Politics

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“You Could Even Make A Case For The Opposite, Saying People Are Dumber”

April 11, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Steve Case won’t be around to read his obituary, which is probably a good thing.

It would no doubt pain him that the lead will be the disastrous America Online-Time Warner merger, an attempt at synergy that wound up a lose-lose of historic proportions. Case, then the AOL CEO, bet on old media at a time when he needed to walk even more boldly into the future with the Internet. It was one step backwards, and he lost his leg.

AOL has long been done as a major player in any sector, but Case continues apace, with entrepreneurial endeavors and charitable work. Steven Levy just interviewed him about his book, The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future, an attempt to predict what comes after Web 1.0 and 2.0. The journalist ventures into an apt topic in this insane political season: If technology has gifted us with more information than ever, why does the public seem less informed?

An excerpt:

Steven Levy:

In the book you include a very prescient statement you made after graduating college in the early 1980s about how technology would affect our lives. We have been transformed by all sorts of gadgets and networks that augment our powers. But judging from the current election process, it doesn’t seem to have made people smarter. You could even make a case for the opposite, saying people are dumber — anti-science, and more susceptible to mob thinking than they used to be.

Steve Case:

That’s fair. One of the things we felt passionate about 30 years ago was leveling the playing field so that everybody can have a voice. Back then when there were three television networks, unless you were rich and owned a printing press, you didn’t really have the opportunity to have your voice heard. Having millions of voices heard is awesome, but it gets noisy and some people are saying things that are inaccurate and not constructive and worse. There is absolutely this dynamic, of people living in a filtered bubble, hearing voices that reinforce their views and not really being exposed to the views of other people. That drives this hyper partisanship. I’m very concerned about it. We need to figure how to rebuild a center. Compromise should become a good word, not a bad word.

Steven Levy:

Has technology made it harder to find compromise?

Steve Case:

It has. In high school I wouldn’t have said this, but also sometimes to reach compromise you have to have a quiet discussion and cut a deal. When you have to have those negotiations, essentially in public, and talking points and sound bites on two-minute cable TV, things get noisier and it gets less constructive. With the current election, it is noisy and a little uncomfortable. The political process is getting disrupted.•

Tags: Steve Case, Steven Levy

“He Proved Himself To Be A Maestro Of The Mob Mentality”

April 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

At this point, the best Donald Trump can hope for is that his campaign goes down ingloriously in flames. The fire may not be metaphorical, however.

Remarkably unprepared–unwilling, even–to lead, the troll can only dream of the appearance of the Republican nomination being “stolen” from him should he not secure a majority of delegates. His thuggish Presidential bid, a crude and racist joke that got out of hand, may yet ball itself into a big fist that’s unleashed at the GOP convention, the misdemeanors of the trail escalating into felonies.

Among the uniformly irresponsible members of the rogues’ gallery who serve as the hideous hotelier’s braintrust, the gutter-level political hack Roger Stone has already turned prepper for an End of Days scenario in Cleveland, unveiling the threats, only further reducing Trump to the appearance of John Gotti with a Southern strategy.

In a New Yorker piece by Evan Osnos, one of my favorite contemporary nonfiction writers, the journalist reminds that when it comes to this ugly campaign season, Trump didn’t build it alone. It took a village. But how was the mob activated? An excerpt:

It’s easy to mock Trump for his thin-skinned fixation on the size of his audiences, but that misses a deeper point: you can’t have a riot without a mob. Even before he was a candidate, Trump displayed a rare gift for cultivating the dark power of a crowd. In his role as the primary advocate of the “birther” fiction, he proved himself to be a maestro of the mob mentality, capable of conducting his fans through crescendos of rage and self-pity and suspicion. Speaking to the Times editorial board, in January, he said, “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe, thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!,’ and they go nuts.”

The symbiotic exchange between a leader and his mob can thrive on what social psychologists call “emotional contagion,” a hot-blooded feedback loop that the science writer Maggie Koerth-Baker describes as “our tendency to unconsciously mimic the outward expression of other people’s emotions (smiles, furrowed brows, leaning forward, etc.) until, inevitably, we begin to feel what they’re feeling.”

When we are exposed to the right energy, even those of us who are not inclined to cross the boundaries from politics to force will do things that we would ordinarily consider reprehensible. Stephen David Reicher, a sociologist and psychologist at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, who has studied soccer mobs and race riots, told Wired last month, “People don’t lose control, but they begin to act with collective values.” Recently, he has turned his attention to studying Trump’s crowds. “It’s not your individual fate that becomes important but the fate of the group.”

And therein lies the key to Trump’s ability to introduce menace into the convention: he does not need to call upon his supporters to do anything but protect their newfound sense of identity and purpose.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Evan Osnos

“The Gains From AI Will Flow Not To Capital But To Consumers”

April 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The economist Alex Tabarrok participated in an interesting Q&A session at Quora, but I really wish I could ask him a follow-up on the exchange about Artificial Intelligence’s impact on the middle class. One point he makes is that the benefits of AI will flow to masses the way smartphones have. That sounds promising except that the diffuse nature of that particular technology has coincided by most estimates with a hollowing out of the middle. For instance, those phones have enabled Uber to destabilize the taxi industry, replacing solid jobs and small businesses with Gog Economy insecurity. Having a remarkably great tool in our shirt pockets isn’t necessarily a panacea for larger economic issues, and it’s possible the benefits from AI won’t cover the losses it creates.

The exchange:

Question:

Will the proliferation of affordable AI decimate the middle class?

Alex Tabarrok:

Here is how I think about these issues. The Artificial in AI can sometimes mislead so let’s start by getting rid of the A and asking instead whether more NI, Natural Intelligence will decimate the middle class. For example, will increasing education in China decimate the American middle class? I don’t think so.

As I said in my TED talk, the brainpower of China and India in the 20th century was essentially “offline.” Instead of contributing to the world technological frontier the people of China and India were just barely feeding themselves. China and India are now coming online and I see the increase in natural intelligence as one of the most hopeful facts for the future. It’s been estimated that a reduction in cancer mortality of just 10 percent would be worth $5 trillion to U.S. citizens (and even more taking into account the rest of the world). A reduction in cancer mortality is more likely to happen with a well-educated China than with a poorly educated China. So we have a huge amount to gain by greater NI.

In the case of low-skill labor the rise of China has hurt some US low-skill workers (although US workers as a whole are almost certainly better off due to lower prices). The US has historically had an abundance of highly-skilled labor and with greater education around the world we have less of a competitive advantage. In the case of high-skill labor, however, I think the opportunities for gains are much greater than with competition for low-skill labor. Ideas are what drives growth and ideas are non-rivalrous, they quickly spread around the world. The more idea creators the better for everyone. At the world level, for example, the standard of living and the growth rate of world GDP have both gotten larger as population has increased.

Greater foreign intelligence and wealth could be a threat if intelligence turns from production to destruction (this is also a potential problem with AI). We probably can’t keep China poor, even if we tried, and any attempt to try to do so would likely backfire in the worst possible way. Thus, if want to keep high-skill Chinese workers working on medical rather than military breakthroughs, we must preserve a peaceful world of trade. Indeed, peace and trade become ever more important the richer the world gets.

Now let’s turn from NI to AI. For the foreseeable future I see AI as being very similar to additional NI. Smart people in China aren’t perfect substitutes for smart people in the United States and there are also plenty of opportunities for complementarity. Similarly AI is not a perfect substitute for NI and there are plenty of opportunities for complementarity. An AI that drives your car, for example, complements your NI because it leaves more time for more productive tasks.

(What happens when AI does become a perfect substitute for NI? We could easily be 100 years or more from that scenario but my foresighted colleague, Robin Hanson, has a new book The Age of EM that discusses the implications of uploads, human intelligence copied into software—Hanson’s book is the most serious attempt in all of history to lay out the implications of a new technology but we may not know whether he is right for a long time.)

Thus, the analysis of AI and NI is similar except for one important fact. As Chinese workers become better educated a significant share of the gains will go to Chinese workers (although by no means all). AI, however, is produced by capital. But in our world capital isn’t scarce. The world is awash in capital and computing power is getting ever cheaper. AI isn’t like an oil field owned by a handful of people. AI will be cheap and ownership will be widespread. Just look at your cellphone—it’s faster and more powerful than a multi-million dollar Cray-2 supercomputer of 1990. Moreover, in 1990 there were only a handful of Cray-2s and today there are billions of cell-phone super-computers including hundreds of millions and soon billions in poor countries. The gains from AI, therefore, will flow not to capital but to consumers. So if anything the gains from more AI are even larger than the gains from more NI.•

Tags: Alex Tabarrok

“Most People Are Not Seeing Any Benefit From This Growth”

April 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While I don’t think the Singularity is upon us, mass automation could very well be. For all the good Weak AI can do for production, it will likely force us to reconsider politics, economics and even the meaning of being human.

It’s best, though, to be circumspect when considering the impact thus far of robotics. While it’s probably safe to assume machines have contributed to the middle-class decline in the U.S., there are other considerable factors, including tax codes. As far as the recent Case-Deaton findings about a spike in the death rate among white, middle-aged Americans, the wide availability of opioids has probably been as much the culprit as the decline of manufacturing. Tax codes and drug restrictions can be shifted, however, whereas automation is pointed in only one direction–and that’s up. If jobs of similar quantity and quality aren’t created to replace the vanished ones, something will have to give.

From Moshe Y. Vardi in the Guardian:

The US economy has been performing quite poorly for the bottom 90% of Americans for the past 40 years. Technology is driving productivity improvements, which grow the economy. But the rising tide is not lifting all boats, and most people are not seeing any benefit from this growth. While the US economy is still creating jobs, it is not creating enough of them. The labor force participation rate, which measures the active portion of the labor force, has been dropping since the late 1990s.

While manufacturing output is at an all-time high, manufacturing employment is today lower than it was in the later 1940s. Wages for private nonsupervisory employees have stagnated since the late 1960s, and the wages-to-GDP ratio has been declining since 1970. Long-term unemployment is trending upwards, and inequality has become a global discussion topic, following the publication of Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Most shockingly, economists Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel memorial prize in economic science, and Anne Case found that mortality for white middle-aged Americans has been increasing over the past 25 years, due to an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse.

Is automation, driven by progress in technology, in general, and artificial intelligence and robotics, in particular, the main cause for the economic decline of working Americans?•

Tags: Moshe Y. Vardi

“Railway Buffs Are Getting Up Close And Personal With The New Superfast Maglev Train”

April 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, Japan is promising–perhaps overpromising–driverless taxis, robot assistants, instant language translation, etc. In the “et cetera” category is next-level maglev trains, which may reach a world-record 374 mph. Railroad geeks, a global phenomenon, are excited and turning out at viewing posts for test runs.

From Asahi Shimbun:

FUEFUKI, Yamanashi Prefecture–Railway buffs are getting up close and personal with the new superfast maglev train after two special observation platforms overlooking a test line were opened to the public last month.

In addition to seeing the ultimate in train technology speed past at close quarters, observers can also take in the beautiful backdrop of the expanse of the Kofu Basin and the peaks of the Southern Japan Alps.

As most parts of the test line has been carved underground through mountains, the observation platforms provide rare photo opportunities and places to wait for the test train.

The Yamanashi maglev test line is for what will be called the Linear Chuo Shinkansen, and when it goes into service it will allow passengers to travel between Tokyo and Nagoya in just 40 minutes.

One of the lookouts, the Hanatoriyama observatory, is in a park called “Linear no Mieru Oka” (hill where the linear motor train can be seen). The park spreads out over 2,900 square meters including the area for car parks for visitors.•

“This Is As Real As Mud”

April 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

There are numerous reasons for the surprising success of Donald’s Trump’s racist bumfight of a campaign, something even the hideous hotelier himself didn’t really want. He impetuously entered the race to “burnish his brand,” which stinks like a cheap cologne concocted from sewer water. A troll NEVER really wants to be king.

The emotional homunculus was subsequently aided by myriad factors: the the drift into the fringe by the GOP base, the initially overcrowded field of lacklustre candidates, a racist backlash to the first African-American President and struggling media companies gladly accepting free content, no matter how ugly or inappropriate the Reality TV show was. It’s not that cable news should have ignored the rise of Trump, but it shouldn’t have abetted it to erase the red ink, either. But there was CNN, Jeff Zucker’s clown car of infotainment, pretending populism in the name of the bottom line, and Maureen Dowd realizing far too late that Trump had never been a “fun brand” and had actually become something fascistic. They were not alone in their opportunism or blissful ignorance.

Two passages about this Baba Booey of an election season, one from Markus Feldenkirchen in Spiegel and a couple of David Remnick quotes from The Hollywood Reporter.

From Feldenkirchen:

The political culture that is emerging here is a mixture of primary school, mafia, and porn industry. It alternates between cries of “He started it!,” brawls, misogyny, and penis size comparison. It’s almost as if guests at a formal dinner, where basic table manners were a given, suddenly began to belch and break wind without restraint. America is currently experiencing not only political but also moral bankruptcy. Dirty tricks are not new in US election campaigns, but the new lows to which the candidates are currently stooping are unprecedented.

It’s not just the two bullies at the top who are to blame. Their rise was made possible through a decline in values such as decency, honesty, tolerance and fairness — a process that has been hastened by the Republican Party more than anyone else. For too long, it has pursued fiscal, economic and social policies that served only companies and the rich, the financial backers of their election campaigns. At the same time, millions of Americans slid into precarity. Cultural declines are often the consequence of real economic decline. Propriety isn’t the primary concern of those with financial worries, those who are embittered and living without hope. Instead, the neglected long for a culture of radicalism and coarseness. Destruction, they believe, may presage something better.

Over the course of decades, the Republicans have likewise built up a culture of contempt for public goods and services. They argue for educational policies that exclude the non-privileged, instead pushing them towards stultification and barbarization. They allow billionaires like the Koch brothers to direct the party’s policy and appoint it’s key candidates. A few years ago, Republicans furthermore embraced the radical and destructive Tea Party movement, thus marking the party’s departure from any semblance of moderation.It is too late to turn back the clock.•

From Remnick:

“Donald Trump, for decades, occupied a kind of comic space in the New York ego-scape,” [Remnick] continued. “He was the guy who discovered, ‘If I just say outrageous things and behave like a cartoon of Louis XIV, I will become enormously famous. It doesn’t matter that I’m wrong or it doesn’t matter that I’m ill-informed and it doesn’t matter that I’m even racist. Some portion of people will find this hilarious.’ But now it’s not a question of whether or not he gets to put his name on the side of a skyscraper. It’s whether he has the nuclear codes.”

Not surprisingly, The New Yorker’s coverage of the presidential candidate has been withering. Remnick penned a piece in the March 14 issue of the magazine that dredged up some Trump bon mots that would make even the shameless billionaire wince (marveling about Melania’s bowel movements or his willingness to have sex with Princess Diana). “This is not a Seth Rogen movie; this is as real as mud,” Remnick wrote.

Regardless of the outcome, the 2016 presidential campaign will go down in the annals of politics thanks to Trump, Remnick told THR.

“I can’t believe that in 100 years, we won’t remember the bizarre, frightening, hilarious — did I mention bizarre? — quality of this race, and it begins and ends with Donald Trump,” he added. “You have an American demagogue getting very close to the Republican nomination. This is as close as an American demagogue has gotten to power in history. George Wallace, Huey Long, all those people never got as close as Donald Trump. We may laugh and find it all a gas. And for journalists, it’s a kind of welfare program. Everybody’s ratings get boosted and people read about it and everybody’s happy, but it’s pretty damn frightening.”•

Tags: David Remnick, Markus Feldenkirchen

“The Party Has Mobilized Its Unique And Extensive Network Of Surveillance, Security, And Secret Police”

April 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

During the 1930s, a surprising number of American captains of industry looked longingly at Mussolini’s Italy and even Hitler’s Germany. What they thought they saw was indomitable power. How can we compete with well-coordinated Fascism and totalitarianism, they churlishly asked, with our impudent U.S. laborers? They’ll eat our lunch.

Although Mussolini met with the business end of a meat hook and Hitler died a bunker-based suicide, modern China has aroused those feelings of jealousy all over again in some of our current pouty plutocrats. There is some cause for envy. It’s awe-inspiring what that nation has done in short order, with its headlong dive through the Industrial Age and into the Digital one. Tens of millions have been lifted from abject poverty through mass, manic urbanization, though the day-to-day costs have been steep. It’s striking, though, that while the world’s highest cancer rates and the planet’s worst air pollution receive plenty of attention, the new money has seemingly papered over how sick the larger system is. Authoritarianism is still antithetical to human nature.

Xi Jinping’s current tough-on-crime crusade, aided by cutting-edge sensors and algorithms, is more a political purge than a righteous reckoning for the corrupt. It’s Mao married to modern technology.

The opening of “Crackdown in China,” Orville Schell’s excellent NYRB article:

“As a liberal, I no longer feel I have a future in China,” a prominent Chinese think tank head in the process of moving abroad recently lamented in private. Such refrains are all too familiar these days as educated Chinese professionals express growing alarm over their country’s future. Indeed, not since the 1970s when Mao still reigned and the Cultural Revolution still raged has the Chinese leadership been so possessed by Maoist nostalgia and Leninist-style leadership.

As different leaders have come and gone, China specialists overseas have become accustomed to reading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tea leaves as oscillating cycles of political “relaxation” and “tightening.” China has long been a one-party Leninist state with extensive censorship and perhaps the largest secret police establishment in the world. But what has been happening lately in Beijing under the leadership of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is no such simple fluctuation. It is a fundamental shift in ideological and organizational direction that is beginning to influence both China’s reform agenda and its foreign relations.

At the center of this retrograde trend is Xi’s enormously ambitious initiative to purge the Chinese Communist Party of what he calls “tigers and flies,” namely corrupt officials and businessmen both high and low. Since it began in 2012, the campaign has already netted more than 160 “tigers” whose rank is above or equivalent to that of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400 “flies,” all lower-level officials.¹ But it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style mass purge aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or political views.

To carry out this mass movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of surveillance, security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas of Chinese life.•

Tags: Orville Schell, Xi Jinping

“The New Era Of Megaleaks Is Already Underway”

April 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite Snowden’s leak, governments will continue to have powerful tools of surveillance and will likely use them often despite any legislation. But it isn’t a one-sided fight.

As the eye-popping Panama Papers demonstrate, we’ve permanently moved into an era of cat-and-mouse games among governments, corporations and private citizens, with encryption tools and smaller and more powerful microchips allowing the lone leaker to be the mouse that roared–to even become the feline.

Andy Greenberg’s Wired article details how the “Mother of All Megaleaks,” which makes Assange seem a relatively small matter, began simply with a mysterious message sent to a German newspaper reporter. The writer also explains how technology has enabled such revelations to grow in frequency, size and impact. An excerpt:

The leaks are bound to cause ripples around the world—not least of all for Mossack Fonseca itself. The firm didn’t respond to a request for comment from Wired, but it wrote to the Guardian that “many of the circumstances you cite are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca” and that “we have always complied with international protocols … to assure as is reasonably possible, that the companies we incorporate are not being used for tax evasion, money laundering, terrorist finance or other illicit purposes.” Another letter posted to WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed, meanwhile, purports to show how the firm has responded to its own clients:

Mossack Fonseca and its customers won’t be the last to face an embarrassing or even incriminating megaleak. Encryption and anonymity tools like Tor have only become more widespread and easy to use, making it safer in some ways than ever before for sources to reach out to journalists across the globe. Data is more easily transferred—and with tools like Onionshare, more easily securely transferred—than ever before. And actual Moore’s Law continues to fit more data on smaller and smaller slices of hardware every year, any of which could be ferreted out of a corporation or government agency by a motivated insider and put in an envelope to a trusted journalist.

The new era of megaleaks is already underway: The Panama Papers represent the fourth tax haven leak coordinated by the ICIJ since just 2013.•

Tags: Andy Greenberg

“His Vision Of The Future Was Nonetheless Optimistic”

April 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Utopians tend to overpromise.

Techno-utopians go even further. It’s not that Singularitarians with bold plans for transforming medicine or transportation are making theoretically impossible claims, but they sure have aggressive timeframes and seem to think tomorrow will be smooth as can be. But it’s a world with wrinkles and probably needs to be.

Perhaps by the end of the century, we’ll live in a post-scarcity society with robot assistants and miraculous medicine, though there’ll still be problems–stubborn old ones, new ones, ones we can’t yet imagine. We’re far from perfect, and our machines won’t be flawless, either. Progress is wonderful, but it’s not an arrow pointed toward the heavens.

From Nick Romeo’s Daily Beast piece about Singularity University:

It’s common for tech industry rhetoric to invoke the ideal of a better world, but since its 2008 inception, Singularity University has articulated an astonishingly ambitious series of goals and projects that use technological progress for philanthropic ends. Medicine is just one of many domains that [co-founder Peter] Diamandis wants to fundamentally change. He and others at Singularity are also working to develop and support initiatives that will provide universal access to high-quality education, restore and protect polluted environments, and transition the economy to entirely sustainable energy sources.

His audience was a group of 98 executives from 44 countries around the world; each had paid $14,000 to attend the weeklong program at Singularity University’s NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View, California. As Diamandis moved through the sectors of the economy that artificial intelligence would soon dominate—medicine, law, finance, academia, engineering—the crowd seemed strangely energized by the prospect of its imminent irrelevance. Singularity University was generating more than $1 million of revenue by telling its prosperous guests that they would soon be surpassed by machines.

But his vision of the future was nonetheless optimistic. Diamandis believes that solar energy will soon satisfy the demands of the entire planet and replace the market for fossil fuels. This will mean fewer wars and cleaner air. Systems for converting atmospheric humidity into clean drinking water will become cheap and ubiquitous. The industrial meat industry will also vanish, replaced by tastier and healthier laboratory-grown products with no environmental downsides. He also predicts that exponential increases in the power of AI would soon render teachers and universities superfluous. The best education in the world will become freely available to anyone.•

Tags: Nick Romeo, Peter Diamandis

“They Are Wheelers And Dealers”

April 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Gary Silverman’s excellent Financial Times article includes passages about repossessed monkeys and Ukrainian trophy wives, as all good stories about the odious Trump campaign must.

The piece is about the corrosive candidate’s political point man in Vegas, his billionaire business partner Phil Ruffin, who would be a wonderfully entertaining Horatio Alger figure if he wasn’t working his damndest to elect an American Mussolini. A “Cadillac-and-redhead man” is how the journalist describes his subject, who in the ’50s repossessed a surly simian for a Texas department store and in the Aughts acquired a second wife, an Eastern European beauty queen 46 years his junior.

Ruffin hated the monkey and loves his bride but lacks any kind of passion for politics. He promised his buddy he’d back him, however, and a deal’s a deal.

An excerpt:

A wiry, wily Wichita, Kansas, native who was 147 pounds when he was winning titles as a high school wrestler, Mr Ruffin is the stylistic opposite of his brash buddy from New York. He wears wire-rim glasses. His thinning hair, dyed a deep orange, falls haphazardly across his scalp, unlike Mr Trump’s structured coiffure.

They are the kind of Americans who inspired historian Walter McDougall’s description of the US as a nation of “hustlers”, by which he meant “builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organisers (and) engineers” as well as “self-promoters, scofflaws, occasional frauds and peripatetic self-reinventors”.

Both trace their family histories in the US to the frontier. Mr Trump is the grandson of a German immigrant who took part in the Alaska gold rush before settling in New York. Mr Ruffin’s paternal grandfather left Lebanon for Oklahoma, where Mr Ruffin’s father recalled witnessing the 1924 gunfight that took the life of Bill Tilghman, the legendary gunslinger and marshal of Dodge City, Kansas.

Neither Mr Trump nor Mr Ruffin has created a smartphone app or commanded an enterprise of the complexity of a General Electric, a Goldman Sachs or a Google. They are wheelers and dealers in real estate, hotels, casinos and whatever else comes their way. Theirs is a milieu where money is made by seizing moments, squeezing contractors, battling creditors, and “pushing and pushing and pushing,” as Mr Trump put it in The Art of the Deal, his 1987 book.

“We negotiate all the time,” says Mr Ruffin. “We negotiate something every week.”•

Tags: Donald Trump, Gary Silverman, Phil Ruffin

“High-Speed Chases Could Become A Thing Of The Past”

April 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Interesting Marketwatch article by Martin Libicki about the potential driverless age allowing law enforcement to override controls of cars. I only have one question: Why would the autos need to be driverless for this to occur?

Cars are already rolling computers and will only continue to be developed in that direction. Such machines can be hacked, and it would make sense that police will eventually have the ability to externally take control of a computerized car. I think the plausibility of this scenario will ultimately come down to what society finds acceptable when we write laws, not to the advent of autonomous vehicles.

From Libicki:

It is time to start thinking about the rules of the new road. Otherwise, we may end up with some analog to today’s chaos in cyberspace, which arose from decisions in the 1980s about how personal computers and the Internet would work.

One of the biggest issues will be the rules under which public infrastructures and public safety officers may be empowered to override how autonomous vehicles are controlled.

It is not hard to imagine why they might want such override power. One is for traffic control. As AVs proliferate there are many advantages to having them talk with intelligent roadways, the better to use scarce freeway space. Controls may also be imposed to leave lanes clear for emergency vehicles or crowded busses. Road conditions that are hard to detect by AV sensors, like weather-related lane closures, may also be more efficiently and fairly handled by having roadways or emergency crews redirect AVs away from problematic lanes, as well as around police, fire, and EMS activity. Overrides could be used to restrict certain vehicles from sensitive locations, like military sites.

More intrusive controls may be called for to deal with crime. For instance, high-speed chases could become a thing of the past.•

Tags: Martin Libicki

“Technology Will Render Such A Shift Inevitable”

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

Silicon Valley technologists are mythologized for birthing products in their garages, but considering the room serving as a makeshift workspace, cars are conspicuously not among those goods. Will 3D printing change that?

Will there come a day when a handful of engineers and designers in grad school are able to turn an automotive startup into a going concern, without massive factories and thousands of employees? Let’s say driverless makes vehicles lighter and cheaper and these latter-day Henry Fords dream up a better vehicle. They raise VC to purchase their own 3D printers or offload the production responsibility to companies that specifically handle that chore. Can they make a car that’s competitively priced? Can hundreds or thousands of such small-scale companies exist and compete? It’s already being tried, but can it succeed? Today’s costs make it almost impossible to envision presently, but you could have said the same of computer hardware a decade before Homebrew tinkerers began repurposing their garages.

Even if automaking isn’t markedly decentralized by 3D printers, much of manufacturing will likely be. It will have good and bad effects on the economy, as these outfits won’t produce a ton of assembly-line positions, but they will likely lower consumer costs greatly. It’s progress with an asterisk.

The opening of “How 3-D Printing Will Make Manufacturing in America Great Again,” a Newsweek piece by Kevin Maney:

If the folks at 3D Hubs are right, presidential candidates can stop fulminatingabout bringing back manufacturing from China or Bangladesh or wherever.

Technology will render such a shift inevitable. In the next decade, the whole business dynamic that makes it a good idea for a lot of U.S. companies to manufacture overseas will go poof. The very concept of a big honkin’ factory will eventually become as anachronistic as a typing pool.

Instead, companies are going to custom-make most things in small factories right in your neighborhood or town, close enough so you could go pick up your stuff, or maybe have it dropped onto your porch by a drone. Factories will essentially get broken up, scattered and made local. As 3D Hubs co-founder Bram de Zwart puts it, “Why would you put a thousand machines in one place when you can put one machine in a thousand places?”

Such is the promise of “distributed manufacturing.” The World Economic Forum last year named it one of the most important technology trends to watch. It is expected to have a mighty impact on jobs, geopolitics and the climate. And while massive distributed factories might seem a little far-fetched in 2016, a handful of companies are starting to make it happen.•

Tags: Bram de Zwart, Kevin Maney

“Where Do You Start The Movie?”

April 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, equal parts George Steinbrenner and George Wallace, has made it clear that there will be riots if he doesn’t get the GOP nomination. There will likely be riots even if he does. There’ll be riots.

The cancerous candidate sat for an interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post, and while it doesn’t make Trump answer for his racist and xenophobic comments and peculiar policy positions, it is fascinating as a psychological portrait of a delusional megalomaniac who doesn’t even understand his own motivations. His extremely logorrheic explanation of why he entered politics isn’t exactly analogous to Ted Kennedy’s famous waterloo when he was unable to express why he wanted to be President during his 1979 joust with Jimmy Carter, but I think it does confirm suspicions that Trump impetuously entered the race because he’s an unhappy man whose need for attention can’t be sated. Thanks to a perfect storm of GOP craziness, he wound up the clear frontrunner, even if his path to delegate majority is increasingly difficult to find.

If it succeeds as a personality profile, the interview fails on other grounds. One passage that’s somehow making news is a Trump prediction the Post reporters were remiss in not effectively addressing. It’s this:

“I’m talking about a bubble where you go into a very massive recession. Hopefully not worse than that, but a very massive recession.”•

If it sounds familiar, that’s because Trump periodically releases such sky-is-falling mouthfarts which almost always turn out to be wrong. Here’s another one from 2012:

Billionaire Donald Trump says the U.S. economy is poised for “massive inflation” and is warning investors to take steps now to protect themselves.•

Someday the hideous hotelier will be correct in a stopped-clock-being-right-twice-a-day fashion, but it won’t be because of any knowledge. Woodward and Costa should have pushed back at this proclamation.

The opening:

Bob Woodward:

And the real first question is, where do you start the movie of your decision to run for president? Because that is a big deal. A lot of internal/external stuff, and we’d love to hear your monologue on how you did it.

Donald Trump:

Where do you start the movie? I think it’s actually — and very interesting question — but I think the start was standing on top of the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, which is the day — Bob, you were there, and you know what I mean, because there has. . . . I mean, it looked like the Academy Awards. I talk about it. There were so many cameras. So many — it was packed. The atrium of Trump Tower, which is a very big place, was packed. It literally looked like the Academy Awards. And . . . .

Bob Woodward:

But we want to go before that moment.

Donald Trump:

Before that? Okay, because that was really . . . .

Bob Woodward:

Because, other words, there’s an internal Donald with Donald.

Robert Costa:

Maybe late 2014 or before you started hiring people?

Donald Trump:

Well, but that was — okay, but I will tell you, until the very end. . . . You know, I have a good life. I built a great company. It’s been amazingly — I’m sure you looked at the numbers. I have very little debt, tremendous assets. And great cash flows. I have a wonderful family. Ivanka just had a baby. Doing this is not the easiest thing in the world to do. People have — many of my friends, very successful people, have said, “Why would you do this?”

Bob Woodward:

So is there a linchpin moment, Mr. Trump, where it went from maybe to yes, I’m going to do this? And when was that?

Donald Trump:

Yeah. I would really say it was at the beginning of last year, like in January of last year. And there were a couple of times. One was, I was doing a lot of deals. I was looking at very seriously one time, not — they say, oh, he looked at it for many — I really, no. I made a speech at the end of the ’80s in New Hampshire, but it was really a speech that was, it was not a political speech. But because it happened to be in New Hampshire . . . .

Bob Woodward:

And that guy was trying to draft you.

Donald Trump:

And he was a very nice guy. But he asked me. And he was so intent, and I made a speech. It was not a political speech, anyway, and I forgot about it.

Bob Woodward:

And that was the real possibility? Or the first . . . .

Donald Trump:

Well no, the real possibility was the Romney time, or the Romney term. This last one four years ago. I looked at that, really. I never looked at it seriously then. I was building my business, I was doing well. And I went up to New Hampshire, made a speech. And because it was in New Hampshire, it was sort of like, Trump is going to run. And since then people have said, Trump is going to run. I never was interested. I could almost say at all, gave it very little thought, other than the last time, where Romney was running.•

Tags: Bob Woodward, Donald Trump, Robert Costa

“What The Candidates Should Be Focusing On…Are Emerging Technologies”

April 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Donald Trump wants to make America great again. You remember those halcyon days, right? Girls Gone Wild entrepreneur Joe Francis had not yet been incarcerated, the Bumfight producers hadn’t been sued and the hazards of Purple Drank were not fully appreciated. It was 2011, and it was ours.

Mitt Romney’s biggest moral failing during the last Presidential campaign may have been his dalliance with Birtherism stemming from his partnership with the megalomaniac Trump, but his greatest practical misstep was decrying government investment in alternative energy, going so far as to bury Tesla which had received a loan from the Obama stimulus. Elon Musk’s outfit wasn’t insolvent like Solyndra, paid back the borrowed money early and will be providing thousands of good jobs for Americans in its battery and solar plants in Nevada and New York. That is, of course, not even mentioning the dire need for replacing fossil fuels as we heat and melt even faster than feared.

This stance is but one of the disastrous decisions the GOP has doubled down on in the current egregious election season, with Trump the leader of the ugly mob. No, he didn’t start it, but he boiled the lies down to their purest and most dangerous form, selling the return of yesterday’s manufacturing base when it’s tomorrow’s high-tech positions that must be won.

From Issie Lapowsky’s Wired piece about the blowhard’s bad ideas about Apple and economics:

Still, it stands to reason that Trump would cling to this talking point. His campaign, exit polls show, has been largely buoyed by the populist anger of the so-called white working class, roughly defined as white working adults without a college degree. These are the people who once staffed the factories of the Rust Belt and the mines of coal country, and their opportunities have taken a big hit from the flow of manufacturing jobs overseas, as well as competition from new generations of immigrants and the rise of technology as a more efficient substitute for manual labor.

The number of voters who meet the “white working class” definition is shrinking. In 1980, 65 percent of voters were white and lacked a college education. In 2012, it was just 36 percent. But it’s been a powerful constituency for Trump, nonetheless, one that he’d be far less dominant without.

Which is why, despite the fact that as a businessman Trump is likely all too aware that upending Apple’s supply chain would be unfeasible, he continues to make grand claims about the company. With this promise, Trump is pandering to his base, promising to restore the kinds of jobs that were once a key part of the American Dream.

But Trump’s promises if realized, would actually hurt the very people he’s promising to help, experts say. That’s because today, those once dependable jobs on the assembly line have been reduced to low-wage, low-skill commodity labor. If Trump—or any of the presidential candidates—really want to help the working class, researchers say, they would be wise to focus less on the types of jobs the US has already lost and more on the industries the US is uniquely poised to create.

Forget Apple. Focus on Tesla

Trump isn’t wrong to see the tech industry as a potential creator of manufacturing jobs in America. He’s just looking at the wrong parts of the tech industry. What the candidates should be focusing on instead, says Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, are emerging technologies like robotics, electric vehicles, and autonomous aviation.•

Tags: Elon Musk, Issie Lapowsky

“It’s Sort Of Soft Fascism In A Way”

April 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Adrienne LaFrance’s Atlantic article “What Is a Robot?” is one of my favorite pieces thus far in 2016. As the title suggests, the writer tries to define what qualities earns a machine the name “robot,” a term perhaps not as slippery as “existential” but one that’s nebulous nonetheless. The piece does much more, presenting a survey of robotics from ancient to contemporary times and asking many questions about where the sector’s current boom may be leading us.

Two points about the article:

It quotes numerous roboticists and those analyzing the field who hold the opinion that a robot must be encased, embodied. I think this is a dangerous position. A robot to me is anything that is given instructions and then completes a task. It’s increasingly coming to mean anything that can receive those basic instructions and then grow and learn on its own, not requiring more input. I don’t think it matters if that machine has an anthropomorphic body like C-3PO or if it’s completely invisible. If we spend too much time counting fingers and toes, we may miss the bigger picture.

Early on, there’s discussion about the master-slave relationship humans now enjoy with their machines, which will only increase in the short term–and may eventually be flipped. The following paragraph speaks to this dynamic: “In the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1807 opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit, there is a passage known as the master-slave dialectic. In it, Hegel argues, among other things, that holding a slave ultimately dehumanizes the master. And though he could not have known it at the time, Hegel was describing our world, too, and aspects of the human relationship with robots.” I believe this statement is true should machines gain consciousness, but it will remain a little hyperbolic as long as they’re not. Holding sway over Weak AI that does our bidding certainly changes the meaning of us and will present dicey ethical questions, but they are very different ones than provoked by actual slavery. Further, the human mission being altered doesn’t necessarily mean we’re being degraded.

From LaFrance:

Making robots appear innocuous is a way of reinforcing the sense that humans are in control—but, as Richards and Smart explain, it’s also a path toward losing it. Which is why so many roboticists say it’s ultimately not important to focus on what a robot is. (Nevertheless, Richards and Smart propose a useful definition: “A robot is a constructed system that displays both physical and mental agency, but is not alive in the biological sense.”)

“I don’t think it really matters if you get the words right,” said Andrew Moore, the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “To me, the most important distinction is whether a technology is designed primarily to be autonomous. To really take care of itself without much guidance from anybody else… The second question—of whether this thing, whatever it is, happens to have legs or eyes or a body—is less important.”

What matters, in other words, is who is in control—and how well humans understand that autonomy occurs along a gradient. Increasingly, people are turning over everyday tasks to machines without necessarily realizing it. “People who are between 20 and 35, basically they’re surrounded by a soup of algorithms telling them everything from where to get Korean barbecue to who to date,” Markoff told me. “That’s a very subtle form of shifting control. It’s sort of soft fascism in a way, all watched over by these machines of loving grace. Why should we trust them to work in our interest? Are they working in our interest? No one thinks about that.”

“A society-wide discussion about autonomy is essential,” he added.•

Tags: Adrienne LaFrance, Andrew Moore, John Markoff, Neil Richards, William Smart

“I Think Of It As Another Form Of Auschwitz”

April 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

You can understand if Kim Jong Un is guilty of emotional eating.

The North Korean tyrant’s ballooning weight, which has caused him to have a Hitchcockian profile and myriad health problems, is pointing to an early grave. It would be good riddance to an absolute monster, but would it lead to a better, freer, saner government? Because of the despot’s young age, you don’t often hear of succession plans should he soon succumb. Considering the great strength of the state’s military, a new strongman would likely be installed, the Orwellian nightmare continued.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything, Kang Chol-hwan, a former North Korean political prisoner who escaped after a decade, answers questions about his experiences. Two exchanges follow.

_______________________

Question:

What goes on day to day in the jail/concentration camps? Has anyone gotten in-trouble from getting caught with USB sticks?

Kang Chol-hwan:

Daily life in the work camps is very mundane. We wake up at 5 am and are forced to work until sunset. We are given lessons on Kim il-sung and Juche. We are forced to watch public executions. We are physically abused – hit and tortured. I think of it as another form of Auschwitz. These work camps are like products of Nazism, and an abusive government needs elements such as Nazi concentration camps. They just have different ways of killing people.

People have almost gotten caught with the USB sticks. Thankfully, they managed to get out before they were caught. However, they cannot go back to North Korea now. But that’s about it currently. North Korean citizens often get caught using these USB sticks but they are released when they give bribes to the police. I believe it would be about 500 dollars maximum in Pyongyang and about 200~300 dollars in other regions. The problem would be if they are caught and they have no money to bribe their way out.

_______________________

Question:

Do you miss North Korea despite what you endured? And, is there any misconception about North Korea that you would like to share?

Kang Chol-hwan:

I dislike the North Korean government, not the people- so yes, I do miss the people there. North Koreans may seem different because they are brainwashed by the government; but once their thoughts change through the flow of information, they are the same as anywhere else. I think it is lamentable that people think of the North Korean government and North Koreans as one entity. North Koreans may seem loyal to the government, but because they fear the government, they cannot speak their minds. For example, Seungjin Park, the North Korean soccer player during the World Cup, was at the Yodok Political Prisoners Camp with me, but is now acting as the soccer team coach. However, he must hide the fact that he was at the prisoners camp. To learn more about North Korea, you must know something about the nature of North Korea. This is true even when visiting North Korea.•

Tags: Kang Chol-hwan

“New Technologies Do Change Our Perception Of Ourselves”

March 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

CRISPR’s surprising success has swept us into an age when it all seems possible: the manipulation of humans, animals and plants, even perhaps of extinct species. Which way forward?

The geneticist George Church, who has long had visions of rejuvenated woolly mammoths and augmented humans, is interviewed about our brave new world at Edge. He realizes some bristle at manipulation of the Homo sapiens germline because it calls into question all we are, but apart from metaphors, there are also very real practical concerns over the games getting messy and possibly dangerous. The good (diseases being edited out of existence, organs being tailored to transplantees, etc.) shouldn’t be dreams permanently deferred, but it is difficult to understand how bad applications will be contained. Of course, the negative will probably unfold regardless, so we owe it ourselves to pursue the positive, if carefully. Church himself is on board with a cautious approach but not one that’s unduly so.

An excerpt:

New technologies do change our perception of ourselves. It used to be new discoveries, and it still is; it’s integrating. If you have a new technology like a telescope, it can cause a discovery about where our planet sits in the universe—whether it’s at the center or not—but more and more frequently in the present, we have new technologies.

Sometimes people ask me why everybody is so worked up about applying CRISPR to the germline of humans. They’re not worked up particularly about applying it to the germline of animals. We just got approval for genetically modified salmon, and plants have been genetically modified for many years now. Even though some people will eat it and some people won’t, the fact is it’s a multibillion dollar business.

Why are humans special? You could say we have the Food and Drug Administration (in multiple countries) that makes sure every new medical technology, whether it’s a medical device or pharmaceutical has to be safe and effective. It does you no good to have a drug that’s safe but does nothing, nor having one that’s very effective but kills people.

What is it that makes germline manipulation of humans special? It’s what you were just getting at—our perception of ourselves. If we feel that we can change any aspect of ourselves, where do you begin and where do you stop? and who sets those rules?

When you’re in a more primitive phase of the technology, you don’t have to ask that question because it seems so far off. We can only make minor changes: a little nip-and-tuck, cure a few vaccines; it doesn’t fundamentally change human nature. But if you ever did get a tool where you could fundamentally change human nature to anything you wanted—any hybrid with any animal properties that you like, hybridization with your inorganic machines that’s more intimate than it is now—that changes our view of ourselves. I guess that’s why people not only want more caution than ever before, which I would concur. They want maybe so much caution that it can never happen. There are many technologies that get banned at one point or another; it’s not unusual. Railroads were banned because trains were colliding with one another, sometimes in the middle of towns.•

Tags: George Church

“What Do Our Lives In Today’s World Mean?”

March 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The 1993 version of Hillary Clinton probably would have been far more appreciated in 2016 than this year’s model, but that iteration wasn’t so popular back then. Soon after her husband’s first inauguration, Michael Kelly published “Saint Hillary,” a NYT Magazine article that concerned what Clinton believed was her spiritual mission as the freshly minted First Lady.

Her views seem New Agey in retrospect and were no doubt spurred in part by grief over her father’s death, but Kelly, who was later killed as an Iraq embed, did unwittingly pen the piece at the perfect time to capture the moment prior to the sea change in the culture due to the decentralization of the media, the rise of the Internet and the emergence of Reality TV. It was just before our communications matured and we regressed. Any deep conversation now is just waiting to be trolled. We’re better but we’re worse.

An excerpt:

Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life, Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer. Something in the Meaning of It All line, something that would inform everything from her imminent and all-encompassing health care proposal to ways in which the state might encourage parents not to let their children wander all hours of the night in shopping malls.

When it is suggested that she sounds as though she’s trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life, she says, excitedly, “That’s right, that’s exactly right!”

She is, it develops in the course of two long conversations, looking for a way of looking at looking at the world that would marry conservatism and liberalism, and capitalism and statism, that would tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God, the end of Communism and the beginning of the third millennium, crime in the streets and on Wall Street, teen-age mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parks, the cynicism of the press and the corrupting role of television, the breakdown of civility and the loss of community.

The point of all this is not abstract or small. What Mrs. Clinton seems — in all apparent sincerity — to have in mind is leading the way to something on the order of a Reformation: the remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life. A lot of people, contemplating such a task, might fall prey to self doubts. Mrs. Clinton does not blink.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she says. “But we can’t get scared away from it because it is an overwhelming task.’

The difficulty is bound to be increased by the awkward fact that a good deal of what Mrs. Clinton sees as wrong right now with the American way of life can be traced, at least in part, to the last great attempt to find The Answer: the liberal experiments in the reshaping of society that were the work of the intellectual elite of . . . Mrs. Clinton’s generation.

THE CRUSADE OF HILLARY Rodham Clinton began on April 6 in Austin, Tex. There, speaking from notes she had scribbled on the plane, she moved swiftly past the usual thanks and jokes to wade into an extraordinary speech: a passionate, at times slightly incoherent, call for national spiritual renewal.

The Western world, she said, needed to be made anew. America suffered from a “sleeping sickness of the soul,” a “sense that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough — that we lack at some core level meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are.”

She spoke of “cities that are filled with hopeless girls with babies and angry boys with guns” as only the most visible signs of a nation crippled by “alienation and despair and hopelessness,” a nation that was in the throes of a “crisis of meaning.”

“What do our governmental institutions mean? What do our lives in today’s world mean?” she asked. “What does it mean in today’s world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human?”

These questions, she said, led to the larger question: “Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum?” The answer to that was “all of us,” all required “to play our part in redefining what our lives are and what they should be.”

“Let us be willing,” she urged in conclusion, “to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.”•

Tags: Hillary Clinton, Michael Kelly

“Trump Never Intended To Be The Candidate”

March 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, a classy individual who may soon be taking leaks in White House terlets, never actually wanted to be President.

David Remnick recently scolded himself for not believing that the Trump campaign would be anything more than a couple of months of brand-building before quickly burning out. He shouldn’t be so tough on himself, since that’s all the hideous hotelier himself was planning. He threw lots of shit at the wall–the wall Mexico will be paying for, I suppose–and some of it, shockingly, stuck. If at the conclusion of his campaign announcement speech you told Trump that his “Mexicans are rapists” remark was a winner, he would have been stunned. He’s actually occasionally acknowledged during the campaign that he knew he was making ridiculous comments that should not be taken seriously. But the fascist poseur became a frontrunner and is now in it to win it.

Former Trump strategist Stephanie Cegielski, who’s left the campaign, writes of her former boss in XO Jane. An excerpt:

I don’t think even Trump thought he would get this far. And I don’t even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all.

He certainly was never prepared or equipped to go all the way to the White House, but his ego has now taken over the driver’s seat, and nothing else matters. The Donald does not fail. The Donald does not have any weakness. The Donald is his own biggest enemy.

A devastating terrorist attack in Pakistan targeting Christians occurred on Easter Sunday, and Trump’s response was to tweet, “Another radical Islamic attack, this time in Pakistan, targeting Christian women & children. At least 67 dead, 400 injured. I alone can solve.”

Ignoring the fact that at the time Trump tweeted this (time-stamped 4:37 p.m.) the latest news reports had already placed the number differently at 70 dead, 300 injured, take a moment to appreciate the ridiculous, cartoonish, almost childish arrogance of saying that he alone can solve. Does Trump think that he is making a cameo on Wrestlemania (yes, one of his actual credits)?

This is not how foreign policy works. For anyone. Ever.

Superhero powers where “I alone can solve” problems are not real. They do not exist for Batman, for Superman, for Wrestlemania and definitely not for Donald Trump.

What was once Trump’s desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks.

I’ll say it again: Trump never intended to be the candidate. But his pride is too out of control to stop him now.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Stephanie Cegielski

“There’s Already An Evolution Taking Place Inside Of Cuba”

March 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Friendships are fragile things.

In his just-concluded trip to Cuba, President Obama met with Che Guevara’s ghost but was denied Fidel Castro in the flesh. Brother Raoul, now running the show more or less, was likewise refused a conflict-free visit by his American counterpart, who shook with one hand and pointed accusingly with the other. The most tense moment of a trip that ended well occurred in the Grand Theater in Havana. From Veit Medick in Spiegel:

The theater became quieter when Obama began to address more sensitive issues, such as political constraints and the lack of a private economy in Cuba. It was a bit much for Castro, but a necessary evil. After all, the Cubans also made their points during the visit. Obama had to pose for a photograph in front of an image of Che Guevara, he had to make appearances in the Palace of the Revolution, and during a joint press conference, Castro tried to lift the president’s arm into the air to form a victory salute. Now it was Castro’s turn.

“There’s already an evolution taking place inside of Cuba,” Obama said to Castro, who was sitting in the first row. By that point, mostly the Americans were clapping. Those in the Cuban section of the audience, sitting in the right half of the auditorium, apparently didn’t dare to applaud. They had clearly been chosen very carefully, and the speech was being broadcast on national television.

Following a half-hour speech, Obama disappeared after receiving a brief round of applause. Castro stepped onto the balcony again. The mood was tremendous, as the crowd chanted “Raúl! Raúl!” The American delegation looked a little bewildered. Socialism was alive and well, at least a little.

Throughout the state visit, the mood remained as wave-like as it was in the theater — sometimes good, sometimes bad, and then good again. On Sunday, when Raúl Castro did not appear at the airport for the arrival of Obama on Air Force One, some Americans did not seem so pleased. On Monday, the two leaders visited the memorial to freedom fighter Jose Martí, and it almost seemed as if they had been doing this for decades “It is a great honor to pay tribute to Jose Martí, who gave his life for independence of his homeland,” Obama wrote in the guestbook. The Cubans were satisfied.

At the ensuing press conference in the Palace of the Revolution, when Obama encouraged journalists to ask questions, it was Castro’s turn to look dissatisfied.•

Tags: Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, Raoul Castro, Veit Medick

“Her Signature Was Tension Disguised As Pride”

March 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

Nancy Reagan married well. A starlet who never came close to shuffling free of the suffix, she wed a marginally more successful Hollywood player who graduated from the studio system to the political machine. He enjoyed shocking success, first in the California Governor’s mansion and then the White House.

As an older First Lady, she always displayed grace and looked the part, advised the children to simply “just say no” the way a grandmother can because she doesn’t have the responsibility of actually raising the kids. She was a mixed blessing for the country, asinine with astrology and awful on AIDS but admirable with Alzheimer’s. Perhaps most importantly, she was on the right side of history when a thaw in the Cold War seemed possible. The stars were aligned correctly.

The opening of the great critic Tom Carson’s MTV obituary of the First Lady:

Once upon a time, a now-forgotten saloon singer named Francis Albert Sinatra recorded a tune called “Nancy (With the Laughing Face).” A sentimental fellow whenever he wasn’t threatening mayhem to anyone who dared to criticize him, Frank thought it had been composed in honor of his newborn daughter, and the songwriters decided they’d let him roll with that illusion. It wasn’t the truth, but it was only a song.

Decades later, “Nancy (With the Laughing Face)” entered political history. Now a lot burlier, more reliant on toupees, and even more prone to threatening mayhem to anyone who dared to criticize him, the self-same Frank Sinatra sang it — with revised lyrics — at Ronald Reagan’s inaugural. What’s a bungled notion of hailing your daughter compared to celebrating the new first lady of the United States?

The sad thing is that Nancy Reagan’s face was never exactly renowned for its bubbly gift of childish laughter. She did have a nice smile, like a superbly arranged bunch of white bullets greeting you below two anxious, frozen blueberries. But spontaneity wasn’t her specialty. The facial expression she was most famous for — others had tried, but she perfected it — was the Adoring Wife as Ronnie made one more of his gazillion speeches. At least on TV, her signature was tension disguised as pride.

She had reasons for the tension. Yet she also had reasons for the pride.•

____________________________

Sinatra, that erstwhile Liberal Democrat, supporting his Hollywood buddy Reagan at the 1980 Republican Convention. “Harry Truman played the piano…Nixon played the piano…they could entertain you also,” he said in defense of the aspiring Actor-in-Chief. Chris Wallace and Lynn Sherr do the honors. Lousy audio, but still worth it.

Tags: Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Tom Carson

“That Trend Is Only Going To Go In One Direction”

March 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The physicist and entrepreneur Joseph F. Engelberger, who died late last year, was a pioneering industrial roboticist. In 1978, he predicted in the pages of Penthouse it would take 100 years before blue collar workers would be replaced by automation. He peevishly blamed labor unions and politics for the slow transition, though the scientist didn’t offer many suggestions for what the newly unemployed would do to survive. Well, factories have, to a great degree, fallen to our silicon sisters far ahead of that schedule, and workers with white collars are also being watched opportunistically by the bionic eye.

As Erica Phillips writes in her WSJ article, Labor has so far been able to largely forestall robotics at American shipping terminals, but the arrow is pointed in one direction, and that’s toward Engelberger’s vision of the future. An excerpt:

Many in the industry believe automation, which boosts terminal productivity and reliability while cutting labor costs, is critical to the ability of ports to cope with the surging trade volumes and the huge megaships that are beginning to arrive in the U.S. Analysts estimate the technology can reduce the amount of time ships spend in port and improve productivity by as much as 30%.

“We have to do it for productivity purposes, to stay relevant and to be able to service these large ships,” said Peter Stone, a member of TraPac’s board.

Yet the TraPac site is one of only four cargo terminals in the U.S. using the technology. That is fewer automated terminals than there are at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands alone.

Supporters of robotic cargo handling are getting a new showcase this month with the phased-in opening of an automated terminal at the Port of Long Beach, next door to the Los Angeles port. At a cost of over $1 billion to complete and the capacity to handle 3.3 million 20-foot container units—nearly half of the entire port’s volume last year—the Orient Overseas (International) Ltd. site is a big bet on the future.

A successful operation in Long Beach could persuade other U.S. ports to follow, said Mark Sisson, a senior port planner with infrastructure-development group Aecom. “The industry at a global level is rushing hard into this technology,” he said. “That trend is only going to go in one direction. It’s just a question of timing.”

Experts in port-terminal infrastructure and operations say the U.S. has been slow to adopt the technology because of years of resistance by longshore labor unions. Some studies have shown robotic cargo handling can reduce the need for longshore labor by as much as 50%.•

______________________________

Engelberger conducts a demo for Johnny Carson in 1966, at the 9:09 mark.

Tags: Erica Phillips, Joseph Engelberger

“He Will Change What It Means To Be A Republican”

March 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Nicholas Confessore is one of the amazingly talented and dedicated group of New York Times political reporters who’ve covered the 2016 American Presidential election better than I think any national election in this country has ever been covered by any news organization. In “How the G.O.P. Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump,” Confessore writes about the Republican power structure having the candidate selection process torn from its grip. There’s a lot of good stuff about how the party lost touch with its working-class base, but I think the article–like almost all articles this odd season–misses one valuable point: Donald Trump is essentially a modern Republican, the substance the same even if the style is markedly different.

Trump uses unvarnished, hateful language, substituting dog bites for dog whistles, and his wedge issues are married to populism more than social issues, but he’s still a wealthy person trying to pick the pockets of lower-income people and shift the money to those who already have plenty. His tax schemes and health-care plans assuredly would send the U.S. in that direction. Trump may seem like a different thing because he wasn’t anointed from on high, but he’s the new boss, same as the old boss.

From Confessore:

As the Republican Party collapses on itself, conservative leaders struggling to explain Mr. Trump’s appeal have largely seized on his unique qualities as a candidate: his larger-than-life persona, his ability to dominate the airwaves, his tough-sounding if unrealistic policy proposals. Others ascribe Mr. Trump’s rise to the xenophobia and racism of Americans angry over their declining power.

But the story is also one of a party elite that abandoned its most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty over the past decade as the party’s donors, lawmakers and lobbyists prospered. From mobile home parks in Florida and factory towns in Michigan, to Virginia’s coal country, where as many as one in five adults live on Social Security disability payments, disenchanted Republican voters lost faith in the agenda of their party’s leaders.

In dozens of interviews, Republican lawmakers, donors, activists and others described — some with resignation, some with anger — a party that paved the way for a Trump-like figure to steal its base, as it lost touch with less affluent voters and misunderstood their growing anguish.

“This is absolutely a crisis for the party elite — and beyond the party elite, for elected officials, and for the way people have been raised as Republicans in the power structure for a generation,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush. “If Donald Trump wins, he will change what it means to be a Republican.”•

Tags: Donald Trump, Nicholas Confessore

“We’re So Obsolete In Cyber

March 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Donald Trump, Jean-Marie Le Pen with a neckwear line, was born into wealth and connections yet feels gypped.

He often expresses this inner void in terms of politics. In the 1980s, when he was a vocal opponent of President Ronald Reagan, he felt Japan was being allowed to rip us off. Now it’s China, Mexico and any nation not overwhelming us with gifts of oil and treasure. We need more. Well, he needs more. And nothing will ever be enough, because endless amounts of bragging and petroleum and steak meat can’t make up for a lack of parental love.

In the New York Times, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger interviewed Trump about foreign policy. The GOP candidate extended his feelings of personal inadequacy to the topic of cyberwar, revealing an appalling lack of knowledge on the topic. An excerpt:

David Sanger:

The question was about cyber, how would you envision using cyberweapons? Cyberweapons in an attack to take out a power grid in a city, so forth.

Donald Trump:

First off, we’re so obsolete in cyber. We’re the ones that sort of were very much involved with the creation, but we’re so obsolete, we just seem to be toyed with by so many different countries, already. And we don’t know who’s doing what. We don’t know who’s got the power, who’s got that capability, some people say it’s China, some people say it’s Russia. But certainly cyber has to be a, you know, certainly cyber has to be in our thought process, very strongly in our thought process. Inconceivable that, inconceivable the power of cyber. But as you say, you can take out, you can take out, you can make countries nonfunctioning with a strong use of cyber. I don’t think we’re there. I don’t think we’re as advanced as other countries are, and I think you probably would agree with that. I don’t think we’re advanced, I think we’re going backwards in so many different ways. I think we’re going backwards with our military. I certainly don’t think we are, we move forward with cyber, but other countries are moving forward at a much more rapid pace. We are frankly not being led very well in terms of the protection of this country.•

“You Can Engineer Yourself Out Of Any Situation”

March 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Perhaps the future will come screaming across the sky, or maybe it will just putter along.

Nevada just became the first state to experience an FAA-approved drone delivery, which may be a harbinger of a different near-term future the way the first online purchase (a copy of the Sting CD Ten Summoner’s Tales) was in 1994. But ground-bound delivery robots on wheels, the tortoise in the race, can also cheaply get groceries and goods to consumers and could be formidable competition. Probably there’s room for both.

From Michael Laris’ Washington Post piece about Starship Technologies‘ autonomous “rolling suitcases” perhaps coming to our nation’s capital soon:

There were no chirpy little R2-D2 sounds, just the quiet churn of bureaucracy starting to roll as [Council Secretary Nyasha] Smith stamped in the legislation. “I want it to speak with me. I want it to have a relationship with me!” [Councilwoman Mary] Cheh said.

As does Allan Martinson, Starship’s chief operating officer, who saw some 6,000 firms as a venture capitalist before deciding to join the robotic delivery startup. This is no phantom product that will have fizzled in a year, he said.

“It’s a real, tangible, solid thing,” Martinson said. “You can engineer yourself out of any situation. That’s the philosophy of this company.”

Martinson said the robots began rolling autonomously last month through parts of London and Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, using proprietary digital maps and sophisticated software. They can also be guided over the web by an operator if they get stumped on their way. To make delivery cheap — from $1 to $3 dollars a trip, hopefully dropping to under $1, company executives said — engineers are trying to keep the hardware basic. That means no laser-pulsing LIDAR, an expensive surveying technology used in many driverless car prototypes.

“It’s basically a mobile phone on wheels,” Martinson said. Its low speed and weight — 4 miles per hour and 40-pounds max — also short-circuit safety concerns, he added. “It’s basically a rolling suitcase. If you go home and try to kill yourself with a suitcase, you’d have to be very inventive.”•

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