where they can interact with each other.”

As more daily activities are automated, human interaction may become a luxury

Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, responded, “Even simple technologies have been doing this—most of what was a secretary’s job has been replaced by answering machines and Word. Robots will be able to stock store shelves and check out and bag groceries and other store purchases. They’ll do much of today’s custodial work, delivery services, and transportation. Customer service will be almost entirely done with scripted agents. Software agents will work their way up from the crowd scenes in movies to smaller speaking roles, and eventually to fully automated ‘live’ films. Employment will be mostly very skilled labor—and even those will jobs will be continuously whittled away by increasingly sophisticated machines. Live, human salespeople, nurses, doctors, actors will be symbols of luxury, the silk of human interaction as opposed to the polyester of simulated human contact.”

Andrew Bridges, a partner and Internet law litigator and policy analyst at Fenwick & West LLP, wrote, “’Brain work’ will increasingly become a commodity as computing power enables more artificial intelligence. We already see Google Translate displacing translators, investment advice algorithms displacing investment advisors, automated landing systems replacing airplane piloting skills, and so forth. I expect that the world will become increasingly divided between ‘standard’ service and ‘concierge’ service in many aspects, with standard service left entirely to the machines and concierge service resting more upon human relationships.”•

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