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“Mr. Trump Thinks The Menstrual Cycle Is A Handicap”

January 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Pol Pot with hair plugs, is like all bullies, a coward. His behavior stems from weakness and insecurity, so he can be handled. Jeb!, the favored son of a privileged family, doesn’t have adequate experience neutralizing such toxic types, but there are sure ways to deal. Lecture him about it in a mature way like Bernie Sanders and the hideous hotelier looks small. Aggressively return his obnoxious behavior like Megyn Kelly and he positively wilts. 

Women in particular throw Trump for a loss because he’s spent his life making sure he’s in a superior position to the ones in his life. He controls the purse strings and they should bleed in silence. Edward Luce’s latest Financial Times column about the 2016 race looks at this particular Trump shortcoming. The opening:

Hillary Clinton should be celebrating. Donald Trump’s decision to boycott the Fox News debate was ostensibly about ratings. How can the cable network make money without his celebrity pull? Mr Trump may prove his point when Thursday night’s viewership numbers come in.

But switching channels is not the same thing as showing up at a polling booth. More than half America’s electorate is female — they accounted for 53 per cent of the vote in the last election. Even the most apathetic will by now have heard Mr Trump’s opinions about Megyn Kelly, the Fox anchor, who will co-host the debate. Ms Kelly is a “bimbo”, according to Mr Trump, who is incapable of objectivity when there is “blood coming out of her whatever”.

So that is settled. Mr Trump thinks the menstrual cycle is a handicap. He also recoils at other female bodily functions. When Mrs Clinton took a bathroom break at a recent Democratic debate, Mr Trump described her as “disgusting”. He used the same word about an opposing lawyer in a 2011 hearing when she asked for a short break to pump breast milk. Looks are also fair game. Among those attacked for their appearance are the actress Bette Midler (“extremely unattractive”), Angelina Jolie (“she’s been with so many guys she makes me look like a baby”), media figure Arianna Huffington (“unattractive both inside and out”), fellow Republican candidate Carly Fiorina (“look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”) and comedian Rosie O’Donnell (“fat pig”).

None of which has done Mr Trump’s ratings any harm. The more controversial a celebrity, the bigger audiences they attract. The question is whether there is any longer a meaningful distinction between show business and US politics. Do ratings equal votes?•

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“Space! Rockets!”

January 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

DR. WERNHER VON BRAUN SUITED UP IN SPACE SUIT PRIOR TO ENTERING MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER'S NEUTRAL BUOYANCY SIMULATOR. 1967

Five Books did an excellent interview with geneticist Matthew Cobb on the topic of the “History of Science.” In discussing William E. Burrows’ really fun 1999 title, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, Cobb comments on Wernher von Braun an erstwhile Nazi and American hero who directly oversaw the murders of Jewish prisoners and who wanted to gas monkey astronauts in outer space (I swear!). An excerpt:

Question:

You just mentioned Enceladus so, talking of space missions, we’ll go on to your next book: William Burrows’s This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age published in 1998. What do you like about this book?

Matthew Cobb:

Space! Rockets! When it came out I was about to go on holiday and wanted a thick book to read. Burrows is a science journalist: not a historian or a scientist. I find it incredibly readable, very exciting. Although it was written by an American, it didn’t cover up the fact that Wernher von Braun, the brains behind the Apollo programme, was a Nazi Party member who was absolved for his involvement with the Hitler regime because he could build ICBMs. The book contains a good account—as good as there could be at the time, given the archives in the USSR hadn’t fully opened—of the huge advances the Russians made, which became obvious as they first flew up the Sputnik and then put the first man in space. I find it an extremely readable account of a time I grew up in—almost like a novel. I wasn’t reading it with a professional eye because I don’t know much about space history.

Question:

Burrows’s book is very dramatic—especially some of the moments like the first moon landing.

Matthew Cobb:

I remember it! I was 11 years old at the time. I was watching it with my uncle Brian in the middle of the night. Although I remember the excitement of seeing Neil Armstrong’s feet stepping down on to the ground, I was equally amazed by the fact that Brian was eating four Weetabix at three o’clock in the morning. We have lost a lot of the excitement about space flight. A year ago NASA trialled the Orion space capsule, which they may use to fly to Mars. The launch was in the middle of one of my lectures, so I decided to take a brief break and show the students the NASA live stream. You don’t see rocket launches on live TV anymore. The space shuttle has been scrapped and although there are rockets going to the Space Station, and private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin developing reusable rockets, they doesn’t enjoy the same media attention as in the 60s and 70s. So we all sat and watched it—the students were very excited.•

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“The ‘Total’ Office Heralds The Rise Of A New Technocracy”

January 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The technocratic office space has some of its roots in Fascist Italy, in the work of Italo Balbo, though Mussolini’s Air Minister wasn’t overly concerned like Google and Facebook are now with swallowing up employees’ lives by smothering them with amenities (though he did have coffee delivered to their desks via pneumatic tubes!). He just wanted the “trains” to run on time.

For lot of workers in today’s Gig Economy, the office has disappeared, the software serving as invisible middleman. The inverse of that reality is the sprawling technological wonderlands that are campuses from Apple to Zappos (which actually tried to reinvent downtown Las Vegas), with their amazing perks and services aimed to make managers and engineers feel not just at home but happy, incentivizing them to remain chained, if virtually, to their desks. 

In a smart Aeon essay, Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey traces the history of today’s all-inclusive technological “paradises,” isolationist attempts at utopias in a time of economic uncertainty and fear of terrorism, to yesteryear’s enclosed company towns and college campuses.

An excerpt:

Google boasts more than 2 million job applicants a year. National media hailed its office plans as a ‘glass utopia’. There are hosts of articles for businesspeople on how to make their offices more like Google’s workplace. A 2015 CNNMoney survey of business students around the world showed Google as their most desired employer. Its campus is a cultural symbol of that desirability.

The specifics of Google’s proposed Mountain View office are unprecedented, but the scope of the campus is part of an emerging trend across the tech world. Alongside Google’s neighbourhood is a recent Facebook open office on their campus that, as the largest open office in the world, parallels the platform’s massive online community. Both offices seem modest next to the ambitious and fraught effort of Tony Hsieh, CEO of the online fashion retailer Zappos, to revitalise the downtown Las Vegas area around Zappos’ office in the old City Hall.

Such offices symbolise not just the future of work in the public mind, but also a new, utopian age with aspirations beyond the workplace. The dream is a place at once comfortable and entrepreneurial, where personal growth aligns with profit growth, and where work looks like play.

Yet though these tech campuses seem unprecedented, they echo movements of the past. In an era of civic wariness and economic fragility, the ‘total’ office heralds the rise of a new technocracy. In a time when terrorism from abroad provokes our fears, this heavily-planned workplace harks back to the isolationist values of the academic campus and even the social planning of the company town. As physical offices, they’re exceptional places to work – but while we increasingly uphold these places as utopic models for community, we make questionable assumptions about the best version of our shared life and values.•

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“We Too Want More Freedom”

January 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Some structures survive because they’re made of sturdy material and some because of enduring symbolism. Chinese real-estate billionaire Zhang Xin doesn’t possess the hubris to believe her buildings, even those designed by Pritzker winners, will survive the Great Wall, but she’s hopeful about her nation’s future despite present-day economic turbulence. Zhang thinks the country must be more open politically and culturally, perhaps become a democratic state, and has invested heavily toward those ends by funding scholarships for students to be educated at top universities all over the world. 

An excerpt from Bernhard Zand’s Spiegel interview with her:

Spiegel:

Zhang Xin, if China’s economy was an enterprise and you were running it, how would you make your company fit for the future?

Zhang Xin:

No economy, no company, in fact no individual can develop its full potential today without embracing two fundamental trends — globalization and digitalization. They will dominate for quite some time to come.

Spiegel:

What does this mean for China?

Zhang Xin:

It means that the country needs to continue opening up and keep connecting. It needs to realize that the world has become one. The old concept of isolation, the idea that you can solve your problems on your own does not work anymore — neither in cultural, economic, nor political terms. Isolation means a lack of growth. I grew up in China at a time when the country was completely isolated. That era is over.

…

Spiegel:

When countries prosper economically there comes a time when its people start asking for greater political participation. Will this eventually happen in China, too?

Zhang Xin:

I said before that the Chinese no longer crave so much for food and accommodation, but they do crave democracy. I stand by that. I don’t know which model China will follow. But the higher our standard of living, the higher our levels of education, the further people will look around. And we can see which level of openness other societies enjoy. We are no different — we too want more freedom. The question is: How much freedom will be allowed?

Spiegel:

Today the silhouettes of your buildings dominate the skylines of Beijing and Shanghai, almost serving as a signature of modern China. Have you ever wondered how long these buildings will continue to stand tall and just how sustainable these structures that you have created together with your architects will be?

Zhang Xin:

We have become so quick and effective in building things today. It would be easy to build another Pyramid of Giza or another Great Wall. But these buildings haven’t withstood the test of time because of their building quality. They stand tall because they have a symbolic value, they represent a culture. I’m afraid what we are building today will not have the same impact and sustainability of the architecture of a 100, 500 or 1,000 years ago. The buildings of those days were miracles. We don’t perform such miracles today. So we should be a little more modest. For my part, I’ll be glad to show one of my buildings one day to my grandchildren and say: I’m proud of that.•

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“Mr. Rumsfeld Can’t Code”

January 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responds to a question as he defends President Bush's proposed $439.3 billion defense budget for 2007 during his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006. Beyond budget matters, Rumsfeld told the panel that the U.S. military must continue to change in order to defend the nation against enemy terrorists who could acquire a nuclear weapon or launch a chemical attack against a major U.S. city. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Original Filename: RUMSFELD_DCSA106.jpg

Strategy would not seem to be Donald Rumsfeld’s strong suit.

Despite that, the former Dubya Defense Secretary marshaled his forces and created an app for a strategic video game called “Churchill Solitaire,” based on actual card game played incessantly during WWII by the British Prime Minister. If you’re picturing an ill-tempered, computer-illiterate senior barking orders into a Dictaphone, then you’ve already figured out Rumsfeld’s creative process. At least tens of thousands of people were not needlessly killed during the making of the app.

From Julian E. Barnes at the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Rumsfeld can’t code. He doesn’t much even use a computer. But he guided his young digitally minded associates who assembled the videogame with the same method he used to rule the Pentagon—a flurry of memos called snowflakes.

As a result, “Churchill Solitaire” is likely the only videogame developed by an 83-year-old man using a Dictaphone to record memos for the programmers.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld was known for not mincing words with his memos. Age hasn’t mellowed him.

“We need to do a better job on these later versions. They just get new glitches,” reads one note from Mr. Rumsfeld. “[W]e ought to find some way we can achieve steady improvement instead of simply making new glitches.”

Other notes were arguably more constructive, if still sharply worded.

“Instead of capturing history, it is getting a bit artsy,” he wrote in one snowflake in which he suggested ways to make the game better evoke Churchill—including scenes from World War II and quotes from the prime minister, changes that made it into the final game.•

______________________

“One of the strangest interviews I’ve ever done.”

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“It’s A Salacious Tale Of Revenge And Espionage”

January 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Outside of North Korea, perhaps only Donald Trump is unconvinced of the treachery of Vladimir Putin, a capo with nuclear capabilities. When the Russian tyrant is someday gone from the kleptocracy, the evil he administered, both in plain sight and beneath the surface, will be tallied and described, and it will likely be even worse than feared. The body count won’t be Stalinesque, but the horrible intent will be similar.

His royal heinous is so awful that no one even looks twice at this point when the Kremlin is implicated in political assassination. We’ve crossed that threshold. 

The opening of Julia Ioffe’s New York Times Magazine piece “Alexander Litvinenko and the Banality of Evil in Putin’s Russia“:

Today, a retired British High Court judge named Robert Owen published a 328-page report on the 2006 death in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the F.S.B. Nine years after Litvinenko went bald and wasted away in a London hospital bed, from poisoning with a rare radioactive isotope, Owen’s report found that there was “strong circumstantial evidence of Russian state responsibility” and that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the head of the F.S.B. likely sanctioned the murder.

It’s a salacious tale of revenge and espionage, straight out of a John le Carre novel: an F.S.B. man turned whistleblower meets in a posh London hotel with his former colleagues, who slip polonium 210 into his green tea. Investigators find a clump of debris laced with the radioactive stuff in a sink drainpipe a few floors above, near where one of the F.S.B. men was staying. The other suspected assassin gave Litvinenko’s wealthy benefactor, the banished oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a T-shirt that said, “nuclear death is knocking your door [sic].”

And yet, in Russia the report merited little more than a yawn.•

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“Call It Unreality TV”

January 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, a mix of Mussolini and QVC host, is loathsome to different people for different reasons. 

Take good people for instance: They despise Trump because he’s a lying, egotistical, demeaning, manipulative, racist, xenophobic, sexist misery. There are coke dealers who are more honest. The man is a human waste product.

Now let’s consider terrible people like Glenn Beck and L. Brent Bozell III: They abhor Trump because he isn’t “legitimately conservative.” Well, that’s true, but it probably should be at least #453 on the list of reasons to not support him. That would be like Democrats saying that John Wilkes Booth wasn’t a good representative of their party because of his questionable stance on land taxes. Of course, you can’t expect much from Beck, a cynical salesman of gold-plated bunkers, or Bozell, who once referred to President Obama as looking like a “skinny ghetto crackhead.”

Those shitbags are two of the right-wingers enlisted for a National Review “Against Trump” cover story. In all fairness, some of the essayists do make a moral case as well against hideous hotelier. From Mona Charen:

In December, Public Policy Polling found that 36 percent of Republican voters for whom choosing the candidate “most conservative on the issues” was the top priority said they supported Donald Trump. We can talk about whether he is a boor (“My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body”), a creep (“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her”), or a louse (he tried to bully an elderly woman, Vera Coking, out of her house in Atlantic City because it stood on a spot he wanted to use as a garage). But one thing about which there can be no debate is that Trump is no conservative—he’s simply playing one in the primaries. Call it unreality TV.

Put aside for a moment Trump’s countless past departures from conservative principle on defense, racial quotas, abortion, taxes, single-payer health care, and immigration. (That’s right: In 2012, he derided Mitt Romney for being too aggressive on the question, and he’s made extensive use of illegal-immigrant labor in his serially bankrupt businesses.) The man has demonstrated an emotional immaturity bordering on personality disorder, and it ought to disqualify him from being a mayor, to say nothing of a commander-in-chief.

Trump has made a career out of egotism, while conservatism implies a certain modesty about government. The two cannot mix.

Who, except a pitifully insecure person, needs constantly to insult and belittle others including, or perhaps especially, women? Where is the center of gravity in a man who in May denounces those who “needlessly provoke” Muslims and in December proposes that we (“temporarily”) close our borders to all non-resident Muslims? If you don’t like a Trump position, you need only wait a few months, or sometimes days. In September, he advised that we “let Russia fight ISIS.” In November, after the Paris massacre, he discovered that “we’re going to have to knock them out and knock them out hard.” A pinball is more predictable.

Is Trump a liberal? Who knows? He played one for decades — donating to liberal causes and politicians (including Al Sharpton) and inviting Hillary Clinton to his (third) wedding. Maybe it was all a game, but voters who care about conservative ideas and principles must ask whether his recent impersonation of a conservative is just another role he’s playing. When a con man swindles you, you can sue—as many embittered former Trump associates who thought themselves ill used have done. When you elect a con man, there’s no recourse.•

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“Its Gently Beeping Radio Signal Heralded A New And Very Uncertain World”

January 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

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Losing the first leg of the Space Race ultimately proved beneficial to the U.S. The jolt of the Soviet Sputnik 1 success spurred the government to establish DARPA and fund the ARPANET, which, of course, eventually became the Internet.

Another profound consequence of the Cold War satellite race was the creation of Astrobiology, a field that couldn’t quite form until Sputnik’s brilliant blast provided it with its raison d’être. In a beautifully written Nautilus piece, Caleb Scharf traces the branch’s beginnings, which were propelled in the late 1950s by forward-thinking American scientist Joshua Lederberg, who, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, saw the future and thought it might be murder. His work and warnings put our forays into the final frontier, as Scharf writes, in “bio-containment lockdown,” which was fortunate.

By the 1990s, the mission of astrobiology had morphed and become immense, and it will likely grow larger still as we press further across the universe.

The opening:

Astronomy and biology have been circling each other with timid infatuation since the first time a human thought about the possibility of other worlds and other suns. But the melding of the two into the modern field of astrobiology really began on Oct. 4, 1957, when a 23-inch aluminum sphere called Sputnik 1 lofted into low Earth orbit from the desert steppe of the Kazakh Republic. Over the following weeks its gently beeping radio signal heralded a new and very uncertain world. Three months later it came tumbling back through the atmosphere, and humanity’s small evolutionary bump was set on a trajectory never before seen in 4 billion years of terrestrial history.

At the time of the ascent of Sputnik, a 32-year-old American called Joshua Lederberg was working in Australia as a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne. Born in 1925 to immigrant parents in New Jersey, Lederberg was a prodigy. Quick-witted, generous, and with an incredible ability to retain information, he blazed through high school and was enrolled at Columbia University by the time he was 15. Earning a degree in zoology and moving on to medical studies, his research interests diverted him to Yale. There, at age 21, he helped research the nascent field of microbial genetics, with work on bacterial gene transfer that would later earn him a share of the 1958 Nobel Prize.

Like the rest of the planet, Australia was transfixed by the Soviet launch; as much for the show of technological prowess as for the fact that a superpower was now also capable of easily lobbing thermonuclear warheads across continents. But, unlike the people around him, Lederberg’s thoughts were galvanized in a different direction. He immediately knew that another type of invisible wall had been breached, a wall that might be keeping even more deadly things at bay, as well as incredible scientific opportunities.

If humans were about to travel in space, we were also about to spread terrestrial organisms to other planets, and conceivably bring alien pathogens back to Earth. As Lederberg saw it, either we were poised to destroy indigenous life-forms across our solar system, or ourselves. Neither was an acceptable option.•

_______________________________

“This is the beginning of a new era for mankind.”

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“You Don’t Want A Cop Arresting Anyone When They Haven’t Done Anything Wrong”

January 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Prejudice in the justice system is acknowledged to be a bad thing, but is the slippery slope of predictive analytics much different? 

Schools and social services have always strived to identify children who might be headed for trouble, and that’s a good thing, but algorithms now being used in this area seem to have a flawless authority when identifying some minors as criminals-in-waiting. Couldn’t that system guide policing to pre-judge? Should we have to defend ourselves from guilt before having done anything wrong?

From Matt Stroud’s Pacific•Standard piece, “Should Los Angeles County Predict Which Children Will Become Criminals?“:

When people talk about predictive analytics—whether it’s in reference to policing, banking, gas drilling, or whatever else—they’re often talking about identifying trends: using predictive tools to intuit how groups of people and/or objects might behave in the future. But that’s changing.

In a growing number of places, prediction is getting more personal. In Chicago, for example, there’s the “heat list”—a Chicago Police Department project designed to identify the Chicagoans most likely to be involved in a shooting. In some state prison systems, analysts are working on projects designed to identify which particular prisoners will re-offend. In 2014, Rochester, New York, rolled out its version of L.A. County’s DPP program—with the distinction that it’s run by cops, and spearheaded by IBM—which offered the public just enough information to cause concern.

“It’s worrisome,” says Andrew G. Ferguson, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia who studies and writes about predictive policing. “You don’t want a cop arresting anyone when they haven’t done anything wrong. The idea that some of these programs are branching into child welfare systems—and that kids might get arrested when they haven’t done anything wrong—only raises more questions.”

Ferguson says the threat of arrest poses a problem in all the most widely reported predictive programs in the country. But he acknowledges that there are valid arguments underpinning all of them.•

“Old Man Trump Knows Just How Much Racial Hate He Stirred Up”

January 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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It’s not all bad news for Track Palin in the wake of his domestic violence charges. The Yankees just offered him a contract.

After Sarah Palin’s asinine attempt yesterday to blame President Obama for her son’s recent arrest, it made me wonder if Obama was also responsible for Track’s alleged legal problems from a decade ago, before he enlisted. The Palin boy must have been suffering from (PTSD) Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In the usual perplexing Palin fashion, she accused Obama of “not supporting the troops” as she was endorsing Donald Trump, the only national American politician in memory to actually demean the troops. How perfect.

More Trump news: In an excellent Gawker post by Will Kaufman, the writer dug through the Woody Guthrie Archives to find documents about the songwriter’s painful period in the 1950s living in a Beach Haven building owned by the Trump paterfamilias, Fred. It speaks to a real-estate empire built, in part, on racism.

An excerpt:

‘Old Man Trump’s’ color line

Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a veteran – was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.”

In his notebooks, he conjured up a scenario of smashing the color line to transform the Trump complex into a diverse cornucopia, with “a face of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.” He imagined himself calling out in Whitman-esque free verse to the “negro girl yonder that walks along against this headwind / holding onto her purse and her fur coat”:

I welcome you here to live. I welcome you and your man both here to Beach Haven to love in any ways you please and to have some kind of a decent place to get pregnant in and to have your kids raised up in. I’m yelling out my own welcome to you.

For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ….

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“The Societal Challenges That Come With Suzu’s Graying Population Are Common Throughout Japan”

January 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Daniel Kahneman has argued that the robot revolution, if it comes, will arrive just in time to save China. Realizing such a transition, however, is tougher than promising it, as Foxconn has learned. Perhaps even more urgently requiring robotics in Asia is Japan, which has a graying, homogenous population. Who will do the work and care for the elderly in a country that isn’t based on immigration?

From Mike Ramsey, Miho Inada and Yoko Kubota in the WSJ:

SUZU, Japan—It has been a decade since the train stopped running in a sleepy town at the tip of Japan’s Noto Peninsula, and bus routes have dwindled. The trend limits mobility options for the city’s dwindling rural population of 15,000, nearly half older than 65.

However, Suzu city officials and researchers may have a solution: vehicles that drive themselves.

For months, a white, self-driving Toyota Prius has been zipping along the city’s winding seaside roads. The test car attracts plenty of attention from the community. A bulky spinning sensor mounted to the roof helps the vehicle make critical decisions instead of relying on a researcher from Kanazawa University who is sitting in the driver’s seat.

The societal challenges that come with Suzu’s graying population are common throughout Japan, which leads the world in aging, with one in four people older than 65, compared with 15% in the U.S. and 8% world-wide. The trend is particularly prominent in the countryside, where the young often flee to big cities.

Japan’s car companies,long an engine of the national economy, are looking to tackle the problem of older drivers.•

 

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“Her Embrace Of Mr. Trump Also Has A Biblical Subtext”

January 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Sarah Palin’s halting, incoherent endorsement speech for Donald Trump is the sort of thing that usually comes from the mouth of a nativist stroke victim, a fan of medicines or an imbecile. Sometimes all three at the same time.

It’s amusing that Palin, who’s always pretended to be a great supporter of American troops and has repeatedly excoriated President Obama, even today, for not showing them enough respect (though he always does), is now an ardent advocate of the only national American politician in recent memory (ever?) to mock our service people. What makes it worse is Trump, who requested multiple military deferments and has never seen a bunker that wasn’t on a golf course, ridiculed the extreme sacrifice of the very person, John McCain, who made Palin’s ascendency possible.

From Edward Luce at the Financial Times:

To chants of “USA, USA”, America’s best known hockey Mom briefly stole the limelight during the 2008 election before embarking on a career as a conservative entertainer. Her 2016 comeback, which she kicked off with an endorsement of Donald Trump on Tuesday, may turn out the same. Should Mr Trump becomes the next US president, Ms Palin could be his secretary of energy (as he has promised). Failing that, she will return to her life in Alaska as a fading social media star.

Yet her embrace of Mr Trump also has a biblical subtext. Ms Palin was John the Baptist to Mr Trump’s Jesus. Years before Mr Trump trashed conventional wisdom by boosting his poll numbers with gaffes, Ms Palin had patented that style of campaigning. The more tongue-tied Ms Palin seemed, the more intensely her supporters backed her. The more the media mocked her, the more her fanbase exulted. Mr Trump has elevated that approach into an art form. In an age when knowledge is a mark of elitism, ignorance is power. It is also great marketing.

During the 2008 campaign, Ms Palin famously could not think of a single newspaper title she read. She also failed to recall the name of a founding father. Likewise, she was pilloried for citing Alaska’s proximity to Russia as evidence of her foreign policy credentials. The more derision Ms Palin suffered, the greater her heartland appeal. This is how Ms Palin’s “teachers, and teamsters, and cops and cooks, and stay-at-home Moms,” also felt. Mr Trump has collected Ms Palin’s hockey puck and skated on with it. When he betrayed ignorance of the “nuclear triad” in a recent debate, experts were floored. How could someone auditioning to be commander-in-chief be unaware of America’s three nuclear delivery platforms? Mr Trump’s admission did him no harm. His supporters knew how it felt to be the butt of liberal sneering.

Ms Palin’s endorsement also highlights a lesser known breach — that between “movement” conservatives who tend to be more ideological and generally back Ted Cruz in Iowa, and Mr Trump’s more populist fan base.•

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“There Are Deep Worries, As Well As Awe, At What Technology Can Do”

January 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In Ben Hirschler’s Reuters Davos report, he identifies several game-changing technologies that World Economic Forum attendees believe will be possible by 2025: implantable mobile phones, 3D-printed organs for transplant, clothes and reading-glasses connected to the Internet. Apart from the bioprinting of organs, the rest seem to be not very risky bets. If human kidneys can be printed by that year (or any near it), we’ll have moved into a very remarkable new age. Of course, all new eras have their challenges as well. 

An excerpt:

One of the most in-demand participants in Davos this year is not a central banker, CEO or politician but a prize-winning South Korean robot called HUBO, which is strutting its stuff amid a crowd of smartphone-clicking delegates.

But there are deep worries, as well as awe, at what technology can do.

A new report from UBS released in Davos predicts that extreme levels of automation and connectivity will worsen already deepening inequalities by widening the wealth gap between developed and developing economies.

“The fourth industrial revolution has potentially inverted the competitive advantage that emerging markets have had in the form of low-cost labor,” said Lutfey Siddiqi, global head of emerging markets for FX, rates and credit at UBS.

“It is likely, I would think, that it will exacerbate inequality if policy measures are not taken.”

An analysis of major economies by the Swiss bank concludes that Switzerland is the country best-placed to adapt to the new robot world, while Argentina ranks bottom.•

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“Biometric Data Is Perhaps The Last ‘Missing Link’”

January 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Five years ago when I looked back at the 1978 Michael Crichton film, Coma, through the lens of the new millennium, I wrote this: 

The nouveau tech corporations are aimed at locating and marking our personal preferences, tracking our interests and even our footsteps, knowing enough about what’s going on inside our heads to predict our next move. In a time of want and desperation and disparity of wealth, how much information will we surrender?•

It seems truer now than in 2011, as wearables multiply and the Internet of Things comes closer to fruition. Whenever data is collected, it will be sold, whether that was the original intent or not. And the collection process will grow so seamless and unobtrusive we’ll hardly notice it.

From “What Happens to the Data Collected On Us While We Sleep,” by Meghan Neal at Wired Motherboard:

We already know that the major data brokers like Acxiom and Experian collect thousands of pieces of information on nearly every US consumer to paint a detailed personality picture, by tracking the websites we visit and the things we search for and buy. These companies often know sensitive things like our sexual preference or what illnesses we have.

Now with wearables proliferating (it’s estimated there will be 240 million devices sold by 2019) that profile’s just going to get more detailed: Get ready to add how much body fat you have, when you have sex, how much sleep you get, and all sorts of physiological data into the mix.

“Whenever there’s information that you’re collecting about yourself and you’re quantifying, there’s a very good chance that it will end up in a profile of you,” Michelle De Mooy, a health privacy expert at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told me.

This has many privacy and security experts, politicians, and the government wringing their hands, worried that if and when all that granular personal information gathered gets in the hands of advertisers and data brokers, it could be used in ways we never intended or even suspected.

“Biometric data is perhaps the last ‘missing link’ of personal information collected today,” said Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

“The next great financial windfall for the digital data industry will be our health information, gathered thru wearables, swallowable pills and an ever-present Internet of Things,” Chester told me. “Pharma companies, hospitals and advertisers see huge profits in our health information.”•

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“My Gut Tells Me Things Are Changing For The Worse”

January 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, the Kim Jong-un of casino bankruptcy, had largely played footsie with Ted Cruz even while excoriating all other GOP hopefuls. That changed recently, however, when the two most detestable of all the candidates began throwing haymakers at one another. Amusing to hear Trump play the likability card with Cruz, since the former Apprentice host has tried to not only connect with members of the 4-H club but also those in the 3-K club.

The most telling line of the entire GOP race was spoken before Trump and Cruz were torn asunder, when they still resisted attacking one another. The aspiring potentate said this of his Texan-Canadian competitor: “Everything I say, he agrees with me. No matter what I say.” It was a tacit acknowledgement by Trump that he knew he was spouting crazy shit because he thought it would resonate with nativist voters he needed to float his cockamamie campaign.

Largely it has, at least with a sizable-enough swath of a frayed and divided party. It’s been the Reality TV version of the political season, full of disgraceful taunts and pathetic posturing, and the question is if the show gets cancelled in Iowa and New Hampshire or if the season is sadly extended.

From Edward Luce’s Financial Times column about the approaching American hour of reckoning:

Returning to America after a trip, I encountered a chatty immigration officer. “You guys should have finished off the crusades when you had the chance,” he said as he handed back my British passport. In themselves such encounters mean little. But I have had many similar ones recently — and the plural of anecdote is data, as they say.

Within the next three weeks, we shall find out if the rise of Donald Trump is silly season froth that comes before voting, or whether we are in the midst of a dramatic upheaval in US politics. My head is agnostic. But my gut tells me things are changing for the worse. Either way, the time for speculation is nearly over.

The rest of the world is almost as obsessed about America’s political health as the US. Every time I have been abroad in the past few months, people ask the same question: “Could Donald Trump be president?” The answer is probably not. But it comes with a strict health warning. More seasoned observers have been wrong about US politics in the past year and show few signs of lifting their batting average.

In spite of that, the consensus holds that Mr Trump will not be the Republican nominee. Should he become so, he would lose the presidential election. If, by some miracle, he won it, he would make a disastrous president. The next question is: “What is fuelling Mr Trump’s popularity?” (And for better informed foreigners, that of Ted Cruz too.) This is the issue that matters most.•

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“Going To The Stars Is Often Regarded As Humanity’s Destiny”

January 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Has there ever been an era when enthusiasts have gotten so far ahead of themselves in terms of scientific and technological possibilities? I was reading an article the other day, clearly written by an intelligent person, who proclaimed that by 2050 we would see the “end of death,” that we will have left mere biological life behind. I’m not saying that such a transition is impossible, but it won’t be happening during our lifetimes. We are, ultimately, toast.

Likewise, I have no doubt we can eventually colonize space if we don’t do ourselves in first. We should certainly be sending human-less probes and 3D printers to Mars and elsewhere, but it’s probably a good idea to stay realistic about what we can accomplish in each era. In a rush to save ourselves, we may lose sight of the proper path.

In “What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?” a Scientific American article, Kim Stanley Robinson stresses the difficulty of near-term colonization of other star systems. The opening:

The idea that humans will eventually travel to and inhabit other parts of our galaxy was well expressed by the early Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wrote, “Earth is humanity’s cradle, but you’re not meant to stay in your cradle forever.” Since then the idea has been a staple of science fiction, and thus become part of a consensus image of humanity’s future. Going to the stars is often regarded as humanity’s destiny, even a measure of its success as a species. But in the century since this vision was proposed, things we have learned about the universe and ourselves combine to suggest that moving out into the galaxy may not be humanity’s destiny after all.

The problem that tends to underlie all the other problems with the idea is the sheer size of the universe, which was not known when people first imagined we would go to the stars. Tau Ceti, one of the closest stars to us at around 12 light-years away, is 100 billion times farther from Earth than our moon. A quantitative difference that large turns into a qualitative difference; we can’t simply send people over such immense distances in a spaceship, because a spaceship is too impoverished an environment to support humans for the time it would take, which is on the order of centuries. Instead of a spaceship, we would have to create some kind of space-traveling ark, big enough to support a community of humans and other plants and animals in a fully recycling ecological system.•

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“Decisions About Space Policy Have Enormous Consequences For The Future Of Human Welfare”

January 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

spacecolony8“Greed is good,” proclaimed fictional robber baron Gordon Gekko in 1987, echoing a speech from a year earlier by the very real Ivan Boesky, who by the time Wall Street opened had traded the Four Seasons for the Graybar Hotel, his desires having pried him from the penthouse. The point is well-taken, however, when applied correctly: Unhealthy desires can be useful. You don’t get people to risk life and limb–emigrating to the “New” World or participating in the dangerous Manifest Destiny–unless there’s a potential for a better life, and, often, a bigger bank account. 

I’ve posted previously about my queasiness over recent U.S. regulation which unilaterally allows its corporations to lay claim to bodies in space, but perhaps the quest to go for the gold in out there has a silver lining. While it’s gross for those already fabulously wealthy to be wondering who will use asteroid mining to become the first trillionaire, Grayson Cary considers in a smart Aeon essay that perhaps avarice is a necessary evil if we are to colonize space and safeguard our species against single-planet calamity. As the writer states, past multinational treaties may inhibit unfettered speculation, but probably not. Private, public, U.S., China, etc.–it’s going to be a land rush that sorts itself out as we go, and go we will. As Cary writes, “There comes a point at which Earthbound opinions hardly matter.”

An excerpt:

Over the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday – which, in the spirit of appropriation, seems appropriate – President Barack Obama signed into law the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act. It had emerged from House and Senate negotiations with surprisingly robust protections for US asteroid miners. In May, the House had gone only so far as to say that ‘[a]ny asteroid resources obtained in outer space are the property of the entity that obtained them’. In the Senate, commercial space legislation had moved forward without an answer to the question of property. In the strange crucible of the committee process, the bill ended up broader, bolder and more patriotic than either parent.

‘A United States citizen,’ Congress resolved, ‘engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained.’ It’s a turning point, maybe a decisive one, in a remarkable debate over the administration of celestial bodies. It’s an approach with fierce critics – writing for Jacobin magazine in 2015, Nick Levine called it a vision for ‘trickle-down astronomics’ – and the stakes, if you squint, are awfully high. A small step for 535 lawmakers could amount to one giant leap for humankind.

If you hew to the right frame of mind, decisions about space policy have enormous consequences for the future of human welfare. Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, offered a stark version of that view in a paper called ‘Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development’ (2003). By one estimate, he wrote, ‘the potential for approximately 1038 human lives is lost every century that colonisation of our local supercluster is delayed; or, equivalently, about 1029 potential human lives per second’. Suppose you accept that perspective, or for any other reason feel an urgent need to get humanity exploring space. How might a species hurry things up?

For a vocal chorus of pro-space, pro-market experts, the answer starts with property: to boldly go and buy and sell. ‘The only way to interest investors in building space settlements,’ writes the non-profit Space Settlement Institute on its website, ‘is to make doing so very profitable.’ In other words: show me the money.•

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“That’s The Data”

January 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Confirmation bias is a dangerous thing, so the Harvard economist Roland Fryer likes to stick to data, which can, of course, lead to some inconvenient truths. How about being an African-American scholar in the time of Ferguson who’s convinced that police in the U.S. are no more likely to shoot a black person than a white one?

Fryer’s argument, which he relates to John McDermott of the Financial Times, is that the numbers say officers harass and manhandle African-Americans in a disproportionate way, but actual lethal violence is proportionate among different race groups. The more minor and incessant acts of persecution persuade black folks that they are being shot far more often. 

Well, I haven’t studied the numbers, but if this is true it should make us incredibly vigilant of the type racial profiling and serial intimidation that divides us. The so-called quality-of-life approach to policing has provided too much wiggle room for some to be targeted. Even Fryer himself acknowledges that he had guns pulled on him by police six or seven times during his youth.

An excerpt:

At a quiet table in the cavernous Hawksmoor Seven Dials, a branch of the high-end restaurant chain in central London, where the decor is brown and the meat is red, Fryer tells me how he spent two days last year on the beat shadowing cops in Camden, New Jersey. (On his first day on patrol a woman overdosed in front of him and died.) What Fryer wanted to figure out was whether the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner — two African-Americans whose deaths led to widespread protests — were part of an observable pattern of discrimination, as activist groups such as Black Lives Matter have suggested. After his week on patrol, he collected more than 6m pieces of data from forces such as New York City’s on cases of blacks, whites and Latinos being victims of police violence.

The graph he passes between the salt and pepper displays his provisional findings. The horizontal axis is a scale of the severity of the violence, from shoving on the left all the way to shootings on the right. The curve starts high, suggesting strong differences in minor incidents, but descends to zero as the cases become more violent. In other words, once contextual factors were taken into account, blacks were no more likely to be shot by police. All of which raises the question: why the outcry in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, where Brown was shot?

“That’s the data,” Fryer says. “Now one hypothesis for why Ferguson happened — not the shooting but the outcry — was not because people were making statistical inference, not from whether Michael Brown was guilty or innocent but because they fucking hate the police.” He continues: “The reason they hate the police is because if you spent years having hands put on you and [being] pushed to the ground and handcuffed without proper cause, and then you hear about a [police] shooting in your town, how could you believe it was anything but discrimination?”•

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“We Are At The Cusp Of The Industrial-Robot Revolution”

January 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In a Techcrunch piece, Vivek Wadhwa identifies 2016 as a technological inflection point, naming six fields which he believes will see significant progress, promising the next 12 months “will be the beginning of an even bigger revolution, one that will change the way we live, let us visit new worlds, and lead us into a jobless future.”

I don’t know for most of the areas he mentions that this year will be any more important than 2015 or 2017. Consider the example of space exploration. Perhaps in 2016 private companies or government will accomplish something more impressive than the Falcon 9 landing or maybe not. Even if they do, it will be part of an incremental process rather than a radical breakthrough. Life on Mars will get nearer every year.

Wadhwa’s best bet, I think, is in the area of driverless cars, which will likely move much closer to fruition based on tests done this year. The writer is more measured with robotics, believing the industrial kind is on the cusp of major advances, but personal assistants still have a ways to go. An excerpt:

The 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge required robots to navigate over an eight-task course simulating a disaster zone. It was almost comical to see them moving at the speed of molasses, freezing up, and falling over. Forget folding laundry and serving humans; these robots could hardly walk. As well, although we heard some three years ago that Foxconn would replace a million workers with robots in its Chinese factories, it never did so.

The breakthroughs may, however, be at hand. To begin with, a new generation of robots is being introduced by companies such as Switzerland’s ABB, Denmark’s Universal Robots, and Boston’s Rethink Robotics—robots dextrous enough to thread a needle and sensitive enough to work alongside humans. They can assemble circuits and pack boxes. We are at the cusp of the industrial-robot revolution.

Household robots are another matter. Household tasks may seem mundane, but they are incredibly difficult for machines to perform. Cleaning a room and folding laundry necessitate software algorithms that are more complex than those to land a man on the moon. But there have been many breakthroughs of late, largely driven by A.I., enabling robots to learn certain tasks by themselves and teach each other what they have learnt. And with the open source robotic operating system, ROS, thousands of developers worldwide are getting close to perfecting the algorithms.

Don’t be surprised when robots start showing up in supermarkets and malls—and in our homes.  Remember Rosie, the robotic housekeeper from the TV series The Jetsons?  I am expecting version 1 to begin shipping in the early 2020s.•

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“The Net Result Of The General Howl And Publicity Has Been To Obscure And Avoid The Real Issues”

January 14, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Nothing’s so useful in politics as boogeymen. Fixing an actual large-scale problem is hard, sometimes impossible, so attention is often diverted to a relatively miniscule one. There’s an added bonus: Frightened people are paralyzed, easy to manipulate. 

During the second half of the 1960s, when the American social fabric began to fray in a cultural revolution that no one could contain, motorcycle gangs became useful stooges as symbols of barbarians at the gates. In 1966, when a shocking report of a California crime made the Hell’s Angels Public Enemy No. 1, Hunter S. Thompson elucidated the disproportionate attention the unholy rollers were receiving in an article in the Nation. Of course, the following year he fed the myth himself with a book about his travels–and travails–with the club. An excerpt:

The California climate is perfect for motorcycles, as well as surfboards, swimming pools and convertibles. Most of the cyclists are harmless weekend types, members of the American Motorcycle Association, and no more dangerous than skiers or skin divers. But a few belong to what the others call “outlaw clubs,” and these are the ones who–especially on weekends and holidays–are likely to turn up almost anywhere in the state, looking for action. Despite everything the psychiatrists and Freudian casuists have to say about them, they are tough, mean and potentially as dangerous as a pack of wild boar. When push comes to shove, any leather fetishes or inadequacy feelings that may be involved are entirely beside the point, as anyone who has ever tangled with these boys will sadly testify. When you get in an argument with a group of outlaw motorcyclists, you can generally count your chances of emerging unmaimed by the number of heavy-handed allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and young fools. “I smashed his face,” one of them said to me of a man he’d never seen until the swinging started. “He got wise. He called me a punk. He must have been stupid.”

The most notorious of these outlaw groups is the Hell’s Angels, supposedly headquartered in San Bernardino, just east of Los Angeles, and with branches all over the state. As a result of the infamous “Labor Day gang rape,” the Attorney General of California has recently issued an official report on the Hell’s Angels. According to the report, they are easily identified:

The emblem of the Hell’s Angels, termed “colors,” consists of an embroidered patch of a winged skull wearing a motorcycle helmet. Just below the wing of the emblem are the letters “MC.” Over this is a band bearing the words “Hell’s Angels.” Below the emblem is another patch bearing the local chapter name, which is usually an abbreviation for the city or locality. These patches are sewn on the back of a usually sleeveless denim jacket. In addition, members have been observed wearing various types of Luftwaffe insignia and reproductions of German iron crosses.* (*Purely for decorative and shock effect. The Hell’s Angels are apolitical and no more racist than other ignorant young thugs.) Many affect beards and their hair is usually long and unkempt. Some wear a single earring in a pierced ear lobe. Frequently they have been observed to wear metal belts made of a length of polished motorcycle drive chain which can be unhooked and used as a flexible bludgeon… Probably the most universal common denominator in identification of Hell’s Angels is generally their filthy condition. Investigating officers consistently report these people, both club members and their female associates, seem badly in need of a bath. Fingerprints are a very effective means of identification because a high percentage of Hell’s Angels have criminal records.

In addition to the patches on the back of Hell’s Angel’s jackets, the “One Percenters” wear a patch reading “1%-er.” Another badge worn by some members bears the number “13.” It is reported to represent the 13th letter of the alphabet, “M,” which in turn stands for marijuana and indicates the wearer thereof is a user of the drug.

The Attorney General’s report was colorful, interesting, heavily biased and consistently alarming–just the sort of thing, in fact, to make a clanging good article for a national news magazine. Which it did; in both barrels. Newsweek led with a left hook titled “The Wild Ones,” Time crossed right, inevitably titled “The Wilder Ones.” The Hell’s Angels, cursing the implications of this new attack, retreated to the bar of the DePau Hotel near the San Francisco waterfront and planned a weekend beach party. I showed them the articles. Hell’s Angels do not normally read the news magazines. “I’d go nuts if I read that stuff all the time,” said one. “It’s all bullshit.”

Newsweek was relatively circumspect. It offered local color, flashy quotes and “evidence” carefully attributed to the official report but unaccountably said the report accused the Hell’s Angels of homosexuality, whereas the report said just the opposite. Time leaped into the fray with a flurry of blood, booze and semen-flecked wordage that amounted, in the end, to a classic of supercharged hokum: “Drug-induced stupors… no act is too degrading… swap girls, drugs and motorcycles with equal abandon… stealing forays… then ride off again to seek some new nadir in sordid behavior…”

Where does all this leave the Hell’s Angels and the thousands of shuddering Californians (according to Time) who are worried sick about them? Are these outlaws really going to be busted, routed and cooled, as the news magazines implied? Are California highways any safer as a result of this published uproar? Can honest merchants once again walk the streets in peace? The answer is that nothing has changed except that a few people calling themselves the Hell’s Angels have a new sense of identity and importance.

After two weeks of intensive dealings with the Hell’s Angels phenomenon, both in print and in person, I’m convinced the net result of the general howl and publicity has been to obscure and avoid the real issues by invoking a savage conspiracy of bogeymen and conning the public into thinking all will be “business as usual” once this fearsome snake is scotched, as it surely will be by hard and ready minions of the Establishment.•

 

“America Quickly Pulled Ahead Of The Rest Of The World In Almost Every New Technology”

January 13, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Northwestern economist Robert Gordon may be too bearish on the transformative powers of the Internet, but he does make a good case that the technological innovations of a century ago dwarf the impact of the information revolution. 

A well-written and sadly un-bylined Economist review of the academic’s new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, looks at how the wheels came off the U.S. locomotive in the 1970s, courtesy of the rise of global competition and OPEC along with increasing inequality on the homefront. Gordon is dour about the prospects of a new American century, believing technologists are offering thin gruel and that Moore’s Law is running aground. The reviewer thinks the economist is ultimately too dismissive of Silicon Valley.

An excerpt:

The technological revolutions of the late 19th century transformed the world. The life that Americans led before that is unrecognisable. Their idea of speed was defined by horses. The rhythm of their days was dictated by the rise and fall of the sun. The most basic daily tasks—getting water for a bath or washing clothes—were back-breaking chores. As Mr Gordon shows, a succession of revolutions transformed every aspect of life. The invention of electricity brought light in the evenings. The invention of the telephone killed distance. The invention of what General Electric called “electric servants” liberated women from domestic slavery. The speed of change was also remarkable. In the 30 years from 1870 to 1900 railway companies added 20 miles of track each day. By the turn of the century, Sears Roebuck, a mail-order company that was founded in 1893, was fulfilling 100,000 orders a day from a catalogue of 1,162 pages. The price of cars plummeted by 63% between 1912 and 1930, while the proportion of American households that had access to a car increased from just over 2% to 89.8%.

America quickly pulled ahead of the rest of the world in almost every new technology—a locomotive to Europe’s snail, as Andrew Carnegie put it. In 1900 Americans had four times as many telephones per person as the British, six times as many as the Germans and 20 times as many as the French. Almost one-sixth of the world’s railway traffic passed through a single American city, Chicago. Thirty years later Americans owned more than 78% of the world’s motor cars. It took the French until 1948 to have the same access to cars and electricity that America had in 1912.

The Great Depression did a little to slow America’s momentum. But the private sector continued to innovate. By some measures, the 1930s were the most productive decade in terms of the numbers of inventions and patents granted relative to the size of the economy. Franklin Roosevelt’s government invested in productive capacity with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam.

The second world war demonstrated the astonishing power of America’s production machine. After 1945 America consolidated its global pre-eminence by constructing a new global order, with the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods institutions, and by pouring money into higher education. The 1950s and 1960s were a golden age of prosperity in which even people with no more than a high-school education could enjoy a steady job, a house in the suburbs and a safe retirement.

But Mr Gordon’s tone grows gloomy when he turns to the 1970s.•

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“Public Policy Can Play A Powerful Role In Curbing The Ill Effects Of Technological Disruption”

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

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It’s not a done deal that technological employment will be widespread, that the “lights-out” factory will become the norm, but it’s possible to the extent that we should worry about such a scary situation now.

I doubt the answers will lie in somehow reigning in technology. Not to overly anthropomorphize robots, but they have a “life” of their own. If humans and machines can both do the same job, the work will ultimately become the domain of AI. The solutions, if needed, will have to emerge from policy. Not the kind that artificially limits machines, but the type that provides security derived from social safety nets. 

In an In These Times article, David Moberg writes that “much will depend on whether we humans leave robotization to the free market or whether we take deliberate steps to shape our future relationships with robots.” I disagree with his suggestion that perhaps we can design robots to merely augment human production. That’s implausible and at best an intermediary step, but the author writes intelligently on the topic.

An excerpt:

If we’re on the brink of a period of robotic upheaval, labor organizing will be more crucial than ever. Workers will need unions with the power to negotiate the needs of the displaced.

Another aspect of the disruption could be an exacerbation of economic inequality. MIT economist David Autor argues that the advent of computing in the late 1970s helped drive our current stratification. As demand increased for abstract labor (college-educated workers using computers) and decreased for manual, routine labor (service workers with few skilled tasks), he says, the pay for different occupations consequently became more polarized, fueling the rise of inequality.

But Lawrence Mishel and his Economic Policy Institute colleagues, along with Dean Baker, argue that this model of polarization misses important nuances of contemporary labor markets and ignores the primary driver of inequality: public policy, not robots. They point to a range of U.S. policies, including encouragement of financial sector growth and suppression of the minimum wage, as contributing to burgeoning inequality. 

No matter who is right, it’s indisputable that public policy, in addition to unions, can play a powerful role in curbing the ill effects of technological disruption.

Luckily, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.•

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“Small Drones Have Also Proven To Be Effective Tools Of Mischief”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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For every action, a reaction: Small drones, in addition to all the good they can do, can be used for illicit surveillance and delivering explosives and smuggling, among other nefarious deeds, so Michigan researchers created a concept prototype of an anti-drone tool called “robotic falconry,” which nets the interloping technology and commandeers it to a safe place. What will the countermeasure be when spy drones can fit on the head of a pin? There’ll be a market, so something will emerge.

From Marcia Goodrich at Michigan Tech News:

In January 2015, a Washington, DC, hobbyist accidentally flew his DJI Phantom quadcopter drone over the White House fence and crashed it on the lawn.

Two years earlier, a prankster sent his drone toward German prime minister Angela Merkel during a campaign rally.

Small drones have also proven to be effective tools of mischief that doesn’t make the national news, from spying to smuggling to hacking. So when Mo Rastgaar was watching World Cup soccer and heard about snipers protecting the crowd, he doubted that they’d fully understood a drone’s potential.

“I thought, ‘If the threat is a drone, you really don’t want to shoot it down—it might contain explosives and blow up. What you want to do is catch it and get it out of there.’”

Safe Drone Catcher

So Rastgaar, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University, began work on a drone catcher, which could pursue and capture rogue drones that might threaten military installations, air traffic, sporting events—even the White House.•

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“Look For The Most Frantic Person In The Lineup And You Can Bet They’re Working With An App”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Some people actually believe that those participating in the Gig Economy, that Libertarian wet dream, are mostly entrepreneurial souls gladly Ubering others just until they secure seed money for their startup. That’s preposterous.

Piecework employment isn’t good at all for Labor unless basic income in uncoupled from work, which isn’t the arrangement most citizens find themselves in. And if wages remain flat and too many people are reduced to rabbits with tasks but no benefits, we’re in a collective quandary.

Andrew Callaway has penned a Policy Alternatives article about his perplexing experiences in the so-called Sharing Economy. The writer ultimately doesn’t feel that such an arrangement is bad for everyone, but that most will not prosper within its new rules. The opening:

If you spend enough time in San Francisco, you’ll notice sharing economy workers everywhere. While you’re waiting to get some food, look for the most frantic person in the lineup and you can bet they’re working with an app. Some of them are colour-coded: workers in orange T-shirts are with Caviar, a food delivery app; those in green represent Instacart, an app for delivering groceries. The blue jackets riding Razor scooters are with Luxe—if you’re still driving yourself around this city, these app workers will park your car. 

In the Bay Area, there are thousands of such people running through the aisles, fidgeting in line and racing against the clock. They spend most of their time in cars, where it can be harder to spot them. Oftentimes they’re double-parked in the bike lane, picking up a burrito from inside an adjacent restaurant or waiting for a passenger to come down from the apartment on top. If you look closely, you’ll see a placard in the window that says Uber or a glowing pink moustache indicating they drive around Lyft’s passengers. Last summer, I was one of them.

Oh, Canada! I’m writing you from Berkeley, California to warn you about this thing called “the sharing economy.” Since no one is really sharing anything, many of us prefer the term “the exploitation economy,” but due to its prevalence many in the Bay Area simply think of it as “the economy.”•

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“This Was Shaping Up To Be The Most Surreal Year Of My Life”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

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I recall reading and loving Michael Idov’s “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” his strange 2011 GQ journalistic walkabout in which he reported from the insane Ukraine film set of certifiable auteur Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Several unforeseen WTF professional and geopolitical moments later, he found himself one of Russia’s top screenwriters, crafting successful TV shows and films during the chill of the Second Cold War, perhaps an astute social commentator or maybe an unwitting government stooge.

Idov’s written a piece about his unexpected life changes for the New York Times Magazine, which is the first excellent longform article I’ve read this new year (sorry, Sean Penn). A passage about how the magazine editor began to branch out from the news biz to show biz, which offered greater freedom from the Kremlin’s intentionally fuzzy censorship rules:

Russia and the United States had exchanged the first salvos in the new cold war. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, barring certain apparatchiks from entering the United States. In an asymmetric response, the Duma barred all Americans from adopting Russian children — a sudden jolt of direct discrimination, as my wife and I had been considering exactly that.

At work, too, not a week seemed to pass without a new law designed to curb free speech. Hastily adopted legislation basically made it illegal to offend any social group — though as wielded by the authorities, the new laws primarily seemed to protect the strong from the weak. Impugning the Soviet Union’s conduct in World War II was illegal. Disrespecting Russia’s ‘‘territorial integrity’’ was illegal. Mentioning drugs or suicide in a way that could be construed as ‘‘instructional’’ was illegal, and prosecutors could use an agency called Roskomnadzor to shut down any website for so much as an unruly user comment. A vile anti-gay law banned speech that ‘‘creates false equivalence between traditional and nontraditional lifestyle.’’ (This in a country whose pop stars’ wardrobes suggest that Russia’s biggest natural resource is rhinestones.) I had to fight Condé Nast’s in-house counsel for the right to publish a positive review of the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra; he objected to the use of the word ‘‘love’’ to describe a same-sex relationship.

The genius of all these laws was in their purposeful inconsistency, which ensured that almost anyone could be silenced at any time; they were designed to be implemented capriciously, to weed out undesirables. Editing a magazine became hazardous to your health — mental and otherwise. GQ’s political columnist, Andrew Ryvkin, was beaten up on the street by two pro-­Putin writers of some renown, Sergei Minaev and Eduard Bagirov. I myself ended up slapping a Tatler editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theater after he wrote anti-­Semitic diatribes about me. This was shaping up to be the most surreal year of my life.

One night, I called Ryvkin with a spur-­of-­the-­moment idea: ‘‘Let’s write Louie, but about me in Moscow.’’ Ryvkin had a similar background to mine (he spent his formative years in Boston) and similar comedic sensibilities; we both worshiped 30 Rock and Louis C.K. Three weeks, a few joints and several pizzas later, we had a pilot. The main character, a neurotic, blocked, broke Brooklyn novelist, comes to Moscow to promote his book, gets Jew-­baited on live TV by a glib Russian oligarch and reconnects with his childhood friend Roman, now an out-­of-­control photographer modeled on Terry Richardson. The friends spend most of the episode crafting an appropriate response to the slur and finally head over to the oligarch’s club to beat him up. When they get there, however, the offender offers the novelist a plum job in Moscow, forcing him to sell out on the spot.

The script was a mishmash of autobiography and anger, filled with profanity, drug use, gay jokes, Nazi jokes and weird structural hiccups. I was venting every frustration of my day job. In a good measure of how little I cared about the pilot’s suitability for Russian TV, I named its protagonist Matt Rushkin, ‘‘Rashka’’ being an émigré’s derogatory term for Russia itself.•

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