Urban Studies

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August 4, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"I love submissive women with nipple rings."

“I love submissive women with nipple rings.”

My Taste In Women Is Weird – 38

I can’t believe how difficult I make my own life. I am extremely wealthy, and self-made but I have some of the weirdest taste in women. At age 38, I should just date one of these very pretty girls in NYC and start a family. But of course I have to be attracted to women who are heavily tattooed and have piercings. It really frustrates me actually. I love submissive women with nipple rings. I love ink. It is messed up. These are the women that my family and friends would look at in a weird way. But I find them attractive. I can’t even explain it. It’s frustrating!

“I love ink.”

 

“I Think President Putin Represents A Deep Strain In Russia That Is Probably Harmful To Russia Over The Long Term”

August 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When Vladimir Putin went aggressive with Ukraine, he was heralded by some in this country as appearing “strong” and President Obama as seeming “weak,” although you’d have to be pretty simple to view things that way. Putin was sticking his foot in it but good–his ass, too–becoming ensnared in a quagmire the way the U.S. did when invading Iraq, leaving himself wide open for things to career out of control (like MH-17 being shot down). Putin was a 20th-century leader adrift in the 21-st century, a visitor from the past trying to commandeer the future, and that never turns out well.

One passage from the new long-form Economist interview with Obama, which focuses on his dealings with Russia and China:

“The Economist: 

Because that is the key issue, whether China ends up inside that system or challenging it. That’s the really big issue of our times, I think.

President Obama: 

It is. And I think it’s important for the United States and Europe to continue to welcome China as a full partner in these international norms. It’s important for us to recognise that there are going to be times where there are tensions and conflicts. But I think those are manageable.

And it’s my belief that as China shifts its economy away from simply being the low-cost manufacturer of the world to wanting to move up the value chain, then suddenly issues like protecting intellectual property become more relevant to their companies, not just to US companies.

One thing I will say about China, though, is you also have to be pretty firm with them, because they will push as hard as they can until they meet resistance. They’re not sentimental, and they are not interested in abstractions. And so simple appeals to international norms are insufficient. There have to be mechanisms both to be tough with them when we think that they’re breaching international norms, but also to show them the potential benefits over the long term. And what is true for China then becomes an analogy for many of the other emerging markets.

The Economist:

What about the people who are just outright difficult? Russia being the obvious example at the moment. You tried to ‘reset’ with Russia. Angela Merkel spent the whole time telephoning Vladimir Putin. To what extent do you feel let down almost personally by what’s happened?

President Obama: 

I don’t feel let down. We had a very productive relationship with President Medvedev. We got a lot of things done that we needed to get done. Russia I think has always had a Janus-like quality, both looking east and west, and I think President Putin represents a deep strain in Russia that is probably harmful to Russia over the long term, but in the short term can be politically popular at home and very troublesome abroad.

But I do think it’s important to keep perspective. Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking. And so we have to respond with resolve in what are effectively regional challenges that Russia presents. We have to make sure that they don’t escalate where suddenly nuclear weapons are back in the discussion of foreign policy. And as long as we do that, then I think history is on our side.”

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A Brief Note From 1911 About A Crossed Line

August 3, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 31, 1811 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“St. Claireville, O.–During a thunderstorm at Harrisville, Ada Morgan, a high school girl, while talking over the telephone was knocked unconscious when lightning came in on the wire. The hair was burned from the left side of the head, and one ear was badly burned and a strip of skin an inch wide was burned on the girl’s body from the head to the foot, where the shoe was torn off. She will recover.”

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“Tesla Will Produce 35,000 Cars This Year And Up To 100,000 In 2015”

August 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A company selling thirty-five thousand cars, even one-hundred thousand, would normally be a small deal in annual auto sales, but it does feel like Tesla is starting to move the arrow on electric vehicles a significant distance from EMPTY. Just as hopeful is the giant battery plant that Tesla is creating with Panasonic. The real tell, however, will be when there’s a second, third and fourth competitor for Musk’s machines, when that road begins to crowd. From Charles Fleming at the Los Angeles Times:

“Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk promised shareholders a dramatic boost in the production of his company’s electric cars, telling investors that Tesla will produce 35,000 cars this year and up to 100,000 in 2015.

Tesla, which reported earnings Thursday, also confirmed that the company has begun construction in Reno, Nev., on the first of possibly several battery factories. That news came hours after Tesla announced that it had entered into a long-term partnership with Panasonic Corp. to produce the vehicles’ lithium-ion batteries.

The $5-billion cost of multiple ‘gigafactory’ locations would be shared by Panasonic, which would be expected to match Tesla’s 40% commitment, with an additional 20% commitment coming from other investors and contributions from governments where the factories will be built.

Earlier reports had said Panasonic could invest between $200 million and $1 billion in the massive facility.

Tesla had said recently that California — where the Palo Alto company started and builds all of its automobiles and components — was competing with Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas for the right to host the factory. As many as 6,500 workers could be employed in the battery plant or plants.”

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“You Could Send People A Lot More Than Just Maps And Menus With This Thing”

August 3, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Douglas Coupland’s latest Financial Times column, in which he acknowledges not being able to capitalize on being well-positioned to foresee the explosion of fax machines, Starbucks and zombie films:

“In 1985 I was working in a Tokyo magazine office where, from across the room, I often heard a faint whirring sound. After a few days I went to look, and I saw hand-drawn maps emerging from what appeared to be a photocopier . . . yet nothing was being photocopied. I asked and was told, ‘It’s a fax.’

‘A fax?’

‘Yes, a fax.’

I did some research and quickly learnt that fax machines were developed in Japan specifically because their postal system’s wayfinding is contextual rather than based on streets and street numbers. You can’t just say 123 East Ginza Way; you need maps, often with railway underpasses, subway nodes and visual landmarks. Just before lunchtime, when the office fax seemed to kick into overdrive, it was usually the office manager and local restaurants swapping menus and food orders.

I remember thinking, ‘Hmmm . . . you know, you could send people a lot more than just maps and menus with this thing . . . you could send, well . . . letters and documents.'”

 

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“It’s Rare That We Spend Much Time Wondering What Is Going On Within Our Pocket Computers”

August 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Holy fuck, we have incredibly powerful computers in our shirt pockets!

That seemed unimaginable even recently. Yet we’re so consumed with the function and how we can manipulate it to flatter our egos that we often forget to be filled with wonder. There are political costs and other prices to pay for such bland, unquestioning acceptance. The opening of Robert Herritt’s New Atlantis essay, “When Technology Ceases to Amaze“: 

“Few of us stand in awe at every text message that materializes on our smartphone screen. This is a good thing, for the most part. One can hardly be expected to maintain a state of perpetual bewilderment at the technical marvels we carry around in our pockets. But had a fully charged iPhone fallen from the sky, say, sixty years ago, like the pristine Coke bottle discovered by an African tribe in the 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy, whoever came upon it would have been more than a little amazed. Indeed, the operations of the touch-sensitive slab would have seemed like a series of well-executed magic tricks — events that are manifestly real, but the causes of which are so effectively obscured as to produce the sensation that one is witnessing something impossible.

We would imagine that, lacking any knowledge of the causal antecedents of the device’s high-resolution animations, our mid-century iPhone wielder would have been compelled to ask how the mysterious object worked. He may have even devised a rudimentary theory, the same way a magician’s awestruck spectators grope for explanations after witnessing a seemingly impossible feat.

But is it ignorance of how the mysterious iPhone works that is the true source of this person’s wonder and curiosity? How many of us today have a better understanding of how our newest gadgets work than would our hypothetical friend from the 1950s? Yet it’s rare that we spend much time wondering what is going on within our pocket computers, or any of the various pieces of high technology we interact with every day.

Back in 2002, the authors of the National Academy of Engineering report Technically Speaking: Why All Americans Need to Know More About Technology observed that, ‘Americans use technology with a minimal comprehension of how or why it works or the implications of its use or even where it comes from.’ The danger, they argue, is that, given our lack of comprehension, we ‘are poorly equipped to recognize, let alone ponder or address, the challenges technology poses or the problems it could solve.’

It is certainly true that we might be missing out on some important conversations about the future of the Internet and the like. If the recent controversies over NSA data collection prove anything, it is that there are real political costs to ignoring basic technical questions about the devices we routinely use. But there are broader issues at play when it comes to our easy technological ignorance. Thanks to the abundance of sleek technologies that mediate our lives, the everyday environment of most Americans is filled with mystery.

We are used to telling ourselves the opposite: that, through the march of scientific progress and technical expertise, we’re continuously increasing our knowledge of our surroundings. This belief is surely true in some important respects. But our failure to be more probing about the inscrutable gadgets around us is perhaps the clearest evidence that our appetite for satisfying explanations, and our ability to discover them, may not be as strong as we think. This state of affairs should strike us as more than merely curious — especially since the skills required to seek out relevant information, evaluate competing theories, and make informed judgments about complex issues are only becoming more critical.”

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“it’s His Job To Sell As Much Of The Fizzy, Sugary Soda As Possible”

August 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because of health concerns and market factors, people are drinking less Coca-Cola, and that includes the company CEO hired to steady an icon under siege. The opening of Claire Suddath’s Businessweek piece, “Coke Confronts Its Big, Fat Problem“:

“Sandy Douglas drinks one Coca-Cola every day. He likes it early, before noon, sometimes accompanied by a cup of coffee. ‘You get an espresso, you get your caffeine and have this for lunch, and you’re ahead,’ he says between sips from Coke’s old-fashioned 8-ounce glass bottle. When it’s over, he doesn’t allow himself a second. ‘I will probably have a Coke Zero in the afternoon at some point,’ he concedes, but not another regular one because it has too many calories. ‘That’s approximately my daily regimen.’

For anyone else this is unremarkable, but Douglas is president of Coca-Cola North America, which means it’s his job to sell as much of the fizzy, sugary soda as possible, and admitting that he limits himself to less than a can of Coke a day for health reasons might not seem the best way to go about it. At 52, Douglas has been with Coca-Cola (KO) for 26 years and is very much the company man. He dresses in dark suits. He looks golf-course tan. He carries himself like someone who’s always ready to lecture on the benefits of the product he’s selling. He talks in a form of Coke-speak—’the pause that refreshes,’ ‘our job is to refresh the world’—that would have any public-relations manager giddy with delight.

Coca-Cola Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Muhtar Kent gave Douglas the North America job in January, essentially asking him to turn around a decade-long decline in American soda sales. Most days since then, Douglas has walked the hallways of the company’s Atlanta headquarters, past the polished wood walls adorned with vintage Coca-Cola ads and display cases full of knickknacks and long-expired coupons for 5¢ Cokes, thinking about the nearly impossible task ahead of him. There are 41 bottles of Coca-Cola in the conference room where he’s holding a meeting—2-liters and tallboys, plastics of all sizes, aluminum bottles, and the classic red can. They speak to a specific type of American culture where bigger is better, one that exists outside of foodie-ism and Michelle Obama’s nutrition campaign and the general explosion in health consciousness that has lately put Coke on the wrong side of just about every consumer lifestyle trend. Douglas believes Coca-Cola needs to refocus on the one thing it does best: sell bottles of Coke. This is the beginning, he says, of ‘what I might call the phased relaunch of Coca-Cola in the U.S.’

Given all the choices out there, people just aren’t drinking as much Coke. Douglas has watched this happen from his perch at headquarters, checking numbers reports and meeting with the company’s vast network of bottlers. And you don’t need inside access to the data to detect the trend.”

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“This Degree Of Concentration Still Means That Half The Population Owns Nothing But Debt”

August 1, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of the best things I’ve read this year is an excellent longform conversation at the Baffler between Thomas Piketty and David Graeber, both of whom believe the modern financial system is passé, but only one of whom (Graeber) believes it’s certain to collapse. An exchange:

“Moderators:

Is capitalism itself the cause of the problem, or can it be reformed?

Thomas Piketty:

One of the points that I most appreciate in David Graeber’s book is the link he shows between slavery and public debt. The most extreme form of debt, he says, is slavery: slaves belong forever to somebody else, and so, potentially, do their children. In principle, one of the great advances of civilization has been the abolition of slavery.

As Graeber explains, the intergenerational transmission of debt that slavery embodied has found a modern form in the growing public debt, which allows for the transfer of one generation’s indebtedness to the next. It is possible to picture an extreme instance of this, with an infinite quantity of public debt amounting to not just one, but ten or twenty years of GNP, and in effect creating what is, for all intents and purposes, a slave society, in which all production and all wealth creation is dedicated to the repayment of debt. In that way, the great majority would be slaves to a minority, implying a reversion to the beginnings of our history.

In actuality, we are not yet at that point. There is still plenty of capital to counteract debt. But this way of looking at things helps us understand our strange situation, in which debtors are held culpable and we are continually assailed by the claim that each of us “owns” between thirty and forty thousand euros of the nation’s public debt.

This is particularly crazy because, as I say, our resources surpass our debt. A large portion of the population owns very little capital individually, since capital is so highly concentrated. Until the nineteenth century, 90 percent of accumulated capital belonged to 10 percent of the population. Today things are a little different. In the United States, 73 percent of capital belongs to the richest 10 percent. This degree of concentration still means that half the population owns nothing but debt. For this half, the per capita public debt thus exceeds what they possess. But the other half of the population owns more capital than debt, so it is an absurdity to lay the blame on populations in order to justify austerity measures.

But for all that, is the elimination of debt the solution, as Graeber writes? I have nothing against this, but I am more favorable to a progressive tax on inherited wealth along with high tax rates for the upper brackets. Why? The question is: What about the day after? What do we do once debt has been eliminated? What is the plan? Eliminating debt implies treating the last creditor, the ultimate holder of debt, as the responsible party. But the system of financial transactions as it actually operates allows the most important players to dispose of letters of credit well before debt is forgiven. The ultimate creditor, thanks to the system of intermediaries, may not be especially rich. Thus canceling debt does not necessarily mean that the richest will lose money in the process.

David Graeber:

No one is saying that debt abolition is the only solution. In my view, it is simply an essential component in a whole set of solutions. I do not believe that eliminating debt can solve all our problems. I am thinking rather in terms of a conceptual break. To be quite honest, I really think that massive debt abolition is going to occur no matter what. For me the main issue is just how this is going to happen: openly, by virtue of a top-down decision designed to protect the interests of existing institutions, or under pressure from social movements. Most of the political and economic leaders to whom I have spoken acknowledge that some sort of debt abolition is required.”

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A Brief Note From 1911 About A Jealous Miner

August 1, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 9, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Stockton, Cal.— While Margaret Martinez, a 19-year-old Spanish girl, of whom he was insanely jealous, was playing the piano yesterday for his entertainment, Paul Miller, a miner, aged 43 years, fired two shots into her back, killing the girl. Rushing into an adjoining room, Miller threw himself on a bed, placed a stick of dynamite in his mouth, lit the attached fuse, and blew his head into fragments.”

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“He Has Been Known To Wait Five Minutes In Order To Get Into A Dog Show At Half Price”

July 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Apart from money, J. Paul Getty wasn’t a very rich man.

A billionaire in a time when such things were unheard of, Getty was a strange and miserly sort with five marriages and a procession of troubled heirs. His thriftiness, if you would call it that, seemed to come not from wisdom but from a dark place. The opening of a People article from 40 years ago about the man who, by some measures, had it all:

In deepening solitude, like some melancholy Dickensian recluse, Jean Paul Getty offers the frailest of shoulders on which to rest the title of World’s Richest Man. At 81, he speaks in a low, croaking monotone, his face a sunken mask of old age. When his left hand trembles violently from Parkinson’s disease, his right must come quivering to restrain it. And his conversation, fitful and laborious, trails off into lingering silences. 

But the fertile brain that assembled one of the oil world’s great empires has lost neither its cunning nor its grasp. During the current energy crisis—in which the value of Getty’s oil leases spirals astronomically as great ships laden with his liquid treasure bear it to the oil-parched industrial nations—the gnome of Surrey paces his Tudor palace, monitoring the nerve centers of the financial world. 

The son of a prosperous Minneapolis lawyer who moved to Oklahoma and promptly struck oil, Getty was only 21 when he began buying and selling oil leases himself. He made $40,000 his first year, and his first million a few months after that. When the Depression hit he had enough to buy millions of shares of collapsed oil stocks, acquiring fortunes in oil reserves and fresh cash. In 1949, just before seizing control of the giant Tidewater Oil Co., he arranged a deal with Saudi Arabia’s King Saud, predecessor of the present King Faisal, obtaining half-interest for the next 60 years in a raw swath of land called the Neutral Zone. The area was considered bleakly unpromising, but, typically, Getty brought in the gushers. Moving to London to be nearer his Middle East operations, he has never returned to America. 

Today, with enormous personal holdings in stock in the parent Getty Oil Co. and a controlling interest in nearly 200 other concerns, the octogenarian billionaire has accumulated wealth beyond precise calculation. Yet until 1957, when Fortune named him the richest living American, he was virtually unknown to the public. 

One reason, perhaps, is that he has never been inclined to philanthropy. No foundation bears his name, and he has indicated that when he dies his fortune will be plowed back into his businesses. 

“Money is like manure,” Getty once said. “You have to spread it around or it smells.” Often, in his case, this has been a dictum observed in the breach. Though he paid a modest fortune for Sutton Place, his 72-room mansion outside London, he prudently outfitted it with a pay telephone. “The guests won’t mind paying for their calls,’ he said, ‘and as for the deadbeats, I couldn’t care less.” He never accepts mail with postage due and rarely carries more than $25 in pocket money. He has been known to wait five minutes in order to get into a dog show at half price, and to avoid a restaurant rather than pay a cover charge. “I pay the going rate,” he explained, “but I don’t see any reason for paying more than you have to.”

Getty’s legendary parsimony extends even to eminent friends of long standing. He and the Earl of Warwick have lunched together regularly for 35 years. Lest either pay a bill out of turn, the two share a little black book in which they keep track of all their meetings, the cost of each lunch and whose turn it is to pick up the check.•

_________________________

In the 1970s, the industrialist spoke on behalf of E.F. Hutton:

Old Print Article: “Wooden-Legged Parisian A Walking Cocaine Shop,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1922)

July 31, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cocaine was once something dentists applied and schoolchildren used, but its harsh effects led to new laws and squads of police assigned especially to curtail its sale. Dealers adjusted accordingly, including one Parisian purveyor who made good use of his confederate’s artificial limb. The opening of an article in the July 30, 1922 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paris–A walking cocaine storehouse in the shape of a man with a hollow wooden leg is the latest to come under the eye of the Paris drug squad. The one-legged man was not the cocaine merchant; he was merely the warehouse. The merchant was another man with two good legs, who carried the money, but none of the drug. He went about Montmartre, followed by the cripple. He sought the clients, and when he found them, the customer, the wooden-legged man and the merchant adjourned to the back room of a cafe or a dark hallway to make the transfer.

The merchant had the only key to the receptacle in the wooden leg. The man who owned the leg, on the other hand, had no access to the drug he carried. The merchant unlocked the wooden leg, measured out the powder he had sold, locked the leg up again and told his walking storehouse to be on his way.

Severe as are the penalties for dealing in cocaine, the high profits, small equipment and ease of concealment with which the trade is carried on have caused a great increase in its volume.”

 

“The Colleges Are Blamed For The Absence Of Jobs, Though For Reasons That Are Sometimes Obscure”

July 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Education in and of itself is something American universities do very well, however exorbitant in price many of them are. But education is not merely the goal of the education system in the U.S. (and pretty much everywhere else). It’s about utility, about getting jobs. When a very difficult economic time rolls along like it has now, with threats of massive automation in the future, the follies of the system’s cost structure come under attack. From David Bromwich at the New York Review of Books:

“Andrew Rossi’s documentary Ivory Tower prods us to think about the crisis of higher education. But is there a crisis? Expensive gambles, unforeseen losses, and investments whose soundness has yet to be decided have raised the price of a college education so high that today on average it costs eleven times as much as it did in 1978. Underlying the anxiety about the worth of a college degree is a suspicion that old methods and the old knowledge will soon be eclipsed by technology.

Indeed, as the film accurately records, our education leaders seem to believe technology is a force that—independent of human intervention—will help or hurt the standing of universities in the next generation. Perhaps, they think, it will perform the work of natural selection by weeding out the ill-adapted species of teaching and learning. A potent fear is that all but a few colleges and universities will soon be driven out of business.

It used to be supposed that a degree from a respected state or private university brought with it a job after graduation, a job with enough earning power to start a life away from one’s parents. But parents now are paying more than ever for college; and the jobs are not reliably waiting at the other end. ‘Even with a master’s,’ says an articulate young woman in the film, a graduate of Hunter College, ‘I couldn’t get a job cleaning toilets at a local hotel.’ The colleges are blamed for the absence of jobs, though for reasons that are sometimes obscure. They teach too many things, it is said, or they impart knowledge that is insufficiently useful; they ask too much of students or they ask too little. Above all, they are not wired in to the parts of the economy in which desirable jobs are to be found.”

“‘Legal’ And ‘Illegal’ Are No Longer Adequate Terms For Making Sense Of This Hyperactive Global Market”

July 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t use illegal drugs, and I don’t think you should, either. They’re bad for you. But that doesn’t mean I support any cockamamie “War on Drugs.” That’s just bad policy crashing into stark reality. I think if someone sells drugs to a minor, they should be given a prison sentence. Otherwise, the whole thing should be decriminalized. That doesn’t mean it should be legalized. Relatively mild substances like marijuana should be legal and arrests for other harder drugs should be met with out-patient rehab and community-service sentences, for both dealers and buyers. 

Of course, the situation is further complicated because you don’t have to do anything illegal to get a dangerous high. The number of Americans attaining painkillers, Oxy and others, with prescriptions is staggering. I don’t doubt these folks have pain, though usually it’s more mental than physical. The pusher got pushed by Big Pharma, and attempting to cage that monster will only cause more problems, especially with the Internet opening up global sales far too large to be prosecuted with precision.

Mike Jay, who wrote this brilliant article for Aeon last year, returns to the same publication with a piece that doesn’t try to make sense of this unwinnable war but to show how senseless it is in the light of history and the new normal. The opening:

“When the US President Richard Nixon announced his ‘war on drugs’ in 1971, there was no need to define the enemy. He meant, as everybody knew, the type of stuff you couldn’t buy in a drugstore. Drugs were trafficked exclusively on ‘the street’, within a subculture that was immediately identifiable (and never going to vote for Nixon anyway). His declaration of war was for the benefit the majority of voters who saw these drugs, and the people who used them, as a threat to their way of life. If any further clarification was needed, the drugs Nixon had in his sights were the kind that was illegal.

Today, such certainties seem quaint and distant. This May, the UN office on drugs and crime announced that at least 348 ‘legal highs’ are being traded on the global market, a number that dwarfs the total of illegal drugs. This loosely defined cohort of substances is no longer being passed surreptitiously among an underground network of ‘drug users’ but sold to anybody on the internet, at street markets and petrol stations. It is hardly a surprise these days when someone from any stratum of society – police chiefs, corporate executives, royalty – turns out to be a drug user. The war on drugs has conspicuously failed on its own terms: it has not reduced the prevalence of drugs in society, or the harms they cause, or the criminal economy they feed. But it has also, at a deeper level, become incoherent. What is a drug these days?

Consider, for example, the category of stimulants, into which the majority of ‘legal highs’ are bundled. In Nixon’s day there was, on the popular radar at least, only ‘speed’: amphetamine, manufactured by biker gangs for hippies and junkies. This unambiguously criminal trade still thrives, mostly in the more potent form of methamphetamine: the world knows its face from the US TV series Breaking Bad, though it is at least as prevalent these days in Prague, Bangkok or Cape Town. But there are now many stimulants whose provenance is far more ambiguous.

Pharmaceuticals such as modafinil and Adderall have become the stay-awake drugs of choice for students, shiftworkers and the jet-lagged: they can be bought without prescription via the internet, host to a vast and vigorously expanding grey zone between medical and illicit supply. Traditional stimulant plants such as khat or coca leaf remain legal and socially normalised in their places of origin, though they are banned as ‘drugs’ elsewhere. La hoja de coca no es droga! (the coca leaf is not a drug) has become the slogan behind which Andean coca-growers rally, as the UN attempts to eradicate their crops in an effort to block the global supply of cocaine. Meanwhile, caffeine has become the indispensable stimulant of modern life, freely available in concentrated forms such as double espressos and energy shots, and indeed sold legally at 100 per cent purity on the internet, with deadly consequences. ‘Legal’ and ‘illegal’ are no longer adequate terms for making sense of this hyperactive global market.”

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“Eliminating Human Drivers Will Have Far-Reaching Social And Economic Implications”

July 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Peter Cheney’s Globe and Mail piece about the rapid rise of the robocar, a passage about some of the conversion’s consequences, intended or not:

“Eliminating human drivers will have far-reaching social and economic implications. Entire industries (like truck and cab driving) may be wiped out. AVs will also dramatically reduce (and possibly eliminate) crashes – as safety experts can tell you, almost all accidents are caused by human error. This will shift the landscape for industries like body repair and auto insurance.

‘There won’t be very many claims,’ says [Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre Of Excellence Director Barry] Kirk. ‘But there won’t be much revenue, either. There’s not much risk to underwrite.’

There will also be a direct impact on the medical system. Treating car crash victims is a major industry. A decline in crashes would sharply reduce the supply of human donor organs available for transplant – the largest supply comes from drivers aged 18 to 30.

Autonomous cars will have a positive impact on congestion – they can operate at optimum speed and spacing, maximizing traffic flow. They can also be used with networked control systems that optimize traffic flow by commanding cars to take optimum routes, and letting each car know what other vehicles are doing. This type of networked traffic system has already been developed for aviation – the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NexGen) is starting to be phased in across the United States.

Google has studied the impact of human drivers on road congestion by using what’s known as Agent-Based Simulation – computers model traffic on a road system, and determine how flow is affected when a percentage of drivers engage in behaviours like tailgating, speeding and rapid lane switching. As the research has shown, these drivers have a significant impact on traffic flow.”

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“I Don’t Want Anything Artificial In My Head”

July 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

When embattled chess champion Bobby Fischer wasn’t searching for God and girls, he was living an odd and paranoid existence. In William Knack’s fascinating and fairly crazy 1985 Sports Illustrated article, the reporter relays how Fischer once reluctantly passed on a 1979 meeting with Wilt Chamberlain at the basketball star’s mansion and also reneged on a deal the same year to play an exhibition match at Caesars Palace for $250,000. Oh, and Knack also disguises himself as a bum and stalks Fischer (with some success) at the Los Angeles Public Library. It’s probably the best and most apropos thing I’ve read about the chess champion’s break from public life–and reality. An excerpt:

Moments later I was heading for the library in Los Angeles. Time was getting short. By now, the office was restless, and more than one editor had told me to write the story whether I had found him or not, but I was having trouble letting it go.

So what was I doing here, dressed up like an abject bum and looking for a rnan who would bolt the instant he knew who I was? And what on earth might he be doing now in the desert? Pumping gas in Reno? Riding a burro from dune to dune in the Mojave, looking over his shoulder as the sun boiled the brain that once ate Moscow? And what of his teeth? I had been thinking a lot lately about Fischer’s teeth. In the spring of 1982, one of Fischer’s oldest chess-playing friends, Ron Gross of Cerritos, Calif., suggested to him that the two men take a fishing trip into Mexico. Gross, now 49, had first met Fischer in the mid-’50s, back in the days before Bobby had become a world-class player, and the two had kept in irregular touch over the years. In 1980, at a time when Fischer was leaving most of his old friends behind, he had contacted Gross, and they had gotten together. At the time, Fischer was living in a dive near downtown Los Angeles.

“It was a real seedy hotel,” Gross recalls. “Broken bottles. Weird people.”

At one point, Gross made the mistake of calling Karpov the world champion. “I’m still the world champion,” snapped Fischer. “Karpov isn’t. My friends still consider me champion. They took my title from me.”

By 1982, Fischer was living in a nicer neighborhood in Los Angeles. Gross began picking him up and letting him off at a bus stop at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax, near an East Indian store where Bobby bought herbal medicines.

That March, on the fishing trip to Ensenada, Fischer got seasick, and he treated himself by sniffing a eucalyptus-based medicine below deck. Fischer astonished Gross with the news about his teeth. Fischer talked about a friend who had a steel plate in his head that picked up radio signals.

“If somebody took a filling out and put in an electronic device, he could influence your thinking,” Fischer said. “I don’t want anything artificial in my head.”

“Does that include dental work?” asked Gross.

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “I had all my fillings taken out some time ago.”

“There’s nothing in your cavities to protect your teeth?”

“No, nothing.”

Gross dropped the subject for the moment, but later he got to thinking about it and, while taking a steam bath in a health spa in Cerritos, he asked Fischer if he knew how bacteria worked, warning him that his teeth could rot away. “As much as you like to eat, what are you going to do when your teeth fall out?” asked Gross.

“I’ll gum it if I have to,” Fischer said. “I’ll gum it.”•

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“Life In America In 1815 Was Dirty, Smelly, Laborious, And Uncomfortable”

July 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

soapoldtimey

The War of 1812 brought about many things, but a surfeit of soap was not among them. Americans were drunk, and we stunk. Via the excellent Delancey Place, an excerpt about life in the U.S. 200 years ago from Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought:

Life in America in 1815 was dirty, smelly, laborious, and uncomfortable. People spent most of their waking hours working, with scant opportunity for the development of individual talents and interests unrelated to farming. Cobbler-made shoes being expensive and uncomfortable, country people of ordinary means went barefoot much of the time. White people of both sexes wore heavy fabrics covering their bodies, even in the humid heat of summer, for they believed (correctly) sunshine bad for their skin. People usually owned few changes of clothes and stank of sweat.

Only the most fastidious bathed as often as once a week. Since water had to be carried from a spring or well and heated in a kettle, people gave themselves sponge baths, using the washtub. Some bathed once a year, in the spring, but as late as 1832, a New England country doctor complained that four out of five of his patients did not bathe from one year to the next. When washing themselves, people usually only rinsed off, saving their harsh, homemade soap for cleaning clothes. Inns did not provide soap to travelers.

Having an outdoor privy signified a level of decency above those who simply relieved themselves in the woods or fields. Indoor light was scarce and precious; families made their own candles, smelly and smoky, from animal tallow. A single fireplace provided all the cooking and heating for a common household. During winter, everybody slept in the room with the fire, several in each bed. Privacy for married couples was a luxury.•

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A Brief Note From 1910 About A Dutiful Son

July 30, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the February 10, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Bartlesville, Okla.–‘My stepmother was my tempter to such an extent that I thought I loved her, and so I killed my father with an ax when she ordered me to.’ Peter Brown on trial here charged with murdering his father, made this admission on the witness stand yesterday.”

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“It’s Time For A Discussion About What The Future Will Bring”

July 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1951, Hollywood director Edward Ludwig predicted computers would soon automatically write screenplays, and it’s difficult to see how they wouldn’t be capable of managing the flat dialogue of today’s globalized blockbusters. But machines don’t only want the starring roles–they’re also after us bit players. From Rob Enderle’s CIO report essay the so-called “robot apocalypse” and what it will mean for your job:

“It’s time for a discussion about what the future will bring. It won’t be world of lollipops and rainbows that [Marc] Andreessen and [Larry] Page will live in. The world of the rich won’t apply to the rest of us. Interestingly, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt better anticipates the ‘jobs and robots’ problem, but his solution is investing in startups, which is where we’ll all work while the robots do our existing jobs.

Sure, robots already do some jobs: Assembly lines, self-driving cars, delivery drones and cleaning robots, both the consumer Roomba and larger, industrial vacuums. There’s a bigger threat: Workers who basically look at numbers and draw conclusions. Robots are surprisingly good at this, too. Robots could do a range of jobs – including analysis, purchasing, consulting and journalism – because they can look at more real-time information in less time and with better recommendations than people.

This is one downside to big data analytics. Once you have the information, Watson, Siri, Cortana or any other artificial intelligence-like system can do a pretty decent job of identifying the best path. In the near term, at least, people will remain in the loop, but they’ll increasingly serve as little more than quality control – and, unfortunately, won’t operate fast enough to do the job properly.

Sheehy also created a spreadsheet that ranks the jobs that robots are most and least likely to take from people. The top jobs at risk: Financial analyst, financial advisor, industrial buyer, administrator, chartered legal executive (compliance officer) and financial trader. Least at risk: Clinical embryologist, bar manager, diplomatic services officer, community arts worker, international aid worker, dancer, aid/development worker and osteopath.

What’s interesting is that jobs that focus on dealing with people are relatively safe, while jobs that focus on analyzing things aren’t. Now if the people you focus on are increasingly unemployed, I have to wonder where the money’s coming from to pay the salaries of the people-focused folks. (Given that folks who write about technology need an audience to consume things to pay our salaries, we shouldn’t be sleeping that well, even though we aren’t on the list.)”

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“What Is So Strange About The World We Live In Now Is The Way In Which Fiction And Reality Have Become Reversed”

July 30, 2014 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Long-form 1986 interview with J. G. Ballard. (A little Swedish, mostly English.) 

“The only point of reality we have is inside our own heads,” Ballard said, though that feels like a very different time, our heads no longer really our own, their contents now increasingly quantified and commodified.

The writer also feared a “boring, event-less future.” No such luck.

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“Much Of Chinese Business Has Still Not Plugged In To The Internet”

July 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve yet to meet a single McKinsey consultant who didn’t seem to have a head full of gunpowder, but I’ll trust the firm’s think-tank wing, the MGI, which reports that China, for all its crush of modernization and smartphone ubiquity, has a majority of businesses surprisingly left unplugged. From the Economist:

“AT FIRST glance it would appear that China has gone online, and gone digital, with great gusto. The spectacular rise of internet stars such as Alibaba, Tencent and JD would certainly suggest so. The country now has more smartphone users and households with internet access than any other. Its e-commerce industry, which turned over $300 billion last year, is the world’s biggest. The forthcoming stockmarket flotation of Alibaba may be the largest yet seen.

So it is perhaps surprising to hear it argued that much of Chinese business has still not plugged in to the internet and to related trends such as cloud computing and ‘big data’ analysis; and therefore that these technologies’ biggest impact on the country’s economy is still to come. That is the conclusion of a report published on July 24th by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), a think-tank run by the eponymous consulting firm. It finds that only one-fifth of Chinese firms are using cloud-based data storage and processing power, for example, compared with three-fifths of American ones. Chinese businesses spend only 2% of their revenues on information technology, half the global average. Even the biggest, most prestigious state enterprises, such as Sinopec and PetroChina, two oil giants, are skimping on IT. Much of the benefit that the internet can bring in such areas as marketing, managing supply chains and collaborative research is passing such firms by, the people from McKinsey conclude.“

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

July 30, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Farting

So i came home from work, laid down on couch and pushed out 3 small farts, said excuse me and my wife called me disgusting.

She got up out of her seat after dinner and farted in the kitchen.

I called that classless because it’s the kitchen.

She said she couldn’t control it.

What bullshit.

Old Print Article: “Dangers Of Blindfold Chess,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1906)

July 29, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Pillsbury has for a long time been insane, becoming violent at times through blindfold chess playing.”

A great light of the nineteenth-century chess world who burned briefly, Harry Nelson Pillsbury was a brilliant player as well as an accomplished mnemonist capable of quickly absorbing and regurgitating seemingly endless strings of facts. Pillsbury never had the opportunity to become world champion because his mental health deteriorated, the result of syphilis which he contracted in his twenties. An article in the April 9, 1906 Brooklyn Daily Eagle assigned his decline to more genteel origins. The text:

“Harry Nelson Pillsbury, the greatest chess player since the days of Paul Morphy, is to be taken from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where he is at present, to a sanitarium at Atlantic City, N.J. Pillsbury has for a long time been insane, becoming violent at times through blindfold chess playing. The fact became known through a letter from William Penn Shipley, of the Pennsylvania Chess Association, to a friend at the Brooklyn Chess Club.

The game of blindfold chess requires intense concentration of the mind, and, according to the physicians who have been working on Pillsbury’s case, ultimately destroys the memory cells of the brain, if carried on to excess. A player is placed in a room by himself and plays the game, entirely from memory, while his opponent moves for him at the table.

One instance of Pillsbury’s remarkable skill was shown when he payed for thirteen hours, sitting all alone in the little anteroom which leads into the main rooms of the Brooklyn Chess Club. He did not stop even to eat, and bore in mind twenty-four games during that time. Blackburn and Morphy kept no more than fifteen games in their mind at once. Physicians state that the gift to play blindfold is a gift and cannot be acquired.

While Pillsbury’s case is considered practically hopeless, every effort that can be brought to bear to bring the former champion into the knowledge of the world again will be made.”

 

 

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“[They] May Have A Brand New Tool At Their Disposal: The Pocket Drone”

July 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Now you can put the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin, and you can slide a war in your pocket. Or at least a drone. That’s what American soldiers may soon have to conduct remote reconnaissance. Of course, it’s just a matter of time–and not much time–until the “nano air vehicles” will be in your neighborhood. Just try to legislate that, attempt to manage that cheapness and smallness. From Douglas Ernst at the Washington Times:

“Future U.S. Army soldiers sent into combat may have a brand new tool at their disposal: the pocket drone.

The U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center in Massachusetts is developing a “pocket-sized aerial surveillance device” for soldiers assigned to small units in dangerous environments.

When the Army’s efforts come to fruition, the Cargo Pocket Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance program will provide dismounted troops with real-time surveillance of threats in their environment.

‘The Cargo Pocket ISR is a true example of an applied systems approach for developing new Soldier capabilities,’ said Dr. Laurel Allender, acting NSRDEC technical director, Army.mil reported July 21.”

__________________________

“Just about 10 cm x 2.5 cm”:

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“Human Experimentation Is Definitely Part Of How Websites Work”

July 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Internet is a grand experiment in the macro, and within that framework there are many smaller tests being run on us, some unethical. The question is why is there no real comeuppance for companies, Facebook and OKCupid included, which abuse the rules–abuse us. I guess the answer is twofold: 1) It’s difficult to uncouple our lives from a social network when we’ve been unpacking it there for years, and 2) There seems to be something tacit in the new-media bargain that tells us that we’re not paying with money so there will be some other type of payment. And there is. From Dan Gillmor at the Guardian:

“If you thought the internet industry was chastened by the public firestorm after Facebook revealed it had manipulated the news feeds of its own users to affect their emotions, think again: OKCupid.com, the dating site, is now bragging that it deliberately arranged matches between people whom its algorithms determined were not compatible – just to get data on how well the site was working.

In a Monday blog post entitled – I’m not making this up – ‘We Experiment On Human Beings!’ the site’s co-founder, Christian Rudder, essentially told us to face the facts of our modern world … at least as he sees them:

[G]uess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.

Human experimentation is definitely part of how websites work, in a way, because all online services of considerable size do something called A/B testing – seeing how users respond to tweaks, then adjusting accordingly. But that doesn’t mean sites can, do or should routinely and deliberately deceive their users or customers.”

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A Brief Note From 1933 About A Clap Of Thunder

July 29, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 26, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Philadelphia--A clap of thunder during a severe electrical storm here last night caused a well-dressed young man of about 26 to lose his memory. He was taken to a hospital.”

 

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