Politics

You are currently browsing the archive for the Politics category.

“When We’re Thinking About Voting For President, We’re Also Thinking About What’s ‘Presidential'”

May 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The_Arsenio_Hall_Show_Clinton_TVGM

640_Barack_Obama_Bear_Grylls

trumpmcmahon

Presidential used to mean roughly the same thing to the majority of Americans, Democrat or Republican. It was a code of behavior that meant that if you wanted to hold the highest office in the land it would be really helpful if you didn’t embarrass the rest of us. We were worried about the neighbors might think, so you needed to be a stuffed shirt who kept it in your pants–in public, at least. This behavior was just as important as being competent at the job, maybe more. Merely playing wind instruments in close proximity to Arsenio Hall could make you suspicious. In this Baba Booey of an election season, the word presidential has clearly come to mean something far different than it previously has.

President Obama can park himself in Marc Maron’s garage or bro it up with urine-drinking Bear Grylls and still maintain his dignity, but that trait is quaint today, almost an anachronism. It’s an extra coat of paint that doesn’t raise the value of the house, even if it’s the White House. Donald Trump’s disgusting bumfight of a campaign is more modern, resonating with a public prepared for it by our decentralized media and Reality TV landscape. For a large minority (at the minimum), his behavior is the new normal. The fly’s come undone.

In a smart New York Times essay, Wesley Morris looks for the true meaning of the word presidential. There are great observations like this one: “The Obama era is also our Hamilton moment, in which the state of being ‘presidential’ can belong to whomever we say it does.” The opening:

Of the many words Donald Trump has uttered over the last nine months — all the insightful insults and blustery boasts, all the syntax-slaying murk that sometimes boomerangs back into sense and all the hateful hate that doesn’t — last month brought a new flash of negative élan. Trump was speaking at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., when he took stock of his own demeanor as a candidate.

“Now, my wife is constantly saying, ‘Darling, be more presidential.’ I just don’t know that I want to do it quite yet,” he told a packed, ready-to-rock house. “At some point I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored. And I’ll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people, I’ll have about 150 people, and they’ll say, ‘But, boy, he really looks presidential!’ ”

When we’re thinking about voting for president, we’re also thinking about what’s “presidential.” I never know quite what that means, except that, like the sitcom-wife version of Melania Trump in her husband’s anecdote, I kind of do. It connotes carriage and posture and intelligence. It captures dignified comportment and a degree of knowledge. It’s the ability to depict leadership, from lecterns to tarmacs. It’s partly cosmetic — is this person tall, passably fit, loosely attractive, warm? — and almost entirely presentational. It’s the seriousness a candidate has to project in order to be taken seriously, only without seeming dour or battery-operated. “Presidential” used to be something to aspire to. All of that authority, know-how, gravitas, good posture and moral rectitude — it seemed so important, so adult, so American.

But Trump has tapped into something else about “presidential”: If it’s a performance, then it can be switched on and off as needed.•

Tags:

“Before The Filter Bubble, There Was The So-Called Echo Chamber”

May 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

glennbeckurine

Trending Topics at Afflictor: Monkeys, Astronauts, Monkey Astronauts. Oh, and President Trump’s tiny monkey hands. Take it or leave it.

Facebook got into trouble last week with the GOP because a report claimed human editors choosing the social network’s Trending Topics are exercising bias against conservatives. It was widely thought these keywords rose and fell purely based on popularity, in an automated way.

What’s most amusing about this is that Republicans have been greatly aided in recent congressional races because of gerrymandering, in which humans draw up districts in a willfully biased way. Just suggest to them that prejudice-less algorithms decide the nation’s districts based purely on population statistics. The connection will go silent.

There’s no doubt that Facebook perhaps becoming our chief news source is problematic because the social network isn’t mainly in the journalism business and news will never be its main priority. But I wonder if what it delivers is really any more biased than what we get from traditional outlets. 

In a Wall Street Journal column, Christopher Mims looks deeper at the issue and questions if narrowcasting in Facebook feeds is actually a problem. An excerpt:

Claiming that Facebook is contributing to our age of hyper-partisanship by only showing us things that fit our own personal slant is, ironically, an example of confirmation bias, because the evidence around it is mixed.

After an exhaustive search of the literature around filter bubbles, five co-authors and Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, a researcher at the a researcher at the Personalised Communication project at the University of Amsterdam, concluded concerns might be overblown. “In spite of the serious concerns voiced, at present there is no empirical evidence that warrants any strong worries about filter bubbles,” Mr. Zuiderveen Borgesius wrote in an email.

The authors examined not only Facebook but other online services, including Google search. Mr. Zuiderveen Borgesius’s conclusion: We don’t have enough data to say whether Facebook is biasing the news its readers see, or—and this is even more important—whether it affects their views and behavior.

Facebook’s opacity aside, where does the hand-wringing come from? Two places, I think: the first is that everyone in the media is terrified of Facebook’s power to determine whether individual stories and even entire news organizations succeed or fail. The second is an ancient fear that, by associating only with people like ourselves, and being selective in what we read, we are biasing ourselves unduly.

Before the filter bubble, there was the so-called echo chamber.•

Tags:

“Self-Service Ordering Kiosks Will Be Made Available Across Its 6,000-Plus Restaurants”

May 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

HamburgerMachine

If the only options many workers have are to either accept a less-than-living wage or be replaced by machines, we’re in trouble. Fast-food places use to offer starter jobs, but there’s no place for many burger-and-fries folks to advance to, so these are careers now, for lack of a better word. A $15 minimum wage is necessary yet may drive corporations to automate food ordering and even preparation. At the very least, some of the jobs will vanish. 

From Jed Graham at Investor’s Business Daily:

Wendy’s said that self-service ordering kiosks will be made available across its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year as minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market push up wages.

It will be up to franchisees whether to deploy the labor-saving technology, but Wendy’s President Todd Penegor did note that some franchise locations have been raising prices to offset wage hikes.

McDonald’s has been testing self-service kiosks. But Wendy’s, which has been vocal about embracing labor-saving technology, is launching the biggest potential expansion. …

In addition to self-order kiosks, the company is also getting ready to move beyond the testing phase with labor-saving mobile ordering and mobile payment available systemwide by the end of the year. Yum Brands and McDonald’s already have mobile ordering apps.•

Tags: ,

“The Majority Of The World Might Soon Be Using The Same Map”

May 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kartograph

Thanks to Nicholas Carr’s great blog, Rough Type, for pointing me to Justin O’Beirne’s 2015 essay “The Universal Map,” which I missed last year. It addresses the quietly seismic changes occurring in cartography. The romance of the profession, formerly an often solitary and painstaking thing, has been replaced by (almost) real-time, computerized efficiency, or so it would seem.

So much of the next wave of AI and automation will demand insta-maps communicated from gadget to gadget and constantly updated (think driverless cars). That means maps will become increasingly universal as smartphones continue to spread. Mistakes will still sneak though most likely, and I suppose they’ll become universally accepted as well. Even if those flaws are corrected relatively quickly, they might cause problems for a brief spell. That at least is the best-case scenario.

As Carr notes, the map itself is being disappeared as tiny bits of information and directions obliterate the larger picture. O’Beirne himself is less sanguine on the topic a year later, writing that the work of Google Maps has surprisingly deteriorated. Is it more troubling to have one mediocre map for all of us than plenty of different ones of varying quality?

O’Beirne’s 2015 opening:

Just thirty years ago — and for most of human history — a cartographer would make a map, print and distribute it, and hope that maybe a few thousand or so people would ever use it before it went out of date. Apart from a handful of atlases and classroom maps, most maps had small, local audiences, went out of date quickly, and were often difficult to read and understand — let alone share.

Fast forward to today, and cartography has since undergone a number of profound changes:

  • An unprecedented level of detail is now available to the average person, for little or no cost. The same map literally shows every human settlement in the world at every scale, from the world’s largest cities to its tiniest neighborhoods and hamlets. Every country. Every city. Every road. All mapped in exquisite detail. Moreover, maps increasingly show every business open today — an interactive, visual yellow pages for the whole world. And add to that imagery, street view, and live transit and traffic. No one has ever had access to this much detail, for so cheaply, until now.
     
  • Maps are now always up to date. Errors are corrected in hours and minutes, instead of months and years — and new roads and businesses are added instantly. Unlike the paper maps of thirty years ago, today’s maps never expire.
     
  • Maps fit us, regardless of who or where we are. Foreign lands are presented in our own language, and we can easily and endlessly adjust scales, orientations, dimensions, and even time. We have day mode, night mode, and even basic personalization. And every corner of the globe is presented in the same style, and every map feature is made to be so intuitive, that there’s never a need for a map key. (Google and Apple Maps don’t even have one.) Thirty years ago, we adjusted ourselves to maps; now, maps adjust to us.
     
  • Maps are integrated with robust search & routing. No more looking up the coordinates of an obscure town or street in a map index. No more sitting down and painstakingly planning routes before you leave. Find any place in the world in milliseconds. Calculate any route — be it by walking, driving, or even flying — with unprecedented ease.
     
  • Advanced sensors keep us apprised of our current location, 24 hours a day.Now, we’re never lost.

These are all profound technical changes, 10x improvements that are hugely impactful in their own right. But there’s an even deeper, more profound cultural change seemingly on the horizon:

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY, THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD MIGHT SOON BE USING THE SAME MAP.

Think of how deeply profound this is.•

Tags:

“Before The President’s Murder, Mr. Lane Was A Minor Figure”

May 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

marklane123

JFK conspiracists seem nuts to me, but Mark Lane, author of 1966’s Rush to Judgement, a broadside directed at the Warren Commission, lived a colorful existence even beyond that explosive chapter in American history.

A lawyer for anti-war factions and civil-rights groups in the 1960s, Lane later became a legal representative for Jim Jones and his Jonestown settlement in Guyana, which in 1978 descended into madness. He was on the scene when the cult members prepared to follow their mad leader’s orders, to drink the Kool-Aid, and survived by escaping and hiding somewhere safer–the jungle.

However, it was definitely that horrible day in Dallas that allowed Lane, an anti-Vaughn Meader, to shoot to prominence. From his New York Times obituary by Keith Schneider:

The Kennedy assassination, one of the manifest turning points of the 20th century, was the pivotal moment in Mr. Lane’s life and career. He would go on to raise the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. five years later, but it was his Kennedy inquiry that made his name.

Before the president’s murder on Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Lane was a minor figure in New York’s legal and political circles. He had organized rent strikes, opposed bomb shelter programs, joined the Freedom Riders, took on civil rights cases and was active in the New York City Democratic Party. He was elected a State Assemblyman in 1960 and served one term.

After the Kennedy murder, Mr. Lane devoted much of the next three decades to its investigation. Almost immediately he began the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry, interviewed witnesses, collected evidence and delivered speeches on the assassination in the United States and in Europe, where he befriended Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, who became an early supporter of Mr. Lane’s efforts.

With a strong personality and a yen for visibility and risk, Mr. Lane also began cultivating and attracting high-profile clients. In the 1960s he worked with Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who was investigating the Kennedy assassination in a case that Oliver Stone featured in the 1991 movie JFK. He represented leaders of the Wounded Knee uprising by American Indians as well as the cult leader Jim Jones, narrowly surviving the mass suicide of Jones and his followers in Guyana.•

Lane, in 1966, discussing the Warren Commission with William F. Buckley.

Tags:

“He Says He No Longer Thinks The Story Was A Failure”

May 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

elchapo990

Unsurprisingly, Sean Penn, misguided and stubborn, has still not realized the deep flaws of his ill-advised Rolling Stone jungle flatulence about El Chapo. The actor came off as poetaster, poseur and pawn, allowing the Mexican drug kingpin to use the nouveau print-journalist’s naivete to greatly downplay his horrific crimes. The lack of recognition comes across clearly in Matthew Garrahan’s smart Financial Times profile of the contentious actor-director, though Penn must be credited with summing up the Trump campaign quite succinctly: “It’s a masturbatory populism.”

An excerpt:

Now that the dust has settled, I wonder how he feels about his Rolling Stone article and the controversial visit to Guzmán. In the immediate aftermath of the fugitive’s arrest and the story’s publication, Penn appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes, where he told Charlie Rose that he thought the article had failed. His intention had been to “start a conversation” about the war on drugs but, instead of a dialogue, most of the commentary about the piece was scathing about the publicity it gave to a violent killer.

Was he surprised by the criticism? “No. I’ve had reason to have concerns about the state of English-speaking media for a long time. But this was an all-time high.” Many people reading it missed the point or missed crucial parts, he says, such as the fact that he never actually interviewed Guzmán directly (the then fugitive answered prepared questions on video). He says he no longer thinks the story was a failure. “When I said it failed, that turned out not to be the case. There’s no question there’s ultimately been more conversation about the drug war.” And he’s sure that’s because of this story? “I can’t prove it. But I’ve noticed that there’s been more debate.”

He seems sure; I am less so.•

Tags: , , ,

“The Apocalypse Has Become Big Business”

May 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

falloutshelter5

Speaking of the End of Days, utter societal collapse in the United States doesn’t seem likely to me, even if we’re apparently dumber and more racist than feared. Many of my fellow Americans disagree, however, thinking things will soon fall apart. In advance of the November elections, the panic-room business is booming, as some among us are counting their gold coins and covering their asses.

The opening of “Prepping for Doomsday,” Clare Trapasso’s Realtor.com article:

The apocalypse has become big business. And it’s getting bigger every day.

In the ’50s, homeowners fearing Communist attacks built bunkers in their backyards and basements, hung up a few “God Bless Our Bomb Shelter” signs and called it a Cold War.

But today, Americans en masse are again preparing for the worst—and Communists are just about the only thing not on their list. What is? Terrorist attacks, a total economic collapse, perhaps even zombie invasions. Or maybe just a complete societal breakdown after this November’s scorched-Earth presidential election.

But this is not your Uncle Travis’ guns-and-canned-foods-militia vision of Armageddon preparedness. While the fears of survivalists and so-called preppers are modernizing, so too are their ideas and methods of refuge.

The business of disaster readiness is getting higher tech, higher priced, and way more geographically diverse, with state-of-the-art underground shelters tricked out with greenhouses, gyms, and decontamination units in the boondocks and the latest in plush panic rooms in city penthouses.

Welcome to the brave (and for some, highly profitable) new world of paranoia. 

“There’s a lot of uneasiness in society. You see it in politics. You see it in the economy. The world is changing really, really quickly and not always for the better,” says Richard Duarte, author of “Surviving Doomsday: A Guide for Surviving an Urban Disaster.”

Prepping “gives them a certain comfort that at least they’ve got some sort of preparations to … take care of their family if things start falling apart all around them,” he says.•

Tags: ,

“Our Job Is To Treat Them Like Mega-Celebrities”

May 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

hollywoodredcarpet8

Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President in June to a crowd of paid actors, which was sort of quaint in this Digital Age, as if he were Frank Sinatra in the ’40s crooning before “fainting” bobby soxers who’d been slipped a few dollars in advance to encourage their dizzy spells. You would think the practice of poseur appreciators and persuaders would be passé in our time, when there are bots and algorithms to goad the gormless, but there are things about human flesh that still cannot be replicated by machines. In some cases, all the world’s a stage and we’re all merely players–or at least some of us who are been compensated for pretending to be paparazzi or protesters or proponents. 

In “Crowd Source,” Davy Rothbart’s smart California Sunday Magazine article, the writer profiles a company that can make any carpet red and anyone a Kardashian, selling the aura of popularity in this Reality TV era. They offer a little extra–they offer extras, with titles like “Selfie Guy.” The opening:

The text message says to show up at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel at 11 a.m. on a Monday. But through some combination of traffic and my own chronic lateness, I find myself rushing into the lobby at 12 minutes after, aware that it’s not a good look to be late for work, my first day on a new job.

I’ve been hired by a company called Crowds on Demand. If you need a crowd of people — for nearly any reason — Crowds on Demand can make it happen. Now it has taken me on as one of its crowd members, although the specifics remain a mystery. It’s an odd sensation to be headed into a gig with no idea what task I’m expected to perform. All I know is that I’ll be making 15 bucks an hour.

In the hotel lobby, Adam Swart, the company’s 24-year-old CEO, is greeting a dozen other recruits. Handsome, fit, sporting slacks and a button-down shirt, Adam bears an uncanny resemblance to House Speaker Paul Ryan, though he’s more than 20 years younger. He circles around us with manic energy, as though jacked up on six cups of coffee. While he gently reprimands me for my lateness, I take his tone to mean, You’re off the hook this time, but don’t do it again. He leads us downstairs to a ballroom in the basement and gives us the lowdown.

The Marriott, Adam explains, is hosting a conference for life coaches from around the country. As these folks arrive in the ballroom to register and pick up their badges, lanyards, and gift bags, our job is to treat them like mega-celebrities, to behave like a wild throng of fans desperate for their love. As it turns out, this is one of Crowds on Demand’s most pop­­ular services.•

Tags:

“I Was Astounded To Learn That Jack Van Impe Is Still Alive”

May 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

impe

Despite his many prophesies, Jack Van Impe has lived a nice, long life. 

The accordion-playing, apocalyptic televangelist has long seen the sky falling, the end near, and you have to at least give him credit for adapting his narrative to the sweep of history. There he was in 1999 cheerfully using Y2K to scare the bejeezus out of his flock and raise some funds, with help from his brittle-boned wife, Rexella. When the first African-American President was elected, Impe was on the scene to suspiciously label Barack Obama the Antichrist because of “policy.” His reading of Muslims in this time of terror and tumult screams of Islamophobia. Well, the paranoid preacher hasn’t completely modernized: He believes Henry Kissinger and the Bilderberg Group want to implant microchips in all of us, but in reality that’s Google’s goal.

In “Trump and the End Times,” Dan Sinykin’s excellent LARB article, the writer wonders about the appeal of the prurient politician to preppers in this weird election season. In the opening, the author is staggered to learn the boogeyman of his sleepless tween years–yes, Jack Van Impe–was still among us. An excerpt:

I was astounded to learn that Jack Van Impe is still alive. When I was 12 and suffering from insomnia, in the mid-1990s, I watched Van Impe on network TV through the wee hours. I found his supernatural confidence queerly compelling. His proclamations of imminent doom for sinners invited me to look with a mix of narcissism and horror at my own sins. Even all those years ago, he looked elderly. I was sure that by now he would be dead.

As a sleepless 12 year old, I was riveted. I didn’t believe or disbelieve Van Impe. Instead, I loved the tidy ordering of the world, and the idea that with a brief prayer I could be transformed. It sounded scary, like falling in love. I was a voyeur peeping at the other side. The order, the faith, these were shields against an apocalypse that, to me, seemed like a metaphor for individual death, and I was terrified of death.

The Jack Van Impe Presents of today masquerades as a news show. Jack and his wife, Rexella, sit behind a desk and discuss the week’s “headlines.” Their headlines tend to be about Islam, including, for example, reports on ISIS’s beheadings, opinion pieces on Saudi Arabia and Sharia law, and investigations of preachers who claim that Allah and Jesus are the same God. Rexella — who is blonde and frail — editorializes with phrases of grandmotherly astonishment: “Oh my word” and “whoa boy.” She then turns to Jack for interpretation. Jack — whose website claims that his nickname is “The Walking Bible” — recites a string of verses that prove the headlines are signs of the rapture, Armageddon, and the second coming of Christ.

In the latest episode — which I found on YouTube — Rexella begins by reporting on the existence of “22 terror camps in the United States.” (The claims are baseless. She cites the conservative website WorldNetDaily, which also publicized the birther movement’s conspiracy theories about President Obama.) Jack leans toward the camera and says with venom, “The world’s in trouble. We need a strong president, a man who will stand for convictions, a man who will say, ‘You Muslims can’t do this and kill our people!’” He expresses astonishment that the United States has Muslim congressmen and condemns President Obama for “letting it happen.”•

“They’ve laid out plans to microchip all humans by 2017.”

Tags: ,

“He Began Teaching Himself About Rand And Objectivism”

May 10, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

0427_ayn-rand1-500x391 (1)

An extra kick to the ass for struggling Americans is that in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse, a number of the banks that laid the economy low benefited due to the boom in for-profit colleges, which many struggling citizens opted for in desperation, hoping to find a better way, to pay the rent, to save the house. These dreams have often been deferred, at best, with many students now carrying school-related debt among their other burdens.

One entrepreneur who’s grown rich in this higher-education bubble is Carl Barney, an Ayn Rand enthusiast who doesn’t believe, in principle, that the U.S. government should be handing out those student loans, though he somehow manages to cash the checks. In a smart New York Times article, Patricia Cohen profiles the Objectivist tycoon and the industry that made him. An excerpt:

As a teenager, he traveled to Australia, where he sold encyclopedias door to door and picked grapes (“I was good at it”). He toured India, and later ended up in California — dabbling briefly, he admits with some embarrassment, in Scientology — seeking meaning here and there while engaging in the great American tradition of self-improvement.

By the 1970s, he participated in another American tradition: making money in real estate. Then a minor business transaction came along that became a seminal moment. After legally terminating a lease, he offered some extra compensation for the inconvenience.

The leaseholder was offended and said, “I don’t want anything that isn’t earned or deserved,” Mr. Barney recalls. She was describing Rand’s “trader principle,” which holds that two people engaging in a trade shouldn’t take any more, or less, from each other than is deserved.

Mr. Barney was bewildered.

Her explanation? “You need to read Atlas Shrugged.“

He began teaching himself about Rand and objectivism. Attending her final public appearance in 1981 in New Orleans, he heard speaker after speaker declare, “She changed my life.”

It was testimony Mr. Barney would ultimately echo. “This is what Rand taught me — identify that values that are important to you and practice the virtues to achieve that,” he said. It infused him with “a central purpose.”

That led him to pursue a business in education. So when a friend told him about the existence of for-profit colleges, he was struck. “Wow,” he said he thought, “you could actually buy a college? That’s what I want to do.”•

Tags: ,

“Social Media Shines A Big, Bright Spotlight On Donald”

May 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Donald Trump, the dunce cap on America’s pointy head, has been enabled by traditional media, new media and a besieged American middle class, as he’s attempted to become our first Twitter President. Mostly, though, I think he’s been abetted by the large minority of racist citizens who want someone to blame, especially in the wake of our first African-American President and recent myriad examples of social progress.

Trump is no mastermind. He seems to have gotten into the race impetuously to burnish his idiotic brand–you know, Mussolini as an insult comic. His main asset in this campaign season has been an utter shamelessness, a willingness to stoop as low as he needs to go. Whether that’s a prescription for general-election victory, we’ll soon see.

It’s true that in a more centralized media and political climate, the hideous hotelier would have likely been squeezed from the process by gatekeepers, but the more unfettered new normal only gave him opportunity, not the nomination. I don’t think dumb tweets and smartphones made the troll a realistic contender for king. It was we the people.

In a pair of pieces, Nick Bilton of Vanity Fair and Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC see technology as the main cause for the rise of Trump, if in different ways. Excerpts from each follow.

From Bilton:

I’ve heard people say that if it wasn’t for CNN, FOX, and a dozen other television outlets that have “handed Trump the microphone,” there would be no Trump. But with all due respect to the television media, they’re just not that important anymore. Perhaps his popularity is a result of a broken political system, others suggest. But let’s be realistic, people have always believed the system is broken. (It’s that same broken system, it should be noted, that has helped create many of the disruptive unicorns in Silicon Valley.)

The only thing that’s really changed between Trump’s other attempts to run for office and now is the advent of social media. And Trump, who has spent his life offending people, knows exactly how to bend it to his will. Just look at what happens if someone says something even remotely politically incorrect today: the online immune system, known famously as a Twitter mob, sets in to hold that person accountable. These mobs demand results, like seeing someone fired, making them shamefully apologize, or even seeing their life torn to shreds.

Yet someone like Donald Trump doesn’t get fired, or apologize, which only makes the mobs grow more fervent and voluble. And the louder they get, the more the news media covers the backlash. The more the TV shows talk about him, the more we all talk about him. If you want to truly comprehend why Trump is so popular, you just have to behold what people are saying in 140 characters or less. It’s the same thing Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and anyone else who wants attention, understand. If we’re talking about them, they’re winning the war for attention. No one knows this better than Trump. Prod the social-media tiger, you get attention: say Mexicans are rapists, make fun of the disabled, pick a fight with the Pope, attack women, call the media dumb, and social media shines a big, bright spotlight on Donald.

Arianna Huffington may have once famously decided to cover Trump in the entertainment section of the Huffington Post, but the reality is we now live in a world where there is no line between entertainment, politics, and media. And I know Silicon Valley knows this, because they are the ones that helped eviscerate it.•

From Cellan-Jones:

Over the past year we have seen plenty of warnings about the potential impact of robots and artificial intelligence on jobs.

Now one of the leading prophets of this robot revolution has told the BBC he is already seeing another side-effect of automation – the rise of politicians such as Donald Trump and the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.

Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots won all sorts of awards for its compelling account of a wave of automation sweeping through every area of our lives, posing a serious threat to our economic well-being. But there has also been plenty of pushback from economists who reckon his conclusion is wrong and that, as in previous industrial revolutions, the overall impact on jobs will be positive.

In London to speak at a conference on robots held by the Bank of America, he told me that he didn’t think this latest technology upheaval would be as benign as in the past: “The thing is that this time machines are now in some sense beginning to think. And what that means is we’re seeing machines encroach on the kind of capabilities that set humans apart.”

He sees the robots moving up the value chain, threatening any jobs which involve humans sitting in front of screens dealing with information – the kind of work which we used to think offered security to middle-class people with average skills.•

Tags: , ,

“Capitalism Is In A Period Of Prolonged And Arguably Indefinite Stagnation”

May 9, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

George-Lawnmower-1950-1 (3)

Whether we’re talking about baseball umpires or long-haul truckers, I’m not so concerned about machines ruining the “romance” of traditional human endeavor, but I am very worried about technological unemployment destabilizing Labor. Perhaps history will repeat itself and more and better jobs will replace the ones likely to be disappeared in the coming decades, but even just the perfection of driverless cars will create a huge pothole in society. The Gig Economy is a diminishing of the workforce, and even those positions are vulnerable to automation. Maybe things will work themselves out, but it would be far better if we’re prepared for a worst-case scenario.

Excerpts from two articles follow: 1) Mark Karlin’s Truthout interview with Robert McChesney, co-author of People Get Ready, and 2) a Manu Saadia Tech Insider piece, “Robots Could Be a Big Problem for the Third World.”

From Truthout:

Question:

Let me start with the grand question raised by your book written with John Nichols. I think it is safe to say that the conventional thinking of the “wisdom class” for decades has been that the more advanced technology becomes (including robots and automated means of production, service and communication), the more beneficial it will be for humans. What is the basic challenge to that concept at the center of the new book by you and John?

Robert W. McChesney:

The conventional wisdom, embraced and propagated by many economists, has been that while new technologies will disrupt and eliminate many jobs and entire industries, they would also create new industries, which would eventually have as many or more new jobs, and that these jobs would generally be much better than the jobs that had been lost to technology.

And that has been more or less true for much of the history of industrial capitalism. Vastly fewer people were needed to work on farms by the 20th century and many ended up in factories; less are now needed in factories and they end up in offices. The new jobs tended to be better than the old jobs.

But we argue the idea that technology will create a new job to replace the one it has destroyed is no longer operative. Nor is the idea that the new job will be better than the old job, in terms of compensation and benefits. Capitalism is in a period of prolonged and arguably indefinite stagnation.•

From Tech Insider:

The danger lies in the transition to an economy where the cost of making stuff—industry—has become more or less like agriculture today (with very few people employed and a very low share of GDP). With appropriate policies in place, developed countries can probably manage that transition. They have in the past, and therefore it is safe to assume they most likely will in the future. It does not mean that we will not experience dislocations and conflicts, but we do have old and established institutions—government, the press, the public sphere— that allow us to resolve such conflicts over time for the greater benefit of all.

The real challenge will be beyond our comfortable borders, in the developing world. In both nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century Asia, national development has followed a similar pattern. People moved from the countryside to urban centers to take advantage of higher-paying jobs in factories and services. Again, South Korea offers a startling, fast-forward example of that: it underwent a complete transformation from a poor, rural country to a postindus trial, hyperurban powerhouse in less than fifty years. It was so rapid that most visible traces of the past have been erased and forgotten. The national museum in Seoul has a life-size reconstruction of a Seoul street in the 1950s, just like we have over here, but for the colonial era. And imagine this, China went down that very same path at an even faster clip. Half a billion impoverished people turned into middle-class consumers in three decades.

However, this may not happen again if manufacturing is reduced to the status of agriculture, a highly rationalized activity (read: employing very few people). The historically proven path to economic growth and prosperity taken by Korea and China might no longer be available to the next countries.•

Tags: , ,

“As Technology Obliterates The Significance Of Where We Live And Work…Texas Resists”

May 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

rodeo112

When Tyler Cowen wrote his provocative 2013 Time cover story about Texas being the future of America, I pushed back a bit, wondering if the swarm of transplants to the state might change it profoundly, whether Texas as we know it–conservative, small-government, uber-capitalist–was even the future of Texas, let alone the rest of us. 

In a wonderfully written article, Manny Fernandez of the New York Times explores this tension between red and blue and old and new, with lifelong Texans making a fierce stand culturally, attempting to turn their home into something of a “superstate.” The new attitude is a blend of official and unofficial initiatives that began, not coincidentally, after the election of the first African-American President. Despite the pride and ardor, it may be a last stand in this digital, multicultural age.

An excerpt:

The idea that Texas is the last place is part of a new phenomenon. People throughout the state say they believe that their way of life is under assault and that they are making a kind of last stand by simply being Texan. It is this fear, anger and sometimes paranoia that lurks beneath the surface of Texas politics and that underlies the expansion of gun rights, the reflexive antagonism toward Washington, and the opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues that seems essential for succeeding in state politics these days. Senator Ted Cruz’s remarks dismissing New York values at a Republican debate should come as no surprise. That’s how people from the last best place talk about other places.

But Texas is not under attack. It is merely changing as America changes with it. It is a majority-minority state that has become increasingly diverse and nonwhite — rural Texas is shrinking while urban and suburban Texas is expanding — and the tension between what Texas is and what it was has come to define the state.

The hard-right domination of Texas politics frustrates the state’s Democrats and plenty of others in Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. They are agitated, but they stay put because they view Texas as forever, and Republican Texas as a kind of temporary occupation. It’s hard to know if they’re right, but easy to see why people’s emotional investment in Texas transcends conservative politics.

…

As the world grows smaller, as technology obliterates the significance of where we live and work, as Americans become more transient, Texas resists. It declares, to itself and the nation: Place matters. America needs a superstate, or to put it another way, an antistate. Sometimes we love it here and sometimes we are disgusted here, but, to twist Gertrude Stein’s line about Oakland, Calif., there is a here here. We tattoo Texas on our arms, buy Texas-built trucks and climb fire escapes with Texas dirt in our pockets. Place, we are unsubtly suggesting, matters.•

Tags:

“Just Four Years Ago, Petraeus Was Lionized As The Douglas MacArthur Of His Generation”

May 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Petraeus-Bush_981643c

During the darkest days of the second Bush Administration, the comedian Lewis Black had a great joke about hoping for the first time in his life that there would be a military coup in America. The politicians were so bad that the generals were clearly preferable.

At the center of the Army’s appeal stood David Petraeus, a talented commander who was built to mythical proportions out of political expedience, so that a President who’d lost the faith of the people could still operate abroad militarily. But his surge did not last. Like most heroes of convenience, the general was bound for a fall, but the extent of his defeat and surrender was shocking. Scandals personal and professional ended his brilliant career, even if he managed to avoid prison time.

The former CIA Director, now building equity on Wall Street, sat down for lunch with the Financial Times’ Edward Luce, who’s done some of the best writing on American politics during this crazy election year. The journalist finds a subject who doesn’t seem given to deep self-analysis despite his precipitous fall from grace. The opening:

On the dot of noon, as agreed, General David Petraeus strolls into the Four Seasons Restaurant. His arrival causes a flurry among the floor staff. Dressed in a navy blue suit and plain red tie, the former CIA chief is businesslike — in keeping with his new role on Wall Street. When I inquire what keeps him busy nowadays his answer goes on for so long I half regret asking. In addition to a lucrative job in private equity and a clutch of teaching jobs, he is “on the [paid] speaking circuit.” Chuckling, and in an apparent reference to Bernie Sanders’ attacks on Hillary Clinton’s gilded speaking career, he adds: “Many have noted it is the highest form of white-collar crime.” Only when I touch on the scandal that ended his meteoric public career does he assume a crisper tone.

Just four years ago, Petraeus was lionised as the Douglas MacArthur of his generation. Even discounting the hype, he stood head and shoulders above other US generals. In the depths of the Iraq war, when the country was undergoing death by a thousand improvised explosive devices, he was dubbed “King David” of Mosul — a city he cleared and held before it fell back into rebel hands. He was then appointed chief architect of George W Bush’s 2007 Iraq surge and, after a stint as head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, Barack Obama put him in charge of his own surge in Afghanistan. His reward was to be made head of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2011. Many thought the CIA was a springboard for Petraeus’s own presidential ambitions. America loves a successful general and his approval ratings were stratospheric. Could anything stand in his way?

The answer was yes — David Petraeus himself. Shortly after Obama’s re-election in 2012, Petraeus abruptly resigned from the CIA when it emerged he had shared eight notebooks of classified information with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. They had also had an affair. Rarely has a fall from grace been so brutal.•

Tags: ,

“If It Was Up To Me We’d Bring Back Public Execution”

May 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trump-pasted_image_at_2016_05_06_12_23_am_480

The Trump campaign, the moral equivalent of Hitler using the N-word, stopped to take a leak in West Virginia. Some locals eagerly drank from that bowl because the hideous hotelier’s lies sound less polished than the ones they’ve heard before, because the promises he would break are different than other politicians’ broken promises. His words have an unfamiliar and angrier and more accusatory tone, placing the blame elsewhere, allowing the worst of our citizens to feel relieved of their flaws and failings.

This election season has shown us there are a surprising number of damaged, racist Americans who want to hold non-white people accountable for their problems, and the idea that all of them are poor, struggling folks is a falsehood. They come from all manner of background and financial situation and are united in that they look at Trump’s ugliness and see themselves.

Ben Jacobs’ of the Guardian has written an excellent account of rockhead visiting coal country. I will only say that I hope to never have Greg Bonecutter Jr. as my nurse. An excerpt:

The rally at the Charleston Civic Center, a brutalist hunk of concrete, started to fill up hours before Trump arrived and an orderly line outside dissolved into a horde of people desperate to make it into the event.

Greg Bonecutter Jr, a former nurse on disability from Letart, West Virginia, was an avid Trump supporter wearing a Make America Great Again hat and a shirt that proclaimed “Hillary sucks but not like Monica”.

He was a longtime Trump supporter who backed the nominee because he was someone with whom “you knew where you stood” and was sick “of politicians, big money scams and cover-up lies”. A registered independent, he said he thought Obama was “sucking Muslim tail and an apologist to terrorist actions” and “if it was up to me we’d bring back public execution and there’d be several trap doors on the White House lawn.” Bonecutter warned darkly that if Clinton was elected there might be another civil war.

Sandra Riddle of North Charleston shared his pessimism. She was worried about the supreme court and that if Clinton was elected “we might lose freedom of speech and assembly” as well as the second amendment. She wasn’t a gun owner but noted “we have to protect guns … because of people coming from Isis”.

Yet others simply liked Trump for his populist appeal.•

Tags: , , ,

“What Do You Think Hillary Clinton’s Political Future Is?”

May 4, 2016 in Politics | Permalink

George Will needs to call out Geroge Stephanopoulos

George Will sucks at math. In 2012, right before he predicted Romney would beat Obama in a landslide, the pundit handicapped Hillary Clinton’s odds of becoming President in 2016. He failed spectacularly. The former Secretary of State may or may not win the general election but regardless of the outcome, Will’s calculations were yikes. He even thought Martin O’Malley had a better chance of reaching the Oval Office. From an appearance that year on Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing:

Alec Baldwin:

What do you think [Hillary Clinton’s] political future is?

George Will:

Zero. There’s a whole generation of coming candidates. Andrew Cuomo in New York. Governor O’Malley in Maryland. Countless people. Paul Ryan. All kinds of good people out there.•

 

“Connectivity Used To Be Just Entertainment”

May 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Car-phone-circea-1960jpg

Key to making driverless cars a going concern is enabling them to communicate with other vehicles, to receive constant updates, to have maps redrawn in real time. That conversation won’t only be amongst vehicles, however. It will involve all manner of smartphones and sensors and more, utilizing an Internet of Things approach in advance of a truly dense IoT.

In a Detroit News article by Neil Winton, Delphi Automotive executive Jeff Owens believes we may see fleets of driverless taxis popping up in municipalities within five years. Well, who knows? It wouldn’t stun me if someone tried it in that span, though there’ll still be lots of work to do. He touches on the connectivity issue. An excerpt:

Automotive manufacturers have made great strides in automating almost all functions, but it’s the final 5 percent which might be the hardest hurdle to jump. A self-driving car would be able to handle all kinds of physical decisions for braking, steering and avoiding other cars, but how would it handle a situation where a legal decision was required? …

“At the end of the day, technology won’t be the inhibitor, it will be the legal framework,” he said.

Owens said vehicle connectivity which allows cars to talk to each other and share data is building up ahead of full autonomy to improve safety and avoid accidents.

“Vehicle control algorithms will be ready to take on all kinds of problems including that cyclist example. Already cars like the Mercedes S class (its top-of-the-range sedan) and the Audi Q7 (SUV, and the Tesla Model S) allow you to set the auto pilot on the highway which allows hands-off driving. The driver will still be keeping watch, but it helps for a relaxed experience,” Owens said.

“Connectivity used to be just entertainment, now it’s vehicle-to-everything — literally really connected to everything like the infrastructure and providing cloud-based information that will help a safe journey,” he said.•

Tags:

“I Found Myself More And More Having To Look The Other Way”

May 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trumpspeechtea8

The original American revolutionaries sometimes resembled a torch-carrying mob, but they were mostly crazy like foxes. The Tea Party born in 2009 is just plain crazy. A chemtrail of a political movement, it was steeped from the start in extreme paranoia and prejudice.

Many of those Republicans who thought they were creating a big tent when welcoming this sideshow into the center ring are now disgruntled that Donald Trump is their candidate. Funny thing is, Trump is really no different than traditional bigotry merchants Atwater and Rove, who gained power by more subtly selling racism and sexism. The hideous hotelier has merely replaced the dog whistles with dog bites, trading the soft, coded language of Gingrich for graphic soundbites about rape, assassination and genitalia. Funnier still (though not in a ha-ha way), the end result would remain the same should he become President, as Trump would use, as predecessors did, the greatest seat of U.S. power to tilt the game further in favor of the wealthiest.

Ben Howe is just such a conservative Rip Van Winkle, awakened too late to find that his complicity with Birthers and Truthers has ultimately unloosed his nightmare. From his Red State essay:

Allies aren’t friends. They may not even be colleagues. They are simply people that you find enough agreement with on enough issues to not go after each other. You don’t have to overtly support one another but you certainly don’t try to hurt each other.

As more and more people knew who I was and I fostered relationships and allies, I found myself more and more having to look the other way. Moments where I would cringe at something someone said, or quietly roll my eyes at a post they wrote, thinking “Gosh, I can’t believe they think that way” or “I swear that person is one tweet away from saying Obama is from Kenya.”

I justified it quietly to myself the way we had at the beginning of the tea party when such things would happen. People would say outlandish things and I would find myself nodding my head and awkwardly walking away, not calling them out for their silliness.

After all, there were more pressing matters.

And so, as I said, I kept quiet about these allies in new media and in Washington. People who I thought I agreed with only 70% of the time. Which normally is a great reason to consider someone an ally, but not when the other 30% is cringe-inducing paranoia and vapid stupidity.

I chose peace over principle. I chose to go along with those I disagreed with on core matters because I believed we were jointly fighting for other things that were more important.  I ignored my gut and my moral compass.

The result is that, almost to a man, every single person I cringed at or thought twice about, is now a supporter and cheerleader of Donald Trump.

I looked the other way, and I’m sure many others did too, as these people rose to prominence and their microphones got louder.  I ignored it at times because I hate self-righteous liberals who tell anyone they disagree with that they don’t want to be around them and I didn’t want to be like that. At other times because, well, it was easier than standing against foolishness.

I’m done with that now. Albeit a bit too late.•

Tags: ,

A Note From 1952 About Computerized Journalism

May 2, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

univac11_custom-d1f68dfc20a6ede568299ba03659c2775bfd3f2b-s6-c30

From the November 3, 1952 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

univac128

The Univac 1 computer got off to a good start in 1952 when it predicted that Eisenhower would win easily over Stevenson even though the press thought the reverse outcome was a near-certainty. It faltered a bit in the 1954 midterm Senate races and was mocked. (“Tilt!” was hollered in the newsroom by one wiseass when it became clear that the prognostications were errant.) But by the 1956 Presidential election, the computer once more nailed the Eisenhower triumph over Stevenson. No TV broadcast of any major election ever went without a computer again. 

In this 1952 clip, Walter Cronkite cedes the floor the machine which at this early point in the night thought Eisenhower was a 100-1 favorite to win. Nervous CBS brass were so concerned that the “electronic brain” was wrong that they initially pretended it had mechanical difficulties and was being unresponsive.

“I Look Forward To Replacing More Humans In The Future”

April 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

China-robot-factory

In 2011, Foxconn promised a million robots would be installed in its factories within three years. That did not transpire. Overzealous promises by a large corporation, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for epic failure on a national scale. For China, it’s just a dream deferred and likely not by much.

The nation is not only hugely populous but also overwhelmingly graying, desperately needing autonomous machines to take up the slack. Perhaps, as Daniel Kahneman has prophesied, “Robots will show up in China just in time.” That may be so, but some of the country’s younger workers will be destabilized by the transition, and what’s necessary in China may be extremely tumultuous for other countries with markedly different demographics.

In “China’s Robot Revolution,” Ben Bland of the Financial Times looks at the future arriving in a hurry, writing that “the benefits of the robot revolution will not be shared equally across the world.” You wouldn’t want to be living in a country that’s left behind in the Second Machine Age, but progress will have its costs. The opening:

The Ying Ao sink foundry in southern China’s Guangdong province does not look like a factory of the future. The sign over the entrance is faded; inside, the floor is greasy with patches of mud, and a thick metal dust — the by-product of the stainless-steel polishing process — clogs the air. As workers haul trolleys across the factory floor, the cavernous, shed-like building reverberates with a loud clanging.

Guangdong is the growth engine of China’s manufacturing industry, generating $615bn in exports last year — more than a quarter of the country’s total. In this part of the province, the standard wage for workers is about Rmb4,000 ($600) per month. Ying Ao, which manufactures sinks destined for the kitchens of Europe and the US, has to pay double that, according to deputy manager Chen Conghan, because conditions in the factory are so unpleasant. So, four years ago, the company started buying machines to replace the ever more costly humans.

Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers. Robotic arms pick up sinks from a pile, buff them until they gleam and then deposit them on a self-driving trolley that takes them to a computer-linked camera for a final quality check.

The company, which exports 1,500 sinks a day, spent more than $3m on the robots. “These machines are cheaper, more precise and more reliable than people,” says Chen. “I’ve never had a whole batch ruined by robots. I look forward to replacing more humans in the future,” he adds, with a wry smile.•

Tags:

“Trump Reminds Me Of Viktor”

April 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Oh good, I can fit both hands.

Julia Ioffe of GQ wrote a very reasonable and well-researched profile of Melania Trump, somehow making the former middling model interesting, no mean feat if you’ve ever heard the QVC peddler speak. The candidate’s spouse is a sun-addled Stepford Wife, her frozen face always staring off into the distance as if she were a statue of a feral cat, seemingly convinced that at any given moment a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue photographer might emerge from the sea in need of an expression that could pass for vaguely erotic.

Melania voiced her displeasure over the piece, and some Trump supporters reacted to the journalist with anti-Semitic threats. That’s no surprise because the hideous hotelier’s campaign, for the all the theorizing of Thomas Frank and his ilk, has always been about identity politics, not concerns over trade deals or technological unemployment. The identity happens to be a bigoted, white male. When it comes to Trump’s appeal, which is not mainly socioeconomic, the writing has always been on the wall, the wall he insists Mexico will pay for.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the piece reveals the Slovenian immigrant might have something of a father complex, her dad a portlier, lower-case version of her god-awful groom. An excerpt:

Jelančič remembers Melania’s father, Viktor, spending every Saturday lovingly washing his antique Mercedes, another rarity. “It was like a ritual,” Jelančič tells me. After leaving his job working for the mayor of Hrastnik, Viktor, then a member of the Slovenian Communist Party, became a salesman at a state-owned car company. Police files from the time indicate Viktor aroused suspicion for illicit trade and tax evasion in 1976. (He was charged with a tax offense, though his record was later cleared on account of Slovenia’s statute of limitations, a process the courts described to me as “legal rehabilitations.”) Melania blocked my efforts to speak to Viktor, and she denies that any such investigation took place. “He was never under any investigation, he was never in trouble,” she snaps. “We have a clean past. I don’t have nothing to hide.”

While working for the car company in Ljubljana, Viktor had an apartment there, in one of the city’s first residential high-rises. It was a prestigious address and provided the girls a place to stay in the capital so that they could attend design school—another luxury. Meanwhile, in Sevnica, a place where most people still lived in drab apartments doled out to them by their factories, Viktor managed to build a house situated in what was considered the toniest part of town.

“Trump reminds me of Viktor,” Viktor’s friend and neighbor Tomaž Jeraj tells me. “He’s a salesman. He has business in his veins.” It’s a sentiment unanimous in Sevnica, where Viktor and Amalija still own their house and visit two or three times a year.

Indeed, if you look at photos of Viktor Knavs and Donald Trump side by side, you wouldn’t be surprised at the comparison. Donald is just five years younger than his father-in-law. Both are tall, portly men with blond hair and sharp suits; they’re brash men who like the finer things in life. “He likes quality,” says Melania. “Viki”—as Viktor is known to his friends here—“likes good food,” Jeraj tells me. “He loves cars.” He was one of the many people who would tell me about Viktor’s extensive collection of Mercedes. “You’ll never see him in another car.”

Those who know the Knavses say that Viktor is boisterous and strong-willed. “Jokes come naturally to him,” Ana Jelančič, a neighbor and friend of the Knavses’, tells me. “If he goes into a bar, people pay attention.” Viktor sucks the air out of a room, she says. “He is the strong one in the relationship. Amalija supports him. She is a wonderful mother and wife.”•

Tags: , , ,

“It Will Start To Accelerate More”

April 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

darparobot03 (1)

Blue jeans and rock & roll, or something similar, may have won the Cold War, which was ultimately a cultural and economic one for all the rockets and bombs, but robots may be the key to victory in the coming 25 years. 

In Geoff Dyer’s latest insightful Financial Times piece, the Washington-based correspondent writes the Pentagon is investing heavily in robotics and AI in an effort to keep the U.S. ahead of China and Russia as a military power in the next great arms race. I would think bioengineering will also be a part of the gamesmanship, though how far it will unfold in the next quarter century is TBD. The large sums being spent and the competition among different states with varying priorities are the reasons why I believe AI and automation will move into areas that are troubling, even if we promise ourselves something else.

In Dyer’s article, he asks five questions he believes central to the topic. An excerpt:

How far along is the military robotics revolution?

The Pentagon hails its approach as its third great technological surge since the second world war. The first was the development of battlefield nuclear weapons in the 1950s to deter a possible Soviet invasion of western Europe; the second, the development of precision strike weapons, which started in the mid-1970s and came of age during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign against Saddam Hussein.

Asked how far along the current strategy is, [Pentagon second-in-command Robert] Work says: “We are in 1976 and a period of experimentation. It is not until you see it in battle that anyone really trusts it.” He adds: “Five years from now, we will have some confrontation and we will say: ‘Holy crap, something has happened here,’ and it will start to accelerate more.”•

Tags: ,

“My Father Was A Kind Man”

April 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

Rasputin must have been a complicated dad, huh?

The infamous Russian mystic’s elder daughter, Maria, had a wild and woolly life as you might expect, what with the political revolution and the circus-animal training and all. She died in 1977 in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, having spent the final leg of her life collecting Social Security checks and complaining bitterly about communists to Hollywood gossip columnists. Here’s a portrait of her at age 69 from the November 12, 1968 Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Virginia:

We had a pleasant encounter with history last week by taking the daughter of Rasputin, “the mad monk of Russia,” to the Gaslight for a hamburger.

She was in town over the weekend with her friend Patricia Barham, a film and theatre columnist from Los Angeles. While here, they tried and failed to get the apparent Grand Duchess Anastasia to leave her Albemarle County farm for L.A. smog.

The apparent Grand Duchess is, of course, Anna Anderson, the woman who has claimed for 50 years to be the surviving daughter of the last Russian royal family.

If you missed the social news of the summer, Anna moved here from Germany in August and may settle permanently in Albemarle.

Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, has been in the U.S. since 1937 and in Los Angeles since 1965. As was reported during her earlier visit here in August, she came to this country as a circus animal trainer with Ringling Bros.

We learned this trip she was a member of the Hagenbach Brothers animal act, a job she took after several years touring Europe as a Russian folk dancer.

Making a living was a problem for Russian emigres during the 20s and 30s and Maria grabbed at an offer to go on the stage. Girls like Maria who spent their childhood having tea with the Czar’s children every Wednesday weren’t trained to make a living, but Maria had some talent and endless spunk, it appears.

For although Maria was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana, she stayed with the circus until the traveling show played Miami, Florida, where she quit and went to work as a riveter in a defense shipyard, she related Saturday night.

She stayed in defense plant work until 1955 when she was laid off because of her age, 66. Since then she has been working in hospitals and baby sitting for friends.

Since credibility gap had yawned intrusively into the conversation, we asked her how she got into the animal training game, and where she got the courage to whip up on lions and tigers. She learned in London, was her unelaborated answer though she noted, ‘After you’ve been the target of a revolution, nothing scares you anymore.’

Gregori Rasputin, her father, was tied in with the Russian royal court as religious advisor.

That lasted until personal enemies decided Rasputin-style religion was going too far and they ended him in a legendary assassination said to involve poisoning, stabbing, and drowning.

Maria said she had it rough in the Bolshevik revolution the year after her father was murdered and eventually left Russia for Berlin, Bucharest, Paris, London, and Miami.

Her English vocabulary isn’t all it might be, she readily admits. She says she speaks Russian best but also German and French. When the time came to write a book – and virtually every notable Russian emigre wrote at least one in the decade 1925-1935 – she dictated her memoirs and the result was, My Father, an anecdotal book on Rasputin published in 1932.

Her friend Pat Barham is in the throws of re-write on a second Rasputin book based on Maria’s recollections. She intends to call it, The Rape of Rasputin and described it as ‘sexsational and exciting’ but not funny.

Maria claims a leaning to be psychic and Pat affirms that on election morning two weeks ago, Maria said that Mrs. Richard Nixon had come to her in a dream and smiled. Maria has ‘signs’ like that often, Pat said.

“Little Mother,” Pat calls Maria for her continual worrying about handbags within reach of strangers in restaurants, suitcases open in hotel rooms, and columnists getting a comfortable chair for interviews.

Since being interviewed is an old game for Rasputin’s only legitimate daughter, she talks willingly and seemingly without reservation. This prompted Gaslight owner John Tuck to volunteer that the father of one of his boyhood chums was one of the band of assassins that did Rasputin in.

‘Why didn’t he like my father?’ Maria asked with genuine curiosity. John didn’t know, or at least didn’t say.

“My father was a kind man,” Maria later said when we returned to her hotel. “Once he was savagely attacked by the most powerful newspaper in Russia. Friends asked why he didn’t close the paper down since he could have done it like this,” she said with a snap of fingers.

“Let them write about me,” her father reportedly said. “Let them make money.” Maria described him as “a kind man who would never have closed the paper.”

Historians may not agree Rasputin was kind but there’s no doubt Maria is thoughtful. “When you leave the hotel, stop at the desk,” she said as the interview closed.

We did and found waiting a pot of white chrysanthemums to carry home through the season’s first snow flurry.•

Footage of Maria as an animal trainer:

“No Technology Will Automate Away More Jobs”

April 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

convoy787

It would seem that convoys of driverless trucks would be far easier to test and perfect than other autonomous vehicles. In the early stages of adoption, you could just put two human drivers in the first truck and have them alternate sitting behind the wheel. The trailing rigs could be programmed to follow suit of the lead vehicle. The destinations are also much easier to execute, as they’re predetermined and not changing and challenging like with taxis.

It’s estimated that eight million American jobs depend on the trucking industry (not only drivers but also support staff and workers at businesses frequented by truckers, like diners and such). Those will likely be gone in a few decades, not offset by savings to consumers realized as automation increases production and reduces prices.

The opening of Ryan Petersen’s Techcrunch article “The Driverless Truck Is Coming, and It’s Going to Automate Millions of Jobs“:

A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will automate away more jobs — or drive more economic efficiency — than the driverless truck.

Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent of that cost. But those labor savings aren’t the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks.

Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.

And the savings become even more significant when you account for fuel efficiency gains. The optimal cruising speed from a fuel efficiency standpoint is around 45 miles per hour, whereas truckers who are paid by the mile drive much faster. Further fuel efficiencies will be had as the self-driving fleets adopt platooning technologies, like those from Peloton Technology, allowing trucks to draft behind one another in highway trains.

Trucking represents a considerable portion of the cost of all the goods we buy, so consumers everywhere will experience this change as lower prices and higher standards of living.•

Tags:

“Anything That Speeds Up Its Demise Is To The Good”

April 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trumphands7

Donald Trump’s new adviser Paul Manafort wants the cretinous faux conservative to stop waving his penis at America, but the GOP frontrunner, a mix of George Steinbrenner and Ugly George, refuses to remove his itchy trigger finger from his fly.

There’s a theory about Trump’s candidacy I’m not convinced is true. Some Republicans, dismayed by the utter moral and pragmatic collapse of the party, are supporting the hideous hotelier’s bid in an effort to enact a mercy killing of the modern GOP, a death in the gutter but a death all the same. They believe a November obliteration of Trump will stop the madness, clean the slate.

Perhaps. But wasn’t it said before Obama’s reelection in 2012 (even by the President himself) that a second term would force Republicans to come to grips and make changes? That didn’t happen, even with issues like immigration reform, one that would have benefited the GOP to settle as quickly as possible. If anything, the firenge mentality became further entrenched, with even a moderate Supreme Court justice appointee unable to get his day in court? 

It’s not a stretch to envision a scenario where Trump is trounced, and members of the party decry how a True Conservative™ would have won. In four years, they might believe, Hillary will be very defeatable, so let’s just stay the course. Even worse, those GOPers setting up Trump for a fall are simultaneously putting him in a position for an upset win. If so, God help us all.

Former Reagan and Bush 41 cabinet member Bruce Bartlett is playing this game, hoping a Trump debacle in 2016 will be a fresh break, a new beginning. The opening of his Salon interview conducted by Simon Maloy:

Question:

I wanted to talk about 2016 and Trump and the future of the GOP. You are a former Reagan official, you worked for George H.W. Bush, and you voted for Donald Trump in the Virginia primary. And I was hoping if you could just explain why.

Bruce Bartlett:

I think the Republican Party is sick. It’s dying, it just doesn’t know it. And I think anything that speeds up its demise is to the good, because then it can reinvent itself and return as something healthy. Or you could use an addiction metaphor, where people have to hit bottom so that they can reach out and ask for help before they can cure themselves. I think that Trump is a symptom of a disease of rampant stupidity, pandering to morons and bigots and racists and all the sort of stuff that defines today’s Republican coalition. And I just think it’s awful. It’s terrible for the country in a great many ways that I don’t need to tell you. And I think that we need to have a healthy two-party system. We need to have a sane, functioning conservative party and a sane, functioning liberal party. And I think that half of that equation, at least, is not working, and it affects the other half.

 
So I think it’s just bad for the country. So I think that giving Trump the nomination is the surest path to complete and total destruction of the Republican Party as we know it. And I look forward to him getting the nomination for that reason. I think he will have a historic loss. I think he may well bring in a Democratic Senate. But more importantly, my hope is, at least, that he will lead to a really serious assessment of the problems of the Republican Party, and lead to some opening of thought, opening of discussion, conversation among groups that have been sidelined for quite a long time. Mainly moderates and people of that sort who have been just pushed to the sidelines in favor of ever more rabid, nonsensical, right-wing authoritarianism.
 
But I also don’t think it really makes all that much difference whether Trump gets the nomination, because he’s already succeeded in destroying the Republican coalition as far as the general election is concerned. Because, look, if he doesn’t get the nomination, he’ll probably do everything in his power to guarantee that whoever does get the nomination is defeated. So either way the party is looking at historic losses, historic defeat. And I think that is really, really a wonderful thing.•

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »