“Making High Earners Feel Better In Just About Every Part Of Their Lives Will Be A Major Source Of Job Growth In The Future”

December 8, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a piece at the Los Angeles Review of Books about Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over, a meditation on meritocracy run amok, Guy Patrick Cunningham compares tomorrow’s potentially technologically divided society, a sci-fi-ish dystopia few people would find acceptable, to life in the Middle Ages. An excerpt:

“Though Cowen doesn’t see it, the future he lays out seems rife with obvious, intrinsic structural inequalities that will make it very hard for anyone born outside the elite to actually show enough ‘merit’ to rise into it. And when he breezily asserts, ‘The more that the high earners pull in, the more people will compete to serve them, sometimes for high wages, and sometimes for low wages,’ and that, ‘making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future […] Better about the world. Better about themselves. Better about what they have achieved,’ it becomes hard not to see this as a new form of aristocracy — one where people born with certain advantages are able to leverage them even further than today’s wealthy. Certainly, a smart, capable aristocracy, one theoretically open to talented outsiders, but an aristocracy all the same.

Cowen is careful to note that this system ‘is not necessarily a good and just way for an economy to run,’ but he certainly sees it as a given. Interestingly, he is also keen to emphasize the autonomy of the individual in the hyper-meritocracy. This isn’t itself surprising. But Cowen’s efforts to square the system he anticipates with humanistic ideas about individual agency fall flat. When he defends the possibility of building third-world style slums in the United States, he insists, ‘No one is being forced to live in these places […] I might prefer to live there if my income was low enough.’ Cowen essentially defines choice down to the absence of force. But this is meaningless — after all, no one chooses to live in a slum, unless the alternative is homelessness. Choice only matters when there are real alternatives to pick from. When Cowen compares a hyper-meritocratic society to the Middle Ages, he does so merely to point out that it is possible for a deeply unequal society to remain stable over a long period of time. But the comparison brings to mind another thought instead — that the values that underlie hyper-meritocracy are as un-humanist as those of the Medieval period.”

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“It’s As Good Or Bad As The People Harnessing It As A Technology”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Virtual Reality software developer Tony Parisi discusses at Medium how the technology–like all technologies–can be a tool or a weapon, depending on who’s wielding it. An excerpt:

“Question:

What does the future of VR look like?

Tony Parisi:

Maybe we can help visualize climate change and figure out what to do about it. We can certainly teach better. And if we can teach better, then we can understand better. If we can simulate better, maybe we can understand other cultures, get a better sense of history, all those things are possible and going to be made better with VR if done well. Then, we can really help the world.

But it’s not going to solve everything; all of the problems we have as a planet or society. Not everything will be better in VR. I believe VR is like any of these other technological innovations. I believe it’s value neutral — it’s as good or bad as the people harnessing it as a technology, communications, and storytelling platform — and can ultimately be used for good or ill. I think we’re going to see abuses of it, surely. I think we’re going to see over-exuberance with what it can do. But that will all be tempered over time, and eventually the laws of the market and consumer attention will just shake it out and we will see VR wins in certain segments — for example, housing and real estate, retail, and travel all have phenomenal potential in VR.”

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“The Lid Of Pandora’s Box Is Starting To Open”

December 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Computer pioneer Clive Sinclair has been predicting since the 1980s that self-designing intelligent machines will definitely be the doom of us, but he’s not letting it ruin his day. Che sera sera, you carbon-based beings. As you were. From Leo Kelion at the BBC:

“His ZX Spectrum computers were in large part responsible for creating a generation of programmers back in the 1980s, when the machines and their clones became best-sellers in the UK, Russia, and elsewhere.

At the time, he forecast that software run on silicon was destined to end ‘the long monopoly’ of carbon-based organisms being the most intelligent life on Earth.

So it seemed worth asking him what he made of Prof Stephen Hawking’s recent warning that artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

‘Once you start to make machines that are rivalling and surpassing humans with intelligence it’s going to be very difficult for us to survive – I agree with him entirely,’ Sir Clive remarks.

‘I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. It’s just an inevitability.’

So, should the human race start taking precautions?

‘I don’t think there’s much they can do,’ he responds. ‘But it’s not imminent and I can’t go round worrying about it.’

It marks a somewhat more relaxed view than his 1984 prediction that it would be ‘decades, not centuries’ in which computers ‘capable of their own design’ would rise.

‘In principle, it could be stopped,’ he warned at the time. ‘There will be those who try, but it will happen nonetheless. The lid of Pandora’s box is starting to open.'”

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“We Don’t Have Much Time—That’s How I See It”

December 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The opening question from an Economist interview with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a man in a hurry trying to manage the challenging future of a graying nation:

“The Economist:

Recently you seem to have been a whirlwind of activity. You’ve done a lightning tour of the Asia-Pacific region, three major summits in three different cities. You broke the ice with President Xi Jinping in Beijing, and in Brisbane you had a trilateral meeting with the leaders of Australia and the United States. No sooner were you back than you declared the date for a snap election and you dissolved the Diet. It seems, and this has often struck us at The Economist, that you think of yourself as a man in a hurry, a man with a mission.

Shinzo Abe:

We don’t have much time—that’s how I see it. The world is moving fast, in the context of a globalised economy. In East Asia, China is indeed rising, and many other countries around the world are trying to up their competitiveness.

In that context, two years ago Japan’s competitive position looked lost. Japan was about to fall off the world stage. Fertility rates are falling, and our population is ageing. We’re now seeing the absolute level of our population actually shrinking. That’s a very big challenge, and meanwhile Japan is confronted with a huge national debt. As I see it, Japan had to catch up, moving at the speed of the world, which is to say, very fast. And so we needed to speed up our reform of Japan as well.

Now, the 21st century is the one in which Japan really must regain economic strength as well as competitiveness. We are a democratic country, we feel that we cherish the value of freedoms and the rule of law and so forth. And as a democratic country—and as a pacifist nation—we really would like to make a contribution to the region as well as the rest of the world. This is something that I really want to say as a clear message to the rest of the world. This is the firm determination I have, and I am going ahead with reforms, sometimes in the face of severe opposition, but I am determined to do it. In order to do it more resolutely, I decided to dissolve the lower house of the Diet so that we can have strength in holding a solid majority.”

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“They Are Not Yet Innovative Enough To Send Us Many Fantastic New Products”

December 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a post for the “Upshot” section of the New York Times, economist Tyler Cowen suggests a variety of ways technology may begin to reverse the income inequality it has lately helped grow. Many of the ideas are modest and incremental, but there’s one giant one: The rising fortunes of emerging powers like China may eventually also help enrich Americans when such nations lose interest in making knockoff Apple products and create original companies as innovative as Apple. An excerpt:

“A final set of forces to reverse growing inequality stem from the emerging economies, most of all China. Perhaps we are living in a temporary intermediate period when America and many other developed nations bear a lot of the costs of Chinese economic development without yet getting many of the potential benefits. For instance, China and other emerging nations are already rich enough to bid up commodity prices and large enough to drive down the wages of a lot of American middle-class workers, especially in manufacturing. Yet while these emerging economies are keeping down the costs of manufactured goods for American consumers, they are not yet innovative enough to send us many fantastic new products, the way that the United States sends a stream of new products to British or French consumers, to their benefit. 

That state of affairs will probably end. Over the next few decades, we can expect China, India and other emerging nations to supply more innovations to the global economy, including to the United States. This shouldn’t be a cause for alarm. It will lead to many good things.

Since the emerging economies are relatively poor, many of these innovations may benefit relatively low-income Americans.”

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“I Guess There’s Some Residual Regret On Everyone’s Part”

December 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In posting a piece of Norman Mailer’s 1956 letter to the Democrats, urging party members to draft Ernest Hemingway for their Presidential ticket, I made passing reference to Jack Henry Abbott, the longtime convict and fledgling writer Mailer helped spring in 1981 to disastrous results. Abbott later died in prison, a suicide, in 2002. From his Los Angeles Times obituary, penned by Myrna Oliver:

In 1977, when Abbott learned that Mailer was writing the book The Executioner’s Song about death row inmate Gary Gilmore, he wrote the author, offering to advise him on how imprisonment affects men.

Mailer, later calling Abbott’s letters “as good as any convict’s prose that I had read since Eldridge Cleaver,” maintained a prolific correspondence with the inmate from 1978 to 1981.

In 1980, he had excerpts printed in the New York Review of Books, prodding Random House to suggest the book, which was published in 1981.

Mailer further went to bat for Abbott with the parole board, and in June 1981 succeeded in getting him released to a halfway house in New York’s Bowery.

The author bought him a $500 suit and a pair of good shoes, hired him as his $150-a-week researcher and introduced him to other influential people, including the late author Jerzy Kosinski.

Abbott the jailhouse writer quickly became a celebrity, interviewed on Good Morning America and other programs and featured in People magazine.

Within six weeks of his release from prison, glowing in the attention from his just-published book, he went to New York’s Binibon 24-hour restaurant with a girl on each arm, and got into an argument with the actor-waiter Richard Adan over using an employees’ restroom. Taking the fight outside, Abbott stabbed the waiter to death and fled.

The Sunday New York Times had just hit the street with a review of In the Belly of the Beast, describing the book as “awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible, and as an articulation of penal nightmare it is completely compelling.”

The fugitive Abbott was captured two months after the stabbing, convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years to life. He was next due for a parole hearing in June 2003.

His book was adapted into an edgy play of the same title first by Adrian Hall at Trinity Square Playhouse in Rhode Island and then re-adapted by director Robert Woodruff for the Taper Forum in 1984. The Los Angeles production was based not only on Abbott’s letters but on transcripts from his manslaughter trial.

One Times reviewer, when the play opened, wrote: ‘The dramatization is a gut-wrenching indictment of far more than our penal system….It gives us Abbott, unadorned, in his own words, which is enough. He’s a devilishly articulate analyst of the system that has him by the throat. His perceptions are both astonishing and on the mark.’

In 1990, after a bizarre civil trial in which Abbott represented himself, a jury awarded Adan’s widow more than $7.5 million in damages for the wrongful death.

“I’ve become a writer,” Abbott told jurors during the 1990 civil trial, inquiring of each if he had read his book. “As good as any other writer in this country, or even in Europe. This was something told to me, and I was encouraged to write. It was told to me by some of the top publishers and editors in this country.”

But those once-fawning supporters changed their minds after Abbott stabbed a man, abusing the freedom they had helped him win. Mailer’s friend Scott Meredith said, “Norman and I are stunned and distressed. I guess there’s some residual regret on everyone’s part.”

Kosinski was so remorseful that many said the episode contributed to his subsequent suicide. “Both Mailer and I believe in the purgatory power of art,” he mourned. “We pretended he [Abbott] had always been a writer. It was a fraud. It was like the ’60s, when we embraced the Black Panthers in that moment of radical chic without understanding their experience.

“I blame myself again for becoming part of radical chic,” he said. “I went to welcome a writer, to celebrate his intellectual birth. But I should have been welcoming a just-freed prisoner, a man from another planet.”•

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10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

December 7, 2014 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

  • My Children Don’t Know I’m A Lesbian
  • This Artist Paints With Pubic Hair, The Scent Of Vagina (NSFW)
  • Florida Man Caught Slipping Cow Tongue Into Pants: Cops
  • Teacher Told Student To Unclog Toilet With Bare Hands
  • 6 Overrated Sex Acts And Positions (NSFW)
  • Famous 2-Faced Cat Dies At 15
  • Woman Defies Court Order Prohibiting Loud Sex
  • The Following Sex Acts Are Now Banned From British Porn
  • Nebraska Player Kills Raccoon After ‘Selfie Gone Completely Wrong’
  • Chocolate-Scented Farts

Obama Address The National Prayer Breakfast

 

 

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

December 7, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. joan didion writing about woody allen
  2. james lipton interview
  3. jason whitlock is a hack
  4. what does a professional namer at a branding agency earn?
  5. allen ginsberg talking about technology
  6. elvis costello commercial for vinyl record
  7. e.o. wilson half earth
  8. what were charles dickens habits?
  9. how many commercials are there during the baseball playoffs?
  10. predictions about the internet from 1982

 

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

December 6, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, there was proof positive that New York City's marijuana laws have truly been relaxed.

This week, there was proof positive that New York marijuana laws have truly been relaxed.

 

  • Chris Rock says the smartest thing possible about “black progress.”
  • We might need to fear the rise of the machines–or perhaps not.
  • Many who love Uber are still uncomfortable with the company. Why?
  • Cryptocurrency is not a long-term but not immediate threat to big banks.
  • Technology may be both boon and bane for law firms.
  • Alcor, pioneering cryogenics firm, is experiencing market resistance.
  • Solar cars may be coming to the market in 2015.

A Brief Note From 1909 About A Burial At Sea

December 5, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 4, 1909 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Freeport, L.I. — While walking along the shore at High Hill Beach, Gibson Wanser and Garret Verity, whose homes are at Seaford, L.I., came across a rubber boot, which Wanser picked up. He was surprised at the weight of the boot and the two men became curious. With a knife, the boot was ripped open and a human foot was discovered inside. There were two pair of heavy woolen socks on the foot which had been severed at the ankle. It is believed the owner was drowned in the winter and that the salt water preserved the foot intact. The men showed it to the inhabitants in the vicinity and then buried it in the sand.”

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“Musk’s So-Called Gigafactory May Soon Become An Existential Threat To The 100-Year-Old Utility Business Model”

December 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Batteries, based on chemical reactions, are immune to Moore’s Law, but there’s certainly room for great improvement, and Elon Musk is going all in on the devices as a way to make EVs more affordable. If he’s successful with his Gigafactory, the ramifications will go far beyond cars. Tesla batteries are already being repurposed by homeowners who’ve converted to solar, and we’re just at the beginning. From Mark Chediak at Bloomberg:

“Here’s why something as basic as a battery both thrills and terrifies the U.S. utility industry.

At a sagebrush-strewn industrial park outside of Reno, Nevada, bulldozers are clearing dirt for Tesla Motors Inc.’s battery factory, projected to be the world’s largest.

Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, sees the $5 billion facility as a key step toward making electric cars more affordable, while ending reliance on oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At first blush, the push toward more electric cars looks to be positive for utilities struggling with stagnant sales from energy conservation and slow economic growth.

Yet Musk’s so-called gigafactory may soon become an existential threat to the 100-year-old utility business model. The facility will also churn out stationary battery packs that can be paired with rooftop solar panels to store power. Already, a second company led by Musk, SolarCity Corp., is packaging solar panels and batteries to power California homes and companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

‘The mortal threat that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose’ comes from systems that include storage, said Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Snowmass, Colorado-based energy consultant. ‘That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide.'”

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“It May Do Something More Useful, And That Is To Provide A Convincing Model Of How Such Reporting Can Be Paid For”

December 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I have misgivings about the podcast phenomenon Serial, and how can you not? It’s something of an aural In Cold Blood of our times, and it shares many of the same moral quandaries, using a real-life horror to build suspense and entertain. All I could do was cringe when reporter Sarah Koenig told convicted killer Adnan Syed that he seemed like a good guy and that she enjoyed talking to him. It took the man behind bars to point out to her how asinine a statement that was, that it had nothing to do with his guilt or innocence. But as Truman Capote’s book overcame queasiness (at least for me) with sheer narrative greatness, Serial earns its keep with its look inside the deeply flawed worlds of law and order (and journalism).

Another ramification of the show is economics. In a Financial Times piece, Sarah Gordon and Shannon Bond argue that the popular podcast may have pointed the way forward for journalists seeking new revenue streams in our disrupted age. I doubt that, unless every story is going to have soap-ready elements and attractive “characters” and be presented like a crime drama. There will be a second season of Serial, but it’s difficult to imagine a single one about the impact of gerrymandering, for instance. From Gordon and Bond:

“While Serial may not represent a real departure from storytelling and reporting through the ages, it may do something more useful, and that is to provide a convincing model of how such reporting can be paid for. According to Edison Research, about 39m Americans, 15 per cent of the over-12 population, listened to a podcast last month, up from 12 per cent in 2013 and 9 per cent in 2008. Making money from them has, however, proved tantalisingly difficult. Paying per episode has not taken off, and providing potential advertisers with predicted audience size has been a very inexact science.

But as Serial has taken off, it has captured the attention of advertisers. Sponsored from the outset by email marketing provider MailChimp, it is now also supported by website publisher Squarespace, Amazon’s audio publishing arm Audible and NYT Now. These companies, themselves products of the digital revolution, see new opportunities in the close connection that forms between listeners and the voices in their ears.

‘We’re seeing brands get very interested [in podcasts] because they see it as a way to have an intimate connection with listeners,’ says Matt Lieber, co-founder of Gimlet Media, a new Brooklyn-based podcasting venture.

According to its chief executive Adam Sachs, Midroll, a podcast advertising company that places commercials in more than 150 shows, charges rates of between $20 and $30 per thousand impressions (calculated on a projected number of downloads per episode) — about five times the cost for traditional radio advertising. MailChimp says it paid in the range of $25-to $40 per thousand impressions for Serial. With downloads far exceeding the producers’ initial estimates, MailChimp ‘is getting a very good deal,’ says Emily Condon.

MailChimp has benefited not just from its paid advertising but from the social media conversation. Even a mangled pronunciation of MailChimp from the company’s in-show ad has received more than 3,100 mentions (#MailKimp) on social media, according to Brandwatch. The company says it does not measure sign-ups resulting from podcast advertising — and Audible also declined to discuss the impact of itsSerial ads — but Mark DiCristina, MailChimp’s marketing director, told Ad Week magazine that the company had seen a rise in sign-ups since the show started.

Originally funded chiefly by the popular US radio programme This American Life, Serial may not need many ‘sponsors’ (as podcast producers call their advertisers) for a second season.”

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2 Qs About The Good November Job Numbers

December 5, 2014 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

  1. Did the millions of Americans newly receiving health insurance via the Affordable Care Act create well-paying jobs?
  1. Did the sanctions against Putin cause countries to buy products from the U.S. that they normally got from Russia, leading to our companies hiring more workers?

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“If The Higgs Goes, Everything Goes”

December 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

The most chilling words I heard all year were spoken by theoretical physicist David Kaplan near the conclusion of Mark A. Levinson’s documentary, Particle Fever, which focuses on the “awakening” and implementation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN:

Super Symmetry could still be true, but it would have to be a very strange version of the theory. And if it’s the Multiverse, well, other universes would be amazing, of course, but it could also mean no other new particles discovered, and then a Higgs with a mass of 125 is right at a critical point for the fate of our universe. Without any other new particles, that Higgs is unstable, it’s temporary. Since the Higgs holds everything together, if the Higgs goes, everything goes. It’s amazing that the Higgs, the center of the standard model, the thing we’ve all been looking for, could also be the thing that destroys everything. The creator and the destroyer.

But, we could discover new particles and then none of that would be true.•

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“There Are A Lot Of Unanswered Questions That Americans Have, And Frankly I Have”

December 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Something significant happened between the mind-boggling grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, and that was President Obama determining that police-officer body cameras needed to be dispersed across the country. After the brutal Garner homicide, which was captured fully on tape, brought back no indictment, there were pundits who said this was proof that Obama’s initiative wouldn’t help in any meaningful way.

Perhaps. But Eric Garner’s contorted face and cries for mercy are not going to go away thanks to that footage, and those images and sounds have convinced a large number of conservative politicians and editorialists to take an unusual stand, calling on Eric Holder and Congress to further investigate the murder of a victim who will remind us of injustice on an infinite loop. From Ed O’Keefe at the Washington Post:

“House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday that he still has ‘unanswered questions’ about the recent deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two African Americans killed during confrontations with police officers.

‘Clearly both of these are serious tragedies that we’ve seen in our society,’ he said in response to a question at his weekly press conference. ‘I think the American people want to understand more of what the facts were. There are a lot of unanswered questions that Americans have, and frankly I have.’

Boehner said he wouldn’t rule out having House committees hold hearings into the matter. ‘I do think that the American people deserve more answers about what really happened here and was our system of justice handled properly,’ he said.

Boehner’s comments a few hours after Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the fourth-ranking House Republican, said she ‘absolutely’ thinks the House should hold hearings into the matter.”

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Old Print Article: “Robot Will Relieve Post Of ‘Stick Strain'” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1933)

December 4, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two years before piloting the flight that killed himself and the great comic Will Rogers, aviator Wiley Post completed a ’round-the-world trip that was solo save for a helpful robot, an autopilot device fashioned by Sperry. It wasn’t like he could sleep comfortably while his “co-pilot” took over the controls, but it did allow Post to journey the long distance navigator-less. An article from the July 15, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle published just prior to the mission.

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“I Have Thought About Him As A Presidential Candidate Without Passion Or Self-Involvement”

December 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Norman Mailer, no stranger to politics himself, sincerely wanted the Democrats to draft Ernest Hemingway, who liked to fucking fish, as their nominee for President in 1956, encouraging such a move in an open letter to the party in the Village Voice. Not quite as bad an idea as liberating Jack Henry Abbott, but not his best one, either. An excerpt from Mailer’s original article republished at the Penguin Random House Medium site:

YES, IT MAY SEEM a trifle fantastic at the first approach, but the man I think the Democrats ought to draft for their presidential candidate in 1956 is Ernest Hemingway.

I have had this thought in mind for some months, and have tried to consider its merits and demerits more than once. You see, I am far from a worshipper of Hemingway, but after a good many years of forever putting him down in my mind, I came to decide that like him or not, he was one of the two counterposed aesthetic forces in the American novel today — the other being Faulkner of course — and so his mark on history is probably assured.

Now, what I think of Hemingway as a writer would be of interest to very few people, but I underline that I am not a religious devotee of his work in order to emphasize that I have thought about him as a presidential candidate without passion or self-involvement (or at least so I believe it to be). As for his merits and even more important his possibilities for victory, I will try to discuss them quickly in the limits of this column.

To begin with, the Democratic Party has the poorest of chances against Eisenhower, and whether it be Stevenson, Kefauver, or some other political half- worthy, the candidate’s personality would suffer from his unfortunate resemblance to a prosperous undertaker. There is no getting around it — the American people tend to vote for the candidate who gives off the impression of having experienced some pleasure in his life, and Eisenhower, whatever his passive vicissitudes, looks like he has had a good time now and again. I would submit that this is one of the few healthy aspects of our unhealthy country — it is indeed folk wisdom.

A man who has had good times has invariably also suffered (as opposed to the unfortunate number of people who have avoided pain at the expense of avoiding pleasure as well), and the mixture of pain and pleasure in a man’s experiences is likely to give him the proportion, the common sense, and the charm a president needs.

Hemingway, I would guess, possesses exactly that kind of charm, possesses it in greater degree than Eisenhower, and so he would have some outside chance to win.•

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“Cryptocurrencies May Be The Biggest Endgame Threat, But Not The Biggest Immediate Threat”

December 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

David Weidner of Marketwatch on the existential threat Wall Street faces from cryptocurrencies and the more near-term hazard big banks are encountering. The opening:

“Wall Street’s greatest threat isn’t from regulation or another meltdown. As we’ve seen over the past few years, governments and central banks will enable and protect the status quo at any cost.

No, the threat isn’t from traditional sources — it’s from technology. So-called cryptocurrencies, including the best known one, bitcoin, will eventually dislodge the power banks, brokerages and other financial institutions have over the system. Digital currencies circumvent the fees and roadblocks to access that come with traditional financial services.

The possibilities, especially in the underdeveloped world, are enormous. As much as $9.6 trillion in assets locked out of the global economy could be freed up, accordingto the International Monetary Fund.

And on a bigger scale, the centralized power of these institutions will diminish. That was a key message at the Future of Money, a summit of forward-thinking pioneers in the digital-currency space in San Francisco on Tuesday. Bitcoin is community-based; there is no central bank.

Someday a winner will emerge, whether it be bitcoin, a rival or some yet-crafted currency.

There’s just one problem: It isn’t going to happen anytime soon. This stuff is not ready for prime time. It’s not even usable for people and organizations that want to use it. One attendee who was trying to use bitcoin to help finance power projects in underdeveloped nations complained of the currency’s wild valuation swings, the lack of trust and, well, the fact that no one uses it.

Said another enthusiast: ‘When and how do I get my mother to use bitcoin?’

That’s why cryptocurrencies may be the biggest endgame threat, but not the biggest immediate threat. That distinction goes to a new breed of banking that isn’t really technology focused at all. It’s called peer-to-peer lending.”

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“There’s Nothing That Spooks Us More”

December 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

shelby_gt-1

In a New York Times opinion piece, Margaret Atwood looks at the specter of robotics, that helpful and scary thing, offering that it’s not our tin others that may eventually doom humanity but the growing need for a cheap energy source to power these systems we’re increasingly basing our civilization on. An excerpt:

Thereby hangs many a popular tale; for although we’ve pined for them and designed them, we’ve never felt down-to-earth regular-folks comfy with humanoid robots. There’s nothing that spooks us more, say those who study such things, than beings that appear to be human but aren’t quite. As long as they look like the Tin Woodman and have funnels on their heads, we can handle them; but if they look almost like us — if they look, for instance, like the ‘replicants’ in the film Blade Runner; or like the plastic-faced, sexually compliant fake Stepford Wives; or like the enemy robot-folk in the Terminator series, human enough until their skins burn off — that’s another matter.

The worry seems to be that perfected robots, instead of being proud to serve their creators, will rebel, resisting their subservient status and eliminating or enslaving us. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice or the makers of golems, we can work wonders, but we fear that we can’t control the results. The robots in R.U.R. ultimately triumph, and this meme has been elaborated upon in story after story, both written and filmed, in the decades since.

A clever variant was supplied by John Wyndham in his 1954 story “Compassion Circuit,” in which empathetic robots, designed to react in a caring way to human suffering, cut off a sick woman’s head and attach it to a robot body. At the time Wyndham was writing, this plot line was viewed with some horror, but today we would probably say, “Awesome idea!” We’re already accustomed to the prospect of our future cyborgization, because — as Marshall McLuhan noted with respect to media — what we project changes us, what we farm also farms us, and thus what we roboticize may, in the future, roboticize us.

Maybe. Up to a point. If we let it.•

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“Don’t Build New Prisons. They Cost Too Much.”

December 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Almost as surprising as the seemingly sudden acceptance of gay marriage in America has been the GOP turnabout on warehousing nonviolent criminals, creating a massive prison state, a policy equally morally bankrupt and financially expensive. Former David Cameron speechwriter Danny Kruger visited Texas and reported for the BBC on the shuttering of prisons in a red state. An excerpt:

“Texas, for instance, has half the population of the UK but twice its number of prisoners.

Then something happened in 2007, when Texas Republican Congressman Jerry Madden was appointed chairman of the House Corrections Committee with the now famous words by his party leader: ‘Don’t build new prisons. They cost too much.’

The impulse to what has become the Right on Crime initiative was fiscal conservatism – the strong sense that the taxpayer was paying way too much money to fight a losing war against drugs, mental ill-health and petty criminality.

What Madden found was that too many low-level offenders were spending too long in prison, and not reforming. On the contrary, they were getting worse inside and not getting the help they needed on release.

The only response until then, from Democrat as well as Republican legislators, was to build more prisons. Indeed, Mr Madden’s analysis suggested that a further 17,000 prisoners were coming down the pipe towards them, requiring an extra $500m for new prisons. But he and his party didn’t want to spend more money building new prisons. So they thought of something else – rehab.”

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“It’s The ‘Moneyball’ Approach To Crime”

December 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

New York City is apparently a place where a black man can be choked to death with impunity for selling loose cigarettes, but white-collar criminals are bailed out by feds and gifted with bonuses for bringing down the nation’s economy. On the day of the non-indictment in the Eric Garner homicide, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by Chip Brown which examines the virtues of Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr.’s data-rich approach to crime reduction. The thing is, the new system doesn’t move us beyond the crudity of the dubious Broken Windows Theory, only serving as a complement to it, and may actually exacerbate inequity and further profiling. Striving for fewer violent attacks is great, though that should include the kind Garner suffered. Numbers, ultimately, are only as good as the system they feed. An excerpt:

“C.S.U. ‘violence timelines’ reveal patterns around certain housing developments and neighborhoods, including shooting incidents that didn’t generate a police report but that prosecutors were able to substantiate through debriefings or reports on social media. Probably the most comprehensive database is the Crime Prevention System, which targets violent crimes and gathers on one spreadsheet the sort of information that used to be scattered on legal pads or parked in some retired detective’s head — details about a defendant, including nicknames, which can be linked to additional information: friends, tattoos, telltale scars, Facebook entries, geo-coded street addresses, debriefing tips, excerpts from jailhouse phone calls.

‘It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach to crime,’ [Vance’s executive assistant D.A. Chauncey] Parker told me. ‘The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you’ll find a gang tattoo and if you look you’ll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them.’

In speeches praising intelligence-driven prosecution, Vance often cites the case of a 270-pound scam artist named Naim Jabbar, who for more than a decade made a living in the Times Square area bumping into pedestrians and then demanding money, saying they had broken his glasses. Convicted 19 times on the misdemeanor charge of ‘fraudulent accosting,’ Jabbar never served more than five months in jail until he was flagged by the C.S.U. His next arrest, in July 2010, triggered an alert. Instead of being offered a plea bargain, he was indicted and subsequently convicted on a felony robbery charge, and sentenced to three and a half to seven years in prison. With time served before his conviction, he was soon paroled and then arrested again, in July 2014, for another broken-eyeglasses incident and charged with robbery and grand larceny. 

More broadly, working with the Police Department and following a plan based on information developed by the C.S.U., the Violent Criminal Enterprises Unit, which Vance created in his first term, began taking down the most violent of Manhattan’s roughly 30 gangs; since 2011, 17 gangs have been dismantled, including three broken up last June at the Manhattanville and Grant housing projects, resulting in the largest number of gang indictments in a single operation. ‘There’s a reason murders in Manhattan went from 70 in 2010 to 29 so far this year,’ Karen Friedman Agnifilo, former chief of the Trial Division, told me late last year. (In January, Vance promoted Friedman Agnifilo to the No. 2 job, chief assistant district attorney.) ‘We figured out who are the people driving crime in Manhattan, and for four years we focused on taking them out.’”

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“Bitcoin Isn’t Just A Way To Buy Gift Cards Online, But An Act Of Civil Disobedience”

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

There are reasons to be wary of the U.S. government, but there’s also cause to fear the people, and though the two are supposed to be indivisible, you would be hard-pressed to convince the more paranoid among us that such a thing ever be considered. Disney World, that authoritarian state, was host in October to the initial “Coins in the Kingdom” conference, a gathering of cryptocurrency enthusiasts which delivered, among others, all manner of government-hating, Bitcoin-loving Libertarians to Walt-ville. They’re pioneers of a virtual kind, though they want to leverage online might to reconfigure the physical realm. Sam Biddle of Gawker decamped to Orlando to assess the damage:

“‘There are those who just want to be left alone, there are those that just won’t leave ’em alone! It’s no more complicated than that. You think it is, but it’s not.’

Podcaster Ernie Hancock, who takes credit for Ron Paul’s ‘rEVOLution’ campaign logo and once brandished a weapon at an Obama rally, provided Saturday’s opening remark before an audience of about 12. If you’ve ever wondered where the carpet that was removed from your parents house wound up, it appears to be in a Disney conference ballroom now.

Hancock delivered his comments urgently, as if stormtroopers from the Federal Reserve would storm the room at any moment. ‘What we want to do,’ he went on, with the lilt of a carny, ‘is try to make sure that bitcoin develops in such a way that it is supportive of the rights of the individual.’

I would hear this again, and again, and again: bitcoin is a weapon for liberty that we dearly need to wield against government. Bitcoin isn’t just a way to buy gift cards online, but an act of civil disobedience, a democratization of the global financial system. There’s no denying how radical that idea is.

But before we resisted them, we needed to be scared of them.

‘Can they?’ Hancock asked the audience, invoking every conceivable form of big government malice. ‘Then they are.’ It was up to all of us in the uncomfortable chairs to stop this. ‘If it’s technologically possible to advance the interest of those with coercive power, then it will eventually become politically inevitable.’ The audience nodded along—it starts with regulation, with Wall Street acceptance, and before you know it, a prison state. Or something. If anyone disputed the notion that the very concept of government was just one fat obstacle in the way of unobstructed bullion exchange paradise, they kept quiet.

Hancock was in good company at the Magic Kingdom. Down the orange-tinted hall from his orange-tinted conference room was another chasm of hellish textiles, set up with folding chairs and tables as an exhibitor hall. At one table stood Mark Edge and Carla Mora from the Free State Project, a campaign to get 20,000 people who hate and fear government to move to New Hampshire and live near each other. Carla, asking me if I were ‘liberty-minded’ (the actual word ‘libertarian’ was rarely heard), touted New Hampshire’s permissive laws about bar closing times.

I wasn’t ready to commit to a new life in a liberty-minded colony, but I was curious what any of this had to do with bitcoin. Orlando was a long way from Manchester.

Edge provided a cheery answer with his radio host’s tenor: ‘Wide [bitcoin] adoption needs to happen to decimate the state.’ Edge always said the word ‘state’ with finger air-quotes. ‘The state is the most killing-minded thing,’ he explained. As a pacifist, he saw bitcoin as his best means to hurt the U.S. government back, by ditching its dollars.

Edge’s outlook may have sounded fringe-y, but in this particular magic kingdom, there is no lunatic fringe.”

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“While Customers Save Money, Drivers May Also Earn Less”

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

Uber doesn’t care about workers and wishes they would go away, and it doesn’t really even have much concern for its customers, surging prices in the middle of snowstorms. The company is enchanted only with its own emotionless dissection of the market, cooking its schemes into pure narcotic. While medallion prices seem to have fallen even more steeply than first reported, the leading ridesharer is seeking new and creative ways to marginalize drivers, the plans optional for the time being. From a Newsweek report by Polly Mosendz:

“Uber has just launched UberPool, a carpooling service, in New York. UberPool is already live in San Francisco and Paris. With UberPool, a rider will be able to pick up a second and even third Uber user along their way, riders with a destinations close by that of the original rider. Then, the cost of the ride is split between both parties. 

While customers save money, drivers may also earn less. Uber believes a driver won’t earn less simply because the ride may be longer, ‘Drivers spend more time earning money on longer trips—without the downtime between passengers.’ The focus of UberPool is on passengers, however, not drivers. Uber gives several examples of how this benefits New York riders: Williamsburg to the East Village will be as cheap as $7.50 using UberPool, and Nolita to Lincoln Center might be as long as $10 a ride, but none of how driver income may vary.

The long-term effect of UberPool, the company argues, will be getting cars off the road—they hope to remove 1 million cars from the road with the service. Uber estimates that in a personal car, there are only 4.8 person-trips per day. With UberPool, there are 36.4 person trips. 

That is, of course, if drivers agree to use the service.”

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“In A Utopian Society, You Don’t Need Literature”

December 3, 2014 in Books, Videos | Permalink

Anthony Burgess, with Dick Cavett in 1971, thinking racial strife in London had been solved and discussing Shakespeare.

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A Brief Note From 1902 About A Gold Piece

December 3, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the April 11, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Leadville, Col. — John Sullivan committed suicide by drinking three ounces of carbolic acid. Sullivan accidentally swallowed a twenty-dollar gold piece several weeks ago. This depressed him so that he ended his life.”

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