One major concern voiced about the wave of migrants fleeing war-torn Middle Eastern and African countries for Europe is that ISIS or some other terrorist group will embed their own among the refugees in order to wreak havoc abroad. Certainly not impossible, but it seems a needlessly complicated, roundabout method. Kim Hjelmgaard, a USA Today world reporter, who just spent ten days with the exiles, speaks to this issue in a Reddit AMA. The exchange:
Question:
Lots of media around the world are reporting that people are afraid that some of the migrants are in fact, infiltrate terrorists… What do you think about this and do you think there is enough security to filtrate these fears?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
I have read these stories as well and it would be wrong to just dismiss these concerns. What I would say is that I did not, myself, witness any people or behavior that gave me cause for alarm. That is not the same thing as saying there aren’t bad eggs around and about. There are bad eggs everywhere. If someone from the Islamic State wanted to infiltrate Europe from Syria they would probably just fly from Turkey to a major European city. I may be wrong but I can’t see why they would go this route when there are so many others that would probably be open to them. This is also not the same thing as refuting the idea that people can become radicalized after they arrive somewhere. Bu they can also be radicalized by not going anywhere as so-called homegrown attacks have shown.•
Outside of governments largely deregulating drones, the easiest way to bring about their proliferation would be for private companies to purchase fleets of them to rent out. That would remove the risk for individuals and small businesses who have a need for them but are reluctant to purchase. Such large-scale outfits making bulk purchases would spur further development and diminish costs, which in turn would lead to more private ownership. It’s worth remembering, however, that privacy will suffer further if the sector thrives.
The business of drones has ascended into the stratosphere, as investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the tiny unmanned aircraft in hopes of turning them into big business.
Now Robert Wolf, the financier who is a confidant of President Obama, is raising his bet on an industry that has already drawn names like Amazon and GoPro and top venture capital firms like Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Mr. Wolf’s advisory firm plans to announce on Wednesday that it is spinning off its drone-services arm into a separate company. The business, Measure, is betting that its ability to fly the devices to take pictures of farmland and oil rigs will draw interest, and dollars, from a potentially huge number of customers.
Nearly two years ago, Mr. Wolf’s 32 Advisors set up Measure to capture that opportunity. Rather than focus on making the drones or the accessories and software that power them, he has banked on creating a fleet of aircraft that can be flown on behalf of customers. For Measure, it is “drones as a service.”
“We think that over the next 24 to 36 months, we’ll be able to fulfill something that doesn’t exist around the world,” Mr. Wolf, Measure’s chairman, said in a telephone interview.•
Following up on the post about Virtual Reality being utilized to treat PTSD and other disorders, here’s a passage from a 52 Insights Magazine interview with San Francisco-based neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, who’s working on the bleeding edge of video-game therapy. The doctor wants to use the medium to exploit the plasticity of the brain and “retrain” troubled minds. Of course, the potential for the abuse of such tools in the hands of terrorists, sects or authoritarian states is pretty obvious, though those entities have done fairly well without them.
An excerpt:
The Insight:
So what will it look like, say 30 years from now? Would there be something that you can go to your doctor and get or is there something you can go to a healthcare practitioner and talk to about?
Adam Gazzaley:
I would hope that this would be in the next 4 years; this is the immediate future. We’ll start seeing a different class of medicine, what I would call a ‘digital medicine’ that builds on experience and interactivity, being part of what doctors feel comfortable prescribing. I would hope that future is within the next 5 years.
The Insight:
You’re talking about the games specifically?
Adam Gazzaley:
Yes. …
The Insight:
Because you work so deeply in the core of the brain, has there ever been a discussion with you around tackling mental illness? I know that sits a bit on the periphery of what you do, but you do work within multitasking, focus and attention, so I wondered if that was part of what you do?
Adam Gazzaley:
Yeah, that’s pretty much what our main objectives are. If we could use our knowledge of the system to create a relationship through interactivity and the other technologies I’ve described to you. And to improve the function and to minimise the limitation, we think that it could have great impact in the mental health world. That’s a conversation I have daily with the scientists that are in the psychiatric or neurological domain; how these tools could be part of the medicine they are using in the near future.
The Insight:
Could you give us an idea of how that discussion looks, what would be the implementation in an ideal world?
Adam Gazzaley:
The most concrete one would be where a doctor would feel comfortable pulling out a prescription pad and writing down an iPad game for 1 month with the data streaming into their office during each gameplay, with or without a medication as a drug along side it. I think that would be an exciting future, to understand how these worlds will interact with each other; will they be prescribed together or independently? Would you start with the game because it had no side-effects then come in with a drug if needed? All of these are unknowns but very exciting.•
In any reasonably sober season, the Donald Trump Presidential campaign, that odious thing, would be a pig so dead by now that even David Cameron wouldn’t dare penetrate it.
But it’s 2015, a time of the anti-politician. Gerrymandering has left us without a true representational government as well as the inability to get much accomplished across aisles, and Citizens United has made people feel someone else owns the process, even if billionaires have yet to see a return on their investments on the national stage. If the situation is to normalize, those systemic failures need be amended, and it’s going to have to happen without Lessig-ish gimmicks. How to get to there from here?
Meanwhile, a nation that considers absolutely everything entertainment has a Reality TV racist to “shake things up,” whatever that means. In “Donald Trump Is Not Going Anywhere,” the great Mark Leibovich of the New York Times wonders about the new abnormal as he profiles the fascist combover in mid-stream. The opening:
“I don’t worry about anything,’’ Donald J. Trump told me aboard his 757 as we were flying to the recent Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. He was dividing his attention between the brick-size slice of red-velvet cake he was annihilating and the CNN commentator on the 57-inch television who at that moment was talking about Trump, as most commentators have been at pretty much every moment for the last three months. The commentator, Dylan Byers, was saying that Trump now ran the risk of ‘‘jumping the shark’’ because voters were becoming so familiar with his act. ‘‘Nah,’’ Trump said, smirking at the screen. As the real estate and reality-show tycoon sees things, this is all win-win for him. Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal wrote something to this effect recently, Trump told me, explaining that even if he loses, ‘‘he goes back to being Donald Trump, but even bigger.’’
The Trump campaign may be a win-win for Trump, but it is a monstrous dilemma for a lot of other people. It is a dilemma for the Republican Party and a dilemma for the people Trump is running against. They would love to dismiss him as a sideshow and declare his shark jumped, except he keeps dominating the campaign and the conversation, and they have no clue whether to engage, attack, ignore or suck up in response. It is a dilemma for the elected leaders, campaign strategists, credentialed pundits and assorted parasites of the ‘‘establishment.’’ They have a certain set of expectations, unwritten rules and ways of doing things that Trump keeps flouting in the most indelicate of ways. And, of course, it is a dilemma for the media, who fear abetting a circus. This is why The Huffington Post announced in July that it would publish stories about Trump only in its ‘‘entertainment’’ section, so that when it all ended, as it surely would soon, the website could remain pristine and on the side of the high-minded. A similar sort of worry prevented me from writing about Trump throughout his rise this summer. Initially, I dismissed him as a nativist clown, a chief perpetrator of the false notion that President Obama was not born in the United States — the ‘‘birther’’ movement. And I was, of course, way too incredibly serious and high-minded to ever sully myself by getting so close to Donald Trump.
Virtual Reality is usually spoken of in terms of how it will aid work or play, but its greatest efficacy, at least in its nascency, might be in the area of therapy. In the same way that video games seem destined to be a great education tool (but have yet to be properly exploited in this way), VR holds huge promise for creating safe, immersive environments for those trying to put PTSD and other disorders behind them.
Virtual-reality headsets have long been thought of as the ultimate gaming accessory. Now, therapists increasingly are embracing them as an effective therapeutic tool.
The use of immersive virtual reality in mental-health treatment—placing patients in various simulated situations designed to help them deal with their difficulties—has been booming over the past two decades. Therapists, school counselors and even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have adopted the technology in the treatment of everything from phobias to depression to substance abuse.
“Virtual reality offers the promise of a fundamentally new way to treat certain psychiatric disorders,” says Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist. For instance, he says, it can be used to simulate fear-inducing situations—an encounter with a snake, perhaps, or flying in an airplane—that would be difficult or impossible to reconstruct in a therapist’s office. Such simulations can help people work through their phobias by confronting the situations that disturb them and learning new ways to react, a process known as exposure therapy.
Virtual reality also has proved effective in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, by allowing veterans to safely revisit the kinds of situations they faced in the field, and therapists have found it to be a useful tool in teaching autistic children and adults how to identify certain social cues.•
Speaking of Minority Report, Hitachi says it’s created a system that crunches disparate data (tweets, weather patterns, etc.) and predicts where and when future crimes will occur. Of course, right now it will do so on a macro level as traditional crime-prediction models do, not trying to pinpoint particular people, but as these kinds of tools grow more sophisticated and proliferate, it seems likely they’ll try to operate more and more on a micro one. That could be all kinds of trouble. On the surface, it would be less invasive than stop-and-frisk, but systems, like people, contain all sorts of biases and assumptions.
No one has found a trio of psychic mutant “precogs” who can unanimously foresee future crimes, but Hitachi today introduced a system that promises to predict where and when crime is likely to occur by ingesting a panoply of data, from historical crime statistics to public transit maps, from weather reports to social media chatter. Hitachi says that “about half a dozen” U.S. cities will join a proof of concept test of the technology beginning in October, and though Hitachi hasn’t yet named them, Washington, D.C. could well be on the list. It’s one of several dozen cities in the U.S. and Caribbean countries where the company already provides video surveillance and sensor systems to police departments with its Hitachi Visualization Suite. Hitachi execs provided several examples—even screenshots of the software—featuring D.C. in my conversations with them.
“We don’t have any precogs as part of our system,” says Darrin Lipscomb, cofounder of companies Avrio and Pantascene, which developed crime-monitoring tech that Hitachi later acquired. “If we determined that the precogs were actually somewhat accurate, we could certainly use their predictions to feed into our model,” he says with perfect deadpan. What the new technology, called Hitachi Visualization Predictive Crime Analytics (PCA), does have is the ability to ingest streams of sensor and Internet data from a wide variety of sources.•
The biggest problems for the GOP in the current Presidential race are too numerous to list. The most pressing one for the Democrats, apart from their primary candidate carrying worrisome scars, is that there’s no suitable second challenger by normal standards. When Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled in 2008, the party had a fallback should one of them take ill or be knocked out for some unforeseen reason. Elizabeth Warren could have been that other option this time but chose not to run. At present, small-state Socialist Bernie Sanders is the safety net.
In the wake of the tragic death of his son, Beau, Vice President Joe Biden has been urged by many Democrats to run and provide a working-class counterpart to the big-money politics of the Clintons. It seems like something he really, really shouldn’t do. Biden certainly offers the authenticity that our Reality TV era demands (despite being a career politician), but someone who’ll be 74 at the time of the 2017 inauguration and has a habit of misspeaking and a belly full of grief probably shouldn’t be your other slam-dunk candidate. That’s a weak bench.
Gawker pointed me to a 1974 Washingtonian profile of Biden written by future sensationalist Kitty Kelley at an inflection point in the Senator’s life–the aftermath of the auto-wreck death of his first wife and baby daughter. The article, notable for Biden’s discomfort at the time with Roe v. Wade, is a very good piece throughout.
An excerpt:
His 29-year-old sister Valerie and her husband Bruce have moved into the Senator’s house to take care of the children. He commutes from Wilmington every day to be with them when they wake up in the morning and go to bed at night. They like visiting him here, and it is not unusual to see two little blondes streaking through Biden’s reception room. Both seem adjusted to the loss. Beau, now five years old, explains the situation with simplicity: “My father works in his office with the Senators and my mother is in heaven.”
***
Named one of the ten best-dressed men in the Senate, Joe Biden looks like Robert Redford’s Great Gatsby in natty pin-striped suits, elegant silk ties, and black tassled loafers. He dresses rich. “I’m a suit-and-tie kind of guy,” he says. “I’ve been this way all my life. I even wore a tie in college. My wife thought I dressed too conservatively and so she would buy a lot of my clothes which is probably the only reason I look so good.” He looks like a Senator—complete with receding hairline and gravelly voice. He has immense self-confidence. He doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink. Although he makes deprecating noises about some senators and calls Congress an antiquated nineteenth-century institution, he still is proud of his position. He thoroughly enjoys being a politician. “I am proud to be a politician. There is no other walk of life which can do more good for mankind than politics. It influences every thing that happens to the American people. You might think I’m off the wall when I say this, but I believe what Plato said 2,000 years ago: ‘The penalty good men pay for not becoming involved in politics is being governed by men worse than themselves.”
He defines politics as power. “And, whether you like it or not, young lady,” he says, leaning over his desk to shake a finger at me, “us cruddy politicians can take away that First Amendrnent of yours if we want to.” There’s no time to pursue the point—Biden is summoned o the floor for a vote. On the way over to the Capitol he channels the conversation away from politics, talking about his family: “This is really a big deal for them. I’m the only Senator any of us have ever known. We never even knew anyone who knew a Senator before. At first my dad tried to talk me into running for governor but I told him I didn’t want to be a damn old administrator. I wanted to come to Washington and get something accomplished. He calls me champ now. He and Mike Mansfield are probably the most decent men I’ve ever known. My dad never went to college [he’s an automobile sales manager in Wilmington] and he had never been involved in politics until I started campaigning. But he loves it.”•
Just a few decades back, the painter Erik Sandberg-Diment was worried about providing for his family so he became a journalist to make money. In 2015, that sentence is enough to make you laugh and cry.
He ended up focusing on computers, tested out so-so cooking software, reviewed the Macintosh with less-than-full appreciation and famously whiffed on the future of laptops. Right or wrong, he was always an entertaining curmudgeon throughout the early PC period, with all its pre-Web frustrations.
Central to the new videotex is the concept of home banking. For the vast majority of people and businesses, however, banking-by-computer is about as convenient as fishing pickles out of the barrel with a toothpick. Home banking programs, even the heavily promoted Pronto sponsored by Chemical Bank, have grown far slower than predicted. V IDEOTEX services claim they will eventually include such features as stock brokerage, travel services, catalogue shopping and even housing exchanges. I doubt, however, that many people will give up shopping in person for the chance to buy a new refrigerator or washing machine by pressing a few keys on a personal computer.
This is a nation of tire kickers, after all. I can’t help but shake my head at the millions of dollars being spent on the development of videotex applications by companies that simply do not seem to grasp the fundamental tenets of personal computing. Personal computing is timesaving, money saving and fun. Videotex is none of the above. ”There have been a lot of very high expectations for information services that have not been met by either teletext or videotex,” says Michelle Preston, the technology industry analyst at the investment firm of L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin. ”They simply do not offer enough value to really take off.”
Then there is electronic mail, that thoroughly modern offspring of a calcified postal service and a splintered Ma Bell. Currently, the companies promoting this service, nicknamed e-mail, are also offering such added services as a hookup of the subscriber’s personal computer to the Telex network and a two-hour delivery of letter-quality documents to many parts of the country. They have all discovered that electronic mail alone cannot at this stage attract enough customers to stem the tide of red ink.
Electronic mail allows a message to be typed into a personal computer or a terminal and then transmitted variously through cable, telephone-cum-modem, or satellite link to a receiving personal computer or terminal. One of its alleged advantages is the so-called store and forward message. A user may send messages at any time and, unlike a telephone connection, e-mail does not require the recipient to be on the other end of the line. Then again, the old-fashioned postal service does not require that the recipient be there at the time of delivery either.
When all is said and done, electronic mail is no more efficient, in the vast majority of cases, than the telephone or the postal service it is supposed to replace. Nor does it have the flexibility to be able to deliver packages such as spare parts, in the manner of another innovation, the overnight express service pioneered by Federal Express.
In addition, electronic mail faces the problem of compatibility that has plagued the entire personal computer industry since its inception. At the moment, there are about a dozen services, among them MCI Mail, Western Union’s EasyLink, the ITT Corporation’s Dialcom and General Electric’s Quick-Comm – none of which can be linked with any of the others.
The situation is comparable to there being a dozen different postal services, any one of which may or may not be capable of delivering a message to the particular company for which it is intended. Before even sending the message, a company has to determine whether it can indeed be delivered.
The problem is compounded by the fact that there is no e-mail central. Nor is there any universal directory of subscribers to the different services to help a business determine which potential recipient of its electronic letter subscribes to which service. For now, electronic mail’s solution to the dilemma seems to be the hybrid half e-mail, half regular mail represented by MCI’s now familiar orange envelopes.
Chances are that before a universal e-mail network is ever developed, the whole idea of electronic mail, along with those of teletext and videotex, will have been reduced to the span of a few specialized applications. As a general means of information exchange, the concepts are technologically intriguing. But they are economically naive and, more importantly, no more convenient than the existing alternatives.•
The retreat of the middle class began before the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, but their supply-side policies, which promised to rectify this backslide, to create one big class of haves, was always farce played as drama, voodoo offered as science. Instead, these schemes, which were credited with defeating communism, may have ultimately done the same to capitalism as we know it. The reality has become even starker since the rally which followed the post-2008 collapse has been a recovery of the few. A reconfiguring is desperately needed.
In the “The Middle-Class Squeeze,” Charles Moore’s article at the WSJ, the essayist looks at howthis contemporary discomfort has been good for hard-right and -left politicians and not much else. Moore says that “pretty much the whole of the developed world is still in the convalescent ward” and offers some prescriptions, including more employee-owned companies. It’s probably going to require much more than that in the U.S., including a serious reworking of our tax codes. An excerpt:
In Britain and the U.S., we are learning all over again that it is not the natural condition of the human race for children to be better off than their parents. Such a regression, in societies that assume constant progress, is striking. Imagine the panic if the same thing happened to life expectancy.
When things go backward in nations accustomed to middle-class stability, people start to ask questions. What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many? The rights of property do not seem so enticing if the value of what you own collapses or if that property is trapped by debt. What is so great about globalization if it means that the products and services you offer are undercut by foreign competition and that millions of new people can come to your country, take your jobs and enjoy your welfare benefits?
Great international banks and other corporations—and their top executives—can devise a life that escapes normal tax jurisdictions. Their successes are globalized and accrue chiefly to them; their failures crawl back home to die, at the expense of the rest of us.
So instead of feeling that it is a privilege to be an ordinary citizen of a free country, many of us start to feel a bit like suckers. Hope—the inseparable companion of progress—fades and is replaced by disappointment, even bitterness. It has always been understood that opportunity carries some price of insecurity, but what happens if insecurity rises and opportunity contracts?•
I admire Jack Kerouac for not accepting the pretty version of things but could have withstood his self-seriousness, smoking and drinking for about five minutes without screaming. That being said, the embedded 1959 clip of him on Steve Allen’s show is fun. Before reading from On the Road, he defines the word “Beat” as meaning “sympathetic.”
In a 1952 New York Times Magazine piece, “This Is the Beat Generation,” which explained the movement to the masses, John Clellon Holmes also attempted to demystify the term:
Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective … The origins of the word “beat” are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.•
_____________________________
The Olivier of oral and progenitor of the pornstache, Harry Reems saw his work on the landmark 1972 skin-flick Deep Throat lead to years of prosecution on obscenity charges. Reems ultimately was victorious, and converted to Christianity in later life. An excerpt from Margalit Fox’s 2013 obituary of him in the New York Times:
Mr. Reems, who began his career in the 1960s as a struggling stage actor, had already made dozens of pornographic films when he starred opposite Ms. Lovelace in Deep Throat.
But where his previous movies were mostly the obscure, short, grainy, plotless stag films known as loops, Deep Throat, which had set design, occasional costumes, dialogue punctuated by borscht-belt humor and an actual plot of sorts, was Cinema.
Mr. Reems played Dr. Young, a physician whose diagnostic brilliance — he locates the rare anatomical quirk that makes Ms. Lovelace’s character vastly prefer oral sex to intercourse — is matched by his capacity for tireless ministration.
“I was always the doctor,” he told New York magazine in 2005, “because I was the one that had an acting background. I would say: ‘You’re having trouble with oral sex? Well, here’s how to do it.’ Cut to a 20-minute oral-sex scene.”•
In 1976, William F. Buckley “welcomes” Reems and his attorney, a wild-haired Alan Dershowitz.
_____________________________
Barbra Streisand chats up Golda Meir in 1978 as part of The Stars Salute Israel at 30, which is amusing, despite the atrocious canned laughter. Probably the best Meir inquisition wasconducted by Oriana Fallaci, who had an affinity for the Israeli leader, who reminded her of her mother, despite not agreeing with all of the Prime Minister’s politics. An excerpt:
Oriana Fallaci:
Shall we talk about the woman Ben-Gurion called ‘the ablest man in my cabinet?’
Golda Meir:
That’s one of the legends that have grown up around me. It’s also a legend I’ve always found irritating, though men use it as a great compliment. Is it? I wouldn’t say so. Because what does it really mean? That it’s better to be a man than a woman, a principle on which I don’t agree at all. So here’s what I’d like to say to those who make me such a compliment. And what if Ben-Gurion had said, ‘The men in my cabinet are as able as a woman’? Men always feel so superior. I’ll never forget what happened at a congress of my party in New York in the 1930s. I made a speech and in the audience there was a writer friend of mine. An honest person, a man of great culture and refinement. When it was over he came up to me and exclaimed, ‘Congratulations! You’ve made a wonderful speech! And to think you’re only a woman!’ That’s just what he said in such a spontaneous, instinctive way. It’s a good thing I have a sense of humor….
Oriana Fallaci:
The Women’s Liberation Movement will like that, Mrs. Meir.
Golda Meir:
Do you mean those crazy women who burn their bras and go around all disheveled and hate men? They’re crazy. Crazy. But how can one accept such crazy women who think that it’s a misfortune to get pregnant and a disaster to bring children into the world? And when it’s the greatest privilege we women have over men.•
The Economist has a report on the booming drone industry, which has grown many times faster than even most enthusiasts supposed it could, with 15,000 units now sold each month. Legislation clearly hasn’t kept pace with the innovation, so the article suggests the easiest way to arrive at proper rules of the “road” might be to allow the new tools to launch relatively undeterred, enabling us to “lead from behind” with experience as our guide. It certainly worked that way with the fledgling aviation industry of the early twentieth century, when thousands of startups attempted to build on and commodify the Wright brothers’ soaring success.
A hammer, however, is a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and terrorists as well as Taco Bell would like to employ delivery drones. But while criminals might benefit from crowded skies in avoiding early detection, they’re also the least likely to remain within the boundaries of the law, so they can’t be the only priority when drawing up such guidelines. Such concerns probably need to be addressed with myriad approaches.
From a practical standpoint, the Economist identifies the industry’s two key needs: drones able to stay in the air for at least an hour and the development of sense-and-avoid technology.
The opening:
THE scale and scope of the revolution in the use of small, civilian drones has caught many by surprise. In 2010 America’s Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) estimated that there would, by 2020, be perhaps 15,000 such drones in the country. More than that number are now sold there every month. And it is not just an American craze. Some analysts think the number of drones made and sold around the world this year will exceed 1m. In their view, what is now happening to drones is similar to what happened to personal computers in the 1980s, when Apple launched the Macintosh and IBM the PS/2, and such machines went from being hobbyists’ toys to business essentials.
That is probably an exaggeration. It is hard to think of a business which could not benefit from a PC, whereas many may not benefit (at least directly) from drones. But the practical use of these small, remote-controlled aircraft is expanding rapidly. After dragging its feet for several years the FAA had, by August, approved more than 1,000 commercial drone operations. These involved areas as diverse as agriculture (farmers use drones to monitor crop growth, insect infestations and areas in need of watering at a fraction of the cost of manned aerial surveys); land-surveying; film-making (some of the spectacular footage in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” was shot from a drone, which could fly lower and thus collect more dramatic pictures than a helicopter); security; and delivering things (Swiss Post has a trial drone-borne parcel service for packages weighing up to 1kg, and many others, including Amazon, UPS and Google, are looking at similar ideas).•
A Vice story pointed me to a 1976 NASA study of space settlements, which considered, among other things, the psychological ramifications of living in relative darkness and seclusion out there. What struck me about it is that it seems (to a degree) a commentary for life on Earth during a time of Reality TV and smartphones, for how denatured life can feel now. The line about the danger of fulfilling every wish by pushing a button seems particularly meaningful. An excerpt:
The Solipsism Syndrome in Artificial Environment
Some environments are conducive to the state of mind in which a person feels that everything is a dream and is not real. This state of mind occurs, for example, in the Arctic winter when it is night 24 hr a day. It is also known to occur in some youths who have been brought up on television as a substitute to reality.
Solipsism is a philosophical theory that everything is in the imagination, and there is no reality outside one’s own brain. As a philosophical theory it is interesting because is is internally consistent and, therefore, cannot be disproved. But as a psychological state, it is highly uncomfortable. The whole of life becomes a long dream from which an individual can never wake up. Each person is trapped in a nightmare. Even friends are not real, they are a part of the dream. A person feels very lonely and detached, and eventually becomes apathetic and indifferent.
In the small town of Lund, Sweden, the winter days have 6 hr of daylight and 18 hr of darkness. Most of the time people live under artificial light, so that life acquires a special quality. Outdoors, there is no landscape to see; only street corners lit by lamps. These street corners look like theater stages, detached from one another. There is no connectedness or depth in the universe and it acquires a very unreal quality as though the whole world is imagination. Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries expresses this feeling very well.
This state of mind can be easily produced in an environment where everything is artificial, where everything is like a theater stage, where every wish can be fulfilled by a push-button, and where there is nothing beyond the theater stage and beyond an individual’s control.
There are several means to alleviate the tendency toward the solipsism syndrome in the extraterrestrial communities:
A large geometry, in which people can see far beyond the “theater stage” of the vicinity to a view which is overwhelmingly visible.
Something must exist beyond each human’s manipulation because people learn to cope with reality when reality is different from their imagination. If the reality is the same as the imagination, there is no escape from falling into solipsism. In extraterrestrial communities, everything can be virtually controlled. In fact, technically nothing should go beyond human control even though this is psychologically bad. However, some amount of “unpredictability” can be built in within a controllable range. One way to achieve this is to generate artificial unpredictability by means of a table of random numbers. Another way is to allow animals and plants a degree of freedom and independence from human planning. Both types of unpredictability must have a high visibility to be effective. This high visibility is easier to achieve in a macrogeometry which allows longer lines of sight.
Something must exist which grows. Interactive processes generate new patterns which cannot be inferred from the information contained in the old state. This is not due to randomness but rather to different amplification by mutual causal loops. It is important for each person to feel able to contribute personally to something which grows, that the reality often goes in a direction different from expectation, and finally that what each person takes care of (a child, for example) may possess increased wisdom, and may grow into something beyond the individual in control. From this point of view, it is important personally to raise children, and to grow vegetables and trees with personal care, not by mechanical means. It is also desirable to see plants and animals grow, which is facilitated by a long line of sight.
It is important to have “something beyond the horizon” which gives the feeling that the world is larger than what is seen.•
Donald Trump, a shrimp-boat barnacle who’s managed to stain adultery’s good name, believes China has “created” the concept of climate change to prevent America from competing in manufacturing. China, with the world’s highest cancer and air-pollution rates, clearly disagrees, finally bowing to political pressure and agreeing to institute cap-and-trade.
It’s breathtaking news with a caveat: The process won’t be easily enforceable in a country rife with corruption and political opaqueness. But it’s a critical first step, and one that will hopefully make the type of impact that America’s Clean Air Act has. From Michael Greenstone’s NYT Upshot post about that U.S. legislation and how it relates to China’s bold move:
The history and impact of the Clean Air Act can serve as a valuable case study for countries that are struggling today with the extraordinary pollution that we once faced. In Northern China, where pollution is curtailing lives by an average offive years, the government has at last declared a “war on pollution.” While enforcement is not perfect, the government has improved transparency andamendedenvironmental protection laws to impose stricter punishments against polluters.
The hundreds of millions of life-years saved from improved air quality in our country didn’t happen by accident or overnight. This happened because a collective voice for change brought about one of the most influential laws of the land.
As the United States and other nations continue to debate the costs of environmental regulation, they can do so with the knowledge that the benefits can be substantial. As proof, we need look no further than the five extra years residents of Weirton-Steubenville are living and the hundreds of millions of years gained by Americans throughout the nation.•
Effective Altruism is certainly better than doing no good at all, and belittling its true believers while doing less than them doesn’t make anyone morally superior, but there’s something of Pangloss’ misplaced confidence in believing back-of-the-napkin “moral calculations” and “philanthropic formulas” can cure the ills of a spinning, jagged world resistant to such neat solutions. While EA adherents clearly don’t think the rising tide of consumerism will, on its own, lift all boats, they do feel enough people using rigorous logic to co-opt capitalism to benefit those less fortunate is the most effective life preserver.
In “Stop the Robot Apocalypse,” her excellent if misleadingly titled London Review of Books piece about William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better, Amia Srinivasan wonders about this system of charity that’s certainly more nebulous than Utilitarianism. She asks, among other things, if the participation of Effective Altruists in capitalism actually perpetuates and exacerbates the wrongs they purport to heal. She also questions if it’s wise to icily wring all emotion from decisions about the “worthiness” or “arbitrariness” of a cause.
An excerpt:
Doing Good Better is a feel-good guide to getting good done. It doesn’t dwell much on the horrors of global inequality, and sidesteps any diagnosis of its causes. The word ‘oppression’ appears just once. This is surely by design, at least in part. According to MacAskill’s moral worldview, it is the consequences of one’s actions that really matter, and that’s as true of writing a book as it is of donating to charity. His patter is calculated for maximal effect: if the book weren’t so cheery, MacAskill couldn’t expect to inspire as much do-gooding, and by his own lights that would be a moral failure. (I’m not saying it doesn’t work. Halfway through reading the book I set up a regular donation to GiveDirectly, one of the charities MacAskill endorses for its proven efficacy. It gives unconditional direct cash transfers to poor households in Uganda and Kenya.)
But the book’s snappy style isn’t just a strategic choice. MacAskill is evidently comfortable with ways of talking that are familiar from the exponents of global capitalism: the will to quantify, the essential comparability of all goods and all evils, the obsession with productivity and efficiency, the conviction that there is a happy convergence between self-interest and morality, the seeming confidence that there is no crisis whose solution is beyond the ingenuity of man. He repeatedly talks about philanthropy as a deal too good to pass up: ‘It’s like a 99 per cent off sale, or buy one, get 99 free. It might be the most amazing deal you’ll see in your life.’ There is a seemingly unanswerable logic, at once natural and magical, simple and totalising, to both global capitalism and effective altruism. That he speaks in the proprietary language of the illness – global inequality – whose symptoms he proposes to mop up is an irony on which he doesn’t comment. Perhaps he senses that his potential followers – privileged, ambitious millennials – don’t want to hear about the iniquities of the system that has shaped their worldview. Or perhaps he thinks there’s no irony here at all: capitalism, as always, produces the means of its own correction, and effective altruism is just the latest instance.
Yet there is no principled reason why effective altruists should endorse the worldview of the benevolent capitalist. Since effective altruism is committed to whatever would maximise the social good, it might for example turn out to support anti-capitalist revolution. And although MacAskill focuses on health as a proxy for goodness, there is no principled reason, as he points out, why effective altruism couldn’t also plug values like justice, dignity or self-determination into its algorithms. (There’s also no reason why one couldn’t ‘earn to give’ to help radical causes; Engels worked at a mill in Manchester to support Marx’s writing of Capital.) Effective altruism has so far been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men fighting poverty through largely conventional means, but it is at least in theory a broad church.•
Speaking of the think tank that helped Steven Spielberg create the world of tomorrow for 2002’s Minority Report, Wiredreconvened some of the principals of that very productive two-day retreat to mark the tenth anniversary of the film. It sounds like it was a fascinating experience if a harried and discombobulating one. An excerpt:
Alex McDowell (production designer, Minority Report):
It was two full days at the Shutters Hotel in Santa Monica.
We pretended to be a conference of dental technicians or something boring.
Douglas Coupland (novelist, author of Generation X and Microserfs):
We sat around a big U-shaped table like that scene in 2001 — in that conference room on the moon.
Joel Garreau (principal of consulting firm The Garreau Group, in 1999 a reporter at the Washington Post):
I don’t think many of us knew what the fuck we were getting ourselves into.
Peter Schwartz (futurist, co-founder of scenario-planning firm Global Business Network):
We would ask questions: What about advertising? What about transportation? What about newspapers? What about food?
Stewart Brand (editor of Whole Earth Catalog):
They had graphic artists there who could immediately draw things that were being described.
Harald Belker (automotive designer):
We were supposed to just watch and listen and see what people had to say.
Coupland:
It was a big deal back then to have that real-time feedback.
Schwartz:
What about weapons? Surveillance — how did it work? One that moved very quickly was the gesture control of computers. That really began with Jaron. There was pretty quick agreement about what you saw onscreen.
Lanier:
We were doing these glove technologies that could be combined with displays. That was totally commonplace during that time as a demo thing — not as a consumer product. My recollection is that I brought in a working one. I could just pack one in the trunk.
Coupland:
I put together a whole book for it — a 2080 style book. We were told it was 2080, but then it ended up being 2050.•
Speaking of desolate factories, here’s another twist: China’s rising middle class and aging population has made it difficult for many plants to find the necessary supply of cheap labor. The nation’s economic problems have temporarily eased the migration away from factory work, but automation seems the only answer in the longer run. As Daniel Kahneman has said: “robots will show up in China just in time.”
Factory managers tell the same story at industrial estates across Dongguan, in the southern province of Guangdong, which has gone from small town to a megacity of more than 7m people over the past two decades as manufacturers flooded in to take advantage of the vast supply of cheap labour.
A closely watched factory survey on Wednesday revealed that Chinese manufacturing is having its worst month since the depths of the financial crisis. But while heavily indebted steel and cement plants lie idle across China and luxury goods manufacturers have seen their sales slump, the jobs market in the south, one of the country’s most economically dynamic regions, is still in good health for those willing to travel from elsewhere and take up tough manufacturing work.
The problem for factory owners is that their pool of labour has been shrinking in recent years because of the rapidly ageing population and the growth of less-stressful job openings in the service sector, selling cappuccinos and cinema tickets to China’s expanding middle class.
Facing this long-term challenge, many manufacturers from TAL to Foxconn, the Taiwanese maker of iPhones and iPads, are increasing their investments in robots and automation.•
Douglas Coupland, when working as a member of Steven Spielberg’s think tank on Minority Report, advised the director that the future would be much quieter. Well, certain parts of it will be, and some of them are pieces that rumbled with human activity for as long as they existed. Actually, in many cases, Coupland’s tomorrow has already arrived.
Photographer Edgar Martins’ new series, 00:00.00, captures eerie moments when cutting-edge Munich BMW factories are slowed to a stop, their almost-humanless hum silenced, reminding us that they exist and operate while we busy ourselves elsewhere. Soon, these operations won’t need even a few of us, and we’ll have to find other things to do with our time. We’ll have to redefine what humans are here for, a process that will continue as long as we do, and we’ll require fresh political solutions to navigate this new normal.
“Factories and data processing centers are, perhaps, the most relevant production centers of our times,” Martins says. “I’m interested in how technology is shaping our lives and how we have become increasingly dependent on it, for better or worse. I’m also interested in the notion of technological utopias and the dreams and aspirations we attach to technological advancements and progress.”
Car factories have helped shape the world we live in and will reshape it again as companies react to climate change, he says. “The automotive industry faces some major challenges over the next decades, as it aims to deal with the inherent shortcomings and pitfalls of the internal combustion engine and its environmental repercussions.”•
It’s too late to save ourselves, but one gift we could give to people of the future, should they exist, is to explore and map the genomes of those creatures given to remarkably long lives. They’ve somehow developed internal methods for suppressing tumors and other flaws in the DNA that normally accompany aging. Such mysteries, once solved, may allow us to make the human lifespan more elastic.
It’s certainly not just size that matters, as David Robson explains in his BBC Future article “The Secrets of Living to 200 Years Old,” since there are both rats and whales able to grind nature’s inexorable march to a relatively slow crawl. An excerpt:
Several lines of evidence suggest there are brakes that can slow [the aging] progress. For instance, a common diabetes drug,metformin, can modestly slow ageingin mice. And simply changing one gene involved in cell metabolism in a roundworm can lead it to live many times longer than its parents; while it is unlikely the same changes would help more complex organisms, it hints that ageing is not beyond our control. “Ageing is a surprisingly plastic process that can be manipulated,” [the University of Liverpool’s Joao Pedro] de Magalhaes says.
Scientists like de Magalhaes and [Harvard’s Vadim] Gladyshev are now on the hunt for other candidates, using real-life Methuselahs as their guide. Across mammals alone, expectedlifespan can vary 100-fold, from shrews that live for no longer than 1.5 years to the bowhead whales that can live for more than 200. It is as if, for various reasons, natural selection has somehow pushed certain creatures to evolve their own elixir of life.
“Metformin extends lifespan in mice modestly, but when you look at different species, the capacity of natural selection to extend lifespan is incredibly more powerful,” says de Magalhaes. “They will have probably evolved entirely different ways of living longer, and resisting cancer and other age-related diseases.” And each of those could lead to better medicine. Or as Gladyshev puts it: “Nature changes lifespan all the time, so the question is, how does it do it? And can we target those mechanisms, thereby increasing human longevity?”
The most interesting creatures are the extreme outliers; single species that seem to outlive even their closest relatives.•
Unlike the newspaper and music industries, which were upended by the Internet, the traditional TV model is doing just fine–or really, really not.
Michael Wolff, the least beloved of all the Muppets, has written a book about the triumph of this hoary medium in the Computer Age, one of two new titles on which Jacob Weisberg bases his wonderfully written NYRB piece “TV vs. the Internet: Who Will Win?” Weisberg notes: “Most commercials are directed at young people, based on the advertising industry’s belief in establishing brand loyalty early. That’s why so much ad-supported programming caters to the tastes of teenagers.”
That’s an interesting companion for this snippet from “Where Did Everybody Go?” an Advertising Age article published today about the paucity of viewers greeting the new season, those remaining on the couch now grayer than Japan: “The most disconcerting PUT (people using television) data concerns younger viewers, who are ditching traditional TV faster than anyone could have anticipated.”
Weisberg is admiring of aspects of Wolff’s book but ultimately thinks “his analysis is too categorical and in places simply wrong.” An excerpt:
Wolff contends that television learned a useful lesson from the gutting of the music industry. The record companies were at first lackadaisical in protecting their intellectual property, then went after their own customers, filing lawsuits against dorm-room downloaders. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, sites hosting videos such as YouTube appeared to be within their rights to wait for takedown notices before removing pirated material. But Viacom, led by the octogenarian Sumner Redstone, sued YouTube anyway. Its 2007 lawsuit forced Google, which had bought YouTube the previous year, to abandon copyright infringement as a business model. Thanks to the challenge from Viacom, YouTube became a venue for low-value content generated by users (“Charlie Bit My Finger”) and acceded to paying media owners, such as Comedy Central, a share of its advertising revenue in exchange for its use of material. “Instead of a common carrier they had become, in a major transformation, licensors,” Wolff writes. Where it might have been subsumed by a new distribution model, the television business instead subsumed its disruptor.
Wolff is dismissive of newer threats to the business. He regards cord cutting—customers dropping premium cable bundles in favor of Internet services such as Netflix—as an insignificant phenomenon. But even if it gathers steam, as recent evidence suggests may be happening, cord cutting leaves Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the largest cable companies, in a win-win position, since they provide the fiber optic cables that deliver broadband Internet to the home as well as those that bring TV. Even if you decide not to pay for hundreds of channels you don’t watch, you’ll pay the same monopoly to stream House of Cards. (This won’t provide much comfort, however, to companies that own the shows, which stand to lose revenue from both cable subscribers and commercials priced according to ratings.)•
Jackie Collins was the ultimate Hollywood insider, yet she was, British-born, also a stranger, possessing a distance that served her well when writing of the morals (or lack thereof) of the glittering stars in that particularly bawdy time when the Sexual Revolution made Los Angeles even more louche. She wasn’t writing Nathanael West but instead focused south of the belt, and it served her well. From an appropriately very lively (and sadly unbylined) postmortem in the Economist:
There was probably no one in the room who knew Hollywood better. She was its resident anthropologist, anatomiser and guide. The Grill for lunch. Mr Chow’s or Cecconi’s for dinner. Soho House for the best view of the whole staggeringly beautiful city of Los Angeles. Neiman-Marcus in Beverly Hills for shoes and jewels.
But this was only the start. Jackie C. also knew the places of furtive whispers and hot sheets. All of them. She had experienced 90210’s wicked side ever since the age of 15, when she made Errol Flynn chase her round a table in the louche Chateau Marmont Hotel and fought off Sammy Davis Jr. Ever since she’d two-timed a couple of car mechanics on Sunset Boulevard. And ever since Marlon Brando, at a party, had admired her magnificent 39-inch breasts at the start of their brief but fabulous affair. Now for trysts she recommended the Bel-Air (“very discreet”) and Geoffrey’s at the Beach for waves, lights and general sexiness.
Yet this was still not why she was the most potent and dangerous person in the room. She was a writer. Over the years, quietly and intently, she had watched what the denizens of Hollywood were doing, and listened to what they were saying. Who had ditched whom. Who was eyeing up whom. Who had slept with whom, and full details. From her corner table at Spago’s, or half-hidden by a drape in a night-club, or under the dryer at Riley’s hair and nail salon, she would gather every last crumb of gossip and rush to the powder room to write it down. She turned it into sizzling novels in which, every six pages or so, enormous erections burst out of jeans, French lace panties were torn off and groans of delight rang through the palm-fringed Hollywood air. There were 32 books in all, with titles like The Stud, The Bitch, Lethal Seduction and Hollywood Divorces. She had sold half a billion of them worldwide. Anyone she met might turn up there. Stars would beg her not to put them in her stories, and she would tell them they were there, toned down, already. Hard luck.•
Robots have been members of the U.S. military since at least 1928, and the only question in the long term is whether our warriors will ultimately be wholly silicon or if we’ll use brain chips, drugs, exoskeleton suits and genetic manipulation to alter humans into fighting “machines.” We’ll certainly develop both, but the former’s lack of flexibility for the foreseeable future makes battlefield Transhumanism, dicey though it is from an ethical standpoint, more doable for now.
Questions abound for this new arms race: If war is relatively painless (for one side, in some cases), will it make aggression more attractive? How will these experiments in pain vaccines and teleportation eventually inform civilian life? Will humanitarian crises like Syria’s collapse be eliminated by these tools?
In “Engineering Humans for War,” Annie Jacobsen’s excellent Atlantic article, she looks at DARPA’s goal of creating a real-life Iron Man in numerous ways, including a super-soldier suit called TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit), which the department expects to have operational by 2018. An excerpt:
For decades after its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense—focused on developing vast weapons systems. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like [Retired four-star general Paul F.] Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors—on transforming humans for war. The progress of those efforts, to the extent it can be assessed through public information, hints at war’s future, and raises questions about whether military technology can be stopped, or should.
Gorman sketched out an early version of the thinking in a paper he wrote for DARPA after his retirement from the Army in 1985, in which he described an “integrated-powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. The “SuperTroop” exoskeleton he proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a .50-caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual, and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explained, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from the head to the fingertips. Its interior would be climate-controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the 21st-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.
At the time Gorman wrote, the computing technology needed for such a device did not yet exist.•
I admire the London Review of Books, but I was a little surprised when its longtime editor Mary-Kay Wilmers recently told the Financial Times that the periodical has had to lean more heavily on political content because they’re aren’t enough worthy books to fill its pages with critiques.
That isn’t true, I don’t think, even if it’s a frequent refrain: Our digital culture has developed in such a way as to diminish literature, people now won’t read more than 140 characters, the quality of the written word is in steep decline.
Except I truly believe we’re living in a golden age for books, with so many great titles that it’s impossible to keep up with them. Certain corners of the publishing world have been destabilized, particularly by Amazon’s business practices, but in the big picture it seems we have rich and varied contributions from a much wider array of writers.
Maybe future generations raised on smartphones won’t be as accepting of literature (though I don’t think so), and perhaps books will become so cheap that writing won’t attract great talent (not likely), but for now at least, it’s a wonderful time to be a reader.
Another thing that’s often said is that in the near future, all books will be read on screens and not at all on dead trees. This transition wouldn’t mean the death of books, of course, as just the medium would change, and whatever influence this new instrument has on books in the long run, it would be far from lethal and perhaps even more likely prove beneficial. The changeover certainly would, however, sink bookstores. This passage may still materialize, but for now, the tide has receded.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”
But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.
E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.•
I was reading a 1908 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about Red Cloud, and it reminded me of a passage from the opening chapter of Ian Frazier’s excellent 2000 book, On the Rez. In telling about the Oglala Lakota chief’s visit to the White House in 1870, Frazier examined our age and came to some troubling conclusions, all of which seem even truer 15 years on. Real freedom in our corporatocracy is more expensive than ever, but it’s cheap and easy to be discarded. The excerpt:
In 1608, the newly arrived Englishmen at Jamestown colony in Virginia proposed to give the most powerful Indian in the vicinity, Chief Powhatan, a crown. Their idea was to coronate him a sub-emperor of Indians, and vassal to the English King. Powhatan found the offer insulting. “I also am a King,” he said, “and this is my land.” Joseph Brant, a Mohawk of the Iroquois Confederacy between eastern New York and the Great Lakes, was received as a celebrity when he went to England with a delegation from his tribe in 1785. Taken to St. James’s Palace for a royal audience, he refused to kneel and kiss the hand of George III; he told the King that he would, however, gladly kiss the hand of the Queen. Almost a century later, the U.S. government gave Red Cloud, victorious war leader of the Oglala, the fanciest reception it knew how, with a dinner party at the White House featuring lighted chandeliers and wine and a dessert of strawberries and ice cream. The next day Red Cloud parleyed with the government officials just as he was accustomed to on the prairie—sitting on the floor. To a member of a Senate select committee who had delivered a tirade against Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Sioux leader carelessly replied, “I have grown to be a very independent man, and consider myself a very great man.”
That self-possessed sense of freedom is closer to what I want; I want to be an uncaught Indian like them.
Another remark which non-Indians often make on the subject of Indians is “Why can’t they get with the program?” Anyone who talks about Indians in public will be asked that question, or variations on it; over and over: Why don’t Indians forget all this tribal nonsense and become ordinary Americans like the rest of us? Why do they insist on living in the past? Why don’t they accept the fact that we won and they lost? Why won’t they stop, finally, being Indians and join the modern world? I have a variety of answers handy. Sometimes I say that in former days “the program” called for the eradication of Indian languages, and children in Indian boarding schools were beaten for speaking them and forced to speak English, so they would fit in; time passed, cultural fashions changed, and Hollywood made a feature film about Indians in which for the sake of authenticity the Sioux characters spoke Sioux (with English subtitles), and the movie became a hit, and lots of people decided they wanted to learn Sioux, and those who still knew the language, those who had somehow managed to avoid “the program” in the first place, were suddenly the ones in demand. Now, I think it’s better not to answer the question but to ask a question in return: What program, exactly, do you have in mind?
We live in a craven time. I am not the first to point out that capitalism, having defeated Communism, now seems to be about to do the same to democracy. The market is doing splendidly, yet we are not, somehow. Americans today no longer work mostly in manufacturing or agriculture but in the newly risen service economy. That means that most of us make our living by being nice. And if we can’t be nice, we’d better at least be neutral. In the service economy, anyone who sat where he pleased in the presence of power or who expatiated on his own greatness would soon be out the door. “Who does he think he is?” is how the dismissal is usually framed. The dream of many of us is that someday we might miraculously have enough money that we could quit being nice, and everybody would then have to be nice to us, and niceness would surround us like a warm dome. Certain speeches we would love to make accompany this dream, glorious, blistering tellings-off of those to whom we usually hold our tongue. The eleven people who actually have enough money to do that are icons to us. What we read in newsprint and see on television always reminds us how great they are, and we can’t disagree. Unlike the rest of us, they can deliver those speeches with no fear. The freedom that inhered in Powhatan, that Red Cloud carried with him from the plains to Washington as easily as air—freedom to be and to say, whenever, regardless of disapproval—has become a luxury most of us can’t afford.•
Even geniuses aren’t perfect: Billy Beane is the GM of the last-place Oakland A’s and Bill James Senior Advisor to the last-place Boston Red Sox, but they’re two of the pivotal figures in the development and popularization of Sabermetrics. In fact, James is likely the most influential of them all.
Of course, some bright people have the propensity to overthink things and outsmart themselves. For no real reason, Beane decided to trade affordable MVP candidate Josh Donaldson in the offseason for a couple of decent players and perhaps a great future shortstop, even though his team was built to compete now and playing in a very winnable division.
James’ sins haven’t been so slight, not just limited to puzzling player personnel decisions. He’s gone out of his way to defend Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who clearly looked the other way while a pedophilia scandal was brewing right in front of his black glasses. In this case, James’ contrarian streak, which made him great, also laid him low.
The two figures had never appeared in public together until last week’s business-disruption conference hosted by NetSuite. Brian Costa of the Wall Street Journal gathered them and moderated a discussion about the future of Sabermetrics, etc. An excerpt:
WSJ:
Clearly, sabermetrics has improved the management of the game tremendously. How, if at all, has it made baseball a better game to watch?
Bill James:
I don’t know that it has, but we produce information, and information ties the fans to the game. People in a culture with no information about baseball have no interest in baseball. If you give people a little bit of information about baseball, they have a little bit of interest, and if you give them a lot of information about baseball, there’s the potential that they have a lot of interest. I’ve lived most of my life in the fans’ world and I see what I do as a fan’s activity. Granted, I work for the Red Sox. But I do know also that there are fans who go to sleep cursing my name.
Billy Beane:
It’s a different generation of fan that now has exposure and an interest in why things happen. Give them some rational reason for outcomes. We’re an information-hungry society, and one that is constantly trying to understand. I think there are a group of kids who love it for the numbers and love it for the information.
WSJ:
We’ve seen advances in particular areas of the game in recent years—pitch framing, defensive shifts—that are now better understood. What do you guys see as the aspect of the sport that is most in need of more research, more data and better understanding?
Billy Beane:
I’m jumping out of my chair on this one. It’s using analytics—and this sounds sort of non-field-related—but it’s injuries and medical. Even the healthcare industry is doing the same thing – trying to use big data to help solve healthcare. It’s the same in a simpler form for baseball or any sport and injuries. That’s the black swan for anyone involved in a baseball team—our injuries. Trying to predict them, minimize them, limit the downtime.•
There are many negatives about having an American military class so discrete from the rest of the nation, and one of them, as outlined in “Welfare’s Last Stand,” Jennifer Mittelstadt’s Aeon article, is that veterans are no longer an incubator to test benefits that can later be expanded to the rest of society. For example, the G.I. Bill after WWII educated a generation of vets and made grants and loans for higher education for all citizens the goal.
While the draft ended nearly a decade before Ronald Reagan took office, the political historian details how his Administration was the one where benefits for the military and the rest of the country–the huge majority of people–came to a fork in the road. It’s not that our troops don’t deserve exceptional benefits, but separating us into heroes and “welfare queens” is a most unfortunate division. An excerpt:
This post-1973 military welfare state played a different role in US life than most earlier types of military welfare. For one, military welfare no longer served as a reward for the services of citizen soldiers. Instead, it sustained the volunteer force: it lured new recruits, supported them while on duty, and convinced them to re‑enlist.
More importantly, earlier versions of military welfare catalysed broader social welfare programmes for the US populace. Civil War pensions pioneered federal retirement and disability payments, and paved the way for civilian retirement pensions. Veterans’ healthcare after the First World War created the first model of government health provision. And the Second World War-era GI Bill vaulted millions of former civilian draftees and their families into the middle class, legitimising government support for education and housing for all Americans.
The modern military welfare state of the post-1973 era never stimulated social welfare for the populace. Quite the opposite. As a smaller number and narrower cross-section of Americans volunteered for military service in the late 20th century, the divide between the military and civilians grew. So, too, did the divide between the new military welfare state and the existing civilian one. From the 1970s to the early ’90s, while many civilian welfare programmes contracted, public and private unions declined, and employers cut private employment benefits, the military expanded its welfare functions.
