Thursday, August 31, 2017
What Would the End of Football Look Like?
The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?
By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.
Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.
The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits. Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a “contagion effect” with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit. We have seen such domino effects with the risks of smoking or driving without seatbelts, two unsafe practices that were common in the 1960s but are much rarer today. The end result is that the NFL’s feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.
It may not matter that the losses from these lawsuits are much smaller than the total revenue from the sport as a whole. As our broader health care sector indicates (try buying private insurance when you have a history of cancer treatment), insurers don’t like to go where they know they will take a beating. That means just about everyone could be exposed to fear of legal action.
This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players — or worse, high schoolers — commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE. Technological solutions (new helmets, pads) are tried and they fail to solve the problem. Soon high schools decide it isn’t worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it’s mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies. (...)
Despite its undeniable popularity — and the sense that the game is everywhere — the aggregate economic effect of losing the NFL would not actually be that large. League revenues are around $10 billion per year while U.S. GDP is around $15,300 billion. But that doesn’t mean everyone would be fine.
by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Rob Tringali/Getty Images
[ed. See also: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field]
By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.
Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits. Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a “contagion effect” with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit. We have seen such domino effects with the risks of smoking or driving without seatbelts, two unsafe practices that were common in the 1960s but are much rarer today. The end result is that the NFL’s feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.
It may not matter that the losses from these lawsuits are much smaller than the total revenue from the sport as a whole. As our broader health care sector indicates (try buying private insurance when you have a history of cancer treatment), insurers don’t like to go where they know they will take a beating. That means just about everyone could be exposed to fear of legal action.
This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players — or worse, high schoolers — commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE. Technological solutions (new helmets, pads) are tried and they fail to solve the problem. Soon high schools decide it isn’t worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it’s mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies. (...)
Despite its undeniable popularity — and the sense that the game is everywhere — the aggregate economic effect of losing the NFL would not actually be that large. League revenues are around $10 billion per year while U.S. GDP is around $15,300 billion. But that doesn’t mean everyone would be fine.
by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Rob Tringali/Getty Images
[ed. See also: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field]
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
After Decades of Pushing Bachelor’s Degrees, U.S. Needs More Tradespeople
FONTANA, Calif. — At a steel factory dwarfed by the adjacent Auto Club Speedway, Fernando Esparza is working toward his next promotion.
Esparza is a 46-year-old mechanic for Evolution Fresh, a subsidiary of Starbucks that makes juices and smoothies. He’s taking a class in industrial computing taught by a community college at a local manufacturing plant in the hope it will bump up his wages.
It’s a pretty safe bet. The skills being taught here are in high demand. That’s in part because so much effort has been put into encouraging high school graduates to go to college for academic degrees rather than for training in industrial and other trades that many fields like his face worker shortages.
Now California is spending $6 million on a campaign to revive the reputation of vocational education, and $200 million to improve the delivery of it.
“It’s a cultural rebuild,” said Randy Emery, a welding instructor at the College of the Sequoias in California’s Central Valley.
Standing in a cavernous teaching lab full of industrial equipment on the college’s Tulare campus, Emery said the decades-long national push for high school graduates to get bachelor’s degrees left vocational programs with an image problem, and the nation’s factories with far fewer skilled workers than needed.
“I’m a survivor of that teardown mode of the ’70s and ’80s, that college-for-all thing,” he said.
This has had the unintended consequence of helping flatten out or steadily erode the share of students taking vocational courses. In California’s community colleges, for instance, it’s dropped to 28 percent from 31 percent since 2000, contributing to a shortage of trained workers with more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree.
Research by the state’s 114-campus community college system showed that families and employers alike didn’t know of the existence or value of vocational programs and the certifications they confer, many of which can add tens of thousands of dollars per year to a graduate’s income.
“We needed to do a better job getting the word out,” said Van Ton-Quinlivan, the system’s vice chancellor for workforce and economic development.
High schools and colleges have struggled for decades to attract students to job-oriented classes ranging from welding to nursing. They’ve tried cosmetic changes, such as rebranding “vocational” courses as “career and technical education,” but students and their families have yet to buy in, said Andrew Hanson, a senior research analyst with Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
Federal figures show that only 8 percent of undergraduates are enrolled in certificate programs, which tend to be vocationally oriented.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., last year focused attention on the vocational vs. academic debate by contending during his presidential campaign that “welders make more money than philosophers.”
The United States has 30 million jobs that pay an average of $55,000 per year and don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Georgetown center. People with career and technical educations are actually slightly more likely to be employed than their counterparts with academic credentials, the U.S. Department of Education reports, and significantly more likely to be working in their fields of study.
At California Steel Industries, where Esparza was learning industrial computing, some supervisors without college degrees make as much as $120,000 per year and electricians also can make six figures, company officials said.
Skilled trades show among the highest potential among job categories, the economic-modeling company Emsi calculates. It says tradespeople also are older than workers in other fields — more than half were over 45 in 2012, the last period for which the subject was studied — meaning looming retirements could result in big shortages.
High schools and community colleges are the keys to filling industrial jobs, Hanson said, but something needs to change.
“You haven’t yet been able to attract students from middle-class and more affluent communities” to vocational programs, he said. “Efforts like California’s to broaden the appeal are exactly what we need.”
Esparza is a 46-year-old mechanic for Evolution Fresh, a subsidiary of Starbucks that makes juices and smoothies. He’s taking a class in industrial computing taught by a community college at a local manufacturing plant in the hope it will bump up his wages.
It’s a pretty safe bet. The skills being taught here are in high demand. That’s in part because so much effort has been put into encouraging high school graduates to go to college for academic degrees rather than for training in industrial and other trades that many fields like his face worker shortages.
Now California is spending $6 million on a campaign to revive the reputation of vocational education, and $200 million to improve the delivery of it.“It’s a cultural rebuild,” said Randy Emery, a welding instructor at the College of the Sequoias in California’s Central Valley.
Standing in a cavernous teaching lab full of industrial equipment on the college’s Tulare campus, Emery said the decades-long national push for high school graduates to get bachelor’s degrees left vocational programs with an image problem, and the nation’s factories with far fewer skilled workers than needed.
“I’m a survivor of that teardown mode of the ’70s and ’80s, that college-for-all thing,” he said.
This has had the unintended consequence of helping flatten out or steadily erode the share of students taking vocational courses. In California’s community colleges, for instance, it’s dropped to 28 percent from 31 percent since 2000, contributing to a shortage of trained workers with more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree.
Research by the state’s 114-campus community college system showed that families and employers alike didn’t know of the existence or value of vocational programs and the certifications they confer, many of which can add tens of thousands of dollars per year to a graduate’s income.
“We needed to do a better job getting the word out,” said Van Ton-Quinlivan, the system’s vice chancellor for workforce and economic development.
High schools and colleges have struggled for decades to attract students to job-oriented classes ranging from welding to nursing. They’ve tried cosmetic changes, such as rebranding “vocational” courses as “career and technical education,” but students and their families have yet to buy in, said Andrew Hanson, a senior research analyst with Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
Federal figures show that only 8 percent of undergraduates are enrolled in certificate programs, which tend to be vocationally oriented.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., last year focused attention on the vocational vs. academic debate by contending during his presidential campaign that “welders make more money than philosophers.”
The United States has 30 million jobs that pay an average of $55,000 per year and don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Georgetown center. People with career and technical educations are actually slightly more likely to be employed than their counterparts with academic credentials, the U.S. Department of Education reports, and significantly more likely to be working in their fields of study.
At California Steel Industries, where Esparza was learning industrial computing, some supervisors without college degrees make as much as $120,000 per year and electricians also can make six figures, company officials said.
Skilled trades show among the highest potential among job categories, the economic-modeling company Emsi calculates. It says tradespeople also are older than workers in other fields — more than half were over 45 in 2012, the last period for which the subject was studied — meaning looming retirements could result in big shortages.
High schools and community colleges are the keys to filling industrial jobs, Hanson said, but something needs to change.
“You haven’t yet been able to attract students from middle-class and more affluent communities” to vocational programs, he said. “Efforts like California’s to broaden the appeal are exactly what we need.”
by Matt Krupnick, PBS Newshour | Read more:
Image: PBS
[ed. The main problem being that those jobs aren't as Instagramable as some bartender working at an upscale dive for $15/hr. When the world goes to hell and robots take over every administrative and technical job that ever existed, survivors will be those that have some marketable hands-on skill: plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, etc.]
The Transhumanist FAQ
1.1 What is transhumanism?
Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase. We formally define it as follows:
(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies. Transhumanism can be viewed as an extension of humanism, from which it is partially derived. Humanists believe that humans matter, that individuals matter. We might not be perfect, but we can make things better by promoting rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy, and concern for our fellow human beings. Transhumanists agree with this but also emphasize what we have the potential to become. Just as we use rational means to improve the human condition and the external world, we can also use such means to improve ourselves, the human organism. In doing so, we are not limited to traditional humanistic methods, such as education and cultural development. We can also use technological means that will eventually enable us to move beyond what some would think of as “human”.
It is not our human shape or the details of our current human biology that define what is valuable about us, but rather our aspirations and ideals, our experiences, and the kinds of lives we lead. To a transhumanist, progress occurs when more people become more able to shape themselves, their lives, and the ways they relate to others, in accordance with their own deepest values. Transhumanists place a high value on autonomy: the ability and right of individuals to plan and choose their own lives. Some people may of course, for any number of reasons, choose to forgo the opportunity to use technology to improve themselves. Transhumanists seek to create a world in which autonomous individuals may choose to remain unenhanced or choose to be enhanced and in which these choices will be respected.
Through the accelerating pace of technological development and scientific understanding, we are entering a whole new stage in the history of the human species. In the relatively near future, we may face the prospect of real artificial intelligence. New kinds of cognitive tools will be built that combine artificial intelligence with interface technology. Molecular nanotechnology has the potential to manufacture abundant resources for everybody and to give us control over the biochemical processes in our bodies, enabling us to eliminate disease and unwanted aging. Technologies such as brain-computer interfaces and neuropharmacology could amplify human intelligence, increase emotional well-being, improve our capacity for steady commitment to life projects or a loved one, and even multiply the range and richness of possible emotions. On the dark side of the spectrum, transhumanists recognize that some of these coming technologies could potentially cause great harm to human life; even the survival of our species could be at risk. Seeking to understand the dangers and working to prevent disasters is an essential part of the transhumanist agenda.
Transhumanism is entering the mainstream culture today, as increasing numbers of scientists, scientifically literate philosophers, and social thinkers are beginning to take seriously the range of possibilities that transhumanism encompasses. A rapidly expanding family of transhumanist groups, differing somewhat in flavor and focus, and a plethora of discussion groups in many countries around the world, are gathered under the umbrella of the World Transhumanist Association, a non-profit democratic membership organization.
1.2 What is a posthuman?
It is sometimes useful to talk about possible future beings whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards. The standard word for such beings is “posthuman”. (Care must be taken to avoid misinterpretation. “Posthuman” does not denote just anything that happens to come after the human era, nor does it have anything to do with the “posthumous”. In particular, it does not imply that there are no humans anymore.)
Many transhumanists wish to follow life paths which would, sooner or later, require growing into posthuman persons: they yearn to reach intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other primates; to be resistant to disease and impervious to aging; to have unlimited youth and vigor; to exercise control over their own desires, moods, and mental states; to be able to avoid feeling tired, hateful, or irritated about petty things; to have an increased capacity for pleasure, love, artistic appreciation, and serenity; to experience novel states of consciousness that current human brains cannot access. It seems likely that the simple fact of living an indefinitely long, healthy, active life would take anyone to posthumanity if they went on accumulating memories, skills, and intelligence.
Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or they could be enhanced uploads [see “What is uploading?”], or they could be the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound augmentations to a biological human. The latter alternative would probably require either the redesign of the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or its radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, anti-aging therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable computers, and cognitive techniques.
Some authors write as though simply by changing our self-conception, we have become or could become posthuman. This is a confusion or corruption of the original meaning of the term. The changes required to make us posthuman are too profound to be achievable by merely altering some aspect of psychological theory or the way we think about ourselves. Radical technological modifications to our brains and bodies are needed. It is difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to be a posthuman person. Posthumans may have experiences and concerns that we cannot fathom, thoughts that cannot fit into the three-pound lumps of neural tissue that we use for thinking. Some posthumans may find it advantageous to jettison their bodies altogether and live as information patterns on vast super-fast computer networks. Their minds may be not only more powerful than ours but may also employ different cognitive architectures or include new sensory modalities that enable greater participation in their virtual reality settings. Posthuman minds might be able to share memories and experiences directly, greatly increasing the efficiency, quality, and modes in which posthumans could communicate with each other. The boundaries between posthuman minds may not be as sharply defined as those between humans.
Posthumans might shape themselves and their environment in so many new and profound ways that speculations about the detailed features of posthumans and the posthuman world are likely to fail.
by Nick Bostrom, Oxford University | Read more: (pdf)
The Mandibles
Florence Darkly suffers from all the typical problems of the middle-class Brooklynite. With cabbage up to $20 a head, the grocery bill is a constant struggle. Owing to chronic water shortages, she and her teenage son can shower only once a week. Her morning ritual no longer includes coffee — climate change has ruined the arabica bean crop — or The New York Times, which has long since folded (“God rest its soul”), along with every other newspaper. As a white woman in an America where Latinos are now the socially dominant ethnic group, she remembers her marginalization every time a robotic voice on the phone instructs her to press 1 for Spanish and 2 for English.
But Florence is better off than most. She owns her own house in rapidly gentrifying East Flatbush. After years of being displaced at work by bots (now called robs, “for obvious reasons”), she knows her job at a homeless shelter in Fort Greene is secure — “the one thing New York City was bound never to run out of was homeless people.” She even has a safety net: the fortune amassed generations earlier by the family patriarch, Elliot Mandible, pieces of which trickle down in times of need.
This future is only 13 years away, as Lionel Shriver depicts it in “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” her searing exemplar of a disquieting new genre — call it dystopian finance fiction. When the novel opens, America is perched on the cusp of catastrophe, though no one knows it yet. The population is still reeling from the aftershocks of “the Stonage” (an abridgment of Stone Age), the technology blackout in 2024 that brought the entire country to a halt, an event at least as traumatic for this generation as Sept. 11 was for their parents. China has already established itself as the world’s superpower, a position cemented by its usurpation of the number 1 as its international calling code. (The move is largely symbolic: Phone calls have become so rare that the sound of a ringtone triggers the fear that someone must have died.) The European Union has already dissolved, with the euro replaced by local currencies like the “nouveau franc.” Then the United States defaults on its loans; Treasury bills are rendered worthless. Overnight, the dollar crashes, supplanted on the international market by the “bancor,” a currency controlled by the New IMF. The stock market follows suit, taking the Mandible family fortune with it.
Most people assume the crisis is temporary, not unlike the economic downturn that coincided with Florence’s college graduation — born in the mid-1980s, she’s a millennial. But her son, Willing, watches the business news and has an uncanny sense of how all the pieces fit together. As one character puts it, “Complex systems collapse catastrophically.” Within a few years, Florence’s family will have lost literally everything they once thought they owned. (...)
Shriver has always seemed to be at least a few steps ahead of the rest of us, but her new novel establishes her firmly as the Cassandra of American letters. Like David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” or Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake,” “The Mandibles” depicts a world that is at once familiar and horribly altered. What’s most disquieting isn’t the disruption of daily life (though it’s devastating) but the ease with which people adapt to their new circumstances. Shriver’s dystopia is imagined as minutely as a pointillist image, with every detail adding another dot to the overall picture. The devolution of civilized society happens slowly at first, then all at once. The niceties of life gradually disappear: citrus fruit, olive oil, toilet paper. Streets are no longer cleaned; once-upscale storefronts are boarded shut; even Zabar’s is vandalized and looted. Florence stops ironing to save electricity and wears a bandanna to disguise her unwashed hair. Willing gives away his beloved spaniel while the family can still afford to feed it, knowing that by the time they won’t be able to, no one else will either. Homeownership, the foundation of the American dream, proves to be the longest-lasting currency. Eventually, most of the Mandible clan will seek refuge with Florence in East Flatbush, including her sister, Avery, and brother-in-law, Lowell, a former economics professor at Georgetown who failed to predict the current situation and still doesn’t comprehend it. (Tenure is among the luxuries that society can no longer afford — Lowell has been summarily sacked.) Then Florence’s grandfather, Douglas Mandible, appears on the doorstep, now 97 years old and saddled with a wife suffering from dementia. All that remains of Bountiful House, his once-grand estate, is the silver service, each piece engraved with an M.
The M stands for Mandible, of course, but it might just as well stand for Money, the novel’s true subject. The Mandible descendants never laid hands on the cash, but it was always there in the background, silently working its mysteries on their psyches. “A family fortune introduced an element of corruption,” we are told early on. Its bite is felt in subtle ways. Back in the old days, Florence’s father, Carter, wondered if it was fair that he and his sister, Enola, would have to divide the fortune equally, considering that he had three children (Florence, Avery and their younger brother, Jarred) and four grandchildren, while Enola, a novelist, remained single, with no dependents. After the Renunciation, as the economic collapse is called, even a small amount of money can be psychologically transformative. When Lowell heads to the supermarket after finally receiving a summer’s worth of back pay, the sensation of “trouser pockets that bulged with banded cash” makes him feel like “a real man” for the first time in months. But his buoyant mood is pierced by the discovery that, thanks to inflation, the cash won’t even cover the groceries in his cart. (...)
As I walk the streets of Flatbush, the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood where my family recently bought a house of our own, scenes from “The Mandibles” replay in my head. I don’t remember the last time a novel held me so enduringly in its grip. “The line between owners of swank Washington townhouses and denizens of his sister-in-law’s Fort Greene shelter was perhaps thinner than he’d previously appreciated,” Lowell realizes late in the novel. The line separating us from our dystopian future may be equally thin. The curse of Cassandra, after all, was that she told the truth.
But Florence is better off than most. She owns her own house in rapidly gentrifying East Flatbush. After years of being displaced at work by bots (now called robs, “for obvious reasons”), she knows her job at a homeless shelter in Fort Greene is secure — “the one thing New York City was bound never to run out of was homeless people.” She even has a safety net: the fortune amassed generations earlier by the family patriarch, Elliot Mandible, pieces of which trickle down in times of need.This future is only 13 years away, as Lionel Shriver depicts it in “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” her searing exemplar of a disquieting new genre — call it dystopian finance fiction. When the novel opens, America is perched on the cusp of catastrophe, though no one knows it yet. The population is still reeling from the aftershocks of “the Stonage” (an abridgment of Stone Age), the technology blackout in 2024 that brought the entire country to a halt, an event at least as traumatic for this generation as Sept. 11 was for their parents. China has already established itself as the world’s superpower, a position cemented by its usurpation of the number 1 as its international calling code. (The move is largely symbolic: Phone calls have become so rare that the sound of a ringtone triggers the fear that someone must have died.) The European Union has already dissolved, with the euro replaced by local currencies like the “nouveau franc.” Then the United States defaults on its loans; Treasury bills are rendered worthless. Overnight, the dollar crashes, supplanted on the international market by the “bancor,” a currency controlled by the New IMF. The stock market follows suit, taking the Mandible family fortune with it.
Most people assume the crisis is temporary, not unlike the economic downturn that coincided with Florence’s college graduation — born in the mid-1980s, she’s a millennial. But her son, Willing, watches the business news and has an uncanny sense of how all the pieces fit together. As one character puts it, “Complex systems collapse catastrophically.” Within a few years, Florence’s family will have lost literally everything they once thought they owned. (...)
Shriver has always seemed to be at least a few steps ahead of the rest of us, but her new novel establishes her firmly as the Cassandra of American letters. Like David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” or Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake,” “The Mandibles” depicts a world that is at once familiar and horribly altered. What’s most disquieting isn’t the disruption of daily life (though it’s devastating) but the ease with which people adapt to their new circumstances. Shriver’s dystopia is imagined as minutely as a pointillist image, with every detail adding another dot to the overall picture. The devolution of civilized society happens slowly at first, then all at once. The niceties of life gradually disappear: citrus fruit, olive oil, toilet paper. Streets are no longer cleaned; once-upscale storefronts are boarded shut; even Zabar’s is vandalized and looted. Florence stops ironing to save electricity and wears a bandanna to disguise her unwashed hair. Willing gives away his beloved spaniel while the family can still afford to feed it, knowing that by the time they won’t be able to, no one else will either. Homeownership, the foundation of the American dream, proves to be the longest-lasting currency. Eventually, most of the Mandible clan will seek refuge with Florence in East Flatbush, including her sister, Avery, and brother-in-law, Lowell, a former economics professor at Georgetown who failed to predict the current situation and still doesn’t comprehend it. (Tenure is among the luxuries that society can no longer afford — Lowell has been summarily sacked.) Then Florence’s grandfather, Douglas Mandible, appears on the doorstep, now 97 years old and saddled with a wife suffering from dementia. All that remains of Bountiful House, his once-grand estate, is the silver service, each piece engraved with an M.
The M stands for Mandible, of course, but it might just as well stand for Money, the novel’s true subject. The Mandible descendants never laid hands on the cash, but it was always there in the background, silently working its mysteries on their psyches. “A family fortune introduced an element of corruption,” we are told early on. Its bite is felt in subtle ways. Back in the old days, Florence’s father, Carter, wondered if it was fair that he and his sister, Enola, would have to divide the fortune equally, considering that he had three children (Florence, Avery and their younger brother, Jarred) and four grandchildren, while Enola, a novelist, remained single, with no dependents. After the Renunciation, as the economic collapse is called, even a small amount of money can be psychologically transformative. When Lowell heads to the supermarket after finally receiving a summer’s worth of back pay, the sensation of “trouser pockets that bulged with banded cash” makes him feel like “a real man” for the first time in months. But his buoyant mood is pierced by the discovery that, thanks to inflation, the cash won’t even cover the groceries in his cart. (...)
As I walk the streets of Flatbush, the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood where my family recently bought a house of our own, scenes from “The Mandibles” replay in my head. I don’t remember the last time a novel held me so enduringly in its grip. “The line between owners of swank Washington townhouses and denizens of his sister-in-law’s Fort Greene shelter was perhaps thinner than he’d previously appreciated,” Lowell realizes late in the novel. The line separating us from our dystopian future may be equally thin. The curse of Cassandra, after all, was that she told the truth.
by Ruth Franklin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Harper Publishing
A Boat Builder’s 30-Year Obsession Comes Together At Last
Noah is better known, but Steve Thon took the age-old craft of boat building to a higher level. Literally.
Rather than build a boat in a valley and end up on a mountain, Thon built his ark on a mountain and hauled it down to the sea.
Thon grew up in Minnesota, about as far as one can get from bluewater sailing. But he's long had a hankering for adventure. Minnesota is short on mountains too, but Thon has bagged peaks in the Rocky and Chugach mountains. He even made an attempt on Denali.
It was on an impromptu bid to climb Goat Rock, a precipitous peak near the end of the road in Eklutna Valley, where Thon drifted into his life's work, a sailboat big enough to carry him to any corner of the seven seas.
Finding his dreamboat
On his first night in Anchorage after moving north, Thon met Bob Linville, a commercial fisherman now living in Seward, at a mountaineering club meeting. In May 1980, Linville suggested climbing Goat Rock in Eklutna.
They were hiking up to the base of the mountain, behind where Rochelle's Ice Cream Stop is now, when they spied the large wooden mold of a boat hull outside a cabin. A conversation with the mold's owner, Preston Schultz, fanned a slow-burning fire in Thon.
Before long, Thon and Schultz agreed to work on the boat as partners.
Schultz was a commercial fisherman. Having sunk his boat in Prince William Sound during the winter crab season, he wanted to build a combination seiner/longliner that could fish far offshore for tuna, which would require refrigeration and a fair amount of storage. Fuel was expensive. A motor-sailer — part motorboat, part sailboat — seemed like a unique solution.
Schultz moved back to Anchorage and modified the original plans he had purchased for the hull. His new model was the "Spray," a decrepit sloop estimated to be at least 100 years old and completely rebuilt by Joshua Slocum in Massachusetts in the late 1890s. Slocum, who had been given the rotting hulk when he was down on his luck, subsequently sailed the Spray single-handedly around the world, the first to do so.
An Australian boat builder, Bruce Roberts, had stretched Spray's hull to make it sharper, adding more run in the aft sections. Those were the plans Schultz settled on: 47 feet long and 14 ½ feet across the beam.
The boat was designed to be seaworthy, "to behave herself and not terrify the crew," in Roberts' salty description. At her best sailing downwind on the deep-blue seas, she wouldn't necessarily be a willing partner into a headwind. Rather, she was designed to carry a lot of food and water, hold a steady course for days on end and sail sedately. A boat fit for a retired sailor. (...)
Building on a dream
Thon worked on the boat 30 years. Wait. That's not right. Putting it that way diminishes both Thon's dogged perseverance and the forehead-slapping miracle of a boat built from scratch.
Repeat after me: Thon worked on the boat for 30 years. What if every syllable of that sentence took three years? When your lips stopped moving, you'd still have three years of hard labor before the boat was ready to be taken home to the sea.
Thon worked on the boat after long days working as a carpenter and house-builder. He worked on the boat for a decade while exercising his carpentry skills with the Anchorage School District. He worked on weekends and holidays.
He worked on the boat in his sleep.
Alaska is a tough place to work outdoors, especially in winter. Before he could concentrate on the boat, Thon had to erect a shed over it. The firewood-heated, two-story building, which doubled as a shop and had enough room for Debbie's car on cold nights, was bigger than most houses.
Thinking ahead — well over the horizon, it turns out — Thon designed the front of the shed to be detachable. He cradled the boat's hull on heavy-duty metal frames so that, eventually, a trailer could be backed under it.
Boat parts are expensive. He'd save up several thousand dollars, buy a part, a necessary tool, a few rolls of fiberglass cloth or a barrel of resin, then problem-solve, fabricate and expend sweat equity until he had saved enough money for another round.
That's how, for example, he ended up with three welders, each more expensive than the last. When he brought home the third one, Thon's wife Debbie shook her head and rolled her eyes.
"Who knew there were three different kinds of welders?" she said.
Rather than build a boat in a valley and end up on a mountain, Thon built his ark on a mountain and hauled it down to the sea.
Thon grew up in Minnesota, about as far as one can get from bluewater sailing. But he's long had a hankering for adventure. Minnesota is short on mountains too, but Thon has bagged peaks in the Rocky and Chugach mountains. He even made an attempt on Denali.It was on an impromptu bid to climb Goat Rock, a precipitous peak near the end of the road in Eklutna Valley, where Thon drifted into his life's work, a sailboat big enough to carry him to any corner of the seven seas.
Finding his dreamboat
On his first night in Anchorage after moving north, Thon met Bob Linville, a commercial fisherman now living in Seward, at a mountaineering club meeting. In May 1980, Linville suggested climbing Goat Rock in Eklutna.
They were hiking up to the base of the mountain, behind where Rochelle's Ice Cream Stop is now, when they spied the large wooden mold of a boat hull outside a cabin. A conversation with the mold's owner, Preston Schultz, fanned a slow-burning fire in Thon.
Before long, Thon and Schultz agreed to work on the boat as partners.
Schultz was a commercial fisherman. Having sunk his boat in Prince William Sound during the winter crab season, he wanted to build a combination seiner/longliner that could fish far offshore for tuna, which would require refrigeration and a fair amount of storage. Fuel was expensive. A motor-sailer — part motorboat, part sailboat — seemed like a unique solution.
Schultz moved back to Anchorage and modified the original plans he had purchased for the hull. His new model was the "Spray," a decrepit sloop estimated to be at least 100 years old and completely rebuilt by Joshua Slocum in Massachusetts in the late 1890s. Slocum, who had been given the rotting hulk when he was down on his luck, subsequently sailed the Spray single-handedly around the world, the first to do so.
An Australian boat builder, Bruce Roberts, had stretched Spray's hull to make it sharper, adding more run in the aft sections. Those were the plans Schultz settled on: 47 feet long and 14 ½ feet across the beam.
The boat was designed to be seaworthy, "to behave herself and not terrify the crew," in Roberts' salty description. At her best sailing downwind on the deep-blue seas, she wouldn't necessarily be a willing partner into a headwind. Rather, she was designed to carry a lot of food and water, hold a steady course for days on end and sail sedately. A boat fit for a retired sailor. (...)
Building on a dream
Thon worked on the boat 30 years. Wait. That's not right. Putting it that way diminishes both Thon's dogged perseverance and the forehead-slapping miracle of a boat built from scratch.
Repeat after me: Thon worked on the boat for 30 years. What if every syllable of that sentence took three years? When your lips stopped moving, you'd still have three years of hard labor before the boat was ready to be taken home to the sea.
Thon worked on the boat after long days working as a carpenter and house-builder. He worked on the boat for a decade while exercising his carpentry skills with the Anchorage School District. He worked on weekends and holidays.
He worked on the boat in his sleep.
Alaska is a tough place to work outdoors, especially in winter. Before he could concentrate on the boat, Thon had to erect a shed over it. The firewood-heated, two-story building, which doubled as a shop and had enough room for Debbie's car on cold nights, was bigger than most houses.
Thinking ahead — well over the horizon, it turns out — Thon designed the front of the shed to be detachable. He cradled the boat's hull on heavy-duty metal frames so that, eventually, a trailer could be backed under it.
Boat parts are expensive. He'd save up several thousand dollars, buy a part, a necessary tool, a few rolls of fiberglass cloth or a barrel of resin, then problem-solve, fabricate and expend sweat equity until he had saved enough money for another round.
That's how, for example, he ended up with three welders, each more expensive than the last. When he brought home the third one, Thon's wife Debbie shook her head and rolled her eyes.
"Who knew there were three different kinds of welders?" she said.
by Rick Sinnott, ADN | Read more:
Image: Rick Sinnott
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
The Premium Mediocre Life
A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wife, was premium mediocre. She instantly got what I meant, though she didn’t quite agree that Veggie Grill qualified. In the weeks that followed, premium mediocre turned into a term of art for us, and we gleefully went around labeling various things with the term, sometimes disagreeing, but mostly agreeing. And it wasn’t just us. When I tried the term on my Facebook wall, and on Twitter, again everybody instantly got the idea, and into the spirit of the labeling game.
As a connoisseur and occasional purveyor of fine premium-mediocre memes, I was intrigued. It’s rare for an ambiguous neologism like this to generate such strong consensus about what it denotes without careful priming and curation by a skilled shitlord. Sure, there were arguments at the margins, and sophisticated (well, premium mediocre) discussions about distinctions between premium mediocrity and related concepts such as middle-class fancy, aristocratic shabby, and that old classic, petit bourgeois, but overall, people got it. Without elaborate explanations.
But since the sine qua non of premium mediocrity is superfluous premium features (like unnecessary over-intellectualized blog posts that use phrases like sine qua non), let me offer an elaborate explanation anyway. It’s a good way to celebrate August, which I officially declare the premium mediocre month, when all the premium mediocre people go on premium mediocre vacations featuring premium mediocre mai tais at premium mediocre resorts paid for in part by various premium-mediocre reward programs.
It is not hard to learn to pattern-match premium mediocre. In my sample of several dozen people I roped into the game, only one had serious trouble getting the idea. Most of the examples below, and all the really good ones, came from others.
Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden. Premium mediocre is cupcakes and froyo. Premium mediocre is “truffle” oil on anything (no actual truffles are harmed in the making of “truffle” oil), and extra-leg-room seats in Economy. Premium mediocre is cruise ships, artisan pizza, Game of Thrones, and The Bellagio.
Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.
Premium mediocre is Starbucks’ Italian names for drink sizes, and its original pumpkin spice lattes featuring a staggering absence of pumpkin in the preparation. Actually all the coffee at Starbucks is premium mediocre. I like it anyway. (...)
Premium mediocre, premium mediocre, premium mediocre, premium mediocre. Mediocre with just an irrelevant touch of premium, not enough to ruin the delicious essential mediocrity. (...)
Premium mediocre is international. My buddy Visakan Veerasamy (a name Indian-origin people will recognize as a fantastic premium mediocre name, suitable for a Tamil movie star, unlike mine which is merely mediocre, and suitable for a side character) reports that Singaporeans can enjoy the fine premium mediocre experience of the McDonald’s Signature Collection.
Anything branded as “signature” is premium mediocre of course. (...)
At its broad, fuzzy edges, premium mediocre is an expansive concept; a global, cosmopolitan and nationalist cultural Big Tent: it is arguably both suburban and neourban, Red and Blue, containing Boomers and X’ers. It includes bluetooth headsets favored by Red State farmers and the tiki torches — designed for premium mediocre backyard barbecues — favored by your friendly neighborhood Nazis. It includes everything Trump-branded. It covers McMansions, insecure suburbia-dwelling Dodge Stratus owners and Bed, Bath, and Beyond shoppers. It includes gentrifying neighborhoods and ghost-town malls. It includes Netflix and chill. It includes Blue Apron meals.
At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase. Premium mediocrity is a stand-in for the classy kind of post-scarcity digital utopia some of us like to pretend is already here, only unevenly distributed. The kind where everybody gets a mansion, is a millionaire, and drives a Tesla.
As a connoisseur and occasional purveyor of fine premium-mediocre memes, I was intrigued. It’s rare for an ambiguous neologism like this to generate such strong consensus about what it denotes without careful priming and curation by a skilled shitlord. Sure, there were arguments at the margins, and sophisticated (well, premium mediocre) discussions about distinctions between premium mediocrity and related concepts such as middle-class fancy, aristocratic shabby, and that old classic, petit bourgeois, but overall, people got it. Without elaborate explanations.
But since the sine qua non of premium mediocrity is superfluous premium features (like unnecessary over-intellectualized blog posts that use phrases like sine qua non), let me offer an elaborate explanation anyway. It’s a good way to celebrate August, which I officially declare the premium mediocre month, when all the premium mediocre people go on premium mediocre vacations featuring premium mediocre mai tais at premium mediocre resorts paid for in part by various premium-mediocre reward programs.It is not hard to learn to pattern-match premium mediocre. In my sample of several dozen people I roped into the game, only one had serious trouble getting the idea. Most of the examples below, and all the really good ones, came from others.
Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden. Premium mediocre is cupcakes and froyo. Premium mediocre is “truffle” oil on anything (no actual truffles are harmed in the making of “truffle” oil), and extra-leg-room seats in Economy. Premium mediocre is cruise ships, artisan pizza, Game of Thrones, and The Bellagio.
Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.
Premium mediocre is Starbucks’ Italian names for drink sizes, and its original pumpkin spice lattes featuring a staggering absence of pumpkin in the preparation. Actually all the coffee at Starbucks is premium mediocre. I like it anyway. (...)
Premium mediocre, premium mediocre, premium mediocre, premium mediocre. Mediocre with just an irrelevant touch of premium, not enough to ruin the delicious essential mediocrity. (...)
Premium mediocre is international. My buddy Visakan Veerasamy (a name Indian-origin people will recognize as a fantastic premium mediocre name, suitable for a Tamil movie star, unlike mine which is merely mediocre, and suitable for a side character) reports that Singaporeans can enjoy the fine premium mediocre experience of the McDonald’s Signature Collection.
Anything branded as “signature” is premium mediocre of course. (...)
At its broad, fuzzy edges, premium mediocre is an expansive concept; a global, cosmopolitan and nationalist cultural Big Tent: it is arguably both suburban and neourban, Red and Blue, containing Boomers and X’ers. It includes bluetooth headsets favored by Red State farmers and the tiki torches — designed for premium mediocre backyard barbecues — favored by your friendly neighborhood Nazis. It includes everything Trump-branded. It covers McMansions, insecure suburbia-dwelling Dodge Stratus owners and Bed, Bath, and Beyond shoppers. It includes gentrifying neighborhoods and ghost-town malls. It includes Netflix and chill. It includes Blue Apron meals.
At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase. Premium mediocrity is a stand-in for the classy kind of post-scarcity digital utopia some of us like to pretend is already here, only unevenly distributed. The kind where everybody gets a mansion, is a millionaire, and drives a Tesla.
by Venkatesh Rao, Ribbon Farm | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Perverse Incentives of the National Flood Insurance Program
Much of Houston should not exist.
I say that not out of any malice for the Magnolia City, but as a simple statement of geographic fact. The east Texas boomtown — the fourth-largest city in the U.S., now in the midst of a horrific pummeling by Hurricane Harvey — is the product of decades of rapid-fire development in which home after home was built on flat, low-lying land with a propensity for flooding. Drainage is central to Houston's problems, for urban sprawl has engulfed and encased prairie land once far from the city center, replacing deep-rooted, absorbent native grasses on natural floodplains with impermeable paved surfaces. When water arrives — and arrive it will, as environmental changes now have once-in-a-lifetime storms like Hurricane Harvey hitting Houston several times a decade — it must go somewhere. When it cannot drain down, it will go up: up into your yard, your car, your living room, your books, your heirlooms, your life.
When I say that much of Houston should not exist, it is because it is constructed on dangerous and environmentally fragile land that should never have been used for permanent structures. So why does it exist? Why would the practical, fiscally conservative people of Texas anchor their financial security in houses that are now literally underwater?
There is no one answer, but a major culprit is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and specifically its subsidiary, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Together, FEMA and the NFIP have provided builders and buyers with bad information from a trusted source while offering financial encouragement to build on land best left alone. These programs have fostered the infrastructure arrangements that are magnifying the heartbreak in Houston this week. Well-meaning but drenched in perverse incentives, they are complicit in the horrifying destruction now racking the Texas gulf coast.
The NFIP offers flood insurance at steep discounts for homes and other buildings, including businesses, constructed in flood-prone areas. (Such insurance is a federal mandate to secure a mortgage in these zones.) Where a normal insurance company would jack up the premium price to cover the high risk of floodplain construction, thus discouraging vulnerable building plans among those who cannot afford to cover the cost of disaster, the NFIP will insure this construction at a discount.
This incentivizes risky construction and downplays the nature of the risk. After all, catastrophic insurance is essentially a wager in which the company bets disaster won't strike and the customer bets it will. Riskier wagers come at a higher price, so an artificially low premium like the NFIP offers cruelly deludes homeowners into believing their flood-prone houses are far safer than they are.
When it was introduced in 1968, the NFIP was cast as a necessary aid to Americans put in precarious financial situations because they could not afford flood insurance on the open market. But the NFIP's most significant effect is not offering respite for old construction put in new danger by a changing climate. Rather, the NFIP has taxpayers subsidizing unrealistically low premiums that incentivize new construction on dangerous land, and its discounts are available even to wealthy homeowners with pricey properties. "About 80 percent of NFIP households are in counties that rank in the top income quintile," notes a recent report at Politico, and "[w]ealthier households also tend to receive larger subsidies."
For example, journalist John Stossel, formerly of ABC News and Fox Business (and certainly not hurting for cash), recounted his own acquisition of NFIP insurance in a 2004 article entitled, "Confessions of a Welfare Queen." Stossel described building a large, four-bedroom beach house in an "absurd place," where all "that stood between my house and ruin was a hundred feet of sand."
Because "private insurers weren't dumb enough to sell cheap insurance to people who built on the edges of oceans or rivers," the only insurance available to Stossel was the NFIP. For just a few hundred dollars a year, the federal government insured his flood-prone home — indefinitely. "So if the ocean ate what I built, I could rebuild and rebuild again and again," Stossel wrote, as "there was no limit to the number of claims on the same property in the same location" and the NFIP would pay up to "$250,000 per house per flood."
Since Stossel's piece was published, taxpayers have covered the cost to rebuild the entire first floor of his beachfront home after predictable flooding — oh, and Congress bumped the per house per flood payment limit up to $520,000.
by Bonnie Kristian, The Week | Read more:
Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
[ed. See also: How Washington Made Harvey Worse]
I say that not out of any malice for the Magnolia City, but as a simple statement of geographic fact. The east Texas boomtown — the fourth-largest city in the U.S., now in the midst of a horrific pummeling by Hurricane Harvey — is the product of decades of rapid-fire development in which home after home was built on flat, low-lying land with a propensity for flooding. Drainage is central to Houston's problems, for urban sprawl has engulfed and encased prairie land once far from the city center, replacing deep-rooted, absorbent native grasses on natural floodplains with impermeable paved surfaces. When water arrives — and arrive it will, as environmental changes now have once-in-a-lifetime storms like Hurricane Harvey hitting Houston several times a decade — it must go somewhere. When it cannot drain down, it will go up: up into your yard, your car, your living room, your books, your heirlooms, your life.
When I say that much of Houston should not exist, it is because it is constructed on dangerous and environmentally fragile land that should never have been used for permanent structures. So why does it exist? Why would the practical, fiscally conservative people of Texas anchor their financial security in houses that are now literally underwater?There is no one answer, but a major culprit is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and specifically its subsidiary, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Together, FEMA and the NFIP have provided builders and buyers with bad information from a trusted source while offering financial encouragement to build on land best left alone. These programs have fostered the infrastructure arrangements that are magnifying the heartbreak in Houston this week. Well-meaning but drenched in perverse incentives, they are complicit in the horrifying destruction now racking the Texas gulf coast.
The NFIP offers flood insurance at steep discounts for homes and other buildings, including businesses, constructed in flood-prone areas. (Such insurance is a federal mandate to secure a mortgage in these zones.) Where a normal insurance company would jack up the premium price to cover the high risk of floodplain construction, thus discouraging vulnerable building plans among those who cannot afford to cover the cost of disaster, the NFIP will insure this construction at a discount.
This incentivizes risky construction and downplays the nature of the risk. After all, catastrophic insurance is essentially a wager in which the company bets disaster won't strike and the customer bets it will. Riskier wagers come at a higher price, so an artificially low premium like the NFIP offers cruelly deludes homeowners into believing their flood-prone houses are far safer than they are.
When it was introduced in 1968, the NFIP was cast as a necessary aid to Americans put in precarious financial situations because they could not afford flood insurance on the open market. But the NFIP's most significant effect is not offering respite for old construction put in new danger by a changing climate. Rather, the NFIP has taxpayers subsidizing unrealistically low premiums that incentivize new construction on dangerous land, and its discounts are available even to wealthy homeowners with pricey properties. "About 80 percent of NFIP households are in counties that rank in the top income quintile," notes a recent report at Politico, and "[w]ealthier households also tend to receive larger subsidies."
For example, journalist John Stossel, formerly of ABC News and Fox Business (and certainly not hurting for cash), recounted his own acquisition of NFIP insurance in a 2004 article entitled, "Confessions of a Welfare Queen." Stossel described building a large, four-bedroom beach house in an "absurd place," where all "that stood between my house and ruin was a hundred feet of sand."
Because "private insurers weren't dumb enough to sell cheap insurance to people who built on the edges of oceans or rivers," the only insurance available to Stossel was the NFIP. For just a few hundred dollars a year, the federal government insured his flood-prone home — indefinitely. "So if the ocean ate what I built, I could rebuild and rebuild again and again," Stossel wrote, as "there was no limit to the number of claims on the same property in the same location" and the NFIP would pay up to "$250,000 per house per flood."
Since Stossel's piece was published, taxpayers have covered the cost to rebuild the entire first floor of his beachfront home after predictable flooding — oh, and Congress bumped the per house per flood payment limit up to $520,000.
by Bonnie Kristian, The Week | Read more:
Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
[ed. See also: How Washington Made Harvey Worse]
Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Hyping of Whole Foods Under Amazon
Whole Foods under Amazon seems to be doing as well in the free PR category as Trump did in his 2016 campaign. And at this juncture, I see no reason for eventual buyer satisfaction to be any higher.
The press was agog over Amazon cutting prices on a grand total of 100 items. Read that again. 100 items of how many SKUs? And it wasn’t as if many seemed to be the sort of loss leaders you see in conventional grocery stores, like putting a prime cut of meat or very popular dessert line on sale.
Moreover, comments at the Wall Street Journal story on the Whole Foods price reductions were surprisingly hostile. Recall that Wall Street Journal readers are high income and are therefore in Whole Foods’ target market. One had asked store staff how long the price cuts in the meat department would be in effect and was told a week. Another pointed out that the supposedly great new price on organic Fiji apples were still well above those of Sam’s Club, although you admittedly have to buy 6 lbs at Sam’s Club to get them at 75% of the Whole Foods price. Other readers complained of poor quality of berries, avocados, and chicken.
Now there may be sample bias at work, but the antipathy by people who have shopped Whole Foods and not found it lives up to its promise of high quality suggests that even getting its prices down may not be that much of a draw, even if Amazon decides to do more than just a first day price cut gimmick.
And let’s consider a few other factors:
Whole Foods has very few stores compared to big grocers. WalMart has over 4000 grocery stores with extremely large footprints. Unless Amazon buys several Whole Foods sized chains, it’s not remotely in WalMart’s league and does not pose much of a threat. Even the Southeast chain Publix has over 1100 stores. Having said that, the store chain that might be most vulnerable is Sprouts, which operates in 15 states, mainly in the southern part of the US, and has 240 stores. Given all of the noise about the Whole Foods acquisition, it’s a bit surprising that there hasn’t yet been a more granular analysis of exactly where Whole Foods stores are and which major grocery chains are exposed.
At least some, perhaps many, stores are relatively modest in size. That means Whole Foods is even smaller relative its major competitors than the raw number of outlets suggests. Whole Foods stores vary considerably in size. The smaller ones in urban areas (most of the ones I’ve visited in NYC and SF) have confusing layouts and scrimp on things I consider important, like the salad bar. And the lines are bad even at off hours.
Another set of arguments made by the “new Whole Foods” enthusiasts is that Amazon has trotted out all sorts of ideas for getting more people into the stores, like price breaks for Amazon Prime customers, having an Amazon locker service for pickups and returns, and having local deliveries.
Perhaps there is a market niche for the locker service, but for a lot of people, if you are going to bother to go to a store, you might as well go in and have a look. You might decide the asparagus looks punky and you’d rather have broccoli, or that the avocados aren’t ripe enough and so you don’t want them, or the cuts of lamb you wanted look too fatty and you’ll get some nice upscale sausages instead. And who returns anything to a grocery store?
And as for home deliveries, that market is generally limited to higher income, dense neighborhoods. I can’t see anything beyond a trivial interest from the customers of the stores I visited in Plano, Birmingham, and Portland, Maine. So this may be germane some places but can’t be assumed to be a meaningful sales booster across the chain.
Moreover, if these new services are structured like the existing Amazon Fresh food service in Seattle, I’m even more skeptical. Confusingly, as we will unpack. Amazon sems to have been running two different models under its “Amazon Fresh” label.
The original Amazon Fresh dates from 2007. It was and apparently still is a home delivery service. The latest information I could find on our modern crapified search engines is that Amazon now charges $299 per year. That does not sound much if you get deliveries regularly. The flip side is a lot of grocers in NYC, and I would assume in other urban areas, give you free delivery for a big enough order. And that $299 fee locks you into Amazon, which of course is the point.
And that isn’t the whole story. Notice that despite Amazon being a a behemoth by design, that this type of Amazon Fresh service has supposedly expanded from some parts of Seattle into “major cities” in California, and “many parts” of New York and Philadelphia. Clearly I know the wrong people. I’ve never heard a single person mention it, much the less use it.
However, in response to the news, a reader said today he’s heard reports from Seattle where the service was launched first that people steal out of the Amazon food drop boxes and actually scout out the trucks to find the best times to make the raids.
In addition, a different version of Amazon Fresh has serious quality problems, which raises red flags that that may also have been true of version 1.0.
Bethany Jean Clement of the Seattle Times gave a scathing review of the Amazon Fresh service this June. Let us not forget that is presumably the model for the hyped Whole Foods in-store pickup service. Not only is this doubtful in concept, it appears to be even worse in execution.
One reason many people are leery of online ordering for anything other that items like diapers, beer, and “you can’t screw it up much” fresh food like milk is that if you order produce, veggies, fresh bakery goods, meats or fish, you are at risk of winding up with something you never never would have bought in store for quality reasons. Put it more simply, you are subject to adverse selection. And that’s the case with the seriously misnamed Amazon Fresh.
The headline was bad enough: Test-driving Amazon’s brand-new, very weird grocery pickup service.
First, Clement wasn’t keen about the concept and gave it one star for mystery.
She ordered six items. Two were pretty good. The parsley, got four stars, and the asparagus, five. But the four were not good to awful, and the worst items were the most expensive.
A lousy lemon. How can you stick someone with a two star lemon? That verges on being a cosmic bad joke. (...)
The reviewer’s second most expensive item was an $11.77 rose, for which she gave 2 1/2 stars and the summary: “ Out of a dismal selection, maybe the best choice?” Further comments:
If you don’t buy or cook fish, the significance of this picture will be lost on you.
This is an abomination. It should have been thrown as unfit to sell at least two days prior. Fish with visible small cracks is old. This piece has a monster cracks and is dry. I’ve said before that Whole Foods has terrible “fresh” fish, so it looks as if Amazon is already down with that.
This was 1 lb for $22.12. Remember, if you had gotten this as your pickup, you would have been stuck with trying to find some way to make it edible or pitching it and rummaging in your freezer for a backup or ordering in.
From the author:
The press was agog over Amazon cutting prices on a grand total of 100 items. Read that again. 100 items of how many SKUs? And it wasn’t as if many seemed to be the sort of loss leaders you see in conventional grocery stores, like putting a prime cut of meat or very popular dessert line on sale.
Moreover, comments at the Wall Street Journal story on the Whole Foods price reductions were surprisingly hostile. Recall that Wall Street Journal readers are high income and are therefore in Whole Foods’ target market. One had asked store staff how long the price cuts in the meat department would be in effect and was told a week. Another pointed out that the supposedly great new price on organic Fiji apples were still well above those of Sam’s Club, although you admittedly have to buy 6 lbs at Sam’s Club to get them at 75% of the Whole Foods price. Other readers complained of poor quality of berries, avocados, and chicken.Now there may be sample bias at work, but the antipathy by people who have shopped Whole Foods and not found it lives up to its promise of high quality suggests that even getting its prices down may not be that much of a draw, even if Amazon decides to do more than just a first day price cut gimmick.
And let’s consider a few other factors:
Whole Foods has very few stores compared to big grocers. WalMart has over 4000 grocery stores with extremely large footprints. Unless Amazon buys several Whole Foods sized chains, it’s not remotely in WalMart’s league and does not pose much of a threat. Even the Southeast chain Publix has over 1100 stores. Having said that, the store chain that might be most vulnerable is Sprouts, which operates in 15 states, mainly in the southern part of the US, and has 240 stores. Given all of the noise about the Whole Foods acquisition, it’s a bit surprising that there hasn’t yet been a more granular analysis of exactly where Whole Foods stores are and which major grocery chains are exposed.
At least some, perhaps many, stores are relatively modest in size. That means Whole Foods is even smaller relative its major competitors than the raw number of outlets suggests. Whole Foods stores vary considerably in size. The smaller ones in urban areas (most of the ones I’ve visited in NYC and SF) have confusing layouts and scrimp on things I consider important, like the salad bar. And the lines are bad even at off hours.
Another set of arguments made by the “new Whole Foods” enthusiasts is that Amazon has trotted out all sorts of ideas for getting more people into the stores, like price breaks for Amazon Prime customers, having an Amazon locker service for pickups and returns, and having local deliveries.
Perhaps there is a market niche for the locker service, but for a lot of people, if you are going to bother to go to a store, you might as well go in and have a look. You might decide the asparagus looks punky and you’d rather have broccoli, or that the avocados aren’t ripe enough and so you don’t want them, or the cuts of lamb you wanted look too fatty and you’ll get some nice upscale sausages instead. And who returns anything to a grocery store?
And as for home deliveries, that market is generally limited to higher income, dense neighborhoods. I can’t see anything beyond a trivial interest from the customers of the stores I visited in Plano, Birmingham, and Portland, Maine. So this may be germane some places but can’t be assumed to be a meaningful sales booster across the chain.
Moreover, if these new services are structured like the existing Amazon Fresh food service in Seattle, I’m even more skeptical. Confusingly, as we will unpack. Amazon sems to have been running two different models under its “Amazon Fresh” label.
The original Amazon Fresh dates from 2007. It was and apparently still is a home delivery service. The latest information I could find on our modern crapified search engines is that Amazon now charges $299 per year. That does not sound much if you get deliveries regularly. The flip side is a lot of grocers in NYC, and I would assume in other urban areas, give you free delivery for a big enough order. And that $299 fee locks you into Amazon, which of course is the point.
And that isn’t the whole story. Notice that despite Amazon being a a behemoth by design, that this type of Amazon Fresh service has supposedly expanded from some parts of Seattle into “major cities” in California, and “many parts” of New York and Philadelphia. Clearly I know the wrong people. I’ve never heard a single person mention it, much the less use it.
However, in response to the news, a reader said today he’s heard reports from Seattle where the service was launched first that people steal out of the Amazon food drop boxes and actually scout out the trucks to find the best times to make the raids.
In addition, a different version of Amazon Fresh has serious quality problems, which raises red flags that that may also have been true of version 1.0.
Bethany Jean Clement of the Seattle Times gave a scathing review of the Amazon Fresh service this June. Let us not forget that is presumably the model for the hyped Whole Foods in-store pickup service. Not only is this doubtful in concept, it appears to be even worse in execution.
One reason many people are leery of online ordering for anything other that items like diapers, beer, and “you can’t screw it up much” fresh food like milk is that if you order produce, veggies, fresh bakery goods, meats or fish, you are at risk of winding up with something you never never would have bought in store for quality reasons. Put it more simply, you are subject to adverse selection. And that’s the case with the seriously misnamed Amazon Fresh.
The headline was bad enough: Test-driving Amazon’s brand-new, very weird grocery pickup service.
First, Clement wasn’t keen about the concept and gave it one star for mystery.
She ordered six items. Two were pretty good. The parsley, got four stars, and the asparagus, five. But the four were not good to awful, and the worst items were the most expensive.
A lousy lemon. How can you stick someone with a two star lemon? That verges on being a cosmic bad joke. (...)
The reviewer’s second most expensive item was an $11.77 rose, for which she gave 2 1/2 stars and the summary: “ Out of a dismal selection, maybe the best choice?” Further comments:
I get that your users aren’t into spending a bunch, but great values abound in cheap wine! You can do so much better. But I suppose your algorithms tell you this is what the world wants. For your selection/algorithms/the world: one star. This wine, at this price, on its own merits: four stars. Average: two-and-a-half stars.Here is the piece de resistance. This is supposed to be halibut:
If you don’t buy or cook fish, the significance of this picture will be lost on you.
This is an abomination. It should have been thrown as unfit to sell at least two days prior. Fish with visible small cracks is old. This piece has a monster cracks and is dry. I’ve said before that Whole Foods has terrible “fresh” fish, so it looks as if Amazon is already down with that.
This was 1 lb for $22.12. Remember, if you had gotten this as your pickup, you would have been stuck with trying to find some way to make it edible or pitching it and rummaging in your freezer for a backup or ordering in.
From the author:
Raw halibut should be a thing of beauty: firm, fresh, glossy. This fillet was mushy to the touch and even distressing to the eye: matte and sunken, the middle of it a squishy mess with indentations that looked like an angry face. It smelled, unmistakably, fishy, which it never, ever should. According to the label, it had been packed three days before; frighteningly, the use/freeze by date was still four more days away. Oven-roasted for the sake of the experiment, it tasted like it looked: mushy, sad, wrong. A big, majestic fish died for this. This is, apparently, everything that’s wrong with letting the world’s largest e-commerce player — the giant darling of Wall Street — pick out your groceries instead of doing it yourself. I’m really happy I’m not vomiting right now. If I could give this fish zero stars, I would.And Amazon’s response to a highly critical review…in the top paper in Amazon’s home town is telling. No one from the PR department called her to make excuses or try to make up for the lousy order.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson and Bethany Jean Clement / The Seattle Times
Monday, August 28, 2017
To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining
The early diners are dawdling, so your 7:30 p.m. reservation looks more like 8. While you wait, the last order of the duck you wanted passes by. Tonight, you’ll be eating something else — without a second bottle of wine, because you can’t find your server in the busy dining room. This is not your favorite night out.
The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful.
It can track the restaurant’s duck sales by day, week and season, and flag you as a regular who likes duck. It can identify a server whose customers have spent a less-than-average amount on alcohol, to see if he needs to sharpen his second-round skills.
So Big Data is staging an intervention.
Both start-ups and established companies are scrambling to deliver up-to-the-minute data on sales, customers, staff performance or competitors by merging the information that restaurants already have with all sorts of data from outside sources: social media, tracking apps, reservation systems, review sites, even weather reports. (...)
In Chicago, at the Michelin-starred Oriole, where 28 diners sit down each night to a $190 tasting menu, the owners, Noah and Cara Sandoval, rely on data from the Upserve system to identify their top 100 guests in terms of numbers of visits and amount spent, but that’s just the start. The system also creates a profile with every first-time reservation.
“You can’t know that someone’s going to become a regular, so you don’t necessarily keep track of those people,” Ms. Sandoval said. “But the system does.” It also tracks the top 100’s dining companions when they split the check. Upserve sends a list of credit card numbers, dates of visits and items bought; the restaurant matches each number to a name, and a search on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn provides a face to go with it.
“We’re sure to recognize them” the next time they come in, so the staff can welcome them back by name, Ms. Sandoval said. “It surprises people, in a nice way, when they didn’t make the reservation themselves.”
Even the type of credit card contributes to the dossier. If a customer pays with an airline card, a server might mention travel. If a customer is a sports fan, he will most likely get a server who is as well.
The food gets similar scrutiny. Upserve offers a “magic quadrant” feature that divides dishes into four categories — “greatest hits,” “underperformers,” “one-hit wonders” that are popular with first-timers but not with repeat visitors, and “hidden gems,” which regulars like and first-timers don’t — to help the Sandovals understand which are popular, and which prompt diners to return.
Customers who find the mining of personal data invasive can opt out, up to a point, but it requires effort: To avoid detection, they have to pay cash and not make reservations. Those who participate actively in the process get more information in return.
The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful.
It can track the restaurant’s duck sales by day, week and season, and flag you as a regular who likes duck. It can identify a server whose customers have spent a less-than-average amount on alcohol, to see if he needs to sharpen his second-round skills.So Big Data is staging an intervention.
Both start-ups and established companies are scrambling to deliver up-to-the-minute data on sales, customers, staff performance or competitors by merging the information that restaurants already have with all sorts of data from outside sources: social media, tracking apps, reservation systems, review sites, even weather reports. (...)
In Chicago, at the Michelin-starred Oriole, where 28 diners sit down each night to a $190 tasting menu, the owners, Noah and Cara Sandoval, rely on data from the Upserve system to identify their top 100 guests in terms of numbers of visits and amount spent, but that’s just the start. The system also creates a profile with every first-time reservation.
“You can’t know that someone’s going to become a regular, so you don’t necessarily keep track of those people,” Ms. Sandoval said. “But the system does.” It also tracks the top 100’s dining companions when they split the check. Upserve sends a list of credit card numbers, dates of visits and items bought; the restaurant matches each number to a name, and a search on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn provides a face to go with it.
“We’re sure to recognize them” the next time they come in, so the staff can welcome them back by name, Ms. Sandoval said. “It surprises people, in a nice way, when they didn’t make the reservation themselves.”
Even the type of credit card contributes to the dossier. If a customer pays with an airline card, a server might mention travel. If a customer is a sports fan, he will most likely get a server who is as well.
The food gets similar scrutiny. Upserve offers a “magic quadrant” feature that divides dishes into four categories — “greatest hits,” “underperformers,” “one-hit wonders” that are popular with first-timers but not with repeat visitors, and “hidden gems,” which regulars like and first-timers don’t — to help the Sandovals understand which are popular, and which prompt diners to return.
Customers who find the mining of personal data invasive can opt out, up to a point, but it requires effort: To avoid detection, they have to pay cash and not make reservations. Those who participate actively in the process get more information in return.
by Karen Stabiner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Cole Wilson
[ed. Hmm... I can't think of a better way to alienate your customers.]
Crowdfunding Disaster: Silicon Valley Startup Takes Customers’ Money, Shuts Down
A Bay Area startup that promised to give music lovers state-of-the-art wireless earphones is instead closing its doors, becoming the latest in a string of crowd-funded companies to take customers’ money and shut down without shipping a product.
San Francisco-based Kanoa ran out of capital and shut down this week, leaving in the lurch scores of customers who paid $150 or more to pre-order high-tech earphones they never received. The company emailed customers on Wednesday to break the bad news, directing them to a letter posted on the Kanoa website.
“This is not the outcome we had foreseen, and with the quick turn of events, we are emotionally overwhelmed,” the company’s website stated. “We know you are disappointed, and can only ask that you understand that we genuinely tried.”
Cival Van Der Lubbe, Kanoa’s founder and CEO, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday. An email sent to the company’s main help center was not returned.
Kanoa is just the latest local crowdfunded company to disappoint customers. Last summer San Francisco-based startup Skully imploded, to the dismay of 3,000 customers who paid $1,500 each for high-tech motorcycle helmets they never received. In February, Lily Robotics, another San Francisco-based startup, filed for bankruptcy. Unlike Skully and Kanoa, Lily promised to reimburse the more than 60,000 customers who paid for but never received its camera drones.
Kanoa created some buzz when it unveiled its wireless, bluetooth enabled earphones back in 2015, before Apple had released its wireless Air Pods. In a press release announcing the product, Kanoa promised all sorts of high-tech features. Music played through the earphones was supposed to change in pace and volume as the user’s heart raced during a workout. Kanoa said users would be able to control how much ambient sound the earphones let in — listeners would be able to block out the outside world, or set the earphones to let them hear oncoming traffic while biking or walking.
Kanoa launched a pre-order campaign on its website as a way to crowdfund the company, and orders started coming in. The earphones retailed for $300, and early backers got discounts of up to 50 percent. But customers said Kanoa kept pushing back the ship date for their orders — customers who expected to have their earphones by the summer of 2016 still hadn’t received them a year later.
Then on Saturday the company suffered another blow: a scathing video product review posted on YouTube by a reviewer who goes by the online name “iTwe4kz.”
“This is trash. You don’t want to have these,” he says in the video, which had 129,000 page views Friday. “This is not a company that you want to deal with.” (...)
The company shut down four days after the review went live on YouTube. In the farewell note posted on its website, Kanoa said its investors backed out of a pending round of funding.
“We are in negotiations with investors for funding, and also large tech companies on an acquisition, while prioritizing our commitment via KANOA to you,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, without that investment, we do not have enough capital to stay operational while we find a solution.”
That means Kanoa won’t fill any more pre-orders, it said. Kanoa also let go of its employees, and let its customer support and social media channels go dark.
San Francisco-based Kanoa ran out of capital and shut down this week, leaving in the lurch scores of customers who paid $150 or more to pre-order high-tech earphones they never received. The company emailed customers on Wednesday to break the bad news, directing them to a letter posted on the Kanoa website.
“This is not the outcome we had foreseen, and with the quick turn of events, we are emotionally overwhelmed,” the company’s website stated. “We know you are disappointed, and can only ask that you understand that we genuinely tried.”Cival Van Der Lubbe, Kanoa’s founder and CEO, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday. An email sent to the company’s main help center was not returned.
Kanoa is just the latest local crowdfunded company to disappoint customers. Last summer San Francisco-based startup Skully imploded, to the dismay of 3,000 customers who paid $1,500 each for high-tech motorcycle helmets they never received. In February, Lily Robotics, another San Francisco-based startup, filed for bankruptcy. Unlike Skully and Kanoa, Lily promised to reimburse the more than 60,000 customers who paid for but never received its camera drones.
Kanoa created some buzz when it unveiled its wireless, bluetooth enabled earphones back in 2015, before Apple had released its wireless Air Pods. In a press release announcing the product, Kanoa promised all sorts of high-tech features. Music played through the earphones was supposed to change in pace and volume as the user’s heart raced during a workout. Kanoa said users would be able to control how much ambient sound the earphones let in — listeners would be able to block out the outside world, or set the earphones to let them hear oncoming traffic while biking or walking.
Kanoa launched a pre-order campaign on its website as a way to crowdfund the company, and orders started coming in. The earphones retailed for $300, and early backers got discounts of up to 50 percent. But customers said Kanoa kept pushing back the ship date for their orders — customers who expected to have their earphones by the summer of 2016 still hadn’t received them a year later.
Then on Saturday the company suffered another blow: a scathing video product review posted on YouTube by a reviewer who goes by the online name “iTwe4kz.”
“This is trash. You don’t want to have these,” he says in the video, which had 129,000 page views Friday. “This is not a company that you want to deal with.” (...)
The company shut down four days after the review went live on YouTube. In the farewell note posted on its website, Kanoa said its investors backed out of a pending round of funding.
“We are in negotiations with investors for funding, and also large tech companies on an acquisition, while prioritizing our commitment via KANOA to you,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, without that investment, we do not have enough capital to stay operational while we find a solution.”
That means Kanoa won’t fill any more pre-orders, it said. Kanoa also let go of its employees, and let its customer support and social media channels go dark.
by Marissa Kendall, Mercury News | Read more:
Image: via:
[ed. I'd like some good data on the track record of crowd-funded start-ups, along with money donated to sites like GoFundMe. See also: San Francisco startup Skully a sham]
[ed. I'd like some good data on the track record of crowd-funded start-ups, along with money donated to sites like GoFundMe. See also: San Francisco startup Skully a sham]
The Biggest Misconception About Today’s College Students
You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss, spending each day moving among classes, parties and extracurricular activities. But the reality is that an increasingly small population of undergraduates enjoys that kind of life.
Of the country’s nearly 18 million undergraduates, more than 40 percent go to community college, and of those, only 62 percent can afford to go to college full-time. By contrast, a mere 0.4 percent of students in the United States attend one of the Ivies.
The typical student is not the one burnishing a fancy résumé with numerous unpaid internships. It’s just the opposite: Over half of all undergraduates live at home to make their degrees more affordable, and a shocking 40 percent of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.
The typical college student is also not fresh out of high school. A quarter of undergraduates are older than 25, and about the same number are single parents.
These students work extremely hard to make ends meet and simultaneously get the education they need to be more stable: A two-year degree can earn students nearly 20 percent more annually than just a high school diploma.
And yet, these students are often the most shortchanged.
As open-access institutions, community colleges educate the majority of our country’s low-income, first-generation students. But public funding for community colleges is significantly less than for four-year colleges, sometimes because of explicit state policies. This means the amount that community colleges can spend on each student — to pay for faculty, support services, tutoring and facilities — is far less as well.
Tuition for low-income students can be covered by federal financial aid programs, but these students often have significant other costs — including housing, transportation, food and child care — that regularly pose obstacles to their education.
A recent Urban Institute study found that from 2011 to 2015, one in five students attending a two-year college lived in a food-insecure household. A study from the Wisconsin Hope Lab found that in 2016, 14 percent of community college students had been homeless at some point. At LaGuardia Community College in New York, where I am president, 77 percent of students live in households making less than $25,000 per year.
With financial pressures like these, studying full-time is not an option. It is not uncommon for a student to take between three and six years to graduate from a two-year associate degree program.
Even that can be a miraculous feat. At LaGuardia, many of our students start their days by taking their child to day care on the bus. Then they take the subway to college, then ride a different bus to their job, another bus to pick up their child and a final bus to go home. Once home, they still need to cook dinner, help their child with homework, tuck the child in, tidy up and complete their own college coursework.
Many of these students have jobs that are part-time and pay the minimum wage; their schedules can vary wildly, making the fragile balance of each day complex.
Being stretched so thin makes each day an ordeal. It’s no wonder that too many students drop out before graduation.
Community colleges need increased funding, and students need access to more flexible federal and state financial aid, enhanced paid internships and college work-study programs. Improved access to public supports, like food stamps and reduced public transportation fares, would also make a world of difference.
It’s not just that policy must change. Last year, more than $41 billion was given in charity to higher education, but about a quarter of that went to just 20 institutions. Community colleges, with almost half of all undergraduate students, received just a small fraction of this philanthropy. It is imperative that individuals, corporations and foundations spread their wealth and diversify where they donate their dollars.
by Gail O. Mellow, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kelsey Wroten
Of the country’s nearly 18 million undergraduates, more than 40 percent go to community college, and of those, only 62 percent can afford to go to college full-time. By contrast, a mere 0.4 percent of students in the United States attend one of the Ivies.
The typical student is not the one burnishing a fancy résumé with numerous unpaid internships. It’s just the opposite: Over half of all undergraduates live at home to make their degrees more affordable, and a shocking 40 percent of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.The typical college student is also not fresh out of high school. A quarter of undergraduates are older than 25, and about the same number are single parents.
These students work extremely hard to make ends meet and simultaneously get the education they need to be more stable: A two-year degree can earn students nearly 20 percent more annually than just a high school diploma.
And yet, these students are often the most shortchanged.
As open-access institutions, community colleges educate the majority of our country’s low-income, first-generation students. But public funding for community colleges is significantly less than for four-year colleges, sometimes because of explicit state policies. This means the amount that community colleges can spend on each student — to pay for faculty, support services, tutoring and facilities — is far less as well.
Tuition for low-income students can be covered by federal financial aid programs, but these students often have significant other costs — including housing, transportation, food and child care — that regularly pose obstacles to their education.
A recent Urban Institute study found that from 2011 to 2015, one in five students attending a two-year college lived in a food-insecure household. A study from the Wisconsin Hope Lab found that in 2016, 14 percent of community college students had been homeless at some point. At LaGuardia Community College in New York, where I am president, 77 percent of students live in households making less than $25,000 per year.
With financial pressures like these, studying full-time is not an option. It is not uncommon for a student to take between three and six years to graduate from a two-year associate degree program.
Even that can be a miraculous feat. At LaGuardia, many of our students start their days by taking their child to day care on the bus. Then they take the subway to college, then ride a different bus to their job, another bus to pick up their child and a final bus to go home. Once home, they still need to cook dinner, help their child with homework, tuck the child in, tidy up and complete their own college coursework.
Many of these students have jobs that are part-time and pay the minimum wage; their schedules can vary wildly, making the fragile balance of each day complex.
Being stretched so thin makes each day an ordeal. It’s no wonder that too many students drop out before graduation.
Community colleges need increased funding, and students need access to more flexible federal and state financial aid, enhanced paid internships and college work-study programs. Improved access to public supports, like food stamps and reduced public transportation fares, would also make a world of difference.
It’s not just that policy must change. Last year, more than $41 billion was given in charity to higher education, but about a quarter of that went to just 20 institutions. Community colleges, with almost half of all undergraduate students, received just a small fraction of this philanthropy. It is imperative that individuals, corporations and foundations spread their wealth and diversify where they donate their dollars.
by Gail O. Mellow, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kelsey Wroten
The Princess Myth
Royal time should move slowly and by its own laws: creeping, like the flow of chrism from a jar. But 20 ordinary years have jog-trotted by, and it’s possible to have a grownup conversation with someone who wasn’t born when Diana died. Her widower is long remarried. Her eldest son, once so like her, shows signs of developing the ponderous looks of Philip, his grand-father. Diana should be as passe as ostrich plumes: one of those royal or quasi-royal women, like Mary of Teck or Wallis Simpson or the last tsarina, whose images fade to sepia and whose bones are white as pearls. Instead, we gossip about her as if she had just left the room. We still debate how in 1981 a sweet-faced, puppy-eyed 20-year-old came to marry into the royal house. Was it a setup from the start? Did she know her fiance loved another woman? Was she complicit, or was she an innocent, garlanded for the slab and the knife?
For some people, being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse. For the anniversary of her death, the princess’s sons remember her for the TV cameras, and we learn that she was “fun” and “very caring” and “a breath of fresh air”. They speak sincerely, but they have no news. Yet there is no bar on saying what you like about her, in defiance of the evidence. Private tapes she made with her voice coach have been shown in a TV documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words. They were trailed as revealing a princess who is “candid” and “uninhibited”. Yet never has she appeared so self-conscious and recalcitrant. Squirming, twitching, avoiding the camera’s eye, she describes herself hopefully as “a rebel”, on the grounds that she liked to do the opposite of everyone else. You want to veil the lens and explain: that is reaction, not rebellion. Throwing a tantrum when thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesn’t prove you are brave. And because people say “trust me”, it doesn’t means they’ll keep your secrets.
Yet royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see; Diana consulted psychics to work out what was going on. The perennial demand for them to cut costs and be more “down to earth” is futile. They are not people like us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her. Her story is archaic and transpersonal. “It is as if,” said the psychotherapist Warren Colman, “Diana broadcast on an archetypal frequency.”
Though she was not born royal, her ancestors were ancient power-brokers, dug more deeply into these islands than the Windsors. She arrived on the scene in an era of gross self-interest, to distract the nation from the hardness of its own character. As she correctly discerned, “The British people needed someone to give affection.” A soft-eyed, fertile blond, she represented conjugal and maternal love, and what other source did we have? Until Tony Blair took office as a fresh-faced Prince Charming we had female leaders, but they were old and their cupboards were bare of food and love: a queen who, even at Diana’s death, was reluctant to descend from the cold north, and a prime minister formerly known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.
The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any actual person. Even at the beginning she was only loosely based on the young woman born Diana Spencer, and once she was engaged to the Prince of Wales she cut adrift from her modest CV. In the recent documentary Diana, Our Mother, her son Harry spoke of her as “an ordinary 20-year-old”; then checked himself, remembering she was an aristocrat. But in some ways his first thought was right. Like a farmer’s daughter, Diana married the boy across the hedge – she grew up near the queen’s estate at Sandringham. As the third daughter born to Viscount Althorp, she wasperhaps a disappointment. The family’s previous child, a son, had died within hours of birth, and Spencer and his wife Frances had to try again for an heir. The Jungian analyst Marion Woodman posits that unwanted or superfluous children have difficulty in becoming embodied; they remain airy, available to fate, as if no one has signed them out of the soul store. By Diana’s cradle – where the witches and good fairies do battle – stood a friend of the Queen Mother, her maternal grandmother Ruth Fermoy. When Diana was six, Frances left her young family. Fermoy took sides against her daughter and helped Spencer get custody of his four desolate children. Later, promoted to his earldom, he remarried without telling them. Diana is said to have expressed her views by pushing her stepmother downstairs.
Diana’s private education implanted few cultural interests and no sense of their lack. She passed no public exams. But she could write a civil letter in her rounded hand, and since she didn’t have to earn a living, did it matter? In Diana: In Her Own Words, she speaks of her sense of destiny. “I knew … something profound was coming my way … I knew I was different from my friends …” Like Cinderella in the kitchen, she served an apprenticeship in humility, working as an upper-class cleaner, and in a nursery mopping up after other people’s babies. Then the prince came calling: a mature man, with a history of his own.
For some people, being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse. For the anniversary of her death, the princess’s sons remember her for the TV cameras, and we learn that she was “fun” and “very caring” and “a breath of fresh air”. They speak sincerely, but they have no news. Yet there is no bar on saying what you like about her, in defiance of the evidence. Private tapes she made with her voice coach have been shown in a TV documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words. They were trailed as revealing a princess who is “candid” and “uninhibited”. Yet never has she appeared so self-conscious and recalcitrant. Squirming, twitching, avoiding the camera’s eye, she describes herself hopefully as “a rebel”, on the grounds that she liked to do the opposite of everyone else. You want to veil the lens and explain: that is reaction, not rebellion. Throwing a tantrum when thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesn’t prove you are brave. And because people say “trust me”, it doesn’t means they’ll keep your secrets.Yet royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see; Diana consulted psychics to work out what was going on. The perennial demand for them to cut costs and be more “down to earth” is futile. They are not people like us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her. Her story is archaic and transpersonal. “It is as if,” said the psychotherapist Warren Colman, “Diana broadcast on an archetypal frequency.”
Though she was not born royal, her ancestors were ancient power-brokers, dug more deeply into these islands than the Windsors. She arrived on the scene in an era of gross self-interest, to distract the nation from the hardness of its own character. As she correctly discerned, “The British people needed someone to give affection.” A soft-eyed, fertile blond, she represented conjugal and maternal love, and what other source did we have? Until Tony Blair took office as a fresh-faced Prince Charming we had female leaders, but they were old and their cupboards were bare of food and love: a queen who, even at Diana’s death, was reluctant to descend from the cold north, and a prime minister formerly known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.
The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any actual person. Even at the beginning she was only loosely based on the young woman born Diana Spencer, and once she was engaged to the Prince of Wales she cut adrift from her modest CV. In the recent documentary Diana, Our Mother, her son Harry spoke of her as “an ordinary 20-year-old”; then checked himself, remembering she was an aristocrat. But in some ways his first thought was right. Like a farmer’s daughter, Diana married the boy across the hedge – she grew up near the queen’s estate at Sandringham. As the third daughter born to Viscount Althorp, she wasperhaps a disappointment. The family’s previous child, a son, had died within hours of birth, and Spencer and his wife Frances had to try again for an heir. The Jungian analyst Marion Woodman posits that unwanted or superfluous children have difficulty in becoming embodied; they remain airy, available to fate, as if no one has signed them out of the soul store. By Diana’s cradle – where the witches and good fairies do battle – stood a friend of the Queen Mother, her maternal grandmother Ruth Fermoy. When Diana was six, Frances left her young family. Fermoy took sides against her daughter and helped Spencer get custody of his four desolate children. Later, promoted to his earldom, he remarried without telling them. Diana is said to have expressed her views by pushing her stepmother downstairs.
Diana’s private education implanted few cultural interests and no sense of their lack. She passed no public exams. But she could write a civil letter in her rounded hand, and since she didn’t have to earn a living, did it matter? In Diana: In Her Own Words, she speaks of her sense of destiny. “I knew … something profound was coming my way … I knew I was different from my friends …” Like Cinderella in the kitchen, she served an apprenticeship in humility, working as an upper-class cleaner, and in a nursery mopping up after other people’s babies. Then the prince came calling: a mature man, with a history of his own.
by Hilary Mantel, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Fox Photos/Getty Images
Sunday, August 27, 2017
The Philip K Dick Book I Love Most…
You couldn’t really call me a bona fide Dickhead because I haven’t read everything Philip K Dick wrote (60-odd books, including short story collections during a relatively short career – at one point he was so prolific that he completed 11 novels in a single year). I do co-own a large selection of them, though, and in 1992 – or some time thereabouts – I attended a seminar at the ICA, hosted by Brian Aldiss (who else?) in which each title was read aloud and marked out of 10 (this was an approach established by Lawrence Sutin in his marvellous biography of the writer, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick), so that attendees could yell a riotous higher! or lower! according to their own personal predilections.
It would certainly be fair to say that in the 35 years since his early death in 1982 Dick has been openly acknowledged – nay celebrated – as one of the world’s greatest ever writers of science fiction. Sutin rightly summarises Dick’s artistic drive as an exhaustive investigation into both what is real and what is human. Dick himself claimed “the core of my writing is not art, but truth”, and – still more perplexingly: “I am a fictionalising philosopher, not a novelist.” To a majority of his contemporaries (even in sci-fi circles) Dick was, for the most part, considered “a drug-addled nut”. One of his highs (or lows) of choice was horse tranquilliser. He married five times. He was a twin – his sister (who he insisted was a lesbian) died shortly after they were born. His life was illumined by a series of extraordinary spiritual visions.
When you are writing about Dick, there is so much to include, such abundance – so much scandal, so much complexity, so much richness. He was plainly a highly perverse individual and at some level (a funny, clever, joyous level) an outrageous bullshitter. But deny it as he might, he is a novelist – a true novelist – and a novelist of rare genius. These books aren’t simply a series of hypotheses sparsely covered in a thin pelt of character, emotion and language. They are soft and sumptuous and twirl around the reader’s calves, hissing and purring. His writing celebrates art, life, ideas (as surely all the best writing must) and, perhaps most deliriously – the inexpressible.
Early on in his writing career Dick wrote a series of straight novels (not that Dick was ever capable of straightness – he was, by nature, intrinsically curvy). They aren’t among the most celebrated of his works. But my contention is that there are several true gems among them, the shiniest of which – and for me, the most creatively inspirational, as a novelist – are Confessions of a Crap Artist and (my marginal favourite) Puttering About in a Small Land.
Crap Artist definitely has the best opening two lines, though:
“I am made out of water. You wouldn’t know it because I have it bound in.”
It’s a little masterpiece (and for some reason slots into my consciousness hard upon John Kennedy Toole’s superb A Confederacy of Dunces). It was published in 1959, but Puttering (written in 1957 – when Dick was only 29) is my firm favourite. Sutin rates it – rather disconcertingly – at a shockingly measly five. I’m not sure why this is. Because I can find little to fault in it. The bare bones of the story are certainly, on initial appearances, deliberately unshowy – almost pedestrian. But this is what I love. Dick isn’t making a big deal out of anything. He is finding drama in smallness, in the margins, in tiny changes of perspective. The book is slight but transformative. And because this is not an art I have refined myself (a cat may look at a king!), I deeply envy it. I suppose there is a “Kitchen Sink” element (the timing corresponds), but there’s nothing mannered or crass about the way Dick handles his subject matter. He isn’t angry or splenetic. He is quizzical and mystified. He is – best of all – inquisitive.
In brief, the novel details the coming together of its two protagonists, Roger and Virginia Lindahl. They meet, are kind of in love, and kind of horrified by each other. They move from Washington to LA at the end of the war. We see them find work. We see Roger open a television sales and repairs shop. The Lindahls have a son with asthma who they send to a private school in the mountains. Here they meet the Bonners – Chuck and Liz. Roger and Liz commence an affair.
What I most admire about the book is the way people simply do not understand what they are doing while at the same time experiencing utter clarity. Dick’s writing is like a kind of psychological washing-up-brush – he carefully pushes its bristles up into his character’s minds and rotates exhaustively.
The reader has total access. It’s both horrifying and delirious. There are some truly demented passages. And there’s a profound sense that Dick doesn’t really give a damn. He’s not making any great claims for himself (or the novel), he’s just turning it out. It isn’t overthought or minutely considered. It is joyful and propulsive. Because this is how he writes. This is who he is. Effortlessly cool. There are ideas to spare. He throws them around like a Dame tossing Cadbury’s Minis into the crowd at a pantomime.
Such confidence! Such largesse!
I so aspire to be generous in this way. And fun. At one point Dick describes a high-pressure business meeting and says “Beth studied him as if he had managed to fart through his nose.”
Pure Dick. Come on. You gotta love it.
by Nicola Barker, Michael Moorcock, and Adam Roberts, The Guardian | Read more:
It would certainly be fair to say that in the 35 years since his early death in 1982 Dick has been openly acknowledged – nay celebrated – as one of the world’s greatest ever writers of science fiction. Sutin rightly summarises Dick’s artistic drive as an exhaustive investigation into both what is real and what is human. Dick himself claimed “the core of my writing is not art, but truth”, and – still more perplexingly: “I am a fictionalising philosopher, not a novelist.” To a majority of his contemporaries (even in sci-fi circles) Dick was, for the most part, considered “a drug-addled nut”. One of his highs (or lows) of choice was horse tranquilliser. He married five times. He was a twin – his sister (who he insisted was a lesbian) died shortly after they were born. His life was illumined by a series of extraordinary spiritual visions.When you are writing about Dick, there is so much to include, such abundance – so much scandal, so much complexity, so much richness. He was plainly a highly perverse individual and at some level (a funny, clever, joyous level) an outrageous bullshitter. But deny it as he might, he is a novelist – a true novelist – and a novelist of rare genius. These books aren’t simply a series of hypotheses sparsely covered in a thin pelt of character, emotion and language. They are soft and sumptuous and twirl around the reader’s calves, hissing and purring. His writing celebrates art, life, ideas (as surely all the best writing must) and, perhaps most deliriously – the inexpressible.
Early on in his writing career Dick wrote a series of straight novels (not that Dick was ever capable of straightness – he was, by nature, intrinsically curvy). They aren’t among the most celebrated of his works. But my contention is that there are several true gems among them, the shiniest of which – and for me, the most creatively inspirational, as a novelist – are Confessions of a Crap Artist and (my marginal favourite) Puttering About in a Small Land.
Crap Artist definitely has the best opening two lines, though:
“I am made out of water. You wouldn’t know it because I have it bound in.”
It’s a little masterpiece (and for some reason slots into my consciousness hard upon John Kennedy Toole’s superb A Confederacy of Dunces). It was published in 1959, but Puttering (written in 1957 – when Dick was only 29) is my firm favourite. Sutin rates it – rather disconcertingly – at a shockingly measly five. I’m not sure why this is. Because I can find little to fault in it. The bare bones of the story are certainly, on initial appearances, deliberately unshowy – almost pedestrian. But this is what I love. Dick isn’t making a big deal out of anything. He is finding drama in smallness, in the margins, in tiny changes of perspective. The book is slight but transformative. And because this is not an art I have refined myself (a cat may look at a king!), I deeply envy it. I suppose there is a “Kitchen Sink” element (the timing corresponds), but there’s nothing mannered or crass about the way Dick handles his subject matter. He isn’t angry or splenetic. He is quizzical and mystified. He is – best of all – inquisitive.
In brief, the novel details the coming together of its two protagonists, Roger and Virginia Lindahl. They meet, are kind of in love, and kind of horrified by each other. They move from Washington to LA at the end of the war. We see them find work. We see Roger open a television sales and repairs shop. The Lindahls have a son with asthma who they send to a private school in the mountains. Here they meet the Bonners – Chuck and Liz. Roger and Liz commence an affair.
What I most admire about the book is the way people simply do not understand what they are doing while at the same time experiencing utter clarity. Dick’s writing is like a kind of psychological washing-up-brush – he carefully pushes its bristles up into his character’s minds and rotates exhaustively.
The reader has total access. It’s both horrifying and delirious. There are some truly demented passages. And there’s a profound sense that Dick doesn’t really give a damn. He’s not making any great claims for himself (or the novel), he’s just turning it out. It isn’t overthought or minutely considered. It is joyful and propulsive. Because this is how he writes. This is who he is. Effortlessly cool. There are ideas to spare. He throws them around like a Dame tossing Cadbury’s Minis into the crowd at a pantomime.
Such confidence! Such largesse!
I so aspire to be generous in this way. And fun. At one point Dick describes a high-pressure business meeting and says “Beth studied him as if he had managed to fart through his nose.”
Pure Dick. Come on. You gotta love it.
by Nicola Barker, Michael Moorcock, and Adam Roberts, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Bryan Mayes
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