Urban Studies

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“Software Is Not Free Of Human Influence”

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

I’ve written many times that I’d like algorithms to rid us of gerrymandering, that if we want a Congress that has to worry about a seven-percent approval rating, we need to take the drawing of districts from partisan hands.

But formulas can also have embedded biases if we’re not careful (or honest). Claire Cain Miller, one of the brightest thinkers at New York Times’ Upshot section, makes this clear in her latest post, “When Algorithms Discriminate.” Regularly running simulations to test these processes is of utmost importance. An excerpt:

“There is a widespread belief that software and algorithms that rely on data are objective. But software is not free of human influence. Algorithms are written and maintained by people, and machine learning algorithms adjust what they do based on people’s behavior. As a result, say researchers in computer science, ethics and law, algorithms can reinforce human prejudices.

Google’s online advertising system, for instance, showed an ad for high-income jobs to men much more often than it showed the ad to women, a new study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers found.

Research from Harvard University found that ads for arrest records were significantly more likely to show up on searches for distinctively black names or a historically black fraternity. The Federal Trade Commission said advertisers are able to target people who live in low-income neighborhoods with high-interest loans.”•

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A Brief Note From 1927 About A Stroller

July 9, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the November 19, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“[They’re] Creating A Vision For The Future Airport With Robot Technologies”

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

So many jobs at airports and hotels can be handled by present robotics, without even factoring improvements to be made in the coming decades. One airport in Japan has decided to go all in with exoskeleton suits and robot baggage carriers and floor cleaners. Two excerpts about the transition follow.

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From “Robots to Descend on Haneda Airport” at Asahi Shimbun:

Robots will be cleaning the floors and carrying luggage at Haneda Airport by September, the operator of the airport’s terminals has announced.

Employees will also be using strap-on robotic devices to assist in lifting heavy loads.

Japan Airport Terminal Co. will lease the robots from Cyberdyne Inc., it said July 2.

Five robots will clean the floors of the terminal buildings at the airport in Tokyo’s Ota Ward, while three robots will each be able to carry up to 200 kilograms of luggage.

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From “Japan Turns to Robot-Worked Airports” at PSFK:

A number of different robots developed and manufactured by Cyberdyne will be introduced at the airport, including the exoskeleton robot suit HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) for labor support, cleaning robots and transport robots.

HAL’s name may recall the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the suits were designed to help workers lift heavy objects and those undergoing physiotherapy recover strength in their limbs. At the airport, they could assist workers handling merchandise in shops or loading and unloading luggage. The robot suits work by detecting electric signals from the wearer’s brain to make it easier for people to move objects.

The two companies aim to make Haneda Airport a world pioneer in robot technology use in airports, creating a vision for the future airport with robot technologies, while helping to make it an even more attractive place for travelers.

Japan Airport Terminal will provide sales promotion and maintenance services at the airport for the robots and the company’s knowledge and experience in the airport business will be combined with Cyberdyne’s cybernics technology to create a next-generation airport model making use of broad applications of robotics technology.•

“I Wouldn’t Be Able To Afford It”

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

There’s a legal push to make Uber drivers full employees of the company, but what does it say if its workers can’t afford to be full-time employees? Some Libertarians may think Americans choose piece work because it’s so great and flexible, but in many instances it’s the former middle class just grasping at straws. And that straw will get thinner and thinner until eventually it disappears.

From Douglas MacMillan at WSJ:

Flexibility is the new cherished buzzword to dozens of startups rushing to defend the legality of their employment models. Companies from Uber to Lyft to Postmates say they are pioneering a new gig economy where workers are free to clock in and out as easily as they open a smartphone app, helping many of them make time to care for a family or pursue an education or career.

But that flexibility comes at a cost to these workers, some of whom are unhappy with paying for their own health insurance and costs such as car maintenance and fuel. Last month, Uber was ordered to pay Barbara Berwick, a former San Francisco driver for Uber, more than $4,100 to cover the costs of vehicle mileage and tolls, after she argued successfully the company was so deeply involved in every aspect of her job that it was legally acting as an employer. …

But some of those drivers may just dislike the idea of working full time for Uber. Javier Calix, a driver in San Francisco, said in an interview that he would not take a full-time job offered by Uber because the company doesn’t pay him enough for that to make economic sense. While he said he used to make around $25 an hour, after gas and other expenses, when he first started driving for the service two years ago, that’s now down to about $15 an hour after all the fees Uber takes out of his pay.

“I wouldn’t be able to afford it,” Calix said of the prospect of full-time Uber employment.•

 

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Old Print Article: “Sees Folks Shot Through The Air In Sealed Tubes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

July 8, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A giant bullet shot through the sky is one way to describe British scientist W.D. Verschoyle’s early-20th-century plan to propel goods and people through sealed tubes. As described in an article in the September 14, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the inventor envisioned oxygen supplies keeping passengers alive as they were blasted at nearly 1000 mph, enabling them to circle the globe in 24 hours. 

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“Something About The New Economy Drives Prognosticators To Extremes”

July 8, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A reductive view of those of us worried about the transition into a much more automated society is that we think progress is bad, something to be halted. Not true. Better tools will make us richer and relieve us of a great deal of drudgery. But we should be concerned that the wealth might be in the aggregate, not well-distributed, with widespread technological unemployment possible.

From an Economist piece about America’s Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age, a book that tries to make sense of the new normal:

SOMETHING about the new economy drives prognosticators to extremes. Optimists argue that the world is entering an age of abundance, with productivity surging, diseases like polio being wiped out, and tourists flying to Mars. Pessimists retort that abundance for the few will mean impoverishment for the many. Smart machines will destroy jobs and depress wages. Knowledge workers will be proletarianised. And rising insecurity will promote tribalism and protectionism.

One of the many virtues of America’s Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age is that it avoids such extremes. The authors part with the cyber-utopians in acknowledging that disruption has a dark side. But at the same time they part with the cyber-pessimists in embracing radical change. The new economy is not only generating new opportunities. It is providing people with the tools that they need to cope with disruption. …

A century ago Walter Lippmann, a journalist who was then just 24 years old, wrote a surprise best-seller called Drift and Mastery. He noted that “our schools, churches, courts, governments were not built for the kind of civilisation they are expected to serve”. Americans needed to “adjust their thinking to a new world situation”, otherwise they would be condemned to “drift along at the mercy of economic forces that we are unable to master”. These words ring just as true today as they did then. “America’s Moment” provides as useful a guide as any available to turning drift into mastery once again.•

“It Is The Medium Of Last Resort For The Disenfranchised Of The World”

July 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The average age of an International Business Times writer seems to be about twelve, so these young folks sometimes aren’t so familiar with history, believing, for instance, that Project Orion might merely be a “claim” that Freeman Dyson has made rather than well-recorded history. So I’m thrilled when the publication invites someone with a bit more experience to pen pieces for it. One such guest scribe is security expert/erstwhile fugitive John McAfee, although his last article, one about Edward Snowden, was a little woo-woo in the head. Philip K. Dick couldn’t have done better after downing a bowl of amphetamines on a spinning tea cup at Disneyland. 

In his newest writing for IBT, an analysis of the Hacking Team hack, McAfee argues that the Dark Net is exploited by surveillance software companies and governments alike to legitimize mass spying. Further, he believes we’re in the midst of a growing global cyberwar waged by a welter of states and corporations. On one level or another, that type of gamesmanship is happening and will continue without end. An excerpt:

As with the Sony hack, it is the leaked emails that allow us to dig deep into the psyche of this industry. In one of the Hacking Team’s leaked emails Vincenzetti states: “The Dark Net is 99% used for all kinds of illegal, criminal and terrorist activities.”

This statement, as with many of his statements, is blatantly false.

On the Dark Web we of course find mind-numbing pornography, advertisements for hit men, drugs of every kind, fake Cartier watches that even Cartier cannot distinguish, human traffickers of every kind, money launderers – and even lawyers.

However, in the overwhelming majority of the Dark Web, we find human rights activists who, if their identities were known, would certainly be executed by their home country.

We find scientific or religious theories that are unpopular and would invite repercussions if the authors were known. We find whistle-blowers who pass documents of delicate sensitivity but powerful impact.

It is the medium of last resort for the disenfranchised of the world. It is definitely not “99% used for all kinds of illegal, criminal and terrorist activities.

These, and similar statements released by every one of the corporations who create and market surveillance software are designed to foster the attitude of fear propagandised by covert and law enforcement agencies within every government on the planet.”

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“The General Trend Seems A Puzzling Suspension Of The Law Of Supply And Demand”

July 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There can be no reasonable argument against a living wage from a moral perspective. None. But the economics of the minimum wage are puzzling and often partisan. We’re warned that decent pay will kill jobs–even a philanthropic soul like the mid-life, sweater-clad iteration of Bill Gates holds this position–but is it true? In his latest Financial Times column, Tim Harford suggest there should be fewer opinions and more research. An excerpt:

The UK minimum wage took effect 16 years ago this week, on April 1 1999. As with the Equal Pay Act, economically literate commentators feared trouble, and for much the same reason: the minimum wage would destroy jobs and harm those it was intended to help. We would face the tragic situation of employers who would only wish to hire at a low wage, workers who would rather have poorly paid work than no work at all, and the government outlawing the whole affair.

And yet, the minimum wage does not seem to have destroyed many jobs — or at least, not in a way that can be discerned by slicing up the aggregate data. (One exception: there is some evidence that in care homes, where large numbers of people are paid the minimum wage, employment has been dented.)

The general trend seems a puzzling suspension of the law of supply and demand. One explanation of the puzzle is that higher wages may attract more committed workers, with higher morale, better attendance and lower turnover. On this view, the minimum wage pushed employers into doing something they might have been wise to do anyway. To the extent that it imposed net costs on employers, they were small enough to make little difference to their appetite for hiring.

An alternative response is that the data are noisy and don’t tell us much, so we should stick to basic economic reasoning.•

 

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“The Savings On Labor And Fuel Would Just Be Phenomenal”

July 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Progress is real but so are its consequences,” wrote Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants, and he isn’t the first or last to say so. When it comes to tools, the most-pressing short-term concerns are environmental damage, skill fade and technological unemployment. 

On the latter topic, Mary Clare Jalonick of the Associated Press reports on agricultural drones, which are to farms as robots are to warehouses. They’re an amazing example of progress, far more precise and friendlier to the environment, though the consequence, once the slow-moving FAA works out the rules, is likely fewer jobs. The opening:

CORDOVA, Md. (AP) — Mike Geske wants a drone.

Watching a flying demonstration on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the Missouri farmer envisions using an unmanned aerial vehicle to monitor the irrigation pipes on his farm — a job he now pays three men to do.

“The savings on labor and fuel would just be phenomenal,” Geske says, watching as a small white drone hovers over a nearby corn field and transmits detailed pictures of the growing stalks to an iPad.

Nearby, farmer Chip Bowling tries his hand at flying one of the drones. Bowling, president of the National Corn Growers Association, says he would like to buy one for his Maryland farm to help him scout out which individual fields need extra spraying.

Another farmer, Bobby Hutchison, says he is hoping the man he hires weekly to walk his fields and observe his crops gets a drone, to make the process more efficient and accurate.

“I see it very similar to how I saw the computer when it first started,” says Hutchison, 64. “It was a no-brainer.”•

 

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“My Knee Always Hurts When I Am Sad”

July 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Oriana Fallaci conducted a famously contentious 1963 interview with Federico Fellini, which marked the brutish end of what had been a lively friendship begun in the previous decade, the director’s ego and the journalist’s envy getting the best of the moment. In the preface, Fallaci wrote of Fellini’s colorful experiences in New York City when he lived there in 1957. The passage:

I have known Fellini for many years; to be precise ever since I met him in New York for the American première of his movie The Nights of Cabiria, at which time became good friends. In fact, we often used to go eat steaks at Jack’s or roast chestnuts in Times Square, where you could also do target shooting. Then, from time to time, he would turn up at the apartment I shared in Greenwich Village with another girl called Priscilla to ask for a cup of coffee. The homely brew would alleviate, though I never understood why, his nostalgia for his homeland and his misery at his separation from his wife Giulietta. He would come in frantically massaging his knee, “My knee always hurts when I am sad. Giulietta! I want Giulietta!” And Priscilla would come running to look at him as I’d have gone running to look at Greta Garbo. Needless to say, there was nothing of Greta Garbo about Fellini, he wasn’t the monument he is today. He used to call me Pallina, Little Ball. He made us call him Pallino, sometimes Pallone, Big Ball. He would go in for innocent extravagances such as weeping in the bar of the Plaza Hotel because the critic in the New York Times had given him a bad review, or playing the hero. He used to go around with a gangster’s moll, and every day the gangster would call him at his hotel, saying, “I will kill you.” He didn’t understand English and would reply, “Very well, very well,” so adding to his heroic reputation. His reputation lasted until I explained to him what “I will kill you” meant. With half an hour Fellini was on board a plane making for Rome. 

He used to do other things too, such as wandering around Wall Street at night, casing the banks like a robber, arousing the suspicions of the world’s most suspicious police, so that finally they asked to see his papers, arrested him because he wasn’t carrying any, and shut him up for the night in a cell. He spent his time shouting the only English sentence he knew: “I am Federico Fellini, famous Italian director.” At six in the morning an Italian-American policeman who had seen La Strada I don’t know how many times said, “If you really are Fellini, come out and whistle the theme of La Strada.” Fellini came out and in a thin whistle–he can’t distinguish a march from a minuet–struggled through the entire soundtrack. A triumph. With affectionate punches in the stomach that were to keep him on a diet of consummé for the next two weeks, the policemen apologized and took him back to his hotel with an escort of motorcycles, saluting him with a blare of horns that could be heard as far away as Harlem.•

 

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A Brief Note From 1864 About The New Hangman

July 7, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 2, 1864 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“Death Denial Can Be A Dangerous Business”

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

Not only can death kill you, but it has all sorts of nasty side effects.

We’d do almost anything to avoid the end, even to just avoid thinking about it. That leaves us open to all sorts of manipulations that prey upon our justifiable fears. In a Financial Times piece about a trio of new books that study our uneasy relationship with mortality, Stephen Cave explains how the human need for infinite life can create a living hell. An excerpt:

To protect ourselves from the inevitable — or at least the thought of it — we need wholly different defences. According to what these authors christened “terror management theory”, these defences have two elements. First, we develop cultural world views that in some way promise “order, meaning, and permanence”. Second, we strive for self-esteem, which reassures us that we are doing what our cultural world view requires and so “enables each of us to believe we are enduring, significant beings rather than material creatures destined to be obliterated”.

An obvious example of a death-denying world view is Christianity. Founded on belief in Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, it promises eternal life for all believers. It is therefore no surprise that those prompted to contemplate mortality by these psychologists afterwards proved to be more inclined to believe in God, Jesus and the efficacy of prayer than the control group.

But religions are not the only world views promising some way of living on. Nationalism and similar mass movements offer continuation as part of a great whole. As Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski vividly explain, the 20th century is replete with examples of more or less veiled immortality ideologies, from Nazism’s “thousand-year Reich” to the “eternal and indestructible” revolution of Chairman Mao in China. The toll taken by these movements shows that death denial can be a dangerous business. And indeed, as experimental evidence shows, fear of mortality makes people more attracted to charismatic leaders, more nationalistic, more aggressive and more suspicious of foreigners. We might therefore wonder what the daily diet of killings served up by news programmes is doing to our psyches.•

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“This Is How All Technology Works”

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

It’s the fifth anniversary of Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and it’s clearly a classic. The author probably would have gotten less grief over the book if he had titled it What Technology Can Do For Us Humans, but that would not have only been unwieldy, it would have been untrue.

In the passage below, Kelly compares the growth of a city–a technology in and of itself–with the development of other technologies, how they start in germinal form, becoming denser and richer as more brains join them. It’s the same for Manhattan and the microchip.

Of course, insta-cities in China and elsewhere are trying to flout this rule. Will any of them become great metropolises? Are they examples of a new technology or just mistakes doomed to failure?

The excerpt:

Every beautiful city begins as a slum. First it’s a seasonal camp, with all the freewheeling makeshift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night or two, and if their camp is deemed a desirable spot, it grows into an untidy village or uncomfortable fort or dismal official outpost with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate until the village chaotically swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center – civic or religious – and the edges of the city continue to expand in unplanned, ungovernable messiness. It doesn’t in what century or in which country; the teeming fringes of a city will shock and disturb the established residents. The eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks and huts at the edges of their town, which “were putrid, sodden and sagging.” Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it rebuilt or moved within weeks.

Babylon, London, and New York all had seamy ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that “slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape” of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at is peak, nearly 20% of its residents did not have a “fixed abode” — that is they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: “Several families inhabit one house. A weaver’s family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace.” That refrain is repeated throughout history. Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak. In the New York slums “nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family.”

San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his wonderful book Shadow Cities,  one survey in 1855 estimated that “95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] city would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land.” Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, “Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties.” Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called “squatlers.”  As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first twenty-first-century cities.

That’s how it works. This is how all technology works. A gadget begins as a junky prototype and then progresses to something that barely works. The ad hoc shelters in slums are upgraded over time, infrastructure is extended, and eventually makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow. This is already happening in Rio and Mumbai today.•

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“He’d Buy Every One Tesla Builds”

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

It’s Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s prerogative if he wishes to replace his drivers with autonomous cars in an attempt to make his company more profitable, but there’s something seriously wrong with the PR bullshit he’s currently peddling, making himself out to be a champion of the worker–even the military veteran. That’s never been the goal. Worse yet, some smart people seem fooled by the charade. 

From Stephen Edelstein at Yahoo! Autos:

Tesla Motors is one of several automakers planning to put a self-driving car on sale sometime in the next few years, and it already seems to have at least one big fan.

This person isn’t a celebrity owner or safety advocate, but rather the CEO of preeminent ride-sharing company Uber.

If Tesla can build a fully-autonomous car by 2020, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says his company would buy it. In fact, he’d buy every one Tesla builds.

Yes, all 500,000 electric cars Tesla expects to produce in that year, according to Forbes (via Charged EVs).

That boast comes not directly from Kalanick himself, but from Steve Jurvetson–an early Tesla investor and board member.

Jurvetson relayed what he claimed were Kalanick’s remarks at the recent Top 10 Tech Trends dinner, hosted by the Churchill Club.•

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Old Print Article: “The Gospel Of Egotism,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1900)

July 6, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

450px-Friedrich_Nietzsche_drawn_by_Hans_Olde-1899

Nietzsche-piano

Announcing God’s death probably wasn’t a real consensus-builder back in the 19th century, so Friedrich Nietzsche was crucified in effigy by some newspapers when he died. This postmortem, originally published in the Springfield Republican and reprinted in the November 4, 1900 edition Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was a merciless takedown of the extremist philosopher.

“If The Technology Matures To A Point Where It’s Reliable, Today’s Taxi Drivers Don’t Stand A Chance”

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

If driverless cars improve to the point where they’re even just as good as human drivers, those jobs behind the wheels of buses, taxis, trucks, etc., may disappear in an avalanche. That’s because autonomous vehicles might already be a cost-effective alternative, according to a paper published by Jeffery Greenblatt and Samveg Saxena of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From Jason Koebler at Vice Motherboard:

Here’s the math used by Greenblatt and Saxena to argue that even today’s expensive autonomous vehicle technology makes sense today.

“In New York City in 2005, only 24 percent of taxi fares went toward vehicle costs, with 57 percent going to drivers … driver income constitutes $97,600 per year, which could more than cover the incremental cost of autonomous vehicle technology [estimated at $150,000]. Even using current costs, if financed using identical model assumptions for vehicle capital, this would amount to $36,500 per year, 37 percent of New York City taxi driver income and 21 percent of total taxi fares. Therefore, autonomous taxis could replace current taxis at current autonomous vehicle costs and possibly even lower fares, providing an important early market niche.” [emphasis mine]

Greenblatt and Saxena suggest that, given those potential cost savings, if the technology matures to a point where it’s reliable, today’s taxi drivers don’t stand a chance. That is, of course, what taxi companies have been very much worried about as Uber makes inroads throughout the world.•

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“It’s Lifestyle Porn For The Consumer”

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

Every time a holiday rolls around, you know there’ll be photos of Taylor Swift, whomever is posing as her boyfriend at the moment, and a collection of aesthetically pleasing, ever-changing friends, frolicing like catalog models in coordinated clothes and accoutrements on a beach or in a pool, a cast of synchronized swimmers going for gold at the Polo Ralph Lauren Olympics. Accessories in the Instagram images can instantly become big sellers, and, in a sense, everything in the pictures is for sale.

It’s completely understandable that Swift would want to protect her real world, but the constant make-believe is disquieting. It’s not only that her relationships are arranged, but that her whole life is. She’s become both Martha Stewart and a lovely item from the Martha Stewart collection.

Paper catalogs have survived in the Digital Age, even thrived, by not selling products but by peddling lifestyle fantasies just as Swift does. It’s no longer about items but ideas. From “Why Shopping Catalogs Just Won’t Die,” by Justin Jones at the Daily Beast:

Why are retailers like Restoration Hardware, Williams-Sonoma, J. Crew, and Barney’s New York still using print publication as a viable shopping medium.

And why are they sending them to our mailbox and not our inbox?

“Catalogs are being geared more towards content over product. It’s very much about the styling and the lifestyle and the connection to the brand,” Bridget Johns, the Head of Customer Engagement at the in-store analytics companyRetail Next, told The Daily Beast.

“[Customers] look at catalogs as a magazine versus a shopping vehicle, which gives this very different experience from the one that you get online.”

More and more we see that retailers are revamping their catalogs, swapping out flimsy four-page throwaways with a few promotional discounts for mammoth, beautifully crafted, coffee table-worthy publications that rival the likes of your favorite high-profile glossy.

It’s lifestyle porn for the consumer. Brands are injecting their aesthetic and aspirational world directly into the minds of millions.•

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“The Revolution Didn’t Come — It Never Does In America, Not Since The First One”

July 6, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a strong New York Times Book Review piece, George Packer surveys the common ground shared by disparate pundits Chris Hedges, a revolutionary on the Left, and the Libertarian-ish Charles Murray, who claims to love both meritocracy and Sarah Palin, go figure. In new titles by each author (here and here), Packer reads the dissatisfaction in America that wasn’t quelled by the evanescence of Occupy, the white-hot anger of the Tea Party or the Presidency of Barack Obama. At the root of this multi-ideological discontent is a stinging anti-government strain, powered by the belief that the system is rigged, if for different reasons. Packer, however, is left wanting by both books.

His opening:

A few years ago, it wasn’t hard to find Americans who thought a revolution was coming. At the depths of the recession, in hard-hit places like the North Carolina tobacco country or the exurbs of Tampa Bay, I met plenty of people who believed we were one power blackout or gas shortage away from civil unrest, political violence, even martial law. The feeling didn’t conform to strictly partisan lines, and the objects of wrath included bêtes noires of both the left and the right: banks, oil companies, federal and state governments, news media. At Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, a Tea Party couple visiting from rural Virginia was surprised to find a patch of common ground with Occupiers — at least until the discussion turned to actual policies. The anger was populist, which is ideologically capacious. The enemy was bigness, feathering its own nest and conspiring against the little guy.

The revolution didn’t come — it never does in America, not since the first one, no matter how bad things get. The Tea Party reared up, only to be appropriated by billionaires and partly dissolved into the Republican Congress. Occupy Wall Street flashed across the sky and flared out, more a meme than a movement. I once asked a man in Tampa Bay — formerly middle class and owner of his own small business, he was without work, facing foreclosure and dying of cancer — why there was no mass movement of Americans in his situation. “Imagine getting up every day and not having a purpose,” he said. “You’re not working, your self-worth goes down the toilet. You don’t interact with people. You stay in your house. You don’t want to answer the phone. It isolates you.” He seemed to be saying that in America failure, like success, feels ­personal.

But the collective discontent hasn’t gone away — far from it.•

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“It’s Kind Of A Slow Death For People”

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

It’s just a few dozen positions at this point, a drop in the bucket, but the world is a little quieter as the Chicago open-outcry trading pits are (almost) completely closing, the transactions now handled electronically. It’s progress, for sure, but jobs are lost and perhaps something more. From Bernard Condon and Don Babwin at the Associated Press:

Since at least 1870, when the first octagonal pits were installed in Chicago, traders have been reading the “tone” of the crowd to sense where prices might be heading and feeling the “rush” when placing a big bet.

After more than 40 years of trading, George Gero knows all about the feel and thrill of the pits. But he is also familiar with wrenching change, and learning to adapt to it.

After fleeing from the Nazi’s in wartime Hungary, he came to New York, and found a home in the commodities pits downtown. And at 79, he’s still at it, marveling at how the computer allows him to find prices for gold and currencies around the world, no matter the time of day.

But Gero, a strategist at RBC Capital Markets, is not a complete fan of the new way. “It’s very cold … strictly numbers,” he says.

[Dan] Grant, the runner turned clerk who now oversees his own trading firm, says he has embraced change, too. But he mourns the loss of the kind of entry-level positions that gave kids without much education a chance to prove themselves, just as he did.

“The customer doesn’t have to call anyone to execute a trade,” he says.

[Dan] Sullivan, the broker, puts it bleakly.

“It’s kind of a slow death for people,” he says. “Maybe I am holding on to something that needs to go.”•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

July 5, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Got divorced selling emu egg 1/2 price – $50

SELLING EMU EGG FOR HALF PRICE – GREAT DEAL. Husband was insistent on buying several weird birds…after divorce now want to get rid of emu egg. Willing to deliver egg if in NYC area. Call or text and ask for Shasta for more info.

“This Is An Underground Shadow Economy”

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

A high number of the Airbnb lodgings in NYC have proven to be illegal, apartments kept from the market by large landlords who aim to make more money than the market would bear, which squeezes supply and forces rental prices upwards. Further, traditional hoteliers complain that they must adhere to regulations that the so-called Sharing Economy doesn’t heed. The same situation seems to be true in Paris.

Airbnb, of course, also has its good side economically. Apart from landlord listings, there are real homes and rooms to be had for vacation at much lower cost than a full-on hotel experience. Travelers who couldn’t afford the latter would have been forced to stay put, so this new option puts money back into the system, not just with the accommodations but also due to ancillary expenses.

In a Stratechery post which stretches back in scope to the Industrial Revolution and the exodus from farms, Ben Thompson argues that the only problem with this new arrangement is the subterfuge of the landlord behavior, which he believes should be out in the open, that ultimately the Sharing Economy, for whatever bad it may bring, is the greater good. Okay, that might be true in the aggregate, but if the so-called Peer Economy coupled with automation disappears many jobs in the hotel industry, and if we see similar shifts in the taxi and trucking and manufacturing sectors, we’d better have some sort of political solution in place to deal with what could make the changeover from farm to factory seem relatively placid by comparison. No one should want to halt progress, but we should be able to quickly adapt to the challenges it brings, including technological unemployment. An excerpt:

A not insignificant number of cities are equally concerned about “home,” but in their view Airbnb is destroying them by incentivizing landlords to remove residences from the rental market and instead offer them full-time on Airbnb. Paris, for example, which is Airbnb’s biggest market, has in recent weeks conducted raids on unauthorized Airbnb listings. As the Wall Street Journal reports::

Paris officials say there are some 30,000 tourist apartments available for rent in the city — about 2% of the total number of units — with as many as two-thirds operating illegally. Airbnb says that it is a fringe issue on its platform; just 17% of hosts in Paris say they rent out apartments other than their primary residences. It isn’t clear how many of those might be doing so without city authorizations.

Some hotel owners and other activists argue that full-time tourism apartments likely account for more than that in revenue terms, however. “You can’t call this a sharing economy anymore,” said Laurent Duc, president of the French Hotel Federation. “This is an underground shadow economy.”

It’s this last sentence that really gets at why the entire debate around the “sharing” economy is so stilted: at the risk of relying too heavily on my own anecdotal experience, it seems clear that at least a sizable portion of Airbnb’s business is made up of apartments and houses dedicated to Airbnb. In other words, no one staying in these professionally cleaned listings, complete with fresh sheets, towels, and complimentary toiletries, is joining their hosts for coffee or tacos or to simply hang out, no matter how delightful Airbnb’s founding myth may be. It is, as the president of the French Hotel Federation said, “an underground shadow economy.” Why, though, should it be underground?•

A Brief Note From 1901 About Chicken Theft

July 5, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 19, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“He Sounded More Like A Marxist Theoretician Than Someone Who Made His Fortune Selling Cartier Diamonds And Montblanc Pens”

July 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I took a NYC bus recently, an odd circumstance for a dedicated subway rider like myself, and it was a depressing experience in a way I didn’t anticipate. The stop at which I boarded was the culmination of an undercover sting operation, and those who hadn’t paid full fare along the line (just put small change in the box) or hopped on via the back door were loudly pointed out by plainclothes cops and herded off like murderers. There they were lined up and written tickets. A cursory glance at these “hardened criminals” showed them to be just sort of down-on-their luck working class people, who weren’t much different than anyone else on the bus, save a Metrocard or enough coins. I didn’t mind if my fare was subsidizing them, and it was tough seeing these struggling folks treated like perps just because they didn’t have enough money. It felt like they were mostly guilty of daring to be poor in New York City, of being on the losing end of a class war.

When Wall Street banks crashed the economy in 2008, those involved in the schemes weren’t pointed out and lined up. No tickets written. Perhaps that’s because they have enough money to avoid taking buses. Fact is, when you can hire lobbyists and buy politicians, you don’t have to really break the law to get what you want. You can have rules bent to your advantage so things that should be illegal are perfectly okay. That’s also class warfare, especially since such behavior had a direct impact on the fate of bus riders.

In a New York Times piece, Alan Feuer, who never disappoints, writes of a few super-rich people at least paying lip service to the problem of wealth inequality. His opening:

EARLIER this month, when the billionaire merchandising mogul Johann Rupert gave a speech at The Financial Times’ “luxury summit” in Monaco, he sounded more like a Marxist theoretician than someone who made his fortune selling Cartier diamonds and Montblanc pens. Appearing before a crowd of executives from Fendi and Ferrari, Mr. Rupert argued that it wasn’t right — or even good business — for “the 0.1 percent of the 0.1 percent” to raid the world’s spoils. “It’s unfair and it is not sustainable,” he said.

For several years now, populist politicians and liberal intellectuals have been inveighing against income inequality, an issue that is gaining traction among the broader body politic, as shown by a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that found that nearly 60 percent of American voters want their government to do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. But in the last several months, this topic has been taken up by a different and unlikely group of advocates: a small but vocal band of billionaires.

In March, for instance, Paul Tudor Jones II, the private equity investor, gave a TED talk in which he proclaimed that the divide between the top 1 percent in the United States and the remainder of the country “cannot and will not persist.” Mr. Jones, who is thought to be worth nearly $5 billion, added that such divides have historically been resolved in one of three ways: taxes, wars or revolution.•

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“They Have Ways Of Making You Happy”

July 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My opinion may be influenced by living in NYC and knowing lots of media workers, but I believe most people are fucking miserable. And the majority never change, except to get worse. So while the implications of “mood surveillance” by corporations and governments are troubling, I don’t know that unhappiness is a problem that can be manipulated or weeded out.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be efforts to do so, though. Philip Matthews of Stuff.co.nz speaks to sociologist William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry, about the past, present and future of measuring and modifying our moods. An excerpt:

Davies asks, what does a happiness or well-being industry exist for, and who benefits from it? At times, it can resemble science-fiction or a culture of benign-seeming surveillance.

There is the wearable technology that could let managers see how stressed employees are, or how active, which has sinister potential. Could managers identify the less active or sociable sector of their workforce and find ways to remove them? They could come to similar conclusions by analysing keywords in emails and social media messages, and picking up patterns in metadata.

“While I give it a slightly sinister spin, there are people out there who think this is the future of business,” Davies says.

Measuring and then modifying the public mood could turn out to be relatively easy. There is the example of a literature festival in the UK that filmed the smiles of attendees, which were analysed by software and rated. It was described by as “the future of evaluation”.

There was the infamous Facebook experiment, in which the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users were manipulated for a week to test theories about “emotional contagion”. Some users saw more good news than usual and some saw more bad news, and Facebook found that the input had a small effect on the output. In other words, those whose feeds had been negative posted more negative comments themselves.

They have ways of making you happy. In the UK, “the science of emotion has been put to work as part of an austerity agenda that withdraws benefits from vulnerable populations”, Davies says.

It almost sounds like a perversion of motivational thinking.•

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“It’s Not Unreasonable To Expect People To Vote For Policies That Will Help Them Avoid The Economic Fate Of The Horse”

July 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The new Foreign Affairs issue on automation, which I’ve excerpted several times (here and here and here), would not have been complete without a piece by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of The Second Machine Age, an excellent book that asks all right questions about the rapid growth of robotics, trying to answer them as well.

In “Will Humans Go the Way of Horses?” the duo wisely points out that regardless of machine progress, we aren’t likely going to become our equine brothers. There’s some chance superintelligence might obliterate humans one day in the very long run, but interpersonal skills, common sense, political will and revolution are some of the tools the authors believe may slow or even mitigate the lower-case calamities on the horizon, keeping us from the stable or glue factory, even if we’re no longer the heart of production. An excerpt:

It’s possible, however, to imagine a “robot dividend” that created more widespread ownership of robots and similar technologies, or at least a portion of the financial benefits they generated. The state of Alaska provides a possible template: courtesy of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was established in 1976, the great majority of the state’s residents receive a nontrivial amount of capital income every year. A portion of the state’s oil revenues is deposited into the fund, and each October, a dividend from it is given to each eligible resident. In 2014, this dividend was $1,884.

Even if human labor becomes far less necessary overall, people, unlike horses, can choose to prevent themselves from becoming economically irrelevant.


It’s important to note that the amendment to the Alaska state constitution establishing the Permanent Fund passed democratically, by a margin of two to one. That Alaskans chose to give themselves a bonus highlights another critical difference between humans and horses: in many countries today, humans can vote. In other words, people can influence economic outcomes, such as wages and incomes, through the democratic process. This can happen directly, through votes on amendments and referendums, or indirectly, through legislation passed by elected representatives. It is voters, not markets, who are picking the minimum wage, determining the legality of sharing-economy companies such as Uber and Airbnb, and settling many other economic issues.

In the future, it’s not unreasonable to expect people to vote for policies that will help them avoid the economic fate of the horse.•

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