Excerpts

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“The Answer Is Anything But Obvious”

August 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Andrew Schrank’s Pacific·Standard essay about Labor in the Digital Age, which imagines possible enlightened and benighted outcomes, he says the truest thing anyone can say on the topic: “The future of work and workers will not be dictated by technology alone.” No, it won’t.

An excerpt in which he looks at the Google Glass as half-full:

Is a jobless future inevitable? Do automation, computerization, and globalization necessarily conspire to undercut employment and living standards? Or might they be harnessed to benign ends by farsighted leaders? The answer is anything but obvious, for the relationship between automation and job loss is at best indeterminate, both within and across countries, and the relationship between automation and compensation is similarly opaque. For instance, Germany and Japan boast more robots per capita and less unemployment than the United States, and the stock of industrial robots and the average manufacturing wage have been growing in tandem—at double digit rates, no less—in China.

What excites me about the future of work and workers, therefore, is the possibility that the technological determinists are wrong, and that we will subordinate machinery to our needs and desires rather than vice versa. In this rosy scenario, machines take over the monotonous jobs and allow humans to pursue more leisurely or creative pursuits. Working hours fall and wages rise across the board. And productivity gains are distributed (and re-distributed) in accord with the principles of distributive justice and fairness.

While such a scenario may seem not just rosy but unrealistic, it is not entirely implausible.•

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“The First Serious Blueprint For Building Cities In Space Was Drawn Almost On A Whim”

August 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Gerald O’Neill’s space dreams were bold–and very unrealistic. The astrophysicist believed 40 years ago, right around the time of his popular paper, “The Colonization of Space,” that Earthlings would be able to make round-trip voyages to other planets for about $3000 before the end of the century. Not quite. 

O’Neill died, however, inspire the famous 1970s space-colonies design, which I’ve used on this site many times. From Brian Merchant at Vice:

The first serious blueprint for building cities in space was drawn almost on a whim. Forty years ago this summer, dozens of scientists gathered in the heart of Silicon Valley for one of NASA’s design studies, which were typically polite, educational affairs. But in 1975, the topic of inquiry was “The Colonization of Space,” a recent paper by the astrophysicist Gerard O’Neill.

“The idea was to review his ideas and to see if they were technically feasible,” said Mark Hopkins, an economist who was there. “Well, they were.” So the scientists had a choice—set about laying the groundwork for real, no-bullshit space colonization, or hold the regularly scheduled series of seminars. “We said, ‘To hell with that,'” Hopkins recalled. The ten-week program became a quest to outline a scientifically possible and economically viable way to build a human habitat in space.

What they came up with—designs for huge, orbital settlements—are still pretty much the basis for all our space digs today, science-fictional or otherwise.•

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“Exley Would Spend His Twenties As The Victim Of His Own Deep Emotional Maladies”

August 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

In my teens, I read the books of Fred Exley’s “Fan” fictional-memoir trilogy one after another, and I remember hoping to never be within a million miles of someone as fucked up and frightening as the author’s doppelganger. That Exley is a fascinating character but also the height (and depth) of American male insecurity: violent, self-pitying, alcoholic, furious, a mess. He realizes too intently that he’s on the wrong side of an ugly score. 

The second and third volumes are so-so, but the original, A Fan’s Notes, is a searing, heartbreaking thing, and everyone who’s picked up a copy probably thought of it again this weekend when hearing of Frank Gifford’s death. I know I did.

The USC and Giants great was the “star” to Exley’s “fan,” and the segment about the back running headlong into a Chuck Bednarik guillotine, which put him in the hospital for ten days and on the sidelines for 18 months, is unforgettable. If Gifford, the golden idol, could be felled by life, what chance did Ex have in the bleachers?

At Grantland, Fred Schruers has a beautifully written article about the literary “relationship” which begat a real one. An excerpt:

Ex, as he called himself and answered to among friends, had begun the fixation on Gifford that led to this nostalgia-and-booze-soaked threnody of dysfunction around 1951, when both men were enrolled at USC. Gifford, a converted quarterback and defensive back who became a halfback his senior year and slashed for four touchdowns against Ohio State, was campus royalty; Ex was a legendarily hard-drinking English major. Like Gifford, Exley would head to New York, having been raised upstate in Watertown as the son of a crusty semi-pro footballer. Before he truly discovered his great gift — striving to redeem his own scattered life in long, lapidary sentences touched with wit and pathos — Exley would spend his twenties as the victim of his own deep emotional maladies. He would know a depression that led to electroshock therapy. In his three main works, he would explicate a painful grapple with attempts to capture the love of the kind of unreachable American princesses he longed for.2

Though he never saw Frank play in college, Exley would understand the mythic heft of this transformed oil driller’s son who became an All-American. Exley’s Fitzgeraldian tangle of thoughts about Gifford only deepened as no. 16’s NFL career soared. In one mid-novel excursion, Exley explains his own role as a failing writer among the working stiffs around him in the $1 bleacher seats:

It was very simple really. Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his … he became my alter ego, that part of me had its being in the competitive world of men …

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“The Need For Unskilled Labor Is Beginning To Diminish”

August 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You certainly don’t want to be a nation left behind by robotics any more than you’d want to miss out on the Industrial Revolution, but at the same time you need jobs for citizens of all skill levels. What to do?

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of reducing unemployment among the nation’s many unskilled workers is threatened by automation, a sector other countries in the region (particularly Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia) are investing heavily in. The need for cheap labor is disappearing just when the nation needs it most. From Natalie Obiko Pearson at Bloomberg:

Robots and automation are invigorating once-sleepy Indian factories, boosting productivity by carrying out low-skill tasks more efficiently. While in theory, improved output is good for economic growth, the trend is creating a headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi: Robots are diminishing roles for unskilled laborers that he wants to put to work as part of his Make in India campaign aimed at creating jobs for the poor.

India’s largely uneducated labor force and broken educational system aren’t ready for the more complex jobs that workers need when their low-skilled roles are taken over by machines. Meanwhile, nations employing robots more quickly, such as China, are becoming even more competitive.

“The need for unskilled labor is beginning to diminish,” Akhilesh Tilotia, head of thematic research at Kotak Institutional Equities in Mumbai and author of a book on India’s demographic impact. “Whatever education we’re putting in and whatever skill development we’re potentially trying to put out – – does it match where the industry will potentially be five to 10 years hence? That linkage is reasonably broken in India.” …

In the race to create factory jobs, Modi isn’t just competing against Asian rivals. Robots are increasingly helping developed economies. In Switzerland, robots make toothbrushes for export; in Spain, they cut and pack lettuce heads — a job previously done by migrants; in Germany, they fill tubs of ice cream, and in the U.K. they assemble yogurt into multipacks at a rate of 80 a minute.•

 

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“Business Has The Most To Gain From A Healthy America, And The Most To Lose By Social Unrest Or Punitive Taxation”

August 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Peter Georgescu, Chairman Emeritus of Young & Rubicam, believes the conscious uncoupling of productivity and worker prosperity, if continued, will eventually lead to social unrest or drastic taxation in America.

That’s hopeful, really. It means citizens won’t forever settle for bread and Kardashians and will demand remedies for a sick system. In a New York Times op-ed about wealth disparity, Georgescu suggests preemptive steps corporations can take to move the haves and have-nots closer to one another, strategies that would require businesses to take a long-term view and unilaterally make concessions–not how things usually are done. He also doesn’t address how increasing automation might impact his prescriptions, but it’s still worth reading. An excerpt:

We business leaders know what to do. But do we have the will to do it? Are we willing to control the excessive greed so prevalent in our culture today and divert resources to better education and the creation of more opportunity?

Business has the most to gain from a healthy America, and the most to lose by social unrest or punitive taxation. Business can start the process in two steps. First, invest in the actual value creators — the employees. Start compensating fairly, by which I mean a wage that enables employees to share amply in productivity increases and creative innovations.

The fact that real wages have been flat for about four decades, while productivity has increased by 80 percent, shows that has not been happening. Before the early 1970s, wages and productivity were both rising. Now most gains from productivity go to shareholders, not employees.

Second, businesses must invest aggressively in their own operations, directing profit into productivity and innovation to boost real business performance. Today, too many corporations reduce investment in research and development and brand building. As a result, we see a general decline in the value of their brands and other assets. To make up for those declines and for anemic revenues, businesses buy back their stock (now at record levels) and thus artificially boost earnings per share.•

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“It Would Be ‘Catastrophic'”

August 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Easily the best article I’ve read about E.L. Doctorow in the wake of his death is Ron Rosenbaum’s expansive Los Angeles Review of Books piece about the late novelist. It glides easily from Charles Darwin to Thomas Nagel to the hard problem of consciousness to the “electrified meat” in our skulls to the “Jor-El warning” in Doctorow’s final fiction, Andrew’s Brain. That clarion call was directed at the Singularity, which the writer feared would end human exceptionalism, and, of course, it would. More a matter of when than if.

An excerpt:

Not to spoil the mood but I feel a kind of responsibility to pass on Doctorow’s Jor-El warning, even if I don’t completely understand it. I would nonetheless contend that — coming from a person as steeped as he is in the contemplation of the Mind and its possibilities, the close reading of consciousness, of that twain of brain and mind and the mysteries of their relationship — attention should be paid. It seemed like a message he wanted me to convey.

I asked him to expand upon the idea voiced in Andrew’s Brain that once a computer was created that could replicate everything in the brain, once machines can think as men, when we’ve achieved true “artificial intelligence” or “ the singularity” as it’s sometimes called, it would be “catastrophic.”

“There is an outfit in Switzerland,” he says. “And this is a fact — they’re building a computer to emulate a brain. The theory is, of course, complex. There are billions of things going on in the brain but they take the position that the number of things is finite and that finally you can reach that point. Of course there’s a lot more work to do in terms of the brain chemistry and so on. So Andrew says to Doc ‘the twain will remain.’

“But later he has this revelation because he’s read, as I had, a very responsible scientist saying that it was possible someday for computers to have consciousness. That was said in a piece by a very respected neuroscientist by the name of Gerald Edelman. So the theory is this: If we do ever figure out how the brain becomes what we understand as consciousness, our feelings, our wishes, our desires, dreams — at that point we will know enough to simulate with a computer the human brain — and the computer will achieve consciousness. That is a great scientific achievement if it ever occurs. But if it does, all the old stories are gone. The Bible, everything.”

“Why?”

“Because the idea of the exceptionalism of the human mind is no longer exceptional. And you’re not even dealing with the primary consciousness of animals, of different degrees of understanding. You’re talking about a machine that could now think, and the dominion of the human mind no longer exists. And that’s disastrous because it’s earth-shaking. I mean, imagine.”•

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“It Might Be Cheapest Just To Have A Robot Follow A Violent Criminal Around All The Time”

August 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Transhumanist Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan penned a Vice article about the influence next-wave technologies may have on violent crime, which he views largely as a form of mental disease. A lot of it is pretty far out there–cranial implants modifying behavior, death-row inmates choosing to be cryogenically frozen, etc. I’ll grant that he’s right on two points:

1) Criminal behavior is modified already in many cases by prescription drugs and psychiatry.

2) Surveillance and tracking, for all the issues they bring, will make it increasingly difficult to stealthily commit traditional crimes.

But debates about cerebral reconditioning and lobotomy? Yikes. Sounds almost criminal.

From Istvan:

One other method that could be considered for death row criminals is cryonics. The movie Minority Report, which features precogs who can see crime activity in the future, show other ways violent criminals are dealt with: namely a form of suspended animation where criminals dream out their lives. So the concept isn’t unheard of. With this in mind, maybe violent criminals even today should legally be given the option for cryonics, to be returned to a living state in the future where the reconditioning of the brain and new preventative technology—such as ubiquitous surveillance—means they could no longer commit violent acts.

Speaking of extreme surveillance—that rapidly growing field of technology also presents near-term alternatives for criminals on death row that might be considered sufficient punishment. We could permanently track and monitor death row criminals. And we could have an ankle brace (or implant) that releases a powerful tranquilizer if violent behavior is reported or attempted.

Surveillance and tracking of criminals would be expensive to monitor, but perhaps in five to 10 years time basic computer recognition programs in charge of drones might be able to do the surveillance affordably. In fact, it might be cheapest just to have a robot follow a violent criminal around all the time, another technology that also should be here in less than a decade’s time. Violent criminals could, for example, only travel in driverless cars approved and monitored by local police, and they’d always be accompanied by some drone or robot caretaker.•

 

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“If Donald Trump’s Comments About Fox News Anchor Megyn Kelly Are Hurting His Standing…It’s Not Showing In The Numbers”

August 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Thinking Donald Trump ruined his campaign in the aftermath of the GOP debates with his gross and stupid comments about Megyn Kelly of Fox News is missing the point for two reasons:

1) A campaign based on bluster, bigotry, insult and ego cannot be undone by bluster, bigotry, insult and ego.

2) What Trump continues to do is speak brazenly to the underlying reality of the modern Republican Party, saying aloud the racist, sexist things that are its driving force. No coded language for him.

The GOP and Fox News have long cultivated bigotry–Kelly herself has made some gross and stupid comments–blaming black and brown people and women for encroaching on white, male privilege. Erick Erickson can feign outrage at Trump all he wants, but he’s at least as much of a sexist toolbox. Conservatives can pretend they’re repulsed by attacks on John McCain’s military service, but John Kerry and Tammy Duckworth were broadly given the same treatment. They can make believe that Trump calling Mexicans “rapists” is beyond the pale, but he’s just echoing what elected Republicans have said.

Trump is the GOP’s private dream and also its public nightmare. At long last, he’s the party’s reckoning.

Of course, someone at some point might actually ask him a detailed policy question instead of playing into his hand. But the ugliness beneath the surface isn’t going away.

From a NBC News report about its post-debate poll:

If Donald Trump’s comments about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly are hurting his standing in the Republican primary, it’s not showing in the numbers.

According to the latest NBC News Online Poll conducted by SurveyMonkey, Trump is at the top of the list of GOP candidates that Republican primary voters would cast a ballot for if the primary were being held right now.

The overnight poll was conducted for 24 hours from Friday evening into Saturday. During that period, Donald Trump stayed in the headlines due to his negative comments about Kelly and was dis-invited from a major conservative gathering in Atlanta.

None of that stopped Trump from coming in at the top of the poll with 23 percent. Sen. Ted Cruz was next on the list with 13 percent.

During the Fox News debate Thursday evening, Trump was the only Republican candidate to say he would not rule out a run as an independent candidate. According to this poll, that’s just fine with over half of his supporters. 54% of Trump supporters said they would vote for him for president, even if he didn’t win the GOP nomination. About one in five Trump supporters said they would switch and support the eventual Republican candidate.

 

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“[It’s] A Critical Part Of NASA’s Journey To Mars”

August 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

We’ll need to learn how to grow food in space if we’re to inhabit other planets, but such otherworldly experiments will be helpful down here on the home base since we’ll need to produce more food with less impact on the environment. 

For the first time, astronauts are supplementing their menus with vegetables they’ve grown in microgravity environments. From a NASA press release:

Fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space officially is on the menu for the first time for NASA astronauts on the International Space Station. Expedition 44 crew members, including NASA’s one-year astronaut Scott Kelly, are ready to sample the fruits of their labor after harvesting a crop of “Outredgeous” red romaine lettuce Monday, Aug. 10, from the Veggie plant growth system on the nation’s orbiting laboratory.

The astronauts will clean the leafy greens with citric acid-based, food safe sanitizing wipes before consuming them. They will eat half of the space bounty, setting aside the other half to be packaged and frozen on the station until it can be returned to Earth for scientific analysis.

NASA’s plant experiment, called Veg-01, is being used to study the in-orbit function and performance of the plant growth facility and its rooting “pillows,” which contain the seeds.

NASA is maturing Veggie technology aboard the space station to provide future pioneers with a sustainable food supplement – a critical part of NASA’s Journey to Mars. As NASA moves toward long-duration exploration missions farther into the solar system, Veggie will be a resource for crew food growth and consumption. It also could be used by astronauts for recreational gardening activities during deep space missions.•

 

“Autonomous Weapons Could Also Initiate Or Escalate Armed Conflicts Automatically”

August 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It would be great to ban autonomous-weapons systems, but you don’t really get to govern too far into the future from the present. Our realities won’t be tomorrow’s, and I fear that sooner or later the possible becomes the plausible. Hopefully, we can at least kick that can far enough down the road so that everyone will be awakened to the significant risks before they’ve been realized. As Peter Asaro makes clear in a Scientific American essay, there will be grave consequences should warfare be robotized. An excerpt:

Autonomous weapons pose serious threats that, taken together, make a ban necessary. There are concerns whether AI algorithms could effectively distinguish civilians from combatants, especially in complex conflict environments. Even advanced AI algorithms would lack the situational understanding or the ability to determine whether the use of violent force was appropriate in a given circumstance or whether the use of that force was proportionate. Discrimination and proportionality are requirements of international law for humans who target and fire weapons but autonomous weapons would open up an accountability gap. Because humans would no longer know what targets an autonomous weapon might select, and because the effects of a weapon may be unpredictable, there would be no one to hold responsible for the killing and destruction that results from activating such a weapon.

Then, as the Future of Life Institute letter points out, there are threats to regional and global stability as well as humanity. The development of autonomous weapons could very quickly and easily lead to arms races between rivals. Autonomous weapons would reduce the risks to combatants, and could thus reduce the political risks of going to war, resulting in more armed conflicts. Autonomous weapons could be hacked, spoofed and hijacked, and directed against their owners, civilians or a third party. Autonomous weapons could also initiate or escalate armed conflicts automatically, without human decision-making. In a future where autonomous weapons fight autonomous weapons the results would be intrinsically unpredictable, and much more likely lead to the mass destruction of civilians and the environment than to the bloodless wars that some envision. Creating highly efficient automated violence is likely to lead to more violence, not less.

There is also a profound moral question at stake.•

 

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“The Occasional Unexpected Weirdness Of Machine Thought Might Also Be A Teaching Moment”

August 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

When Garry Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue, a key breaking point was his mistaking a glitch in his computer opponent for a human level of understanding. These strange behaviors can throw us off our game, but perhaps they can also shed light. In “Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Human,” David Berreby’s Nautilus article, the author believes that neural-network oddities, something akin to AI meeting ET, might be useful. An excerpt:

Neural nets sometimes make mistakes, which people can understand. (Yes, those desks look quite real; it’s hard for me, too, to see they are a reflection.) But some hard problems make neural nets respond in ways that aren’t understandable. Neural nets execute algorithms—a set of instructions for completing a task. Algorithms, of course, are written by human beings. Yet neural nets sometimes come out with answers that are downright weird: not right, but also not wrong in a way that people can grasp. Instead, the answers sound like something an extraterrestrial might come up with.

These oddball results are rare. But they aren’t just random glitches. Researchers have recently devised reliable ways to make neural nets produce such eerily inhuman judgments. That suggests humanity shouldn’t assume our machines think as we do. Neural nets sometimes think differently. And we don’t really know how or why.

That can be a troubling thought, even if you aren’t yet depending on neural nets to run your home and drive you around. After all, the more we rely on artificial intelligence, the more we need it to be predictable, especially in failure. Not knowing how or why a machine did something strange leaves us unable to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

But the occasional unexpected weirdness of machine “thought” might also be a teaching moment for humanity. Until we make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, neural nets are probably the ablest non-human thinkers we know.•

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“The Fact That Data Itself Is Biased May Be Shocking To Some”

August 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Humans are so terribly at hiring other humans for jobs that it seems plausible software couldn’t do much worse. I think that will certainly be true eventually, if it isn’t already, though algorithms won’t likely be much better at identifying non-traditional candidates with deeply embedded talents. Perhaps a human-machine hybrid à la freestyle chess would work best for the foreseeable future?

In arguing that journalists aren’t being rigorous enough when reporting on HR software systems, Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung of the Daily Beast point out that data doesn’t necessarily mitigate bias. An excerpt:

Software is said to be “free of human biases.” This is a false statement. Every statistical model is a composite of data and assumptions; and both data and assumptions carry biases.

The fact that data itself is biased may be shocking to some. Occasionally, the bias is so potent that it could invalidate entire projects. Consider those startups that are building models to predict who should be hired. The data to build such machines typically come from recruiting databases, including the characteristics of past applicants, and indicators of which applicants were successful. But this historical database is tainted by past hiring practices, which reflected a lack of diversity. If these employers never had diverse applicants, or never made many minority hires, there is scant data available to create a predictive model that can increase diversity! Ironically, to accomplish this goal, the scientists should code human bias into the software.•

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“Countless Pit Stops Along Well-Worn Trucking Routes Could Become Ghost Towns”

August 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The passage below from Rachel Nuwer’s BBC report about technological unemployment speaks to why I largely disagree with Jerry Kaplan that robotics will be far worse for male workers than female. There probably will be a difference, but if the machines come en masse in a compressed period of time, they come for most of us.

Oxford’s Carl Frey tells Nuwer that “overall, people should be happy that a lot of these jobs have actually disappeared,” when speaking of drudgery that’s heretofore been vanished by electrical gadgets, but the new reality may mean a tremendous aggregate improvement enjoyed by relatively few. In the long-term, that may all work itself out, but we better be ready with solutions in the short- and medium-term.

The excerpt:

Self-driving trucks wouldn’t be good news for everyone, however. Critics point out that, should this breakthrough be realised, there will be a significant knock-on effect for employment. In the US, up to 3.5 million drivers and 5.2 million additional personnel who work directly within the industry would be out of a job. Additionally, countless pit stops along well-worn trucking routes could become ghost towns. Self-driving trucks, in other words, might wreck millions of lives and bring disaster to a significant sector of the economy.

Dire warnings such as these are frequently issued, not only for the trucking industry, but for the world’s workforce at large. As machines, software and robots become more sophisticated, some fear that we stand to lose millions of jobs. According to one unpublished study, the coming wave of technological breakthroughs endangers up to 47% of total employment in the US.

But is there any truth to such projections, and if so, how concerned should we be? Will the robots take over, rendering us all professional couch potatoes, as imagined in the film Wall-E, or will technological innovation give us the freedom to pursue more creative, rewarding endeavours?•

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“At Several Points In The Two-Hour Debate, He Was Booed”

August 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, a colostomy bag stuffed with ill-considered opinions, face-planted at the first GOP Presidential debate, but how far can you really fall when you live in the gutter? Some thought Trump would be surprisingly good in the forum since he has plenty of TV experience, but if you think about it, he only seems potent in those venues when he goes unchallenged, when he’s the boss. Like most bullies, he grows flustered when having to ward off a return blow.

Far more than any other venue, including reliably Lefty outlets like MSNBC, Fox News led Republicans to a horrifying national defeat in 2012, reassuring the faithful with dodgy poll readings that Barack Hussein couldn’t possibly gain a second term. That led to complacency during campaign season and shocked disbelief on Election Day. Reince Priebus and the party called for a full check-up, with the patient to begin a new course in the immediate future.

But not much has changed. Immigrants, women, LGBT people, universal health care and a sane foreign policy are still anathema to almost all the candidates. Perhaps the Fox moderators’ contentiousness was an attempt to awaken the contenders to another November nightmare, but it was most likely just another Reality TV show, with the hosts pushing buttons to gain ratings. For Trump, of course, it was a different kind of program from the one he’s used to–it was one where he could get fired.

The opening of Edward Luce’s predictably astute Financial Times analysis of the debate:

If clarity and geniality count for anything, Donald Trump was the loser of the Republican Party’s first 2016 debate.

With star billing in the biggest reality TV show of all, the property magnate struggled for rapport with the audience. At several points in the two-hour debate, he was booed.

In the post-debate autopsy, Fox News Channel’s focus groups found Mr Trump to be rude, lacking in specific answers and unpresidential. It is hard to believe the average television viewer would have come away feeling radically different.

Yet it is also hard to believe they did not already know all this about him before the show began. Mr Trump has held a double digit poll lead for several weeks. Might the debate have arrested his rise?

We will have to await the polls. But it is worth bearing in mind that at every point in Mr Trump’s steep ascent since mid-June, the political classes have called his peak — and been wrong. The Fox News debate may be no exception.•

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“There’s A Dangerous Logic In That”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

America was not a particularly militarized country until we were forced to enter WWII, and we haven’t been anything else ever since. Thanks, Germany.

In a Spiegel Q&A conducted by Joachim Mohr and Matthias Schepp, Pizza Hut salesman Mikhail Gorbachev doesn’t believe the world has any hope of being nuclear-free until the U.S. changes its mindset about defense. I could see the country conceding on nukes and reducing spending overall, but Gorbachev’s desire to see America stop creating new weapons systems seems unrealistic. DARPA is going to push robotics and AI as far as they can go. Gorbachev also allows that President Reagan was convinced that there could be no “winner” of a nuclear war, no matter his cowboy-ish bluster.

An excerpt:

Spiegel:

Can the goal of a nuclear free world still be achieved today?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

It is the correct goal in any case. Nuclear weapons are unacceptable. The fact that they can wipe out the entirety of civilization makes them particularly inhumane. Weapons like this have never existed before in history and they cannot be allowed to exist. If we do not get rid of them, sooner or later they will be used.

Spiegel:

In recent years, a number of new nuclear powers have emerged.

Mikhail Gorbachev:

That’s why we should not forget that the elimination of nuclear weapons is the obligation of every country that signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Though America and Russia have by far the largest arsenals at their disposal.

Spiegel:

What do you think of the oft-cited theory that mutually assured destruction prevents nuclear wars?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

There’s a dangerous logic in that. Here’s another question: If five or 10 countries are allowed to have nuclear weapons, then why can’t 20 or 30? Today, a few dozen countries have the technical prerequisites to build nuclear weapons. The alternative is clear: Either we move toward a nuclear-free world or we have to accept that nuclear weapons will continue to spread, step by step, across the globe. And can we really imagine a world without nuclear weapons if a single country amasses so many conventional weapons that its military budget nearly tops that of all other countries combined? This country would enjoy total military supremacy if nuclear weapons were abolished.

Spiegel:

You’re talking about the US?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

You said it. It is an insurmountable obstacle on the road to a nuclear-free world. That’s why we have to put demilitarization back on the agenda of international politics. This includes a reduction of military budgets, a moratorium on the development of new types of weapons and a prohibition on militarizing space. Otherwise, talks toward a nuclear-free world will be little more than empty words. The world would then become less safe, more unstable and unpredictable. Everyone will lose, including those now seeking to dominate the world.•

 

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“My Brother — The Anti-Tebow”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

One positive outcome of our newly decentralized media is that all of society is now a long tail, with room for far more categories of beliefs and lifestyles, whether someone is Transgender or Libertarian or Atheist.

Case in point: Houston Texans star Arian Foster. Religion goes with football the way it does with war, perhaps because they’re two activities where you might want to pray you don’t get killed, but Foster, who’s played in the heart of the Bible Belt his entire college and pro career, doesn’t believe anyone is watching over him except for the replay assistant in the NFL booth. The former Muslim is now a devout atheist who offers a respectful Namaste bow after a TD but does not pray in a huddle. In an ESPN Magazine article, Tim Keown profiles the running back as he publicly discusses his lack of religion for the first time. An excerpt:

THE HOUSE IS a churn of activity. Arian’s mother, Bernadette, and sister, Christina, are cooking what they proudly call “authentic New Mexican food.” His older brother, Abdul, is splayed out on a room-sized sectional, watching basketball and fielding requests from the five little kids — three of them Arian’s — who are bouncing from the living room to the large playhouse, complete with slide, in the front room. I tell Abdul why I’m here and he says, “My brother — the anti-Tebow,” with a comic eye roll.

Arian Foster, 28, has spent his entire public football career — in college at Tennessee, in the NFL with the Texans — in the Bible Belt. Playing in the sport that most closely aligns itself with religion, in which God and country are both industry and packaging, in which the pregame flyover blends with the postgame prayer, Foster does not believe in God.

“Everybody always says the same thing: You have to have faith,” he says. “That’s my whole thing: Faith isn’t enough for me. For people who are struggling with that, they’re nervous about telling their families or afraid of the backlash … man, don’t be afraid to be you. I was, for years.”

He has tossed out sly hints in the past, just enough to give himself wink-and-a-nod deniability, but he recently decided to become a public face of the nonreligious.•

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“This Is The Real Face Of Journalism Today”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For all the great things the shift from newsprint to the Internet has brought us, one thing lost in that dynamic has been the ability for fledgling reporters–even veteran ones–to pay the bills, especially those wishing to write about important social issues. Like most of America, the middle is largely gone in journalism, the fear of falling having proved to be no mere paranoia.

In a Guardian piece, Barbara Ehrenreich writes about this new arrangement, the few haves and the many have-nots, particularly among those who wish to cover poverty in America. After all, what is the good of everybody having their own channel in a decentralized media if they can’t afford the electricity to power their laptop or recharge their smartphone? An excerpt:

In the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a number of people who are at least as qualified writers as I am, especially when it comes to the subject of poverty, but who’ve been held back by their own poverty. There’s Darryl Wellington, for example, a local columnist (and poet) in Santa Fe who has, at times, had to supplement his tiny income by selling his plasma – a fallback than can have serious health consequences. Or Joe Williams, who, after losing an editorial job, was reduced to writing for $50 a piece for online political sites while mowing lawns and working in a sporting goods store for $10 an hour to pay for a room in a friend’s house. Linda Tirado was blogging about her job as a cook at Ihop when she managed to snag a contract for a powerful book entitled Hand to Mouth (for which I wrote the preface). Now she is working on a “multi-media mentoring project” to help other working-class journalists get published.

There are many thousands of people like these – gifted journalists who want to address serious social issues but cannot afford to do so in a media environment that thrives by refusing to pay, or anywhere near adequately pay, its “content providers.” Some were born into poverty and have stories to tell about coping with low-wage jobs, evictions or life as a foster child. Others inhabit the once-proud urban “creative class,” which now finds itself priced out of its traditional neighborhoods, like Park Slope or LA’s Echo Park, scrambling for health insurance and childcare, sleeping on other people’s couches. They want to write – or do photography or documentaries. They have a lot to say, but it’s beginning to make more sense to apply for work as a cashier or a fry-cook.

This is the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals who can’t muster up expenses to even start on the articles, photo-essays and videos they want to do, much less find an outlet to cover the costs of doing them.•

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“I Think A Lot Of People Are Very Relieved I’m Not In Journalism Now”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

it was like Godzilla vs. ...

“It was like Godzilla versus…

... King Kong.

… King Kong.”

It’s not yet certain that it will end for Nikki Finke the way it did for Muammar Gaddafi. Time will tell.

The facacta, constantly dying, yet often useful Hollywood journalist, has reached a settlement with former boss Jay Penske after a poisonous parting and is rebranding herself as a publisher of show-business fiction with Hollywood Dementia. She just did an AMA at Reddit and came across as shockingly normal. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Who is the craziest executive still working in Hollywood?

Nikki Finke:

Oh my. That’s an incredibly long list. The producer Scott Rudin probably is #1 followed close behind by studio chief Harvey Weinstein. I recall one time when the two of them were fighting: it was like Godzilla vs King Kong. I made one of them promise to give a donation to a charity if what I was reporting was wrong: it wasn’t, but they never made the donation, dammit.

I’d have to add Ryan Kavanaugh to that list. But since his company is going belly up (bankruptcy), he may not be around much longer. Which is a shame because who will Hollywood have to kick around now? He was a laughingstock, or should have been.

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Question:

Which scoop have you witnessed go beyond entertainment that possibly affected politics, world events?

Nikki Finke:

Well, I scooped the world about Ronald Reagan’s final weekend and death. And I used to report on U.S.-Russian strategic arms talks and summits between leaders. But when Benghazi broke out, and an anti-Muslim movie was blamed, I kept reorting on what was true and what wasn’t. Plus, I scooped that Oprah was leaving her syndicated show – and that was pretty earth-shattering, LOL. I couldn’t believe what a big deal that was.

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Question:

How’s your relationship with Matt Drudge these days?

Nikki Finke:

I’ve known Matt Drudge for seemingly forever. He was one of the true online pioneers. What’s amazing about Drudge is his reach into every facet of power in every field. He truly has clout. Media outlets like The New York Times beg him to pick up their stories. He and I both are finding the Trump phenom right now very stimulating and interesting for the media – if it lasts.

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Question:

Ben Affleck and the Nanny, yes or no? How about JLo?

Nikki Finke:

Thank god I’ve never done celebrity gossip in my long career. I have zero interest in it. I believe everyone is entitled to a private personal life. I don’t and won’t go there. But from a professional standpoint, Ben Affleck was one of the most humble actors/directors/producers I ever came to know in Hollywood. And that’s saying a lot. I remember the night he won the Best Picture Oscar for Argo, he called me from his car as he was leaving the ceremony. And even though everyone knew he was going to win, he was still gobsmacked about it, almost in shock.

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Question:

Hi Nikki! It seems like the journalism world is very cutthroat and competitive — do you have advice for young reporters just starting out about forming relationships with their peers? Is it sometimes hard to make friendships with people you’re competing against in media?

Nikki Finke:

When I was a young journalist, I found that the older journalists hated me. They threw shade because they knew I was working harder than them and scooping them which made them look bad to their editors. (No journo likes to hear, “Why didn’t you have that story?” from their editors.) It took me a few years to ignore them and that. You must have balls of steel to go with a thick skin. The only thing that matters is working your sources and getting as close to the truth as possible. Who cares if no one likes you for it? Isn’t that why people get dogs? In recent years I’m so used to getting bad press about how I “bullied” Hollywood that I was shocked when anybody had anything nice to say about me. I think a lot of people are very relieved I’m not in journalism now.•

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“We Have Become Too Desensitized To The Horrendous Metrics That Define Today’s America”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Howard Schultz, the President of coffee, has been suggested (by…someone) as a potential game-changing Democratic candidate for those weary from Clinton fatigue. The Starbucks CEO has declared he’s not running, but he apparently loved being seriously considered (by…someone). Taking precious time from getting me my fucking five-dollar frappuccino while I stand here waiting, Schultz has penned a New York Times op-ed in perfect politician speak.

In it, he feigns that Washington gridlock is the result of equivalent irresponsibility of both parties rather than due to the modern GOP being insane, a time-tested gambit to make it appear one’s above the fray. He also declares from within his CEO bubble that “I have no intention of entering the presidential fray. I’m not done serving at Starbucks,” as if those two “nations” were equal. Well, in all fairness to him, only one of them is turning a profit. Schultz thinks we can improve as a country if we just embrace those different from us and try working together. Too bad Obama didn’t think of that.

At any rate, I should be grateful for the rare corporate executive who realizes the American middle class is going, going, gone–even if he might be adding to the problem. An excerpt:

Our nation has been profoundly damaged by a lack of civility and courage in Washington, where leaders of both parties have abdicated their responsibility to forge reasonable compromises to expand the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, improve schools, transform entitlement programs and so much more. We have become too desensitized to the horrendous metrics that define today’s America, from student-loan debt to food-stamp dependency to the size of our prison population.

As a boy growing up in public housing in Brooklyn, I was told by my mother that I could be the first in my family to graduate from college. A scholarship and an entry-level job at Xerox created a path upward that was typical for many of my generation.

For too many Americans, the belief that propelled me, that I had the opportunity to climb the ladder of prosperity, has greatly diminished. I hear it from coast to coast as I sit with customers in our stores. Six in 10 Americans believe that the younger generation will not be better off than their parents. Millennials have never witnessed politics devoid of toxicity. Anxiety, not optimism, rules the day.•

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“Where Do The Dislodged Go?”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

New York City was always about money, but it wasn’t only about it. Now it is. 

The economist Tyler Cowen believes American cities will be only for the rich in the not-too-distant future, and that we’ll look back in wonder that poor people used to actually live in such glamorous places. I still don’t believe that’s true–or don’t want to believe it–but the NYC non-rich are being treated like suspects and moved out to the edges until they fall off. And it’s a long way down from there.

Real estate prices are booming, a global market snaps up addresses, Airbnb helps move rental stock off the market and subsidized rents are quickly disappearing. Sometimes I still like it here, walking in Soho or buying books at the Strand, but I do increasingly feel like an expat in the city where I’ve always lived.

From Michael Greenberg’s New York Review of Books piece about the documentary Homme Less:

The spike in prices has profoundly altered the psychology of these neighborhoods, threatening the security of thousands of long-term residents, many of them families with working parents. The transformation has been dizzyingly abrupt. The process of repopulating a neighborhood with a wealthier class of residents that took twenty years on the Lower East Side during the late 1990s and early 2000s can now occur in five years or less in some parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

In August 2013, for example, Burke Leighton Asset Management bought 805 St. Marks Avenue, a pre-war, six-story building with two hundred apartments in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, for $22 million. In May, a little more than a year and a half later, they sold it to a Swedish real estate company called Akelius for $44 million. Akelius’s CEO said that he decided to invest in Crown Heights when he saw an increasing number of young people with “single-speed bicycles” in the neighborhood. I’ve no knowledge of Akelius’s plans for the building, but the only sure way to derive a reasonable return from this level of investment would be to find a means to deregulate the rent-stabilized apartments, and this invariably involves dislodging the families who live in them.

Over the past fifteen years New York has lost more than 200,000 units of affordable housing—20 percent of the current stock. The rate of loss has accelerated in recent years, putting the future of the city’s remaining rent-regulated apartments in grave doubt. What becomes of a city that economically bars its working class from living in it? New York may be in the process of finding out. Once apartments become deregulated, they never come back.

Where do the dislodged go? And how many are there?•

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“Is It Possible To Design A Utopia?”

August 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The success of China’s insta-cities is dubious even with the iron fist of authoritarianism set to crush dissenters, but dense “cities in a building” or “cities in the sky,” attempts at large-scale, ecologically friendly developments influenced by the work of the late Arcology designer Paolo Soleri, have a particularly spotty track record. Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City (even a diminished version) may prove the exception, but top-down developments seldom satisfy human desires, even if they’re ostensibly good for us.

In a smart Aeon essay, Jared Keller writes of Soleri’s Arizona desert dream and explores why its offshoots, potential goldmines, don’t pan out. An excerpt:

In 1956, Soleri and his wife Corolyn ‘Colly’ Woods moved just miles from Phoenix’s out-of-control suburban sprawl to set up an architectural workshop, dubbed Cosanti (from the Italiancosa and anti, or ‘before things’), in Paradise Valley to develop his unique philosophy of architecture. One of Soleri’s earliest visions was Mesa City, a proposed city the size of Manhattan with 2 million inhabitants. Over five years, Soleri would draw hundreds of feet of scrolls detailing the intricate structures and landscape of this hypothetical metropolis.

In 1970, Soleri finally broke ground on Arcosanti, an experimental city and ‘urban laboratory’ that has been under construction for nearly half a century. To the average visitor, Arcosanti looks like a college campus sprouting in the middle of the desert, molded from the red silt of the surrounding mesa. The complex is marked by a cluster of soaring stone apses, crafted in Soleri’s distinct, casting-inspired architectural style, designed to absorb sunlight and power the town’s energy grid. The majority of buildings are oriented to the south to capture the sun’s light and heat, while an open roof design yields maximum sunlight in the winter and shade in the summer. Artisans live and work in a densely packed compound, designed for maximum energy efficiency and sustainability. The community’s permanent residents keep greenhouses and agricultural fields, and income from bell-casting goes to maintaining the town’s infrastructure.

Arcosanti is as socially efficient as it is sustainable. The buildings and walkways are built in a more dynamic formation than a conventional city grid, not just to conserve resources but also to encourage increased social interaction between residents, forcing them to bump into each other in various open-air atriums, gardens and greenhouses. Living quarters are clustered in a honeycomb of sparse, minimalist apartments, all virtually identical. The open design and emphasis on sustainable living has created a distinctly hippy, communitarian vibe; the population of the town is mostly Soleri fanatics and bell-casting artisans. The city has never been officially finished, and while the current population wavers around 80, the town was designed to sustain some 5,000. …

Despite Soleri’s best efforts, it’s not clear that humanity is ready for the perfect architectural utopias he imagined.•

 

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“Please Forget Everything That You Have Seen In Science Fiction Movies About Spacesuit Failures”

August 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I think the received wisdom about spacesuits is that even the smallest tear in the fabric during a mission in outer space will lead to certain death. Not necessarily so, says Cathleen Lewis, curator at Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, during a Reddit AMA. Three exchanges follow.

___________________

Question:

What would happen if a spacesuit were to be punctured while in space?

Cathleen Lewis:

First of all, there has never been a loss of an astronaut or cosmonaut due to a spacesuit failure. Second, please forget everything that you have seen in science fiction movies about spacesuit failures. They are usually overly dramatized and frequently wrong. There have been four documented cases of spacesuit failures in history. None resulted in deaths. Without a spacesuit and the oxygen necessary to breathe, an astronaut would immediately feel the nitrogen coming out of his fluids, almost like the tears and saliva were carbonated. After about 15 seconds, he would pass out and, without an emergency rescue, he would die within two minutes. The body would float in space and only very slowly lose body heat because there is no efficient way to radiate heat away from the body. In the case of a small puncture, usually the flesh would swell in the immediate area and stopper the hole. This can be extremely painful, but the victim would recover.

___________________

Question:

What are other countries space suits like compared to ours?

Cathleen Lewis:

Remarkably, even though all spacesuits perform similar functions, they do not look alike. When the Soviet Union designed a suit to carry men to the Moon, they opted for a single piece suit that the cosmonaut would climb in through a hinged backpack. The Russians maintain a similar design in the EVA suits that cosmonauts wear when they do spacewalks from the Russian node of the International Space Station. These dissimilarities result from differences in available materials, different senses of aesthetics, and differing attitudes about innovation and refinement of design. The Russians remain very conservative and have retained many of the features that they designed for their first suits over 50 years ago. On the U.S. side, there is a greater effort at matching the spacesuit to the spacecraft and the mission. There is also the contracting and bidding issue that complicates the American side, but I won’t go into that here. You should also look at the Chinese spacesuits. They are remarkably similar to the Russian launch and entry suits. One assumes that they learned this design from the years that they worked with the Soviets and Russians in preparation for their own human spaceflight program.

___________________

Question:

Regardless of accuracy, what is your favorite movie space suit?

Cathleen Lewis:

It hasn’t opened yet, but I am anxiously awaiting Ridley Scott’s The Martian. I loved the book and from the promotions, he seems to have gotten the spacesuit right. Usually in movies the helmets are too big. I understand that this is for filming and showing the actors’s faces, but it is a distracting feature for a spacesuit curator.•

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“Levin Has Been Warning TMZ Employees Both Past And Present Not To Speak”

August 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

TMZ seems to exist solely to excitedly announce which famous people have died, some of whom have actually died.

My main issue with Harvey Levin’s clown car of entertainment reportage isn’t that it’s scurrilous, which it is, but that it doesn’t use that scurrilousness to a good end, never holding a light to the industry’s dark side. The outlet is just another part of the Hollywood game, not revealing anything too damaging which could jeopardize access. You don’t think maybe the folks there might have heard something about the many, many abuses and inequities that occur in show business? The site may report on lawsuits stemming from such behaviors if they’ve already come to light, but it will never break such stories. There are relationships to be maintained.

Nicholas Schmidle, a very talented New Yorker writer, is working on a TMZ story, according to a piece by Matthew Belloni and Chris Gardner of The Hollywood Reporter, and I can’t wait. The opening:

Levin, 64, has been warning TMZ employees both past and present not to speak to writer Nicholas Schmidle, whose résumé might explain why Levin is so nervous. Schmidle’s previous subjects include the hunt for Osama bin Laden (his New Yorker story “Getting Bin Laden” was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2013), a Russian arms trafficker and war crimes in Kosovo. In addition, The New Yorker has shown a willingness to publish unflattering stories set in the world of media and entertainment. For instance, the Conde Nast-owned magazine’s lengthy profile of filmmaker Paul Haggis’ separation from Scientology by writer Lawrence Wright led to Wright’s book Going Clear and the Alex Gibney-directed HBO documentary that premiered at Sundance and was recently nominated for an Emmy. Several TMZ insiders have spoken to Schmidle anyway, according to sources, as have others in the so-called Thirty Mile Zone around Hollywood from which TMZ took its name.•

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“Iceberg Slim’s Prose Was, And Is, As Ecstatic And Original As A Chuck Berry Guitar Solo”

August 5, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I know it sounds unlikely, but I once asked Snoop Dogg what it was he liked about pimping, that disgraceful thing, when he was a child. He answered in the most consumerist terms: the clothes, the cars, the hair–the style that only money could buy. It was the closest thing to capitalism that young Calvin Broadus could imagine his.

I don’t know if the late and infamous pimp Iceberg Slim (born Robert Beck) was what Malcolm X would have been had he never been politicized, but he certainly was the template for Don King, Dr. Dre and other African-American males who wanted into the capitalist system in the worst way–and got there by those means. The way they looked at it, their hands weren’t any dirtier than anyone else’s, just darker. 

A new biography of Slim encourages us to consider him for his literary talent, not just his outsize persona. Dwight Garner of the New York Times, who writes beautifully on any topic, has a review. The opening:

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, if you wanted a book by Iceberg Slim, the best-selling black writer in America, you didn’t go to a bookstore. You went to a black-owned barbershop or liquor store or gas station. Maybe you found a copy on a corner table down the block, or being passed around in prison.

The first and finest of his books was a memoir, Pimp: The Story of My Life, published in 1967. This was street literature, marketed as pulp. The New York Times didn’t merely not review Pimp, Justin Gifford notes in Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim. Given the title, this newspaper wouldn’t even print an ad for it.

Pimp related stories from Iceberg Slim’s 25 years on the streets of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit and other cities. It was dark. The author learned to mistreat women with a chilly élan. It was dirty, so filled with raw language and vividly described sex acts that, nearly 50 years later, the book still makes your eyeballs leap out of your skull, as if you were at the bottom of a bungee jump.

Yet Iceberg Slim’s prose was, and is, as ecstatic and original as a Chuck Berry guitar solo. Mark Twain meets Malcolm X in his sentences. When he was caught with an underage girl by her father, for example, the author didn’t just run. “I vaulted over the back fence,” he wrote, “and torpedoed down the alley.”

Pimp is a different sort of American coming-of-age story, the tale of a determined young man who connived to take what society would not give. It’s a subversive classic.•

_______________________________

A masked Slim meets Joe Pyne in the 1960s.

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“It’s No Substitute For Rail”

August 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets, but until then urban centers are going to become increasingly dense and we’ll need people-moving mass transportation.

In a Conversation essay, Roberto Palacin argues the future of rail travel isn’t magnetic levitation or the Hyperloop but something very similar to high-speed trains of today. (It should be noted he doesn’t address how the perfecting of driverless vehicles would impact rail.) An excerpt about why the the writer feels the Hyperloop is not the next big thing:

Hyperloop is an elegant idea: travelling seamlessly at 1,220kph (that’s right, 760mph – just under the speed of sound) in gracefully designed pods that arrive as often as every 30 seconds is very appealing. The concept is based around very straight tubes with a partial vacuum applied under the pods. These pods have an electric compressor fan on their nose which actively transfers high-pressure air from the front to the rear, creating an air cushion once a linear electric motor has launched the pod. All this would be battery and solar powered.

Technically it’s a challenging design, although if someone can make it happen it’s the man who proposed the idea, Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX and Tesla. However, Hyperloop is not rail travel. It is, as Musk puts it, a fifth mode of transport (after trains, cars, boats and planes). It’s designed to link Los Angeles to San Francisco; cities hundreds of miles apart that can be connected in an almost straight line over a relative flat landscape. This simply isn’t an option in much of the world.

Ultimately, if Hyperloop happens at all it will be a stand-alone system. It’s no substitute for rail.•

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