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“There’s Also A Tightrope Of Personalization And Privacy”

June 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It seems that drivers may surrender the wheel, but will they concede ownership as well? “We don’t think people will give up their own cars,” asserts Mercedes-Benz futurist Eric Larsen in a New York Times Q&A with Quentin Hardy. That isn’t nearly the most disputed thing he said during the interview.

When asked about electric vehicles, Larsen says that internal-combustion model “isn’t broken for most people,” since fracking has kept gas prices low and refueling with gasoline requires of the owner only five minutes weekly. I suppose in a lower-case sense, the model isn’t broken, but in the much bigger one, the one in which we’re putting ourselves in a very precarious position environmentally, the model seems hopelessly broken for everyone.

An excerpt about changes to the automobile interior, which touches on another thorny issue–privacy:

Question:

What has changed inside the car itself?

Eric Larsen:

Screens have become more important. Will a driver’s screen get lots of upgrades like a phone app? If you have a five-year-old car now, people know it by looking at the sound system and the screen. Leased vehicles may be refurbished more often, as dealers look to make them seem newer. Cars may become more modular that way, and there won’t be model years in American cars the way there were.

There is more awareness in the controls. You can’t input long addresses into a navigational system while you’re driving. When a car knows it is at rest, it may allow you to put the seat back further, letting you work, sleep or watch TV from the driver’s seat.

But there’s also a tightrope of personalization and privacy. Companies can know how fast you drive, how tight you corner. We’ve already seen start-ups that tell how fast you’re driving and how you are braking by using the sensors in your phone. It can be a capability in the car itself. As you get into “pay as you drive” car businesses, that will become an issue. There are legal points that have to be worked out.•

Tags: Eric Larsen, Quentin Hardy

“Eventually There Will Be Artificial Wombs”

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

Transhumanist Party Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan wants to radically extend life with the aid of organ printing, brain implants, etc. But won’t that lead to a dangerously crowded planet? That was one question asked of the fledgling politician in a smart Q&A conducted by Sarah Fecht of Popular Science. The exchange:

Popular Science:

How can the planet support an immortal population?

Zoltan Istvan:

There’s a very strong chance that within 10 years, most of us will be using IVF techniques and designing our babies. We’ll still probably be using the uterus for another 10 years, but giving birth is something that’s medically dangerous. Eventually there will be artificial wombs. There won’t be such a natural family as we see it now. In 25 or 30 years, making a family will be very much something where you sit in front of a computer, and you decide how you want to do this, and then probably they’ll have something–an aquarium or something in your living room or at the hospital, similar to the Matrix. Again that might be 35 years out, and it’s all dependent upon whether this kind of technology is ethically passed. But I do believe the future of having children will change dramatically, and that will also impact the population levels. You’ll find that people won’t necessarily want to have children if they can spend 100 years in great health.•

Tags: Sarah Fecht, Zoltan Istvan

A Brief Note From 1934 About A Quiet Man

June 10, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the February 17, 1934 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Tags: Bernard R. Hubbard

“Death May Take A Different Shape In The Future”

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

Taking performance-enhancing drugs is a serious health risk, though that’s not why it seems to bother us when it comes to sports. For some reason–the shaky idea that competition should be pure?–we don’t want athletes using PEDs even though it doesn’t seem to upset that such usage is prevalent in many other competitive fields.

A paragraph from a 2012 Vanity Fair article about HGH use in Hollywood:

A business in Hollywood is small potatoes until it’s known by three letters: CAA, MGM, PMK, SAG, UTA, WME. These days, though, nothing is hotter than Hollywood’s latest health-and-fitness craze: H.G.H. therapy. Just ask any major-league Hollywood player. Earlier this year, following a game of tennis at a swank Beverly Hills country club, a prominent movie producer sat nursing a sore knee. “Just take this,” one of the club members said, offering a vial of H.G.H. A former studio executive recalls a recent dinner out with one of his colleagues. “He’s a family man with a wife and kids,” the executive says. “And he just starts talking about using H.G.H. I was like, ‘Are you crazy?! You’re fucking shooting yourself up?!’ But he said, ‘No, it’s great. And I feel great in the morning. And it’s invigorating.’ ”

All these people are searching for a “cure” for aging, the look of it and the biology of it also, a pursuit that will never end as long as there are humans. In a Vice piece, Seung Lee writes of drugs aimed not at defeating death but rather certain geriatric diseases that lead to it. An excerpt:

Private funds has been on the rise for anti-aging research, especially among Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech giants looking for the next frontier to conquer. One of the most active donors has been PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who donated $35 million to an anti-aging researcher in Cambridge Universtiy in 2006 and $500,000 to a biotech start-up in 2010.

Google has joined the fray last year with the foundation of Calico. Described as mysterious and Google’s mad science project, Calico revealed plans to build an anti-aging research facility in the San Francisco Bay Area with a cost of up to $1.5 billion.

So far, the Alk5 kinase inhibitor has yet to draw any funds from firms and investors some forty-odd miles away, even though [Irina] Conboy considered these discoveries “low-hanging fruit.”

The researchers remain hopeful that the drug will continue to move forward in pace with the explosive growth of the larger anti-aging research community.

“I look at it as more promising than anything,” said Hanadie Yousef, the lead author of the Oncotarget study and currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. “When I was starting graduate school five years ago, there was absolutely nothing known about how aging actually happened. The field is growing so rapidly that I would bet within the next decade we’ll see effective anti-aging therapeutic methods.”

With the probability of anti-aging therapy on the horizon, death may take a different shape in the future. Death, as Conboy’s team hoped to accomplish, would no longer come with pain or suffering at some hospital with wires and machines keeping the body alive.

Instead, death will come by more natural causes such as cardiac arrest or a stroke—a relatively quick way to die than fighting years against cancer or similar diseases.•

Tags: Hanadie Yousef, Irina Conboy, Seung Lee

“The Reality Is That China Is Now Shifting Its Appetite To Robots”

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

Martin Ford has written a New York Times op-ed explaining why “China could well turn out to be ground zero for the economic and social disruption brought on by the rise of the robots.” Outsourcing used to mean moving jobs out of country, but more and more it will mean shifting them out of species. And no matter what the official line is, better jobs don’t necessarily await the displaced. The opening:

OVER the last decade, China has become, in the eyes of much of the world, a job-eating monster, consuming entire industries with its seemingly limitless supply of low-wage workers. But the reality is that China is now shifting its appetite to robots, a transition that will have significant consequences for China’s economy — and the world’s.

In 2014, Chinese factories accounted for about a quarter of the global ranks of industrial robots — a 54 percent increase over 2013. According to the International Federation of Robotics, it will have more installed manufacturing robots than any other country by 2017.

Midea, a leading manufacturer of home appliances in the heavily industrialized province of Guangdong, plans to replace 6,000 workers in its residential air-conditioning division, about a fifth of the work force, with automation by the end of the year. Foxconn, which makes consumer electronics for Apple and other companies, plans to automate about 70 percent of factory work within three years, and already has a fully robotic factory in Chengdu.

Chinese factory jobs may thus be poised to evaporate at an even faster pace than has been the case in the United States and other developed countries. That may make it significantly more difficult for China to address one of its paramount economic challenges: the need to rebalance its economy so that domestic consumption plays a far more significant role than is currently the case.•

Tags: Martin Ford

“If I Could Double The World’s GDP, It Would Be Very Gratifying To Me”

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

When you’ve been one of the leading minds behind getting cars to drive themselves, you tend to shoot for the moon. Sebastian Thrun certainly is with Udacity, his education start-up which currently offers nanodegrees in things like Data Analyst and Android Developer. Not exactly a Stanford or Harvard or even community college curriculum, but Thrun believes he’s just at the beginning of reimagining higher ed. From a Smithsonian Q&A Roger Catlin conducted with the Google X lab founder:

Question:

What is your dream for Udacity?

Sebastian Thrun:

If I could double the world’s GDP, it would be very gratifying to me, measuring it not by the company itself but by the impact it would have. We are launching an education system that Google has undersigned, a joint education for entrepreneurship. It’s a niche to some extent, but if you bring this to the Middle East, if you bring this to Africa, if you bring this to Bangladesh, to developing countries, to China and India, I think it can have a huge impact on their ability to participate constructively in the creation of wealth and prosperity. Specifically the Middle East, at this point, suffers from the fact there is no path for young people to participate constructively, so some of those, as a result, may choose other paths, like terrorism.

Question:

What are the greatest obstacles of reaching that goal?

Sebastian Thrun:

Eventually, it will take broadening the course catalog. We work with computer science and software stuff, but not everyone wants to be a software engineer.

Where should I start? Obviously we are iterating the student experience, and in some courses we managed to get the finishing rate from about 2 percent to over 90 percent. And that was really hard work to make it really good. So think about it as a car that in the beginning drives about 10 mph, but with relentless engineering you get it to about 100 mph. That’s the product quality. The quality of the experience. The second one, honestly, is that education is such a slow growing field, so there is a trust element. Like, do you trust a new player? And to some extent education is owned by the degree-granting universities that have an efficient delivery model. So to gain the trust of our students means we’ll be placing them in jobs, showing the job records, to show how the teaching really empowers them. That will bring new students, but that’s going to take some time.•

Tags: Roger Catlin, Sebastian Thrun

Old Print Article: “Bat Masterson Dies At Editor’s Desk,” New York Times (1921)

June 9, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

No one has ever come up with a bigger lie than F. Scott’s Fitzgerald with this whopper: “There are no second acts in American lives.” There have always been second acts and many more after that. I mean, not if you drink yourself to death, but for anyone who waits out the bad times with good humor.

Bat Masterson was many things in his sixty-seven years–buffalo hunter, Army scout, sheriff, gambler, boxing manager, etc.–until he was one final thing in his dotage: a New York City newspaper sportswriter. He died an ink-stained wretch at an editor’s desk, not a gunslinger in a saloon. The report of his death from the October 26, 1921 New York Times:

William Barclay Masterson, better known as Bat Masterson, sporting writer, friend of Theodore Roosevelt and former sheriff of Dodge City, Kan., died suddenly yesterday while writing an article at his desk in the office of the The Morning Telegraph. He had been connected with the paper for more than ten years, and for the last few years had been one of its editors.

At one time Masterson was said to have been the best known man between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast, and his exploits and his ability as a gun fighter have become part of the tradition of the Middle West of many years ago. He was the last of the old time gun fighters.

He was born in Iriquios County, Ill., in 1854, the son of a farmer who came originally from St. Lawrence County, N.Y. Little more than a boy, Bat, his rifle across his knees, left the farm and rode into the then Fort Dodge and joined a party of buffalo hunters. Then his actual career began, and probably more weird and bloodthirsty tales have been written about him than of nearly any other man. His fights, however, were in the cause of justice, and he was one of a group of gunfighters who made that part of the country unhealthy for the bad men of the period.

While in the frontier town Bat heard one day that his brother had been killed across the street. Bat headed over. What happened he thus told later on the witness stand:

‘The cowboys had been on the range for some time and were drinking. My brother was the Town Marshall. They were carrying six-shooters and he attempted to disarm one of them who was particularly mean. They shot and killed him and they attempted to kill me. I shot and killed them–one at any rate–and shot the other one.’

His second killing was a cowboy named Jim Kennedy, who had come to town seeking the life of the Mayor. Kennedy shot several times through the door of a Mayor’s house and killed a woman. Then Masterson started out to get him. And he did.

One of Masterson’s most famous exploits was the battle of Dobe Walls, when with nine companions he stood off 200 Indians in a siege of 29 days. The attacking force was composed of Arapahoes and Cheyennes. A fortunate accident–the fall of part of the dirt roof of a saloon in which the buffalo hunters were sleeping–prevented the party from being surprised by the Indians and murdered in their sleep, for the attack was not anticipated. In the gray light of a June morning, when the hunters were engaged in restoring the roof, the Indians descended upon them. The hunters abandoned the roof and took to their guns. Time after time the Indian attack was stopped and the enemy driven back to the shelter of a fringe of cottonwoods along the Canadian River.

Masterson was only 18 years old when he joined Lieutenant Baldwin’s civilian scouts under Colonel Nelson A. Miles. He participated in the battle of Red River, where the Indians were commanded by Geronimo, and in other Indian engagements. Masterson lived fifteen years in Denver. There he became interested in pugilism. He went broke backing Charlie Mitchell in his fight with James J. Corbett. He was an official in the fight between Fitzsimmons and Corbett.•

________________________________

Masterson officiating Fitzsimmons-Corbett in 1897:

“There Are Japanese People Being Paid To Do Things That No One, Not Even A Robot, Should Be Paid To Do”

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

Japan currently has a very low unemployment rate of 3.30%, but economist Noah Smith would like it to rise.

Well, that’s not exactly true. He thinks that number is illusory and the nation’s rife with bullshit jobs (in Graeber-ian terms) and redundancies, positions suited neither for humans nor robots. He argues that elevator operators or extraneous clerks will find something else to do and the economy will gain steam. Perhaps. But if all busywork is eliminated and many in these positions are only qualified for busywork, what would become of them? Even those qualified to do more may have to compete with white-collar automation going forward. What exists is a free-market safety net of sorts, and if you want to eliminate it, there probably should be a Plan B in place. Believing a political solution will necessarily come to pass if the market doesn’t provide seems optimistic.

From Smith at Bloomberg View:

There’s something even better than robots that could replace large numbers of Japan’s human jobs: nothing.

Japan is a country famous for its low white-collar productivity; this is borne out by the statistics. Some of that comes from the reluctance by tradition-minded companies to adopt modern workplace technologies — there are still companies using fax machines or copying electronic documents onto paper. Some of it is from outdated management practices. Some of it is from employees staying at work for too many hours, long after their productivity has gone into free-fall. But some of it is certainly just a function of useless jobs. There are Japanese people being paid to do things that no one, not even a robot, should be paid to do.

Any American who has lived in Japan has a long list of anecdotes about jobs that seem utterly pointless. There are security guards being paid to guard vacant lots. There are women standing in elevators pushing the button for you. There are crossing guards at intersections with functional traffic lights.

Then there are the useful jobs for which Japanese companies simply hire too many personnel.•

Tags: Noah Smith

“Some Warehouse Workers Already Wear Wristbands Or Headsets That Measure Their Productivity”

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

Wearables that track workers are, for now, mostly optional. Some employees get rewards for voluntarily attaching themselves to gadgets that provide real-time feedback to their bosses. But that trend toward quantification seems clear, especially in countries where unions are weak and good jobs may grow scarcer with increased automation. Even for that contingent job, you may need to surrender to the nudge of modern technology. It’s a further Uberization of the workforce.

From Sarah O’Connor at the Financial Times:

Technology has made it possible for employers to monitor employees more closely than ever, from GPS trackers for delivery drivers to software that tracks which websites office workers visit. Companies such as Profusion think wearable gadgets could open a new frontier in workplace analytics, albeit one that would further blur the lines between our work and private lives.

“I think there’s an inevitability that it will gain ground, and there’s a backlash risk that will follow if the data get abused,” says Mr Weston.

For employers, the simplest way to use wearable gadgets (and so far the most common) is to give them to staff and try to nudge them into healthier lifestyles — a financially worthwhile goal if the company is on the hook for their health insurance. BP, for example, gives Fitbits to workers in North America and offers them rewards if they meet activity targets. Indeed, one of Fitbit’s five strategic goals is to “further penetrate the corporate wellness market”, according to its IPO prospectus. Wearables could also be straightforward tools.

But the bigger prize is to use the data from such devices to make the workforce safer or more productive. Some warehouse workers already wear wristbands or headsets that measure their productivity and location in real-time.•

Tags: Sarah O'Connor

“The New Industries And Companies…Will Only Use People To Do The Work If They’re Better At It Than Machines Are”

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

As someone consumed by robotics, automation, the potential for technological unemployment and its societal and political implications, I read as many books as possible on the topic, and I feel certain that The Second Machine Age, the 2014 title coauthored by Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson, is the best of the lot. If you’re just beginning to think about these issues, start right there.

In his Financial Times blog, McAfee, who believes this time is different and that the Second Machine Age won’t resemble the Industrial Age, has published a post about an NPR debate on the subject with MIT economist David Autor, who disagrees. An excerpt:

Over the next 20-40 years, which was the timeframe I was looking at, I predicted that vehicles would be driving themselves; mines, factories, and farms would be largely automated; and that we’d have an extraordinarily abundance economy that didn’t have anything like the same bottomless thirst for labour that the Industrial Era did.

As expected, I found David’s comments in response to this line of argument illuminating. He said: “If we’d had this conversation 100 years ago I would not have predicted the software industry, the internet, or all the travel or all the experience goods … so I feel it would be rather arrogant of me to say I’ve looked at the future and people won’t come up with stuff … that the ideas are all used up.”

This is exactly right. We are going to see innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity that I can’t even begin to imagine (if I could, I’d be an entrepreneur or venture capitalist myself). But all the new industries and companies that spring up in the coming years will only use people to do the work if they’re better at it than machines are. And the number of areas where that is the case is shrinking — I believe rapidly.•

Tags: Andrew McAfee, David Autor, Eric Brynjolfsson

“Like Cities, Not All Malls Are Alike”

June 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ghost malls have long been a fascination–a fantasy, really–of urban catastrophists thrilled by the stillness of decommissioned escalators. But while competition from online vendors has ended the phase in which any old mall was a license to print money, some analysts have recently begun arguing that upscale shopping centers that embrace technology can thrive at the very same time that their sadder siblings fall to ruins. It can’t just be a place–it has to be the place to be. In a Daily Beast piece, Joel Kotkin makes that very case. An excerpt:

To suggest malls are dead based on failure in failed places would be like suggesting that the manifest shortcomings of Baltimore or Buffalo means urban centers are not doing well. Like cities, not all malls are alike.

Looking across the entire landscape, it’s clear the mall is transforming itself to meet the needs of a changing society but is hardly in its death throes. Last year, vacancy rates in malls flattened for the first time since the recession. The gains from e-commerce—6.5 percent of sales last year, up from 3.5 percent in 2010—has had an effect, but bricks and mortar still constitutes upwards of 90 percent of sales. There’s still little new construction, roughly one-seventh what it was in 2006, but that’s roughly twice that in 2010.

Shopping in stores, according to a recent study from A.T. Kearney, is preferred over online-only by every age group, including, most surprisingly, millennials, although many of them research on the web, then visit the store, and sometimes then order on line. The malls that are flourishing tend to be newer or retrofitted and are pitched at expanding demographic markets. These “cathedrals of commerce” in the past tended to reflect the mass sameness of mid-century America; those in the future focus on distinct niches—ethnic, income, even geographical—that are not only viable but highly profitable.

This leaves us with a tale of two kinds of malls. One clear dividing line is customer base. In the ’80s and before, malls succeeded fairly universally, notes Houston investor Blake Tartt. But now it’s a matter of being in the right place. “Everything has changed and you have to be with the right demographics,” he suggests. “It’s not so much about the mall but the location that matters.”

Old malls in declining areas, notes a recent analysis by the consultancy Costar, do truly face a “bleak future” and should look to be converted into apartments, houses, corporate headquarters, or churches.

In contrast, affluent urban areas are becoming an unexpected hotspot for malls—even outlet malls are opening open in the urban core.•

Tags: Joel Kotkin

“They Live In The Desert For Up To A Month As If They Were Actually On Mars”

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

Speaking of going to Mars: Dr. Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society chose six fauxstronauts to “travel” to Mars in the Utah desert, which has terrain similar to that of the Red Planet. It’s a mission meant to discover what may lie ahead should we make it to our neighboring planet and one that raises awareness about a project close to the heart of the author of The Case for Mars.

From a byline-less CBS Denver report:

This week the group wrapped up a practice mission in the rural Utah desert.

“We are talking about the area known as Capitol Reef, not far from the Henry Mountains,” said Zubrin.

The Mars Society has organized a practice Mars station where hundreds of hopefuls who volunteered for the practice run were narrowed down to a crew of six.

They live in the desert for up to a month as if they were actually on Mars.

“The terrain is quite Mars-like,” said Zubrin.

The crew members on the most recent trip were from Europe. They perform missions that would theoretically helps Mars colonists such as collecting soil samples, building and moving equipment.

“We are starting to learn what is going to work on Mars, what is not going to work on Mars,” said Zubrin.

Zubrin calls the practice missions crucial to developing a guidebook to living on the red planet.•

Tags: Robert Zubrin

A Brief Note From 1926 About A Vengeful Act

June 8, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 25, 1926 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“I Was Surprised By How Conventional—And Tame—Most Of Its Reports Are”

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

The disruption of traditional journalism as practiced in the twentieth century has brought some good things beyond just the technological advances of content delivery. One is diversity, as newsrooms had long been primarily the domain of the white male. Many of the web-only news sites have tapped into the larger pool of employees, and that’s made the story selections wider. But other factors have conspired to make the new normal simultaneously shallower.

Most of these financially successful nouveau news organizations have maintained–further developed, even–the dicier aspects of old-school journalism: native advertising, capitulation to clients, etc. But none of the large-scale ones have thus far shown the capacity to consistently publish probing articles that go much beyond headlines and basic facts. There are wonderful niche non-news publications (Aeon is my favorite example), but the latest wave of for-profit mass media is largely an attenuated thing. Perhaps that’s what smaller screens demand or maybe institutional wisdom has been lost, but it’s a step backwards, at least in these early stages.

From Michael Massing’s NYRB piece about digital journalism:

Arriving at BuzzFeed’s editorial offices (housed in temporary quarters while the main office is being renovated), I found two adjoining cavernous spaces filled with long tables, at which sat some two hundred people gazing at computer screens. I was introduced to Shani Hilton, the executive editor for news. Thirty years old, she had worked for NBCWashington.com, the Washington City Paper, and the Center for American Progress before joining BuzzFeed in 2013. I asked her to cite some recent stories she felt were noteworthy. She mentioned a report by Ben Smith about the threat by an Uber executive to dig up dirt on a reporter who had criticized the company (it kicked up a storm); a story by Aram Roston on financial conflicts of interest involving a top NSA official (which led to the official’s resignation); and “Fostering Profits,” an investigation into deaths, sex abuse, and gaps in oversight at the nation’s largest for-profit foster care company. As for regular beats, Hilton mentioned two in which she felt BuzzFeed had excelled—marriage equality and rape culture.

From talking with Hilton and with Ben Smith (now editor in chief) and from sampling BuzzFeed’s home page, I came away convinced of its commitment to being a serious provider of news; there’s a sense of earnest aspiration about the place. At the same time, I was surprised by how conventional—and tame—most of its reports are. Much of BuzzFeed’s news feed seems indistinguishable from that of a wire service. Its investigations, while commendable, fall squarely within the parameters of investigative reporting as traditionally practiced in this country, with a narrow focus on managerial malfeasance, conflicts of interest, and workplace abuses. There’s little effort to examine, for example, the activities of hedge fund managers, Internet billionaires, or other pillars of the new oligarchy.

In April, Ben Smith removed two BuzzFeed posts that were critical of the advertising campaigns for Dove cosmetics and the Hasbro board game Monopoly. Both Dove and Hasbro advertise on the site. After coming under much fire, Smith restored the posts, though he denied that their original removal had had anything to do with pressure from advertisers. Soon after, the writer of the post critical of Dove, Arabelle Sicardi, resigned. So much for “true journalistic independence.” Overall, BuzzFeed’s practice of journalism seems nowhere near as pioneering as the sleek platform it has developed to deliver its product.•

Tags: Michael Massing

“American Social Mobility Has Stalled In Recent Decades, And That Accidents Of Birth Have Come To Matter Far Too Much”

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

It’s hard to imagine greater symbols of America living in the past than roasting pigs and gas-guzzling motorcycles, but an Iowa “Roast and Ride” is where GOP hopefuls just gathered to make a case that they should be the next President. In their speeches, the Perrys and Walkers of the world unironically promised to return America to greatness by wallowing in nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. According to an Economist report, there was one exception: Marco Rubio. An excerpt:

Mr Perry is 65 years old, while Mr Walker is 47. But the two governors sounded rather similar in their wistful recollections of modest childhoods marked by cheerful, hard-working, up-by-the-bootstraps small town thrift. Mr Walker was the undoubted star of the day even before he arrived. His speech was well-received, but it was a disappointment. He talked of an American Dream led astray, and set up a straw man attack on Mr Obama and the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, saying that to listen to them, the measure of success in America was “how many people are dependent on government.” But in his own childhood in small town America, nobody said or wrote in their high school yearbooks that they wanted to grow up to be dependent on the government, Mr Walker said. The great thing about America, he went on, was that it offered equality of opportunity, even if outcomes were up to individuals. America is one of the few countries left in the world where it doesn’t matter what class you are born into, he declared, and many in the audience, notably the older voters with snowy hair, clapped enthusiastically.

But even in a political speech to activists, that was a riskily glib thing to say. The evidence is overwhelming that American social mobility has stalled in recent decades, and that accidents of birth have come to matter far too much. The great question of the age is how to fix that, and both thoughtful Republicans and Democrats have begun wrestling with competing solutions. Mr Walker simply sweeps that debate aside, and in doing so sounds like a spokesman for an imperfectly-remembered past when the American Dream came easily.

The contrast was startling when Senator Marco Rubio came to talk. The Cuban-American senator from Florida is only three years younger than Mr Walker, but he sounded as if he came from a different generation. The economy has changed in the past 20 years, he told the crowd. There is more global competition and machines can do many of the jobs that once paid good wages to middle class workers. We are living through a moment of transformation such as we have not seen since the Industrial Revolution, Mr Rubio said. Unfortunately, we have all of these leaders that are stuck in the past, he said. He was polite enough to add: “especially on the left”, but his rebuke to some of his Republican rivals was well made.

In part Mr Rubio is defending himself tactically from the charge that America is not ready to hand the White House to another young, eloquent senator (having tried that with a certain Senator Obama from Illinois). But he is right to challenge crowds such as the one in Boone. I like the 20^th century, Mr Rubio joked. I was born in the 20^th century. But it is time to build a new American century.•

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 8, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

WANTED!! Photos of animals! – $50

I collect photos of animals having sex. Pets, wild animals, or a mix of both! I am willing to pay up to $50 dollars for an original photo that I would be able to copyright as my own. The photos will eventually be displayed in a calendar.

Old Print Article: “Artist Pictures Earth Before The Coming Of Man,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1927)

June 7, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Our visual understanding of prehistoric megafauna and other creatures is aided greatly by the work of Charles R. Knight, the painter who gained nationwide attention beginning in the 1920s for his interpretations of dinosaurs and birds long extinct. He certainly couldn’t work from life or memory or photographs, so he became a hunter of facts, an interviewer of scholars, a measurer of skeletons. For an article in the July 31, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, reporter Frank J. Costello visited the paleoartist in his Upper West Side Manhattan studio and studied his process. The piece’s opening below.

Tags: Charles R. Knight, Frank J. Costello

“I See You—You Get Overloaded By The Truth”

June 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

We celebrate youth when we most fear death. We seek escapism when there seems no way out.

From a 1977 Interview Q&A Andy Warhol and Bob Colacello conducted with Sissy Spacek:

Andy Warhol:

It’s funny they never write about you in the scandal sheets. I guess it’s because you always play such a young person.

Sissy Spacek:

I’m grouped together with Tatum O’Neal and Jodie Foster. That’s fine with me. You see, you can get by with a lot more that way. People let things slide. That’s good, I guess.

Andy Warhol:

And child actors are getting so big again.

Sissy Spacek:

I wonder why.

Bob Colacello:

I think because everything’s going in an escapist direction because things are getting worse.

Sissy Spacek:

Do you think so?

Bob Colacello:

They don’t seem to be getting better. The news magazines always used to have hard news stories on the covers. Now it’s entertainment stories.

Sissy Spacek:

I see you—you get overloaded by the truth. That’s the nice thing about livin’ in Los Angeles. Anything that happens in the news—great tragedies, scandals—people just think, “What a great idea for a film!” Everything’s thought of in terms of “material.” Remember that thing in Uganda? They couldn’t get the films out fast enough.•

Tags: Andy Warhol, Bob Colacello, Sissy Spacek

“They Undermine Economic Growth And Social Cohesion”

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

I put up a post of Thomas Piketty’s NYRB take on Sir Tony Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can Be Done? Here’s a passage from an Economist piece about the same book, which compares Atkinson’s work to Piketty’s conversation-turning Capital in the Twenty-First Century:

In the event, Sir Anthony is more radical than Mr Piketty; he calls for robust taxation of the rich whom he reckons have got off easily over the last generation (see chart). But that’s not all. He believes government should meddle in markets in all sorts of ways to influence the distribution of economic rewards. Sir Anthony’s recommendations are a throwback to the 1960s and 1970s, when trade unions were a dominant force in politics and the state was seen as a much-needed check on markets. Even the most egalitarian economists, such as Mr Piketty, are reluctant to recommend employment guarantees and wage controls. Sir Anthony is not. And if his arguments are not always wholly convincing, he may nonetheless succeed in shifting the debate.

Inequality begins with a clear statement of the harm done by rising income gaps: they unfairly punish those who suffer bad luck. They undermine economic growth and social cohesion. Perhaps most importantly, inequality in economic resources translates directly into inequality in personal opportunity. Wealth generates comfort even when it isn’t being spent; the rich enjoy the fact that they are insured against future hardship or could use their wealth in future to satisfy personal or professional goals.•

Tags: Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty

“Without That Synthetic Flavoring, I Don’t Think People Would Eat Much Junk Food”

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

Extremely cheap meat isn’t appetizing on its own, even if you smother its rankness in as many equally low-end toppings as possible. That’s where the Flavor Industry enters, using chemical enhancers to appeal to taste buds and pleasure centers of the brain, something chicken-ish pink goo and indestructible dessert cakes can’t manage on their own.

From Scott Porch’s Salon interview with The Dorito Effect author Mark Schatzker:

Question:

Did you go to some of the tasting panels that come up with these flavors?

Mark Schatzker:

Absolutely. I went to a flavor company and spoke to many of those people. They’re very talented at putting together thrilling combinations of flavors.

Question:

Do they defend this largely as giving consumers what they want?

Mark Schatzker:

Yes. It’s what consumers want, and they say over and over that overeating is a matter of personal responsibility. What they don’t think about and what no one has thought about is: Why does food have flavor in the first place? It’s a crucial question. If you start putting chemicals in junk food and fast food and soft drinks, you create the illusion of nutrition. You’re making things more delicious than they ordinarily would be. Without that synthetic flavoring, I don’t think people would eat much junk food at all.

Question:

We talked before the interview that it’s not just food. There’s artificial flavoring in cigarettes too.

Mark Schatzker:

One of the most striking and alarming things about flavoring is that it’s used in tobacco and has been for decades. I dug up a document from the tobacco industry from the early ’70s saying that young people are more inclined to smoke flavored cigarettes. They’re the same flavoring that you see [in foods] and for the same reason — it makes it taste better.•

Tags: Mark Schatzker, Scott Porch

“We Have A Political Selection Ritual Straight Out Of The 19th Century”

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

I have a natural aversion to institutions that have run their course and entered into obsolescence. I felt it in churches and libraries I was dragged to as a child (though I loved reading), and I feel that way about post offices and polling places as an adult. It doesn’t work anymore, and I’m not a good enough sport to play along with the ruse.

In his latest Financial Times column, Douglas Coupland wonders how the hanging chad still hangs around. An excerpt:

The most interesting lie I see in millennial bashing is that millennials aren’t political and that they don’t vote. I hear this, and inside my head I hear a loud screeching brake noise in my head and say, WTF?

Millennials are the most politically informed cohort ever. They know their rights. They know about power imbalances. They know about environmental degradation, they know about GMOs, Yellow 6, fuel rods, transgender politics and the near complete lobbyocracy of US politics. You can’t pull the wool over the eyes of most millennials. I think it’s because millennial political expression began with the stillborn Occupy events that they get branded as apathetic but the issue with millennials isn’t a perceived apathy on their part. I think it’s in large part the fact that they look at the mechanics of voting and compare it to the universe they inhabit and they collectively say, You have to be kidding: every four years I go into a plywood booth and use a graphite-based stylus to “fill in a box” corresponding to my decision for who’s best for the job? What century are we in? How is this still even happening?

And they have a point. The way voting works now is like taking everyone’s computers and devices away and telling them they have to instead use envelopes and stamps to communicate with each other. In the era of Airbnb, Netflix and Skype we have a political selection ritual straight out of the 19th century.•

Tags: Douglas Coupland

“The Robots Remain Decades Away From…Science-Fiction Feats”

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

The DARPA Robotics Challenge this weekend was about as unimpressive as the 2004 Grand Challenge for driverless vehicles–the “Debacle in the Desert.” It seemed like robocars were decades away from reality, but in the aftermath of that competition autonomous vehicles showed marked improvement in a stunningly short time. The requirements of unplugged robots are greater than that of a driverless car, but the money being currently poured into this research is also far more substantial.

What does the future hold? I’ll quote the technophobe Andre Gregory from the end of the long conversation that makes up most of My Dinner with Andre: “A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?”

From a report on the competition from John Markoff at the New York Times:

Despite clear progress since a trial event in Florida in 2013, the robots remain decades away from the science-fiction feats seen in movies like Ex Machina and Chappie.

Instead, the robots seemed more like an array of electronic and hydraulic contraptions that, in some cases, walked in a lumbering fashion on two or four legs and, in other cases, rolled on tracks or wheels. Some of the machines weighed more than 400 pounds. They were equipped with sensors and cameras to permit remote control.

On Friday, the first day of the Robotics Challenge, it took until 2:30 in the afternoon for the first robot to successfully complete the course, seven and a half hours after the competition began. Frequently, the machines would stand motionless for minutes at a time while they waited for wireless connections with their controllers to improve. Darpa degraded the wireless links on purpose to create the uneven communications that would simulate a crisis situation.

Reporters were once again left grasping for appropriate metaphors to describe the slow-motion calisthenics performed by the menagerie of battery-powered machines. Most agreed that “like watching grass grow” was no longer the best description, and Gill Pratt, the Darpa official in charge of the competition, suggested that it had risen to the level of “watching a golf match.”•

Tags: John Markoff

“At The Core Of His Program Is A Series Of Proposals That Aim To Transform The Very Operation Of The Markets For Labor And Capital”

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

In a New York Review of Books piece, Thomas Piketty, who has suggested his own remedies for wealth disparity (including aggressive investment in education), reviews British economist Anthony B. Atkinson’s progressive treatment of the problem in the UK, Inequality: What Can Be Done? which suggests, among other things, an endowment be paid to all citizens at the time of their eighteenth birthdays. An excerpt:

The idea of going back to a more progressive tax structure clearly has a major part in the plan of action that Atkinson sets forth. The British economist leaves no doubt about it: the spectacular lowering of top income tax rates has sharply contributed to the rise of inequality since the 1980s, without bringing adequate corresponding benefits to society at large. We must therefore waste no time discarding the taboo that says marginal tax rates must never rise above 50 percent. Atkinson proposes a far-reaching reformation of the British income tax, with top tax rates raised to 55 percent for annual income above £100,000 and 65 percent for annual income above £200,000, as well as a hike in the cap on contributions to national insurance.

All of which would make it possible to finance a significant expansion of the British social security and income redistribution system, notably with a sharp increase in family benefits (doubling and even quadrupling them in one of the variants proposed), as well as a rise in retirement and unemployment benefits for people with lower resources.* Atkinson presents a series of variants of these measures and scenarios for reform, while advocating those measures that make it possible to return to a policy of universal social safety nets (i.e., that would be open to everyone), as opposed to conditional transfers of resources.

If these proposals, statistically accounted for and fully financed from taxes, were to be adopted, there would be a significant drop in British levels of inequality and poverty. According to the simulations done by Atkinson and Sutherland, those levels would fall from their current quasi-American levels to the point where they would come close to European and OECDaverages. This is the central goal of Atkinson’s first set of proposals: you can’t expect everything from fiscal redistribution, but that nonetheless is where you have to begin.

Radical Reformism: A New Philosophy of Rights

But Atkinson’s plan of action hardly stops there. At the core of his program is a series of proposals that aim to transform the very operation of the markets for labor and capital, introducing new rights for those who now have the fewest rights. His proposals include guaranteed minimum-wage public jobs for the unemployed, new rights for organized labor, public regulation of technological change, and democratization of access to capital. This is only a sampling of the many reforms he recommends.•