China's Tiangong-1 Space Station Will Crash to Earth This Weekend

It will all be over in a flash. At some point this weekend, a dazzling fireball will tear across the sky as China’s out-of-control space station tumbles back to Earth at 16,500mph and burns up in the atmosphere.

The Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace”, has been hopelessly adrift since the Chinese space agency lost control of the prototype space lab in 2016, five years after it launched as a bold symbol of the nation’s ambitions in orbit.

From the moment it was lost, scientists around the world began plugging information on the stricken craft into computer models to predict how its final act would play out. On Friday, the European Space Agency said that the unoccupied wreckage would crash back to Earth between Saturday night and Sunday evening UK time.

“If you’re in the right place at the right time, and the sky is clear, it will be quite spectacular,” said Holger Krag, head of ESA’s space debris office in Darmstadt. “It will be visible to the naked eye, even in daylight, and look like a slow-moving shooting star that splits into a few more shooting stars. You might even see a smoke trail.”

Compared with the International Space Station (ISS), Tiangong-1 is a minnow. The 400-tonne ISS would barely fit inside a football field, while the 8.5 tonne Chinese station is no bigger than a bus. Visitors to Tiangong-1, including China’s first two female taikonauts, Liu Yang and Wang Yaping, had two sleeping berths at their disposal, but the toilet and cooking facilities were on the Shenzhou module that ferried them to the orbiting outpost.

Though Tiangong-1 will be the largest lump of space junk to fall back to Earth so far this year, it is nowhere near a record-breaker. In 2001, the Russian space agency steered their 120 tonne Mir space station safely into the Pacific Ocean. The far less controlled re-entry of Nasa’s 74 tonne Skylab in 1979 scattered pieces of space hardware over hundreds of miles of Western Australia. The re-entry of Tiangong-1 will be uncontrolled too.

About 100 tonnes of spent rocket stages, defunct satellites, and other space debris come down each year. Most of the material burns up in the atmosphere as aerodynamic friction turns terrific speed into ferocious heat. As a rule of thumb, only about 20 to 40% of a spacecraft survives the inferno of re-entry. The components that hit the ground tend to be heat-resistant fuel tanks, thrusters and other parts, such as metal docking rings, which can be the size of a rear tractor wheel.

On Friday, the Chinese space station was still hurtling around the planet more than 180km above the surface. The atmosphere is tenuous at that altitude, but thick enough to drag on the solar panels and body of Tiangong-1. Gradually this slows the spacecraft down until gravity can pull it from orbit. When the spaceship falls below 100km, it will begin its re-entry in earnest.

by Ian Sample, Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Courtesy of CMSE

Julie Paterson
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A Chat Room of Their Own

In the fall of 2015, Nina Lorez Collins, a former literary agent, writer and mother of four young adults, including a pair of twins, was experiencing a fairly typical middle-aged malaise. She had a complicated second marriage, and her body was betraying her — textbook perimenopausal stuff, awaking most nights at 3 a.m., heart pounding, soaked in sweat. When she Googled “perimenopause,” it amused her to read that one of the symptoms was “impending sense of doom,” and she noted her discovery in an uncomplicated (until recently) manner: a Facebook post.

Friends wrote back, half-seriously, suggesting she start a group for their cohort, but what to call it? Black Cohosh (for the herbal remedy)? How about What Would Virginia Woolf Do? one friend joked darkly, because of course what Woolf did, at 59, was kill herself.

Within a week or so, Ms. Collins, now 48, had created a secret Facebook group with just that title, inviting her friends into the internet era’s version of a consciousness-raising group, where women of a certain age could talk about things they didn’t want to share with husbands, partners or children.

That would be everything from the peevishly quotidian (complaints about dry skin or men not shutting cabinets) to the truly harrowing (suicide ideation; job loss at middle age; bad marriages; domestic abuse; and children suffering from drug addiction).

And sex. There would be lots of chatter around sex: requests for tips on technique; concern about “the handful of limp” of an older boyfriend; vaginal atrophy; dry vaginas; sex toys; bad sex; no sex; anal sex; the viability of hiring a male prostitute; who has an orgasm first during sex: weird places to have sex; obligatory sex; sex with an ex; tantric sex; group sex; and many, many posts about coconut oil (see “dry vaginas,” above).

Now It’s a Book

Ms. Collins, who lives in Brooklyn Heights in a modish duplex apartment overlooking the East River, is emblematic of a certain demographic: mostly white — though Ms. Collins is half-black — expensively educated and housed liberals. You would assume that group would mirror itself online and stay small and homogeneous. But within a year of its founding, WWVWD, to use its colloquial abbreviation, had more than 1,300 members; the week after the presidential election there was an increase of another 1,000, Ms. Collins said, with many seeking a way to marshal themselves for political action.

The original group, which Ms. Collins changed from “secret” to “closed” (meaning it can be seen by the public), begot subgroups, for those who wanted to focus on philanthropy, activism, business networking and writing. Woolfers in New York City began meeting in person, as Ms. Collins led field trips to Toys in Babeland, the sex accessories emporium on the Lower East Side, and hosted Scrabble tournaments and clothing swaps.

Woolfers have also swapped houses and apartments, rented each other rooms and raised money for groups including the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Trust for Public Land. Recently, four Woolfers spent a day at the Wallkill Correctional Facility, joining a mentorship program for inmates there.

There are now more than 7,600 Woolfers across the country, from New York City, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles, as you might expect, but also from Arkansas, Chicago and Maine. And Ms. Collins, who spent a few weeks last month on a cross-country road trip with a new boyfriend meeting Woolfers in Memphis and Telluride, Colo., among other spots, has a new book, out in April, called “What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself as I Attempt to Age Without Apology.” It is a sometimes wince-inducing primer on fashion, sex, marriage, divorce, money and health gleaned from her experience as Woolfer in chief, and with contributions from her Woolfer sisters.

It also has memoirish elements: Ms. Collins details her adventures in the orgy tent at Burning Man (she and her ex brought their own sheets, and kept to themselves), her struggles with depression and her adherence to an expensive beauty routine that involves fake eyelashes and Botox. She also cops to divorce envy, and notes the benefits of prenups, long-term-care insurance and pharmaceuticals like Xanax. In its breezy candor, the book is as appealing and appalling as the conversations of the Woolfers online, though it lacks the tartness and invective that occasionally erupts there, turning a you-go-girl group of self-affirmers into an unruly scrum.

Because when thousands of women get together on social media, what could possibly go wrong?

‘Assume Goodness, Please’

“We do fight sometimes,” Ms. Collins said. “We’re talking about super-candid things, and people have strong opinions. If you’re talking about whether or not to let your 16-year-old have sex or whether to have an affair or how to tell your colleague at work that she’s a jerk, people will have strong responses.”

When one long-married woman wrote about the heartache she was feeling because her lover of five years had broken up with her, many Woolfers were upset by her adultery, Ms. Collins said, and she had to step in to remove comments that were aggressive, moralistic and vitriolic. When a white Woolfer reported that a black man in a park had exposed himself to her, many in the group were inflamed that she had noted his race.

At first, Ms. Collins read every post herself, to steer the conversation and defuse tension. But when the group swelled to 3,000, she asked some of the early Woolfers to help her moderate; now, about 20 women have oversight of what’s posted. Politics, race and infidelity are topics that reliably lead to problems. “I’ll be out somewhere and I’ll get a text from someone saying basically there’s a huge fight in Aisle 6 and what do we do?” Ms. Collins said.

Early last year, Ms. Collins chastised the group for what she saw as occasional reflexive pettiness. “This is not a liberal arts college, circa 2016,” she wrote in part. “We don’t have to give trigger warnings. Bring on the posts about money concerns and racism concerns and class struggle, but don’t blame fellow members without real cause. Assume goodness, please.”

Jenny Douglas, an early Woolfer and moderator, said, “If there’s a post you don’t like, we say, ‘Scroll on by.’ You don’t need to pick a fight with everything or anyone you disagree with. When we are meeting online and tackling subjects that are so nuanced, you can lose that nuance. Those tender subjects are tricky to tackle in any form.”

Just a few weeks ago, a moderator quit the group after a discussion of moderator practices — how they vetted posts, for example — left her feeling bullied, she said.

There are over-posters, and drunk posters; there are angry, cursing posters — whose words are promptly removed, Ms. Collins said — and posters who are a tad self-righteous. And there are the lurkers and the hate readers, along with those who are repelled or bored or disappointed by the particular window into women’s lives that the group affords them.

“I always think that Virginia Woolf would be mortified at having her name associated with this group,” said Daphne Merkin, the memoirist and cultural critic, who is a member of the group but does not post anything. “At first I thought it was going to be some kind of literary meeting of the minds. That there would be some interesting comments about Jean Rhys. Instead it’s, “What do you do with your dildos?” Or this sort of subclinical despair about no longer having a flat stomach.

“It’s not like that stuff is beneath me,” Ms. Merkin went on. “I mean, I once wrote a story on buffing up the vagina, but these revelations are very cosmeticized. There’s little wit, but maybe wit takes more time than social media allows. This is more like the stuff you tell your girlfriend at the end of the day, the eye-glazing end of intimacy. There’s intimacy that’s thrilling, but this isn’t.”

by Penelope Green, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Amy Lombard

“We All Had the Same Acid Flashback at the Same Time”: The New American Cuisine

The dawn and rise of the American chef commenced when Americans, from coast to coast, and in large numbers, began voluntarily, enthusiastically cooking in restaurants for a living — a once forbidden and unrespected professional course — screw the consequences. Many started like Marder, spontaneously, rebelliously, often in isolation, with no idea there were others like them Out There. A few stuck their toes in the water in the 1960s, a few more in the 1970s, and then hordes jumped into the pool in the 1980s and ’90s, after which there was no looking back.

These weren’t the first American chefs, or even the first prominent ones. There had always been exceptions, like the astounding Edna Lewis, who for five years ending in 1954 had been the chef and a business partner at Café Nicholson in Midtown Manhattan— that she did this as both an African American and a woman in the 1950s is nothing short of miraculous. But those stories were few and far between, not part of an overarching national phenomenon. And the lower kitchen ranks were more often than not populated with lost souls who lacked ambition or the aptitude for a traditional career, weren’t pursuing a love of food and/or craft, or acting on Marder-like epiphanies, a version of which became a rite of passage for an entire generation. Professional cooking was viewed as menial, unskilled labor performed, often in unsavory conditions, by anonymous worker bees. The United States Department of Labor categorized chefs as domestics through 1976 when — after lobbying by the American Culinary Federation, who themselves required nudging by Louis Szathmary, the Hungarian American Chicago chef, writer, and television personality — it recognized them as professionals. Domestics suggests chauffeurs and housekeepers; most Americans regarded cooks as something grittier.

“One of the comparisons I make today that illustrates the difference between then and now is back in the day you never would put your uniform on or anything that made you look like a cook on the way to work,” says San Francisco–based chef Jan Birnbaum, who started his career in New Orleans and New York. “Because it wasn’t a proud thing to be. You’re that guy behind the door who has no skill. He’s certainly not intellectual, and he probably is either a criminal or he’s amongst them. There’s just a whole lot of undesirable stuff. Today the streets of San Francisco, man, they proudly walk down the street all the time in full uniforms.” Even in France, historically the Western capital of fine dining, this stigma attached to the profession through the 1960s. Chefs were not renowned or celebrated; at best, they were regarded as craftsmen. Alain Sailhac, who grew up in the mountain village of Millau, France, and would go on to become the chef of Le Cygne and Le Cirque in New York City, remembers the moment he first became enticed by the kitchen, in the mid-twentieth century: At age fourteen, at his brother’s wedding, he struck up a conversation with the chef, which sparked an interest he couldn’t shake.

“Why do you want to be a cook?” demanded his father, who wanted his son to take up the family’s glove-manufacturing business. Sailhac persisted until his dad relented, walked him into the town’s only one-star restaurant, where the chef was a World War I buddy. “Do you want to take my son?” asked the senior Sailhac. “He wants to be like you, a stupid chef.” (Even after he became a cook, Sailhac hid his profession from women; if they learned he worked in a restaurant, he told them he was a chef de rang [dining room captain], which was more prestigious.)

Consider, too, Auguste Escoffier, whose crowning achievement, Le guide culinaire, first published in 1903, was the kitchen bible of its day. The book codified basic recipes and techniques, set forth a system for organizing the kitchen brigade, and recommended a front-of-house structure. Yet Nathan Myhrvold, author of a defining tome on modernist cuisine, unsentimentally dubs Escoffier “the Henry Ford of the conventional kitchen. . . . His masterwork was fundamentally motivated by gastronomy as a manufacturing process rather than as an art. . . . He was an artisan striving to run a factory rather than be an artist.”

So what happened? To impose biblical simplicity on the narrative would be dishonest; there was no Garden of Eden, no aproned Adam and Eve from whom all future American chefs descended, no single moment that lit the fuse. The movement was scattershot but not coincidental, produced (Big Bang–style) by a confluence of events and phenomena: the Vietnam War and the resistance at home; the counterculture; easy access to travel; the music, movies, and literature of the day; drugs, including “the pill”; and a new approach to restaurant cooking, to name the factors most often cited by those who were there as the ones that propelled them into the kitchen.

“It’s a universal mind,” says Thomas Keller, chef-owner of a restaurant empire founded on Yountville, California’s The French Laundry, of the national reach of those influences. “We all talk about universal minds and how people come up with the same idea relatively around the same period of time without having had conversations about it personally. They’re just doing the same thing.”

Jonathan Waxman, a California chef who has toggled back and forth between the coasts throughout his career, puts it slightly differently: “We all had the same acid flashback at the same time,” he says. “But each of us did it differently.”

by Andrew Friedman, Longreads |  Read more:

Image: getty images + 123RF images, composite by Katie Kosma

Is a Different Kind of Paradigm Driving Jazz These Days?

Too. Many. Notes! All that noodling. Honking and screeching. Borrrrrrring.

As a jazz critic and fanatic, I frequently hear what people do not like about the music. Chief among their complaints is this: jazz is indulgent—music for other musicians that just goes on and on with all that playing, all that complicated music. I might deride folks for lack of patience or appreciation, but what's wrong with jazz being more accessible, more digestible, shorter? After all, what we admire about The Beatles or Stevie Wonder might be an ability to compress so much great music into a classic pop song length with the impact that comes with brevity.

In the early decades of jazz, of course, the music as recorded came in short form. Until the LP became common in the '50s, almost every recorded performance was less than four minutes. Duke Ellington, to use just one example, could fill three minutes with a universe of creativity. In the most recent past, jazz musicians have tried to make their art more accessible by writing tighter tunes and recording shorter, "poppier" material, and there are examples of some success. But dumbing the music down to compete with real pop—hooks and choruses and all that—meant erasing the beauty that made jazz special.

In the last few years, however, we are seeing a new brevity arrive from jazz musicians who are thinking differently about getting their art into people's ears. Specifically, we are seeing the release of EPs—"extended play" recordings that contain fewer tracks then a traditional full-length "album", which usually means about 20 minutes of music.

Most notably, in 2017 saxophonist Kamasi Washington released Harmony of Difference, an EP containing music written for an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Washington's previous recording was his three-CD debut, The Epic, a recording that utterly defied the notion that the hipper jazz audience requires something brief. It was released on Brainfeeder, an imprint associated with Flying Lotus rather than mainstream jazz. Yes, Washington's latest work was inherently shorter, but the move remains intriguing and savvy. And he's not alone.

More and more, jazz artists across the spectrum find that releasing EPs makes sense. Often, these shorter collections of tunes are being released digitally rather than in a physical format, quite often through Bandcamp. How and why this makes sense in the 2018 commercial climate for jazz is an intriguing question that I explored with saxophonist and composer Jonathan Greenstein and the president of Mack Avenue Records, Denny Stilwell.

Up-and-Coming Artists and EPs: Saxophonist Jonathan Greenstein

How does a 14-year-old who's been studying classical music in Israel have his head turned in the direction of jazz? Jonathan Greenstein had his 8th-grade after-school music teacher give him a cassette of Charlie Parker's classic Bird with Strings album. "This will really convince you," he told the young saxophone student. "It was the opening phrase of 'Just Friends'—it was so different from anything I'd heard before, anything I'd heard on the radio," Greenstein says, with wonder still in his voice. "I was listing to a lot of Pink Floyd at the time, a lot of Metallica."

Today, Greenstein is in his early 30s and living in New York, and the lessons of Bird with Strings are still paramount. What Greenstein heard in Parker's art in 8th grade was simple: he heard a story-teller at work.

Greenstein studied music in Israel out of high school and played in the IDF military band as part of his mandatory service. But the lure of coming to the birthplace of jazz was strong. "I wanted to give it a try. I figured I'd regret not trying, even if I tried and failed. I visited The New School in New York then headed up to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, someone told us to go a free concert with alumni, and there was a student who was a songwriting major, and she sang a country song."

Greenstein aspired to play jazz, but at some level, the real lure was storytelling. "I thought, if there is someone who can sing something like that, a pop hit, that's the place for me."

After music school, says Greenstein, "I thought, I am ready. I moved to New York and nobody cared." He and a few friends went out every night "trying to cut each other" but "New York is very expensive, and I ran through my money quickly." He moved back to Israel for a time but didn't feel at home, at least not musically. And so in 2011 he returned to New York and developed a new way of thinking about his music. "I'm thinking, I don't like the supper club experience. I didn't want to play at Dizzys [expensive jazz club that is part of Jazz at Lincoln Center] and have people pay a $30 cover, $50 for a meal, more for wine. That was not the experience I wanted for my music. You play differently for those audiences."

Crafting a New Way of Telling a Jazz Story

Greenstein wanted out of jazz clubs and thought about a place where the audience would be standing up. "So, I thought, what if we play at a rock club—at Rockwood Music Hall? I convinced them to let me play even though they don't usually have instrumental music. We played on a Wednesday at 1.00 AM. On our first gig there was one guy, drunk, who yelled, 'Jazz at Rockwood, I can't believe it!' We played there every week for a year and a half. It completely changed what I was trying to do. Because the audience is standing up, a certain groove has to be there. Everything has to have closure, a concise story. It has to be short or otherwise people will pull out their phones. If we started with something that sounded too 'jazzy', we would lose the audience right away."

Recording his music in the EP format, then, was simply a way of following the lead created by a new audience. "On an artistic level, making an EP is more like writing a short story. I think of it as a story rather than a bunch of tunes with solos. Form became the thing for me: how does the form of one tune tell the story? I want there to be closure at the end of the track.

You hear this in Greenstein's music. On Vol2, the second of his two EPs, with Michal King and Takeshi Ohbayashi on keys, bassist Joshua Crumbly, and drummer Jonathan Pinson. Consisting of five tunes over 20 minutes, Greenstein creates music that is approachable and tonal (that is, not edgy or avant-garde) and that makes a statement through atmosphere and groove. There-s improvising and interesting form—this is not some poppy, smooth jazz—but the tunes aren't structured as bebop melodies, strings of solos from all the players, then the melody again. The opener, "Once You're There" sets out a tenor saxophone melody in ballad form and then sets up a hip-hop-type groove ... but one with alternating bars of four beats and six beats. The original melody doesn't return as a ballad. "Retrograde" features a haunting minor melody that transitions into an unusual, somewhat military sounding drum groove just as a ghostlike electronic keyboard begins playing figures and washes behind Greenstein's improvisation. The melody does return this time, with just the tenor and Wurlitzer piano remaining.

"The idea," Greenstein said of this recent recording, "is this: if you have one subway ride, can you go through this transformative experience in that time. It's connected to this idea that you are holding someone's hand and saying, this music is okay, it won't bite. It's not a complex, through-composed thing that will exhaust you. Hopefully, you hear it, you might think you didn't need it, then you realize how much you needed it.

"I think that's what Bird with Strings did for me. I thought he's talking to me. He's bringing me into the song. I'm trying to do the same thing. So you as a listener can enter this story, a whole world of sound and texture. Hopefully, this music stays with you, and you can grow with it, through the closure, through it being a full statement. Too much jazz lacks that full statement."

by Will Layman, Pop Matters |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

A Short Description of Cultural Appropriation for Non-Believers

1. Your new friends Bob and Rita come to lunch and you serve them idlis, like your grandmother used to make.

2. They love your south Indian cooking and ask for the recipe.

3. You never hear from Rita and Bob again.

4. You read in the Style section of the Guardian about Rita and Bob’s new Idli bar in Covent Garden… called ‘Idli.’

5. You visit Idli. The food tastes nothing like your grandmother’s.

6. Your grandmother dies.

7. Rita and Bob’s children inherit the Idli chain, and open several franchises in America.

8. Your children find work as short order chefs… at Idli.

9. Your children visit you in a nursing home and cook you idlis, which taste nothing like the ones you remember from your youth.

10. You compliment their cooking and ask for the recipe.

11. You die.

by Rajeev Balasurbramanyam, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: ImagesBazaar/ Getty Images via:

Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?

Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?

A new technology—virtual embodiment—challenges our understanding of who and what we are.

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Daniel Zender

America’s Gender-Fluid Future, in 100 Years of Baby Name Trends

In 1910, just 5% of American babies named “Charlie” were girls. Over 100 years later, girl Charlies took over their male counterparts for the first time in 2016—making up 51% of the share.

With little fuss or fanfare, Charlie has gone gender-neutral.

Quartz analyzed the Social Security Administration’s public data on baby names to find out whether what happened with “Charlie” is an exception, or part of a wider trend. Our results show that, on average, the country is slowly moving toward using more gender-neutral names. And a few popular names are leading the way.

To analyze the trend, we calculated a “genderedness score” for every American baby name—and for the country on the whole. The score goes from zero to one. A zero means a name is perfectly non-gendered. That is to say, exactly half of the babies with that name are boys, and the other half are girls. A one, meanwhile, means the name is used exclusively for one gender. So a lower score means a name is more gender-neutral, and less biased.

American parents have long had a strong preference for gendered names. The overall genderedness score was 0.97 in 1920, meaning nearly every kid had a name that was used almost exclusively for just boys or just girls. The score is falling, though. It hit 0.946 in 2016, the most recent year the SSA has name data for. The 1920 score is close to the historical average for names like “Billy,” “Selma,” and “Otis.” Names around the new—less gender-specific—number include “Jerry,” “Aden,” and “Orion.”

Several popular names, Charlie among them, are driving this trend. No girls named “Blake” show up in the data at all until 1951. But today, one-quarter of American Blakes are female. And it’s not just boys’ names being given to girls, either. “Marion,” for example, has seen a major shift from girls to boys.

Many other popular names from the 2016 dataset are also gender-neutral, including “Finley,” “Justice,” and “Armani.” Here are the least-gendered 20, only including those with more than 500 babies with that name.

At the same time, some names are becoming more gendered. “Ashton” has gone from being pretty equal to primarily a boys’ name. “Harper” used to be more common for boys, but is now over 97% girls. And the most popular names from 2016 score high on the genderedness scale—Emma and Olivia at 0.99, and Scarlett and Victoria at 1.00, without a single boy.

Given that the average is moving the other way, though, it seems these mono-gendered choices are slowly becoming less popular. Gender-neutral options like Parker, Jordan, and Riley were among the top 100 in 2016.

by Nikhil Sonnad, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Quartz

Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, Congolese 2014via:

John Philipps Emslie, 1846-1860.
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For Fender Guitars, The Future Is Digital And Female

There have been numerous news stories about the impending death of U.S. guitar business. Not without some reason. The instrument long ago lost its central role in pop music. Iconic brand Gibson is in trouble. So is big-box retailer Guitar Center. Ditto many of the mom-and-pop stores that used to be the heart of the business.

According to The Music Trades magazine, though, the $7.4 billion market for all new instruments and music gear has actually been growing since the recession years of 2008 and 2009. Last year retailers sold $1.9 billion of new fretted instruments (mainly guitars) and related gear, up 8.9% from 2016.

Andy Mooney, CEO of Scottsdale, Arizona-based Fender, says his company has been growing faster than the industry. Private equity owned Fender, which had about $500 million in revenues in 2017, is building a strategy on developing a younger audience through new instruments and on reaching customers online. Last July Fender introduced Fender Play, an online subscription guitar lesson service. This March it rolled out a line of lower priced guitars aimed at beginning players, particularly young women. The California Series guitars are acoustics with built in electronics, which can be played plugged or unplugged. While high priced acoustic guitars tend to look like fine antiques, the look and feel of the California Series (the company was famously launched in 1945 out of Leo Fender's Fullerton radio repair shop) echoes Fender’s iconic and flashy electrics.

In this interview which has been edited and condensed Mooney, a retail veteran formerly with Nike and later chief of Disney's consumer product division, talked about why the future of the guitar business is female and why he's not worried about the brick and mortar apocalypse.

The guitar is the baby boomer's instrument. What's the reason for optimism about it now?

It comes back to the environmental positives: consumption of live and recorded music is at an all-time high and continuing to grow. There are 125 million people paying for digital streaming services and that’s growing. We had LiveNation last month reporting 82 million people went to concerts last year up 21%. There is not a signal that the uptake of Spotify or Apple music subscriptions is going to decrease for the foreseeable future, not a signal that LiveNation which is the largest provider of live concerts and has been growing for 11 years, is going to slow down. In Fender's case we think we are just doing a really good job of being a contemporary provider of product and a contemporary marketer of product through predominantly social media and digital channels. We’ve really stepped up our game in terms of more marketing money and spending all the incremental money on appealing to audiences online. (...)

How much of your dealers’ sales are online?

It depends on the region. We estimate that half our sales in the North America are getting done online in some form or other. It's moved from 35 % to 50 % over the last three years.

How does that compare with your competitors?

I can't speak for those brands but I’d think that would be about par for the course for anybody that’s got a significant brand in North America. (...)

What’s the business case for going after beginners?

About two years ago we did a lot of research about new guitar buyers. We were hungry for data and there wasn’t much available. We found that 45% of all the guitars we sell every year go to first-time players. That was much higher than we imagined. Ninety percent of those first-time players abandoned the instrument in the first 12 months — if not the first 90 days — but the 10% that didn’t tended to commit to the instrument for life and own multiple guitars and multiple amps.

We also found that 50% of new guitar buyers were women and that their tendency was to buy online rather than in a brick and mortar store because the intimidation factor in a brick and mortar store was rather high.

The last thing we found was that new buyers spend four times as much on lessons as they do on equipment. So that shaped a number of things. It shaped the commitment we made to Fender Play because we felt there was an independent business opportunity available to us that we’d never considered before because the trend in learning was moving online. We also found we needed to communicate more to the female audience in terms of the artists we connect with, in terms of using women in our imagery and thinking generally about the web.

Has the additional marketing spend helped?

What we found that was a shocker to us was that Fender Play and our other marketing activity encouraged people who had never thought about buying a guitar to buy a guitar. We have good sell-through data for electric guitars in North America. In the November, December, and January we had sell- through increases of 13.5%, 15% and 15%. We’ve haven’t seen growth in the industry at that level for many years and the industry has inherently growing.

We've been growing at faster pace than the industry and enjoying that growth. Gibson’s travails are all of their own making; it’s nothing to do with the state of the industry.

by Peter Carbonara, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Fender

Julia Lillard and Eric Edelman, Trolley to Folly (2017)

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Facebook’s Chaotic, Destructive Corporate Culture

TPM Reader MS has a critique of my recent comments about Facebook, both on the podcast and the Editor’s Blog. I spoke of “sleaze” and a “if we can code it, we should totally do it” ethos. On “sleaze” he’s probably right because that’s just a loaded word and too imprecise in its meaning. On the latter point, I think we were actually talking about something similar or even the same thing. In any case, here’s MS’s take …

"I heard you talking about this on the podcast, with some befuddlement, as to why Facebook has such problems playing nice etc. etc. Then you make this remark in the Editor’s Blog about Facebook’s “sleaze and ‘if we can code it, we should totally do it’ ethos,” which seems to me a very inaccurate take on what’s going on inside Facebook. I don’t think sleaze and “whoa, that’s cool I like it” are driving much of anything over there. To me it’s all fairly clear and has very deep roots in Zuckerberg specifically and the way Facebook all got started in the first place. 

This will probably be inarticulate but (I hope) it should be clear enough. I’m an adult who was much older than college-age in 2005 (therefore observed Facebook go from something I was not allowed to join to something I was allowed to join) and has spent the last 5 years writing for a website that makes its money by getting articles to become more popular via Facebook. Nobody at my website ever intended as a business plan for Facebook to have so much control over our fortunes, but it was an unavoidable outcome of working for a place that depends on clicks. In 2014 it was Facebook or nothing, which was just the way Facebook wanted it. All of which is to say I may not have your experience dealing with them as some kind of unreliable business partner but I do have a pretty valid stretch of experiences with them using a slightly different lens. 

Facebook started at Harvard, and Zuckerberg consciously used Harvard’s cachet as the most revered school in the country to drive a dynamic whereby he has the thing and you, the client, the product, are on the outside seeking entry. He did it within Harvard, he did it within the Ivy League, he did it for the collegiate world as a whole…. He set up a closed world that was by definition private and unknown to the uninitiated and traded on people’s FOMO, fear of missing out. The unclarity of Facebook’s goings-on and the indifference towards the customers’ collective voice were baked in very very early. 

You know that thing about deciding whether you are going to ask permission to do something or do it and beg forgiveness later? That little trope describes Facebook’s MO to an unusual extent. There’s zero transparency and very little accountability to outsiders at Facebook. For several years the website I work for has ridden a roller coaster of unpredictable booms and busts because Facebook twiddled some knob in or against our favor and we’re forced to live with the result. We’re often in a semi-panic as a result. Oh Facebook, can we have some idea what those changes you made are or mean so we can plan around them? Don’t make me laugh. They’re not going to tell us that. What’s that? We made a change and decided in 2011 or whatever that this subset of your data couldn’t be private anymore even though it was implied that it would stay private? Oh well sorry, you should probably just adjust to that because we like things better this way. In a month we’ll make some other change without consulting you and you won’t be able to get any information about that change either. We’re going to do these things and we don’t care even a little what you think of them or how they affect you. Is there someone at Facebook regular users (including businesses) can contact so that people can appeal or get some information about how they should proceed with interacting with Facebook? Don’t be ridiculous, there is no such person. You can’t call Facebook tech support, that is just not a thing that exists. More than most companies, Facebook conducts its affairs using the frustrating method of the unarticulated fiat, choices made from on high with no transparency. 

Greed and desire for control drive this to be sure, I’m not sure “sleaze” does. 

Look, about 3 years ago it became clear that Facebook and the publishing world at large were joined in some kind of death dance…. Facebook had every opportunity to meet with those publishers as equals and try to be a “good faith partner” with them as we all moved forward together. Instead they made 300 decisions a day that made it clear they didn’t want any give or take with publishers. They would dictate the terms and everybody would be happy with what they got, and that’s it, because they held the upper hand at that time. If you tried to game out what would happen with such a relationship, it was inevitable that that relationship would sour and a great many proud, important and not-important entities would get very steamed about being pushed around by Facebook all the time. 

What ended up happening was that Facebook made a series of decisions that were a direct result of their blitheness towards data and privacy issues and their lack of a good relationship with those publishers made it impossible for them to make any smaller adjustments to the system in a way that made any sense. As a result they ended up nuking the entire “posting on Facebook for profit” model, and the entire publishing and online advertising model is in tatters because the only possible venue for online advertisements/virality that can yield actual profits has decided that nothing can be done for gain on Facebook for a while. I’m saying all this to express the idea that playing nice with the publishers was in THEIR best interest all along, even if they spectacularly failed to recognize this. They went the other way and now the relationship might be irreparable. Facebook has made squeaky little “we’re sorry, whatevs” noises in the past and I can’t actually tell if the current contrition is in any way real or just a holding tactic to get through this scandal. If past performance is any guide, I’m forced to conclude that it’s bullshit. 

In any case, what remains is that there’s a lot of advertising cash out there waiting to be thrown at the internet and a lot of entities who would love to receive it. Facebook has temporarily absented itself from being the broker for those transactions. This is where the current “leave Facebook” movement has the potential to do real harm to Facebook, because it trades on Facebook’s being the only game in town and the primary venue for Boomers and GenXers and some millennials to interact. But Facebook rather feels like an advertising venue first and foremost these days, which is new; that was simply not true 2 years ago. The acridity of the 2016 political year left a lot of my liberal friends (most of them women) with extremely little desire to spend time on Facebook, and not all of that is Facebook’s fault. They’re all at Instagram, which is nicer, more tolerant, and more respectful. But while the shrinking of the Facebook audience can hurt the site, the likelihood of publishers building a separate set of institutions to deal with this shit would also be very harmful to Facebook. The publishers rightly feel very burned, and it’s not yet clear whether a reasonable second option is even viable. But an aging audience that is not hip and that is not being truly replenished by the hip could spell bad news for Facebook, as are the calculations of prideful publishers who detested being under the thumb of someone who is as callow as Zuckerberg often appears to be. 

I think this is entirely a mess of its own making, and I might be in a minority but I think it was entirely predictable. I was saying as far back as 2014 that Facebook had absolutely terrible BO and that it really made no sense to treat all of these publishers as slaves, in the long run. 

Anyway. Rather than sleaze and “we should totally do it” I see idealism and incredible arrogance and incredible entitlement, that’s what is driving this."

by Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo |  Read more:

Image: via

Carriers Are Hoarding America’s Bandwidth. Google Just Wants Them to Share

A Google-led plan to overhaul how valuable airwaves are used for calls and texts is gaining momentum across the wireless industry, giving the company the chance to play a central role in networks of the future.

Citizens Broadband Radio Service, or CBRS, is a fat slice of the U.S. airwaves being freed this year from the military’s exclusive control. Instead of just zipping messages between aircraft carriers and fighter jets, the spectrum will be shared by the Navy, wireless carriers like Verizon, cable companies including Comcast, and even hospitals, refineries and sports stadiums.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google, with help from some smaller tech companies, is leading the charge on ways to make the new service work seamlessly. They've built databases and sensor systems that switch users to different CBRS channels to avoid interference, especially when the Navy sails into town.

This could upend the wireless business. Carriers spent more than $50 billion in recent years buying exclusive spectrum rights then charging users for cell service. What if, instead of buying and hoarding, spectrum is shared in new ways? It could become an abundant resource, making mobile internet connectivity more available and potentially cheaper.

“This will be a huge psychological hurdle for U.S. wireless companies to overcome,” said industry consultant Chetan Sharma. “These operators want to own the spectrum clean and not worry about interference.”

What’s changed is that the U.S. wireless industry is so desperate for new spectrum it’s willing to try the idea — and even work with Google, which has been viewed skeptically by the industry. Unlimited wireless plans have caused data usage to soar. Throw in pressure to build new 5G networks and companies like Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. can’t afford to ignore CBRS, even if it disrupts decades of spectrum orthodoxy.

CBRS has three tiers. At the top is the military, which has gets spectrum whenever it needs it. The second is a priority level that will be sold to the highest bidders in hundreds or thousands of mini auctions covering different parts of the country. At the bottom is a free tier that any company can use. That final tier won’t get protection from interference.

Imagine you’re on a call with your smartphone in Los Angeles and it’s using CBRS to connect you. An aircraft carrier churns past. Systems run by Google, startup Federated Wireless or a few other companies, will spot that, give the Navy a prime bit of the spectrum to use, then move you onto a slightly different channel without dropping the call. When the ship leaves the area, the Navy’s spectrum is sent back into the mix. There's enough spectrum to go round — 150 MHz is the largest chunk of contiguous airwaves to be released in years. And the Navy is unlikely to sail past Denver, Kansas City or most other U.S. locations.

The key is that if a company buys a priority slice and doesn’t put it to work, the spectrum is free for others to use. This prevents hoarding and changes the supply and demand equation, making spectrum more plentiful.

“Spectrum is like drinking water. There’s only so much of it and you better use it efficiently,” said Joel Lindholm, an executive at Ruckus Wireless, a unit of Arris International Plc that’s building CBRS gear.

For Google, the project is the most successful in a long series of efforts to increase internet availability — the digital oxygen that sustains its search engine, YouTube video service and the ads that generate almost 90 percent of the company’s revenue. When CBRS goes live, the company will be in a powerful and somewhat familiar position. As a Spectrum Access System provider, it will be paid to sit in the middle of information flows about valuable spectrum and decide what happens to the airwaves in real time. To avoid interference, Google has even installed special sensors along U.S. coastlines to spot when Navy ships are near (although the exact locations are digitally scrubbed).

That power doesn’t sit well with the wireless industry...

by Alistair Barr, Mark Bergen, and Scott Moritz, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Susana Gonzalez

One of the Biggest and Most Boring Cyberattacks Against an American City Yet

Want to hear a boring story?

I can’t submit an expense report for a recent out-of-town work trip. I’ve got all the receipts, except one from long-term parking at the Atlanta airport. A sensor lets me in and out of the parking lot there, and my account gets charged automatically. Later, I can download a receipt from a website, which I submit to accounting at my university, which creates an expense report, which eventually processes a reimbursement.

But the website has been inaccessible all week. I’m assuming it’s a consequence of the recent ransomware attack on the City of Atlanta’s computer systems. In what The New York Times has called “one of the most sustained and consequential cyberattacks ever mounted against a major American city,” a group of hackers has been holding the systems hostage for a ransom of about $51,000 (payable in Bitcoin) since late last week. To stop the spread of the attack, the city has shut down some of its online services, including some that provide consumer services. The airport’s Wi-Fi system has been disabled—and, apparently, the parking system I use there, too.

I emailed the manager of the airport-parking service, but chances are she won’t be able to respond; Atlanta has directed many workers to turn off or unplug their computers, another precaution that they hope will help control the damage. Until the city decides to pay the ransom or extract the virus, many city officials are processing paperwork by hand.

In a statement, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, assured citizens that utility and safety systems, like police and water, are unaffected. She also noted, “This is a massive inconvenience to the city.”

Tell me about it. This is the new, humdrum reality of information-security breaches. When they don’t leak reams of personal information for theft and resale on the black market, they make ordinary life annoying in small but important ways.

***

Here’s more boring corporate bureaucracy for you: My university uses software made by Oracle and PeopleSoft for accounting and expense management. The system assumes one expense report per trip, which means that now I have to wait until the parking-system website comes back online so I can extract a receipt (for $100 or less) and submit it. Until then, I can’t get reimbursed for the rest of my trip, which totals far more than $100, unless I want to absorb the parking expense in the interest of expediency.

I’ll be fine, but not everyone can wait days or weeks for their reimbursement. In fact, other Atlanta citizens might fare worse. The city courts, unable to process tickets or warrants automatically, have been forced to do so by hand. Surely someone will make an honest mistake, and a ticket could be advanced to warranting after registering unpaid, or a warrant could wind up assigned to the wrong person.

The City of Atlanta assures its residents that anyone who can’t pay a utility bill won’t be penalized if they cannot access an online system to do so. But those exceptions would also have to be entered into a computer. Someone’s account could be incorrectly marked in arrears, and their water service shut down. Perhaps turning it back on again will require visiting the City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management in person with payment by cashier’s check or money order. I can’t tell you what they’d have to do, because as I write this, the Atlanta Watershed’s billing website is down. Taking time off from work to correct inadvertent consequences of the computer outage could easily cost someone a shift, or even a job.

These are the kinds of cascading failures that take place when internet-connected systems get taken down, whether by surprise on the part of hackers or intentionally by municipalities or corporations impacted by them. Nobody means for these things to happen. Not the City of Atlanta. Not even the hackers who initiated the ransomware attack. But they are the consequence of building and operating computer infrastructure interconnected via the internet.

When a breach at the credit agency Equifax exposed almost 150 million Americans’ most personal information last year, I remarked on how banal the matter seemed. Equifax didn’t even appear to be trying to treat the situation with the gravity that it deserved, and the public seemed resigned to the matter. “Breaches have settled into a kind of modern malaise, akin to traffic or errands,” I wrote. “They are so frequent and so massive that the whole process has become a routine.”

That routine is only accelerating. Last week, when news broke that tens of millions of Facebook users’ personal data had been extracted by a personality-quiz app and sold to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, public reaction was strong mostly because that data appears to have been used in U.S. election targeting. The fact that the data was vacuumed out of the social network has also raised hackles, even if people don’t fully realize that Facebook was designed to allow that very extraction.

All of these incidents arise from a slow, steady drip of small changes to the way people store, access, and manage information and services. Contemporary civilization has rebuilt itself atop a lattice of fragile computer systems, all interconnected. The chaos that ensues when these systems fail or get breached is so constant, it feels expected. Almost natural.

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Rick D. via

Bang For the Buck

“Welcome, Patriots! Gun Show Today,” says a big sign outside the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, just south of San Francisco, where the Republican National Convention nominated Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Inside, past the National Rifle Association table at the door, a vast room, longer than a football field, is completely filled with rows of tables and display cases. They show every conceivable kind of rifle and pistol, gun barrels, triggers, stocks, bullet keychain charms, Japanese swords, telescopic sights, night-vision binoculars, bayonets, a handgun carrier designed to look like a briefcase, and enough ammunition of every caliber to equip the D-Day landing force. Antique guns on sale range from an ancient musket that uses black powder to a Japanese behemoth that fires a bullet 1.2 inches in diameter.

Also arrayed on tables are signs, bumper stickers, and cloth patches you can sew onto your jacket: 9-11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB; THE WALL: IF YOU BUILD IT THEY CANT COME; HUNTING PERMIT UNLIMITED FOR ISIS. Perhaps 90 percent of those strolling the aisles are men, and at least 98 percent are white. They wear enough beards and bushy mustaches to stuff a good-sized mattress. At one table a man is selling black T-shirts that show a map of California in red, with a gold star and hammer and sickle. Which means? “This state’s gone Communist. And I hate to say it, but it was Reagan that gave it to them. The 1986 amnesty program [which granted legal status to some 2.7 million undocumented immigrants].”

If reason played any part in the American love affair with guns, things would have been different a long time ago and we would not have so many mass shootings like the one that took the lives of seventeen high school students in Parkland, Florida on February 14. Almost everywhere else in the world, if you proposed that virtually any adult not convicted of a felony should be allowed to carry a loaded pistol—openly or concealed—into a bar, a restaurant, or classroom, people would send you off for a psychiatric examination. Yet many states allow this, and in Iowa, a loaded firearm can be carried in public by someone who’s completely blind. Suggest, in response to the latest mass shooting, that still more of us should be armed, and people in most other countries would ask you what you’re smoking. Yet this is the NRA’s answer to the massacres in Orlando, Las Vegas, Newtown, and elsewhere, and after the Parkland killing spree, President Trump suggested arming teachers. One bumper sticker on sale here shows the hammer and sickle again with GUN FREE ZONES KILL PEOPLE.

Nor, when it comes to national legislation, do abundantly clear statistics have any effect. In Massachusetts, which has some of America’s most restrictive firearms laws, three people per 100,000 are killed by guns annually, while in Alaska, which has some of the weakest, the rate is more than seven times as high. Maybe Alaskans need extra guns to fend off bears, but that’s certainly not so in Louisiana, another weak-law state, where the rate is more than six times as high as in Massachusetts. All developed nations regulate firearms more stringently than we do; compared with the citizens of twenty-two other high-income countries, Americans are ten times more likely to be killed by guns. In the last fifty years alone, more civilians have lost their lives to firearms within the United States than have been killed in uniform in all the wars in American history.

Congress, terrified of the NRA, not only ignores such data but has shielded manufacturers and dealers from any liability for firearms deaths, and has prevented the Centers for Disease Control from doing any studies of gun violence. As of last October—the figure has doubtless risen since then—the top ten recipients of direct or indirect NRA campaign funds in the US Senate had received more than $42 million from the organization over the past thirty years. Funneling a river of money to hundreds of other members of Congress as well, the NRA has certainly gotten what it pays for.

In Armed in America, Patrick J. Charles points out that after each horrendous mass shooting, like the one we’ve just seen at Parkland, not only does the NRA once again talk about good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns, but gun purchases soar and stock prices of their makers rise. However, only a tiny fraction of the more than 30,000 Americans killed by guns each year die in these mass shootings. Roughly two thirds are suicides; the rest are more mundane homicides, and about five hundred are accidents. Some 80,000 additional people are injured by firearms each year. All these numbers would be far less if we did not have more guns than people in the United States, and if they were not so freely available to almost anyone.

Although not the definitive study of the NRA that David Cole called for in these pages recently, Armed in America does cast a shrewd eye on what is probably the most powerful lobbying organization in Washington. For almost a century the NRA has pursued a two-faced strategy. It “would tout itself to lawmakers as the foremost supporter of reasonable firearms restrictions. At the same time, the NRA informed the gun-rights community that virtually all firearms restrictions would either make gun ownership a crime or somehow lead to disarmament.” The NRA presents itself to the public as “a voice of compromise” and boasts of its courses in gun safety, but skillfully mobilizes its five million members and annual budget of more than $300 million to make sure Congress never passes any meaningful gun control. The poignant, outspoken campaigning by the Florida high schoolers who survived the Parkland shooting may spur somewhat tightened gun control in a few states, but, at least at the national level, don’t expect new laws to be sweeping and significant.

The Koch brothers have been major financial supporters of the NRA because it so reliably turns out right-wing voters on election day. A vocal and militant NRA also helps protect people like the Kochs by encouraging the illusion that the real source of political power in America is gun ownership—rather than, say, great wealth. (...)

Men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Dunbar-Ortiz points out, have been sanitized in a different way, remembered not as conquerors of Native American or Mexican land, but as frontiersmen roaming the wilderness in their fringed deerskin clothing—and as skilled hunters. This has powerful resonance with many gun owners today, who hunt, or once did, or at least would like to feel in themselves an echo of the hunter: fearless, proud, self-sufficient, treading in the footsteps of pioneers. One of those fringed leather jackets (although not deerskin, the salesman acknowledges) is on sale at the gun show, as is a huge variety of survival-in-the-wilderness gear: canteens, beef jerky, buffalo jerky, bear repellent, and hundreds of knives, many of them lovingly laid out on fur pelts: coyote, beaver, muskrat, possum, and the softest, badger.

The early militias are one strand of ancestry Dunbar-Ortiz identifies for gun enthusiast groups like the NRA. Another is the legacy of America’s wars—not those with defined front lines, like the two world wars and Korea, but the conflicts in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan. In those wars it was often unclear who was friend and who was enemy, mass killings of civilians were common, and many a military man evoked the days of the Wild West. General Maxwell Taylor, Lyndon B. Johnson’s ambassador to South Vietnam, for instance, called for more troops so that the “Indians can be driven from the fort and the settlers can plant corn.”

One of the greatest predictors of American gun ownership today is whether someone has been in the military: a veteran is more than twice as likely as a nonveteran to own one or more guns. Among the bumper stickers and signs at the gun show are JIHAD FREE ZONE and I’LL SEE YOUR JIHAD AND RAISE YOU A CRUSADE; the latter shows a bloody sword. Many a vet is strolling the aisles, happy to talk about fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. The first of the chain of mass shootings that have bedeviled the United States over the last half-century or so, from atop a tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, was by Charles Whitman, an ex-Marine.

The passion for guns felt by tens of millions of Americans also has deep social and economic roots. The fervor with which they believe liberals are trying to take all their guns away is so intense because so much else has been taken away. In much of the South, in the Rust Belt along the Great Lakes, in rural districts throughout the country, young people are leaving or sinking into addiction and jobs are disappearing. These hard-hit areas have not shared the profits of Silicon Valley and its offshoots or the prosperity of coastal cities from Seattle to New York. Even many of his supporters know in their hearts that Trump can never deliver on his promises to bring back coal mining and restore abundant manufacturing jobs. But the one promise he, and other politicians, can deliver on is to protect and enlarge every imaginable kind of right to carry arms.

People passionate about guns often display a sense of being under siege, left behind, pushed down, at risk. One of the large paper targets on sale at the gun show shows a scowling man aiming a pistol at you. On bumper stickers, window signs, flags, is the Revolutionary era DON’T TREAD ON ME, with its image of a coiled rattlesnake. At one table, two men are selling bulletproof vests. For $500 you can get an eight-pound one whose plates—front, back, side—are made of lightweight compressed polyethylene. “They used to use it to line the bottom of combat helicopters,” said one of the men. For only $300, you can get one with steel plates, but it weighs twenty-three pounds. Also on sale is a concealable vest that goes under your clothing: medium, large, and X-large for $285; XX-large and XXX-large for $315.

Who buys these? I ask.

“Everybody—who sees the way the world is going.”

by Adam Hochschild, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Sunnyland Slim, Homesick James and Elmore James at Charlie’s Lounge, Chicago, 1959
via:

Everything is Terrible: An Explanation

Facebook is a breeding ground for fake news and polarized outrage, accused of corrupting democracy and spurring genocide. Twitter knows it has become a seething battleground of widespread, targeted abuse — but has no solution. YouTube videos are messing with the minds of children and adults alike — so YouTube decided to pass the buck to Wikipedia, without telling them.

All three of those sentences would have seemed nearly unimaginable five years ago. What the hell is going on? Ev Williams says, of the growth of social media: “We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior.” What changed? And perhaps the most important question is: have people always been this awful, or have social networks actually made us collectively worse?

I have two somewhat related theories. Let me explain.

The Uncanny Social Valley Theory

“Social media is poison,” a close friend of mine said to me a couple of years ago, and since then more and more of my acquaintances seem to have come around to her point of view, and are abandoning or greatly reducing their time spent on Facebook and/or Twitter.

Why is it poison? Because this technology meant to provoke human connection actually dehumanizes. Not always, of course; not consistently. It remains a wonderful way to keep in contact with distant friends, and to enhance your relationship and understanding of those you regularly see in the flesh. What’s more, there are some people with whom you just ‘click’ online, and real friendships grow. There are people I’ve never met who I’d unhesitatingly trust with the keys to my car and home, because of our interactions on various social networks.

And yet — having stipulated all the good things — a lot of online interactions can and do reduce other people to awful caricatures of themselves. In person we tend to manage a kind of mammalian empathy, a baseline understanding that we’re all just a bunch of overgrown apes with hyperactive amygdalas trying to figure things out as best we can, and that relatively few of us are evil stereotypes. (Though see below.) Online, though, all we see are a few projections of those mammal brains, generally in the form of hastily constructed, low-context text and images … as mediated and amplified by the outrage machines, those timeline algorithms which think that “engagement” is the highest goal to which one can possibly aspire online.

I am reminded of the concept of the Uncanny Valley: “humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.” Sometimes you ‘click’ with people online such that they’re fully human to you, even if you’ve never met. Sometimes you see them fairly often in real life, so their online projections are just a new dimension to their existing humanity. But a lot of the time, all you get of them is that projection … which falls squarely into an empathy-free, not-quite-human, uncanny social valley.

And so many of us spend so much time online, checking Twitter, chatting on Facebook, that we’ve all practically built little cottages in the uncanny social valley. Hell, sometimes we spend so much time there that we begin to believe that even people we know in real life are best described as neighbors in that valley … which is how friendships fracture and communities sunder online. A lot of online outrage and fury — the majority, I’d estimate, though not all — is caused not by its targets’ inherent awfulness but by an absence, on both sides, of context, nuance, and above all, empathy and compassion.

The majority. But not all. Because this isn’t just a story of lack of compassion. This is also a story of truly, genuinely awful people doing truly, genuinely awful things. That aspect is explained by…

The Intransigent Asshole Theory

Of course the Internet was always full of awful. Assholes have been trolling since at least 1993. “Don’t read the comments” is way older than five years old. But it’s different now; the assholes are more organized, their victims are often knowingly and strategically targeted, and many seem to have calcified from assholedom into actual evil. What’s changed?

The Intransigent Asshole Theory holds that the only thing that’s changed is that more assholes are online and they’ve had more time to find each other and agglomerate into a kind of noxious movement. They aren’t that large in number. Say that a mere three percent of the online population are, actually, the evil stereotypes that we perceive so many to be.

If three of 100 people are known to be terrible human beings, the other 97 can identify them and organize to defend themselves with relative ease. 97 is well within Dunbar’s number after all. But what about 30 of a 1,000? That gets more challenging, if those thirty band together; the non-awful people have to form fairly large groups. How about 300 of 10,000? Or 3,000 of 100,000? 3 million of 100 million? Suddenly three percent doesn’t seem like such a small number after all.

I chose three percent because it’s the example used by Nassim Taleb in his essay/chapter “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.” Adopting his argument slightly, if only 3% of the online population really wants the online world to be horrible, ultimately they can force it to be, because the other 97% can — as empirical evidence shows — live with a world in which the Internet is often basically a cesspool, whereas those 3% apparently cannot live with a world in which it is not.

Only a very small number of people comment on articles. But they are devoted to it; and, as a result, “don’t read the comments,” became a cliché. Is it really so surprising that “don’t read the comments” spread to “Facebook is for fake outrage and Twitter is for abuse,” given that Facebook and Twitter are explicitly designed to spread high-engagement items, i.e. the most outrageous ones? Really the only thing that’s surprising is that it took this long to become so widespread.

Worst of all — when you combine the Uncanny Social Valley Theory with the Intransigent Asshole Theory and the high-engagement outrage-machine algorithms, you get the situation where, even if only 3% of people actually are irredeemable assholes, a full 30% or more of them seem that way to us. And the situation spirals ever downwards.

“Wait,” you may think, “but what if they didn’t design their social networks that way?” Well, that takes us to the third argument, which isn’t a theory so much as an inarguable fact:

by Jon Evans, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: The Trouble With Quitting Facebook Is That We Like Facebook]

How Companies are Responding to the New Tax Bill

This is going to be a long post on my experience with the recent tax reform.

I work in finance for a small global company and needed to understand how the tax reform legislation would affect us. I read the all high status financial press, but the information provided was very low quality for my needs. I found that one big 4 firm and two law firms had good quality material online that gave me the information I needed to have productive discussions with our accounting firm and make informed decisions for our company.

Between my research online and the need to explain things to the boss, owners and other stakeholders, I began to see one of the biggest impacts of the tax reform was the destruction of tax shelters used by many US tech companies. Now, here is a claim I am less certain about: some firms have been and will be net losers by their use of creative tax strategies in the past. I expected to see this idea expressed more widely or at least investigated. (...)

This is not about whether the tax reform was good or bad. It’s about what it means to a good chunk of the corporate world, mainly, but not entirely tech companies.

Imagine a thousand tall towers all collapsing simultaneously. Imagine the noise, the pain, the horror of incomprehension, seeing dimly through the dust, ears ringing. That’s what was felt by a subset of tax lawyers, CFOs, CEOs and accounting firms all around the world. The US tax reform did have an impact on individuals, sure, but It was also about blowing up an enormous edifice of tax avoidance. There may not be many of us, but I feel this has been largely overlooked in the media.

For many years, companies have been placing their IP, booking their sales and paying themselves transfer prices to low tax jurisdictions to avoid US taxes. And yet all this was and is illegal unless:

1) There was a real underlying business purpose to it.
2) The business purpose was not merely to reduce taxes.
Sometimes only the thinnest veneer of business purpose was invoked. Then you would get a law firm to write an Opinion Letter which said what you were doing was legal because reasons and you could rely on this Opinion Letter to stay out of jail. Nevertheless, setting up the correct legal framework to avoid taxes was expensive. (A few years ago someone quoted me a price of about $2million to set up something like that for where I worked. I never did it though.)

And now none of this tax strategy works. It’s all over.

US corporate tax at 35% was among the highest in the world, even though effective rates were lower due to tax strategies. The high rate encouraged tax avoidance strategies, that for many companies was borderline (ref. the trouble Caterpillar is in now), and also had significant costs. This incentivized spending that had no real productive purpose. And it encouraged inversions, i.e. moving corporate headquarters out of the US into another tax jurisdiction.

The US also had a weird worldwide system where all a company’s income was taxed together. However, if a foreign subsidiary of a US company kept their profits, those profits were not taxed. The rules here were complex. To highly simplify, if a company kept their foreign profits overseas they would not pay US tax on those profits. The dominant tax avoidance strategy used by US companies involved creating profits in foreign subsidiaries, creatively.

The thing is, these shelters often don’t last forever. Major tax reforms don’t happen often, but they do clear out many abusive shelters.

As a historical example, do you recall seeing video of buildings in Grand Cayman where there are literally thousands of companies registered there? That was the great tax evasion effort of a couple generations ago. Then the application of the rules 1) & 2) destroyed that tax strategy. Corporations could not point to an underlying business reason to have their investment portfolios domiciled in Grand Cayman as opposed to anywhere else. There have been many other geographically based tax avoidance strategies that were eventually blown up by European or US regulators, e.g. Jersey Islands, Malta, Cyprus. And others.

Caterpillar put a formal sales office in Geneva. Many others created profits in Ireland where they had a 12% tax to domicile their IP. Other countries were used as well. These countries had a lower tax rate than the US 35% and as long as they didn’t repatriate profits technically, they had no US tax, even though the US was, in theory taxing all profits worldwide at 35%. These companies’ foreign subsidiaries creatively created foreign profits could then be deposited in a US bank, which could be used as collateral for the parent company. Eventually, this tax avoidance strategy started to become embarrassing to US authorities. (...)

Back to US corporate tax. A lot of companies were able to get their effective tax rates down into the low teens. Using the embarrassing strategy I described. The CBO estimated the average marginal rate was 18.6%, others have estimated more like 27%, the truth is nobody really knows.

With the recent tax reform the corporate rate was reduced to 21% from 35%. Kinda average for the developed world, but fabulous for domestic companies that didn’t have good tax strategies available to them.

With the recent tax reform companies have to pay tax, 15.5% on all the profits they previously sheltered from US tax (8% if you invested in real property). That’s why you see stories of companies like Apple paying $38 billion dollars in tax from prior profits of foreign subsidiaries.

And the expensive tax shelters they set up have to keep running. They can’t just shut them down because of 1) and 2) above. If they did just shut them down, it would be close to an admission of guilt for tax fraud. I find this both weird and sort of beautiful.

There has been some bad journalism about this, even in the high status financial press.

Several stories about corporate quarterly earnings calls have featured CEOs explaining that their effective tax rates are going UP, even though the tax rate was lowered, because specific shelters don’t work anymore. Then a journalist asks something like, “so will you shut down the operation in Ireland?” The CEO responds, “No, Ireland is an important part of our business.” The stories never note that the CEO has to say that or the CEO would be almost admitting to fraud.

Eventually, the tax strategies that are now an expensive waste, can be unwound. You have to let enough time go by to let them get “old and cold.” After a couple/three years a company can simply be assumed to be changing business strategy.

by mrjeremyfade, Commenter, Slate Star Codex | Read more:

Without Belief in a God, but Never Without Belief in a Devil.

Eric Hoffer wrote The True Believer in 1951. One prefers to think of the hippie 60’s, or the raging 70’s, or the majorly moral 80’s, when they discuss mass movements. But all of those preyed on the same kinds of people, and followed similar patterns to, the Beatniks and the Birchers. It also immediately shifts us away from the more popular model of “economic dissatisfaction”. I don’t mean to imply that poverty is unimportant for mass movements – economic discontent is one of the primary drivers – but that it’s not alone capable of explaining their rise. The ’50s were horrifically unequal in other ways, but they aren’t a by-word for mass poverty. Perhaps more telling: neither the Beats nor the Birchers arose from the impoverished classes. (...)

Hoffer is most famous for (what’s now called) “Horseshoe Theory”, which postulates that extremes are always closer to one another than to moderates on either side. He thinks something similar, although I’m not sure he would agree with our common use. I’ve heard basically two arguments for horseshoe theory, one better and one worse: 1) the bad one, that “extremism is extremism” which is tautologically true but explains approximately nothing and, 2) that effective tactics will be adopted by extremist parties, making their actions the same if not their intentions. This is not exactly true, but with some qualifications it’s a lot closer.

What Hoffer thinks extremes share is neither ideology nor praxis. He thinks they share a hatred of the present, a desire for some vague future, and that their behavior is predicated on this. Here’s the passage that gets the most play:

In reality the boundary line between radical and reactionary is not always distinct. The reactionary manifests radicalism when he comes to recreate his ideal past. His image of the past is based less on what it actually was than on what he wants the future to be. He innovates more than he reconstructs. A somewhat similar shift occurs in the case of the radical when he goes about building his new world. He feels the need for practical guidance, and since he has rejected and destroyed the present he is compelled to link the new world with some point in the past. If he has to employ violence in shaping the new, his view of man’s nature darkens and approaches closer to that of the reactionary.

The reason for this commonality, for this shared deprecation of the present, has to do with the “state” of a person that joins (active) mass movements, and the way that mass movements exacerbate this quality. There’s not necessarily a connection between the current cause of frustration and whatever heaven will “resolve” it. Indeed: to find the “cause” would be to dwell on the present, which is precisely what it seeks to avoid.

This state is what Hoffer calls frustration. (...)

Hoffer doesn’t mean to explain precisely why humans get frustrated psychologically or politically. He’s more interested in what happens after it exists. Frustration is useful because it’s the only common factor among the disparate groups that make up an early mass movement. This is apparent from his taxonomy of the frustrated (Part II), and I’ll give you the chapter titles without going into detail: The Poor (subdivided into The New Poor; the Abjectly Poor; the Free Poor; the Creative Poor; the Unified Poor); Misfits; The Inordinately Selfish; The Ambitious Facing Unlimited Opportunities; Minorities; The Bored; The Sinners, i.e. quite a wide array of people.

The impetus to join a movement appears among the poor and the wealthy, so it can’t be strictly economic (the abjectly poor aren’t actually frustrated: the chapter is instead about why they aren’t). It appears among the unemployed and the ambitious, so it can’t just be “a job”. It appears among the smart and the stupid, so it’s not simple intelligence. What these groups instead share is dissatisfaction with the self and an attempt to substitute their self for a larger group identity. Or, this:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause.

Frustration in Hoffer’s lexicon, is never only frustration with “the system” or the status quo. It is always, always frustration with yourself. Even that frustration with the system is your own relation to it. This doesn’t mean it’s unjustified. It might be, like if the system stole your wife, but it might not be (examples abound). Its objective justification is fundamentally irrelevant. The individual always feels that it is.

Hoffer often talks about “substituting”, and the above passage is an example of it. One of the drives of the frustrated is to substitute an unsatisfactory self for some other thing. The dissatisfaction is not merely self-image, but fundamentally about action. You can tell yourself that you’re “good and perfect and beautiful” all day every day, but that’s not going to make you hate yourself less. At least the larger group you choose does something, or can do something.

Again, this might be justified or not: Perhaps you really do have the best start-up idea ever and Those Bastards are keeping the capital from you and destroying your life. Or maybe you have a notion that you’re “meant for something”, couldn’t figure out what and didn’t bother to try, and now you work a soul-crushing job clearly meant for [losers] that are definitely worse than you. Or The Onion. Or you’re incompetent but can’t admit it. Or you’re incompetent but only in this context and genuinely are meant for better things (if you read any link, make it that one; Ben Grierson is not the object of opprobrium here). All of this will result in the same: the sense that life has no meaning.

The frustrated cannot derive satisfaction from acting, which means that they can’t derive it from the present. Something else has to fill the void, and that something cannot be practical acts in the present. There are two reasons, mutually exclusive: For some, successfully finding that would reduce frustration and make them focus on the present rather than the future. For others, it would just be one more failure, another more empty nothing, another piece of evidence that the world is against you.

Hoffer:

There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. (...)

One framework for understanding mass movements looks quite similar up until the end. It goes something like this, subbing in terms: populism is the result of [resentment]. The populist movement advances the desires of its adherents over and against an outgroup. “We are the 99%!” means: we’ll take what we want from the rich. Bad for the rich, but certainly good for the 99%. In this view, the ills of a mass movement are their violence, or their illberalism, or their [other].

This is not what Hoffer’s saying. Were that the case, his final sentence would read: “…automatically advances when it seconds the interests of the frustrated.” Mass movements do the opposite: they pretend to give you power, while stealing what little you had; they pretend to solve your problems, while entrenching them. Movements make the frustrated more frustrated and they self-perpetuate with no regard for those who perpetuate them. The seed that they sow is frustration.

This is for one obvious reason: competition. Groups that maintain frustration, or are better at sowing it, will outcompete the others. The strength of a movement is directly proportional to its size and the fanatacism of its adherents, and the fanatacism of its adherents is directly proportional to the frustration they’re trying to escape. Mass movements that are good at what they do: a) make previously content outsiders frustrated; b) further frustrate their adherents while pretending to advance the movement. This means that the strongest mass movements are inevitably going to be the ones that are the best at not delivering the goods. Any movement that actually succeeds for (advances the interests of) its frustrated adherents will make them less frustrated. Hence, they’ll stop being members. Or it will succeed at its purpose, they’ll still be frustrated, and they’ll just join another.

Modern mass movements are actually pretty inexplicable without this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say [group] never does anything of value, and they’d be much better off if they [achieved this material goal]. I think Hoffer explains this perfectly. To achieve that goal would enervate the movement, and another would fill the void.

(That doesn’t mean it never takes power, just that in taking power it either devolves into an organization or manages to accomplish zero of its utopic plans.)

This sort of sounds good, depending on what the end goal of a mass movement is. But the problem is that it doesn’t mean movements do “nothing”, it means they frantically commit to useless, meaningless tasks that appear to solve something (Hoffer calls this “united action” – it dulls the mind and weakens the person). So instead of fighting the system, they suddenly start fighting random people taken to “represent it” but that specifically have no such power. Or they spend all their time writing manifestos and critiques, screaming and marching for no cause, making everyone else frustrated but fixing absolutely nothing. Or they turn on each other, trying to virtuously succeed at tasks they hate which have no real end. I really need to stress this: it kind of sounds like I’m attacking the left, but this is bipartisan, omnipartisan. All movements have this behavior: think of your own. It’s easy.

by Lou Keep, sam[]zdat |  Read more:

Image: The Silence, Ingmar Bergman

[ed. I've been a fan of Eric Hoffer (the "longshoreman philosopher") all my life, and The True Believer always on my bookshelf.]