A Big El Niño is Looming

How warm water in the Pacific shapes storms, droughts, and record heat around the world.

El Niño is the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, and this year’s El Niño is poised to be a big one, sending shock waves into weather patterns around the world. It’s likely to set new heat records, energize rainfall in South America, fuel drought in Africa, and disrupt the global economy. It may already have helped fuel early-season heat waves in Asia this year.

“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, in a statement earlier this month. “This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. (...)

How does El Niño work?

Fishers off the coast of Ecuador and Peru coined the term El Niño in the 19th century to describe a warm water current that regularly built up along the west coast of South America around Christmas (“El Niño” means “the boy,” a reference to the Christ child.)

The warm water turned out to be part of a much larger complicated system connecting seas and skies all over the world. Scientists now know that the Pacific Ocean cycles between warm, neutral, and cool phases roughly every two to seven years, inducing changes in the ocean and in the atmosphere. This back-and-forth is called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s “the strongest fluctuation of the climate system on the planet,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (You can read a more detailed explanation of El Niño’s mechanics here.)

The key thing to understand is that the Pacific Ocean is huge. Huuuuge. Huuuuuuuuge. And that’s just the surface area; the Pacific averages 13,000 feet in depth but can dip as low as 36,000 feet. Water isn’t just moving north, south, east, and west, but up and down. These currents are driven by wind as well as temperature and salt gradients.

Earth’s oceans also act as a giant thermal battery. They’ve absorbed upward of 90 percent of the warming humans have induced from burning fossil fuels, and the Pacific, at least, appears to be warming particularly fast.

All this adds up to a world-changing amount of energy packed into one big ocean.

During ENSO’s neutral phase, wind pushes warm water in the Pacific around the equator from east to west. This lets warm water pool near Indonesia and raises sea levels there by 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) above normal compared to the coast of South America. The warmer water near Asia evaporates more readily and fuels rainstorms there. And as surface waters get pushed away from South America, water from deeper in the ocean rises, bringing with it valuable nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. This phenomenon is called upwelling, and it’s critical for nourishing sea life. About half the fish in the world are caught in upwelling zones.

When El Niño starts picking up, this engine shifts gears. The trade winds slow down and the warm water near Asia starts sloshing back eastward across the Pacific, reaching the coast of South America. The drift in warm water also moves evaporation and rain such that southeast Asia and Australia tend to get drier while Peru and Ecuador typically see more precipitation.

“It creates a lot of convection and a lot of thunderstorms in a part of the world that doesn’t always have that activity,” said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at NOAA. “You release a lot of energy and a lot of heat into the atmosphere and this creates waves that propagate in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere symmetrically.”

These perturbations can then deflect weather patterns across the world. For instance, in the US, El Niño typically leads to less rainfall in the Pacific Northwest and more in the Southwest. But it’s one of several factors that influences the weather, making it tricky to anticipate just how it will play out in a given year. “It’s not always a one-to-one relationship,” Amaya said. (...)

This engine can also shift into reverse. Tradewinds blowing east to west across the Pacific get stronger, cooling the region around the equator, a phenomenon known as a La Niña. This tends to have a cooling effect over the whole planet.

What can we expect this year?

El Niño typically picks up over the summer and shows its strongest effects over the winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Right now, forecasts drawing on ocean buoys, sensors, satellite measurements, and computer models show that a strong one is brewing as the eastern Pacific Ocean steadily warms up just below its surface.

“The vast majority ... are assuming that we’re going to have a big El Niño this winter,” said Amaya. “I think we’re definitely expecting to break global temperature records this year.”

Part of what’s making this so jarring is that ENSO is coming out of an unusually long La Niña phase. They typically last one to two years, but the world has been in one since 2020. “There’s only been three triple-dip La Niñas in the last 50 years: One in 1973 to 76, one from 1998 to 2001, and then this one,” said McPhaden. That has allowed more heat energy to accumulate in the ocean and may have helped cushion some of the warming due to climate change. However, the World Meteorological Organization noted that the past eight years were still the hottest on record.

by Umair Irfan , Vox | Read more:
Image: NOAA

Joe Walsh & Barnstorm

[ed. Why he ever hooked up with those loser Eagles, I'll never know. See also: Joe the guitar perfectionist: StarLicks Master Sessions with Joe Walsh.]

The Average American Millennial

* Meet the average American millennial, who has an $8,000 net worth, is delaying life milestones because of student-loan debt, and still relies on parents for money

"There's no way around it: The average American millennial is financially behind.

Faced with a high cost of living, staggering student-loan debt, and the fallout of the Great Recession, American millennials are trying to make ends meet in the midst of The Great American Affordability Crisis."

* Meet the average American millennial, who's a parent and homeowner with a net worth of $128,000 and hoping for student-debt relief

"Millennials are growing up.

The oldest of the generation, which includes anyone born between 1981 and 1996, is now past the age of 40. In recent years, many have checked off major life milestones including buying a home and having children, and some could even be on the verge of a midlife crisis. (...)

Despite these obstacles, the average millennial is faring better financially than they have in the past. And while some of this may simply be a byproduct of getting older — people tend to earn more over the course of their careers — some experts have argued that even compared to past generations, millennials are doing pretty well financially these days."

[ed. Those millennials are sure amazing. They've turned it all around in just three years! Both articles from Business Insider - March, 2020 and May, 2023. (h/t via: Twitter)]

In a Gift to Polluting Industries, Supreme Court Rolls Back Clean Water Act Protections

The vast majority of wetlands in the United States — more than 100 million acres — are no longer protected by the Clean Water Act, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Sackett v. EPA. Wetlands are critically important to clean drinking water and flood mitigation; they’re also effective at sequestering carbon and a boon to drought resilience, storing water during dry periods. But in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court brushed off peer-reviewed science and plain old common sense that you can’t protect the water downstream, which even the majority agreed is covered by the law, if you’re polluting it upstream.

The case was filed by a wealthy Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, who were annoyed that they were required to get a special permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to build on their land because of its proximity to Priest Lake. The Sacketts’ land contains wetlands, but because the wetlands are separated from the lake by a road, they argued the permit was unnecessary. It’s almost certain they would have gotten the permit had they applied, but they opted to sue instead. The court took the Sacketts’ case as an opportunity to open up a broader discussion about what exactly the Clean Water Act is meant to protect, changing the law completely and removing protections from any wetland not immediately connected to a body of water.

Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who broke with his conservative colleagues, accused the majority of having effectively “rewritten” the Clean Water Act, which was originally passed in 1972 and updated in 1977.

“Since 1977, when Congress explicitly included ‘adjacent’ wetlands within the act’s coverage, the Army Corps has adopted a variety of interpretations of its authority over those wetlands — some more expansive and others less expansive,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But throughout those 45 years and across all eight presidential administrations, the Army Corps has always included in the definition of ‘adjacent wetlands’ not only wetlands adjoining covered waters but also those wetlands that are separated from covered waters by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like.”

In the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court applied a new interpretation of the word “adjacent,” removing protections for any wetlands that are not immediately adjoining lakes, streams, rivers, or oceans, which will have a profound impact on coastal communities around the country. “Wetlands are essential for protecting disadvantaged communities, which are often in low-lying areas, from flooding,” Nick Torrey, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said. Torrey added that wetlands are also critical to the many fishing businesses in the southeast, where he practices. “We have a saying: No wetlands, no seafood,” he said.

“The court’s approach today was to disregard several decades’ worth of precedent interpreting the Clean Water Act,” Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, said. For the past 40 years, the court has interpreted the word “adjacent” to mean what it does to everyone else; in this ruling, five justices said “well actually” adjacent means adjoining, so if there is anything in between a wetland and the water, that wetland doesn’t need to be protected.

It’s not a decision underpinned by science, but rather a legal invention known as the “clear statement rule,” a term the justices use when they want to assert their power to ignore Congress’s wishes and interpret the law solely as written. “The court is increasingly using the clear statement rule to narrow laws written years ago by Congresses that sought to create environmental protections like the Clean Water Act,” Sankar said. 

by Amy Westervelt, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images
[ed. This is a huge deal - one that a variety of industries and special interest groups have been pushing for decades. Environmental destruction to follow (thanks again, Alito).]

Is Cybersecurity an Unsolvable Problem?

In November 1988, a graduate student at Cornell University named Robert Morris, Jr. inadvertently sparked a national crisis by unleashing a self-replicating computer worm on a VAX 11/750 computer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Morris had no malicious intent; it was merely a scientific experiment to see how many computers he could infect. But he made a grievous error, setting his reinfection rate much too high. The worm spread so rapidly that it brought down the entire computer network at Cornell University, crippled those at several other universities, and even infiltrated the computers at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories.

Making matters worse, his father was a computer scientist and cryptographer who was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center. Even though it was unintentional and witnesses testified that Morris didn't have "a fraudulent or dishonest bone in his body," he was convicted of felonious computer fraud. The judge was merciful during sentencing. Rather than 15–20 years in prison, Morris got three years of probation with community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine. He went on to found Y Combinator with his longtime friend Paul Graham, among other accomplishments.

The "Morris Worm" is just one of five hacking cases that Scott Shapiro highlights in his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. Shapiro is a legal philosopher at Yale University, but as a child, his mathematician father—who worked at Bell Labs—sparked an interest in computing by bringing home various components, like microchips, resistors, diodes, LEDs, and breadboards. Their father/son outings included annual attendance at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers convention in New York City. Then, a classmate in Shapiro's high school biology class introduced him to programming on the school's TRS-80, and Shapiro was hooked. He moved on to working on an Apple II and majored in computer science in college but lost interest afterward and went to law school instead.

With his Yale colleague Oona Hathaway, Shapiro co-authored a book called The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, a sweeping historical analysis of the laws of war that spans from Hugo Grotius, the early 17th century father of international law, all the way to 2014. That experience raised numerous questions about the future of warfare—namely, cyberwar and whether the same "rules" would apply. The topic seemed like a natural choice for his next book, particularly given Shapiro's background in computer science and coding.

Despite that background, "I honestly had no idea what to say about it," Shapiro told Ars. "I just found it all extremely confusing." He was then asked to co-teach a special course, "The Law and Technology of Cyber Conflict," with Hathaway and Yale's computer science department. But the equal mix of law students and computer science students trying to learn about two very different highly technical fields proved to be a challenging combination. "It was the worst class I've ever taught in my career," said Shapiro. "At any given time, half the class was bored and the other half was confused. I learned nothing from it, and nor did any of the students."

That experience goaded Shapiro to spend the next few years trying to crack that particular nut. He brushed up on C, x86 assembly code, and Linux and immersed himself in the history of hacking, achieving his first hack at the age of 52. But he also approached the issue from his field of expertise. "I'm a philosopher, so I like to go to first principles," he said. "But computer science is only a century old, and hacking, or cybersecurity, is maybe a few decades old. It's a very young field, and part of the problem is that people haven't thought it through from first principles." The result was Fancy Bear Goes Phishing.

The book is a lively, engaging read filled with fascinating stories and colorful characters: the infamous Bulgarian hacker known as Dark Avenger, whose identity is still unknown; Cameron LaCroix, a 16-year-old from south Boston notorious for hacking into Paris Hilton's Sidekick II in 2005; Paras Jha, a Rutgers student who designed the "Mirai botnet"—apparently to get out of a calculus exam—and nearly destroyed the Internet in 2016 when he hacked Minecraft; and of course, the titular Fancy Bear hack by Russian military intelligence that was so central to the 2016 presidential election. (Fun fact: Shapiro notes that John von Neumann "built a self-reproducing automaton in 1949, decades before any other hacker... [and] he wrote it without a computer.")

But Shapiro also brings some penetrating insight into why the Internet remains so insecure decades after its invention, as well as how and why hackers do what they do. And his conclusion about what can be done about it might prove a bit controversial: there is no permanent solution to the cybersecurity problem. "Cybersecurity is not a primarily technological problem that requires a primarily engineering solution," Shapiro writes. "It is a human problem that requires an understanding of human behavior." That's his mantra throughout the book: "Hacking is about humans." And it portends, for Shapiro, "the death of 'solutionism.'"

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[ed. Personal privacy died a long time ago.]

Jane Madgwick, Swallocky  

via:

Encountering the High Arctic

How nature is revealed when you are most helpless.

“How would you like to go to the high Arctic?”

It was the National Geographic calling, and no one turned down Big Yellow. Not because the prose was great—it wasn’t—but because the money was, and they sent you places you would otherwise never go. Since I knew nothing about the Arctic, I put the editor off until I could do some reading: The sun doesn’t set from May to mid-August… The vastness of the area is difficult to imagine… If we fail to appreciate the challenges we can expect to meet with difficulties…

Daunting photographs of harsh botanical deserts full of nunataks (rocky peaks on glaciers), fluvial braids, hanging tributary valleys, and lichen fields. Ptarmigans exploding from snowbanks and white wolves casting along silt-laden rivers and fjords gouged out by glaciers. Narwhals with twisted tusks in mythic, inky seas, ghosted by white belugas and killer whales stalking you under black ice. Polar bears doing with you whatever they please.

I agreed to go. “We want you to write for the armchair traveler,” the editor said. “No politics, nothing fancy, strictly factual.”

He sent me to a resident expert in Washington, DC, who dreamily twisted his Salvador Dalí mustache. “It will be summer there, which means daylight all the time. And flowers—mountain avens, locoweed, poppies, bumblebees. Maybe even songbirds.” (...)

But no one at National Geographic seemed to know what I would need. The editor sent me down to the Geographic basement, full of old tenting, moldy sleeping bags, outdated frame backpacks. So for weeks I hounded clerks in Appalachian Outfitters, Hudson’s Bay, and other enablers of the wilderness-struck, lavishly spending the Society’s money for a down coat Michelin might have designed and a raucous little pack stove that would have to boil water for a hundred pounds of freeze-dried food. Ten thousand dollars went just for traveler’s checks. My editor didn’t even want me to think about buying a gun, but my contact in the Canadian interior department explained that a 12-gauge pump shotgun with a slug barrel was standard issue for anyone of their own in the Arctic. A friend in Virginia bought one for me, and I drove up to another friend’s house in Pennsylvania to practice with it.

Six white plastic buckets stand in a row on a freight platform at National Airport, scrawled over with Magic Marker hearts by my daughter Susanna to bring me luck. I collected them from Dunkin’ Donuts, washed out the smells of raspberry and chocolate mousse, and filled them with dehydrated lasagna, scrambled eggs, beef stroganoff, shrimp creole, all in foil. My interior frame pack holds an audio device the size of an aspirin tin for playing Pachelbel’s Canon, The Four Seasons, Patsy Cline. Also, a North Col sleeping bag, two pairs of gloves, a chamois shirt, a heavy wool sweater, wool trousers, goggles, binoculars, cook kit, fuel bottle, canteen, maps, a compass, a Buck knife, a Sierra cup, matches, parachute cord, Gortex rain gear, biodegradable toilet paper, insect repellent.

The ticket agent regards my shoal of utilitarian gear without enthusiasm. My jeans and corduroy jacket sharply contrast with the surrounding corporate tack. But I have a seat in first‑class—this is the old Geographic. I’ve just had a good night’s rest in Montreal, where I’ve been put up in a fancy hotel that sends up salmon and chardonnay on a trolley while my pack rests against flocked wallpaper: lip balm, antiseptic ointment, elastic bandage, moleskin, surgical blade, pemmican, suturing strips, tea bags, Hav‑A‑Wipes, morphine. I’m well provisioned, in great physical shape after working at it for a month, and scared.

Frobisher Bay’s radar dome beckons like a giant, teed‑up Titleist at the edge of a cerulean sea. This is the northeastern corner of the continent: sculpted gobs of melting glacier under white, desolate headlands, sunlight glinting off them in one continuous searing. Plumes of steam rise among a cluster of sheds and steel mesh nearby. The heavy equipment operators who got drunk as soon as we left Montreal noisily deplane. Out the window I see a coffin go into the hold, watched by an Inuit couple in matching Velour jogging suits, their soft, round faces passive. Then we are aloft again.

The plane’s bias is northwesterly, across an inky Arctic Sea, without the contracting longitudinal lines on the maps I have studied, all of which converge on the Pole. I am bound for Ellesmere Island, a vast orogeny still birthing after 300 million years, with an intermediary stop in the town of Resolute on Cornwallis Island under glaciated hills, the adjacent sea littered with ice shards. Distant cliffs levitate and then are gone, then back again, shimmering in the thermals.  (...)

The oversized tires on the stubby Twin Otter transport plane have been cut down on a lathe to provide the soft-skinned buoyancy necessary for landing on tussocks. The pilot and co-pilot grip the overhead throttle as we accelerate, the big droning De Havilland engines changing tone once we’re in the air. I can smell the fuel in fifty-gallon barrels stowed behind my seat.

We fly over a pink smear on the sea ice below where a seal was recently killed by a polar bear—Ursus arcticus. I’ve already heard too many stories about the polars: an archeologist on Admiralty Inlet pulled by his head from his sleeping bag, two roughnecks on a drilling rig in the Beaufort Sea walking out onto the metal deck to relieve themselves and a bear crouching in the darkness breaking the neck of one with a single blow. Twice I’ve been told that the last thing you see in a blizzard is a black tennis ball, which is, in fact, the polar bear’s nose. 

by James Conaway, The Hedgehog |  Read more:

Image: BlueIce64 via reddit

[ed. "How nature is revealed when you are most helpless." And completely alone.]

Tina Turner

via:

[ed. She did it her way.]

His Enormous Philanthropy

One-click on a fascinator, readers, because there’s a mega-wedding in the offing. Congratulations to Mr Jeff Bezos, Amazon kajillionaire, and Ms Lauren Sánchez, bralette-wearing philanthropist/immense force of nature. Although news of the couple’s engagement seeped out this week after Lauren was spotted wearing a diamond ring in the south of France, Jeff has yet to release a formal announcement. So let’s just draft one for him: “Ladies and gents, she said Proceed to Checkout.”

Now look, you already know Jeff. World’s third-richest man. Went to space. Looks like he should be appearing above a daytime TV caption reading “I make £40 a month as a Vin Diesel escort and my fiancee loves it!” But are you fully across Lauren? I’ll be honest: we haven’t met. But from the outside looking in, my nose pressed against the glass of Google Images, I simply cannot get enough of this Nietzschean superwoman, the final form of the East German silicon-doping programme, who has missile-titted her way into my consciousness and now captivates me twice weekly with her insouciance, her outfits, and her observations on just how difficult philanthropy is to do. Seriously: no one has ever thought harder about how to help poors while mooching round a Grand Prix enclosure with some kind of You Could Never Access All My Areas lanyard dangling from her belt loop. (...)

Anyway, the now-affianced Bezos and Sánchez are currently touring Europe on Jeff’s new yacht, Koru, a 417ft three-master/three-peniser that is the largest such vessel ever built. To put things into perspective, this yacht is so big it has its own yacht – a 246ft “support vessel”, which lugs around boring little things like the helicopter pad and reportedly some kind of personal submarine. And this week, for the first time, we saw Koru’s figurehead. Ships’ figureheads have traditionally come in various forms, of course: mermaids, Neptunes, angels – and now, Fox-News-anchor-in-transparent-singlet-with-erect-nipples. Suck on it, history! Our century is so the best. The Bezos yacht figurehead is fingering a large pendant necklace, and appears to be about to say something. “Draw me like one of your French girls”? Either way, the vast boat it adorns only recently left the shipyard, hopefully while some urchin child on the dock cackled: “Yeah but you’ll never be cool, will you, Bezos – YOU’LL NEVER BE COOL!”

But will the Amazon boss ever, really, even be a genuine philanthropist? We do seem to be at the stage of human intellectual decay where anyone who is a multibillionaire is also automatically described as a “philanthropist”, when in many cases “misanthropist” would be more supported by the evidence. For instance, I’m forever seeing Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed described as a philanthropist. Is he the one who has at least two of his children missing/kidnapped at any given moment? Honestly, so what if he’s built a sanitation programme? I should hope so.

Back to Lauren, though, who last year declared: “I’m immersing myself in philanthropy and strategic giving.” Which sounds a lot more fun than Amazon warehouse workers immersing themselves in strategic peeing-in-bottles. Yet it turns out this stuff is hard. “You want to give money away,” claimed Lauren. “You want to know that it’s helping people and it’s going to continue to help people, and that it’s going to the right places. You could give it not-strategically. You can just give it away! But, we take it seriously.” Mm. It feels like they’ve thought of everything except Amazon paying tax like normal businesses.

by Marina Hyde, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Clive Mason/Formula 1/Getty Images

Haters Will Say It’s Photoshopped

Adobe is set to give new meaning to the act of photoshopping an image.

Starting this week, the company will begin adding features to the popular image-editing program that let users alter images with AI. The new generative fill tool can replace objects or backgrounds with imagery produced from a text prompt in a way that’s meant to blend seamlessly with the rest of the image.

Haters Will Say It’s Photoshopped (Tech Brew)

Frank Zappa

[ed. Charva...Charva...I loved you through and through. I loved you since in grammar school when we were sniffing glue...]

Two Decades of Prison Did Not Prepare Me for the Horrors of County Jail

When I was 22 years old, I committed robbery and murder. I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 45 years, of which I have so far served two decades. During that time, I’ve experienced the squalor and dangerous conditions of various state prisons. I’ve lived in a crumbling penitentiary built in the 1800s. I’ve been put in isolation for weeks on end because of Covid exposure and infection. Still, I was not prepared for what I found when I was transferred to a county jail for two weeks last December.

Along with people serving short sentences for relatively minor offenses, jails house people who are awaiting trial and either didn’t get bail or simply couldn’t pay it — people, that is, who have not been convicted of any crime.

Despite that fact, conditions in these facilities are often worse, and sometimes much worse, than those in the prisons where people who are convicted of the worst crimes are confined. Jails throw people together in overcrowded units that may be controlled by the most violent people in the room. Like prisons, jails house a disproportionate number of people experiencing addiction or chronic health conditions but jails lack the resources to treat them and adequate staffing overall. Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton University who focuses on policing and criminal justice reform, told me that jails “regularly rely on even harsher conditions of confinement” than prisons do.

As a prison writer, journalist and criminal justice activist, I try to communicate to anyone who will listen that the vast majority of incarcerated people will eventually return to their communities. The trauma they suffer on the inside comes with them. Just as a very short time in solitary confinement can cause lasting harm, weeks or months in county jail can have a huge negative impact on people’s lives, even after they are released. What happens in jails doesn’t stay in jails.

Ethan Frenchman, a lawyer in Washington who advocates on behalf of people with disabilities in jails, told me that while the nation’s roughly 1,500 state prisons are operated or overseen by 50 states, the 3,000 or so jails “are operated by who knows how many hundreds or thousands of different jurisdictions,” making it extremely hard to get reliable information about what goes on there, or to enforce any kind of accountability.

One data point is unmistakable: suicide rates. Suicides are the leading cause of death in jails, where they occur at a much higher rate than in prisons. Big city jails, like the complex on Rikers Island, are infamous for violence, neglect and overcrowding, but they are not outliers. In fact, research by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has found that suicide rates in the nation’s smallest jails were more than six times as high as those in the largest. (...)

Conditions in county jails are bad not just for people suffering from mental illnesses. Prisoners there are often given so little food that they are hungry all the time and must buy more in the commissary. My meals in prison consist of larger portions and far more fruits and vegetables than my meals in jail. To my surprise, I even found myself missing the flavors and variety of prison food. A prisoner in Maine summed up a typical meal in a county jail well when he asked a reporter to “consider eating ground-up gym mat with a little bit of seasoning.” But jail commissaries are so expensive that many people who can’t afford bail also can’t afford anything sold in them. In jail, I saw people beat each other up over commissary food.

Twenty-four packets of Top Ramen noodles that cost $6 on Amazon and just under $8 in my Washington State prison cost $26.40 in the Pierce County Jail’s commissary while I was incarcerated there. A small bag of freeze-dried coffee that costs $3.34 in state prison costs almost $13 in the county jail.

Phone calls to our loved ones, which cost just over a dollar for 20 minutes at a Washington State prison, cost nearly $4 from the county jail. An investigation by the Prison Policy Initiative found that in 20 states, phone calls from jails were at least three times as expensive as calls from state prisons. The calls I made from state prison and the county jail are managed by the same company, Securus Technologies, and I see no legitimate reason they should be three times as expensive at one facility. 

by Christopher Blackwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Robert Gumpert/Redux

via:

Netflix Might Ruin Password Sharing For Everyone

Netflix is betting that a password-sharing crackdown will reverse its dwindling revenue and wavering subscriber count. The company has historically never enforced its policy of one account per household. Now, by making members pay to share their subscriptions with people who live in other homes, Netflix will cash in on all those users they’ve been missing out on for all these years, right?

Well, it might not be that simple.

Netflix — where co-founder and now-former CEO Reed Hastings once said “password sharing is something you have to learn to live with” — told investors last year that password sharing contributed to the streamer’s first loss in subscribers in over a decade. After months of testing throughout Latin and Central America, Netflix finally brought paid sharing to Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, and now, the US. Under its new rules, Netflix wants users to pay an extra $7.99 per month to let just one person outside their household access their subscription.

Many questions remain about how Netflix will actually implement this — and whether it will actually help increase the company’s bottom line. Netflix has warned its investors of a “cancel reaction” several times in the past when talking about paid sharing, meaning that some people will cancel their subscriptions in response to the rollout in their locations. It has already seen that kind of reaction in Spain, where data from the analytics group Kantar found that the streamer lost 1 million users following the crackdown.

But to Netflix execs, the “improved overall revenue” will ultimately outweigh those lost subscriptions. (...)

While Netflix’s $15.49 per month Standard plan lets you watch Netflix on two devices at a time, the $19.99 per month Premium plan allows up to four simultaneous viewers. The shift toward password sharing could mean that some users will opt to go for the $9.99 per month Basic plan instead of canceling their subscription, which allows users to watch Netflix on just one device at a time. This potential trend could deal a blow to Netflix’s average revenue per user (ARPU), which sat at $16.18 in its last earnings report. “The cancellations will hurt, but the downgrades will hurt as well because Netflix can’t make that up in advertising,” Rayburn explains.

Whether or not paid sharing ends up hurting Netflix’s balance sheet, it could have huge implications for the entire streaming industry. Other companies, like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount, are likely looking to see how consumers respond to Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown. If all goes well, other services might want to follow suit, similar to the way we saw several streamers hop on the price hike bandwagon last year.

by Emma Roth, The Verge |  Read more:
Image: Nick Barclay/The Verge

[ed. Seems like a desperation move. The current streaming system is unsustainable and will probably go the way of most big business these days - consolidation around a few major players.] 

There Is No A.I.

There are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it.

The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature. My attitude doesn’t eliminate the possibility of peril: however we think about it, we can still design and operate our new tech badly, in ways that can hurt us or even lead to our extinction. Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.

If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration. (...)

Many of the uses of A.I. that I like rest on advantages we gain when computers get less rigid. Digital stuff as we have known it has a brittle quality that forces people to conform to it, rather than assess it. We’ve all endured the agony of watching some poor soul at a doctor’s office struggle to do the expected thing on a front-desk screen. The face contorts; humanity is undermined. The need to conform to digital designs has created an ambient expectation of human subservience. A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well. We can now imagine a Web site that reformulates itself on the fly for someone who is color-blind, say, or a site that tailors itself to someone’s particular cognitive abilities and styles. A humanist like me wants people to have more control, rather than be overly influenced or guided by technology. Flexibility may give us back some agency.

Still, despite these possible upsides, it’s more than reasonable to worry that the new technology will push us around in ways we don’t like or understand. Recently, some friends of mine circulated a petition asking for a pause on the most ambitious A.I. development. The idea was that we’d work on policy during the pause. The petition was signed by some in our community but not others. I found the notion too hazy—what level of progress would mean that the pause could end? Every week, I receive new but always vague mission statements from organizations seeking to initiate processes to set A.I. policy.

These efforts are well intentioned, but they seem hopeless to me. For years, I worked on the E.U.’s privacy policies, and I came to realize that we don’t know what privacy is. It’s a term we use every day, and it can make sense in context, but we can’t nail it down well enough to generalize. The closest we have come to a definition of privacy is probably “the right to be left alone,” but that seems quaint in an age when we are constantly dependent on digital services. In the context of A.I., “the right to not be manipulated by computation” seems almost correct, but doesn’t quite say everything we’d like it to.

A.I.-policy conversations are dominated by terms like “alignment” (is what an A.I. “wants” aligned with what humans want?), “safety” (can we foresee guardrails that will foil a bad A.I.?), and “fairness” (can we forestall all the ways a program might treat certain people with disfavor?). The community has certainly accomplished much good by pursuing these ideas, but that hasn’t quelled our fears. We end up motivating people to try to circumvent the vague protections we set up. Even though the protections do help, the whole thing becomes a game—like trying to outwit a sneaky genie. The result is that the A.I.-research community communicates the warning that their creations might still kill all of humanity soon, while proposing ever more urgent, but turgid, deliberative processes.

Recently, I tried an informal experiment, calling colleagues and asking them if there’s anything specific on which we can all seem to agree. I’ve found that there is a foundation of agreement. We all seem to agree that deepfakes—false but real-seeming images, videos, and so on—should be labelled as such by the programs that create them. Communications coming from artificial people, and automated interactions that are designed to manipulate the thinking or actions of a human being, should be labelled as well. We also agree that these labels should come with actions that can be taken. People should be able to understand what they’re seeing, and should have reasonable choices in return.

How can all this be done? There is also near-unanimity, I find, that the black-box nature of our current A.I. tools must end. The systems must be made more transparent. We need to get better at saying what is going on inside them and why. This won’t be easy. The problem is that the large-model A.I. systems we are talking about aren’t made of explicit ideas. There is no definite representation of what the system “wants,” no label for when it is doing a particular thing, like manipulating a person. There is only a giant ocean of jello—a vast mathematical mixing. A writers’-rights group has proposed that real human authors be paid in full when tools like GPT are used in the scriptwriting process; after all, the system is drawing on scripts that real people have made. But when we use A.I. to produce film clips, and potentially whole movies, there won’t necessarily be a screenwriting phase. A movie might be produced that appears to have a script, soundtrack, and so on, but it will have been calculated into existence as a whole. Similarly, no sketch precedes the generation of a painting from an illustration A.I. Attempting to open the black box by making a system spit out otherwise unnecessary items like scripts, sketches, or intentions will involve building another black box to interpret the first—an infinite regress.

At the same time, it’s not true that the interior of a big model has to be a trackless wilderness. We may not know what an “idea” is from a formal, computational point of view, but there could be tracks made not of ideas but of people. At some point in the past, a real person created an illustration that was input as data into the model, and, in combination with contributions from other people, this was transformed into a fresh image. Big-model A.I. is made of people—and the way to open the black box is to reveal them.

This concept, which I’ve contributed to developing, is usually called “data dignity.” It appeared, long before the rise of big-model “A.I.,” as an alternative to the familiar arrangement in which people give their data for free in exchange for free services, such as internet searches or social networking. Data dignity is sometimes known as “data as labor” or “plurality research.” The familiar arrangement has turned out to have a dark side: because of “network effects,” a few platforms take over, eliminating smaller players, like local newspapers. Worse, since the immediate online experience is supposed to be free, the only remaining business is the hawking of influence. Users experience what seems to be a communitarian paradise, but they are targeted by stealthy and addictive algorithms that make people vain, irritable, and paranoid.

In a world with data dignity, digital stuff would typically be connected with the humans who want to be known for having made it. In some versions of the idea, people could get paid for what they create, even when it is filtered and recombined through big models, and tech hubs would earn fees for facilitating things that people want to do. Some people are horrified by the idea of capitalism online, but this would be a more honest capitalism. The familiar “free” arrangement has been a disaster.

One of the reasons the tech community worries that A.I. could be an existential threat is that it could be used to toy with people, just as the previous wave of digital technologies have been. Given the power and potential reach of these new systems, it’s not unreasonable to fear extinction as a possible result. Since that danger is widely recognized, the arrival of big-model A.I. could be an occasion to reformat the tech industry for the better.

by Jaron Lanier, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker
[ed. Perhaps, but with the CIA, Pentagon and other international defense agencies deeply involved (and charging full speed ahead) I'm not too optimistic. See also: Whose Planet Are We On? (TomDispatch):

"Still, let’s not forget that AI was created by those of us with LTAI [ed. less than artificial intelligence]. If now left to its own devices (with, of course, a helping hand from the powers that be), it seems reasonable to assume that it will, in some way, essentially repeat the human experience. In fact, consider that a guarantee of sorts. That means it will create beauty and wonder and — yes! — horror beyond compare (and perhaps even more efficiently so). Lest you doubt that, just consider which part of humanity already seems the most intent on pushing artificial intelligence to its limits.

Yes, across the planet, departments of “defense” are pouring money into AI research and development, especially the creation of unmanned autonomous vehicles (think: killer robots) and weapons systems of various kinds, as Michael Klare pointed out recently at TomDispatch when it comes to the Pentagon. In fact, it shouldn’t shock you to know that five years ago (yes, five whole years!), the Pentagon was significantly ahead of the game in creating a Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to, as the New York Times put it, “explore the use of artificial intelligence in combat.” There, it might, in the end — and “end” is certainly an operative word here — speed up battlefield action in such a way that we could truly be entering unknown territory. We could, in fact, be entering a realm in which human intelligence in wartime decision-making becomes, at best, a sideline activity. (...)

The Pentagon, however, instantly responded to that call this way, as David Sanger reported in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials, speaking at technology forums, said they thought the idea of a six-month pause in developing the next generations of ChatGPT and similar software was a bad idea: The Chinese won’t wait, and neither will the Russians.” So, full-speed ahead and skip any international attempts to slow down or control the development of the most devastating aspects of AI!"

[ed. Last quote is a winner. After thousands of years of war, nuanced reasoning still isn't one of humanity's strong points.]

The Cowsills

[ed. Once really popular. See also: The Cowsills: The Heartbreaking Reason Why They Suddenly Disappeared (ed. hint: bad dad manager).

Glen Campbell

[ed. See also: Why THIS Is The Greatest Country Song; and, Wichita Lineman | The greatest song ever? | Guitar Lesson (YouTube).]

Hibernation Artificially Triggered in Breakthrough

In science fiction, space crews are often spared the boredom and inconvenience of long-distance space travel by being placed into a state of suspended animation. Now this goal may have come a step closer after scientists showed that hibernation can be artificially triggered in rodents using ultrasonic pulses.

The advance is seen as significant because the technique was effective in rats – animals that do not naturally hibernate. This raises the prospect that humans may also retain a vestigial hibernation circuit in the brain that could be artificially reactivated.

“If this proves feasible in humans, we could envision astronauts wearing a helmet-like device designed to target the hypothalamus region for inducing a hypothermia and hypometabolism state,” said Hong Chen, an associate professor at Washington University in St Louis, who led the work.

The team first identified a specific group of neurons in a deep brain region called the hypothalamus preoptic area, which were found to be involved in regulating body temperature and metabolism during hibernation. They showed that, in mice, these neurons could be artificially activated using ultrasound, delivered non-invasively through a helmet.

When stimulated, the mice showed a drop in body temperature of about 3C for about one hour. The mice’s metabolism also shifted from using both carbohydrates and fat for energy to only fat, a key feature of torpor, and their heart rates fell by about 47%, all while at room temperature.

The scientists also developed an automatic closed-loop feedback system that delivered an ultrasound pulse to keep the mice in the induced torpor if they showed signs of warming up. This allowed the mice to be kept at 33C in the hibernation-like state for 24 hours. When the ultrasound system was switched off, they woke up again.

The experiments, described in the journal Nature Metabolism, showed that the same device worked in rats, which had a 1C drop in core body temperature when the same brain region was targeted. Chen said the result was “surprising and fascinating” and the team planned to test the technique in larger animals.

by Hannah Devlin, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

[ed. Amazing it's so straightforward and non-invasive.]

The Strange and Fascinating World of r/meth

R/meth has 144,000 followers now, far more than r/StopSpeeding, a subreddit with 28,000 members dedicated to helping people get off meth. In the pinned post, the mod thanks his fellow tweakers for the laughs, late nights, and camaraderie — and tells them they’re in good hands with the new moderator. (...)

I talked to one of them. He’s a 32-year-old-software engineer who calls himself WilliamWegman, after the artist who takes surreal photographs of his Weimaraners dressed up like people. He said when he found the subreddit he became “obsessed and in love,” but also “disgusted, concerned, and humored.”

“Sometimes I can’t look at it. Sometimes I can’t look away,” he told me. “There is this incredible lawlessness about it, and this almost indescribable atmosphere that I more often find worrisome.”

Wegman seems to take his newfound job as a moderator pretty seriously. He tries to be helpful. In one recent post, he replied to a user who complained about vomiting up “yellow stuff,” telling the guy the “yellow stuff” is bile and that he needs to put his phone down and eat. Nobody bothered responding. Unlike some other users, Wegman stresses quitting when possible. He recently wrote a long post titled “if your here because you're new to meth,” encouraging new users to stop before they become hopelessly addicted.

For Wegman, this is personal. A ten-year addict, he’s been sober for two years, but relapsed about two months ago and became a r/meth moderator soon after. During those two years, he told me, he went from making minimum wage sorting recycled electronics to making six figures as a software engineer. “I went to school, I worked nights and weekends and studied all day. I was a machine. Kicking ass at everything. I had never been completely sober before. This is who I actually was. I did not expect this. People who use drugs can’t imagine the kind of success they could have if they were absolutely sober.” He continued:

If you want to make sacrifices of all kinds so that you can maintain a somewhat normal life and use at the same time then do that, and I hope you get high as fuck.

The problem is most people do not have the will power, maturity, or support to use methamphetamine in a somewhat responsible way and wind up getting hurt.

At r/meth I see it like we are all running this marathon together. Drinking copious amounts of water, taking vitamins, staying awake until we hallucinate, having sex for 16 hours straight, taking a break to eat, have a cigarette and go right back to it.

So when I see someone laying on the side of the road saying their heart hurts I stop and say, 'Hey I think it's time to get some help.' I stay with them for a while and tell them everything I can think to encourage them to stop, then I turn around and keep running. I keep running because I can't stop running, most of us can't stop running.

So it is harm reduction, not sobriety, which seems to be r/meth’s official raison d’etre. That said, it's mostly just posts reminding people to drink water and use lube. “There is an absolutely titanic knowledge deficit about true harm reduction,” Wegman said. “So what is commonly known and passed around is always the same stuff. Magnesium, vitamins, electrolytes, food, water, sleeping every couple days, and how to ‘wash’ or remove some of the ‘cut’ from your meth with paint thinner.”

The harm reduction content accounts for a small percentage of posts on r/meth. As a whole, the subreddit is a community built around the shared experience of doing meth, and not much more or less than that. The back and forth in comment sections can get pretty long because, well, everybody’s on meth. But nobody pretends otherwise. There’s no pretense here, no personas. It might be one of the last places on the internet where people know exactly who they are, and are honest with themselves and everybody else about it. They post pictures and videos of themselves, shitpost, ask for advice, and commiserate over their shared experiences on the drug — encounters with the so-called “shadow people” being one of the most interesting. (...)

Unlike the mysterious shadow people, many r/meth users are more than willing to show people exactly who they are. Although depictions of intravenous use are banned, videos of users smoking meth aren’t, and such videos are ubiquitous. The people posting videos of themselves don’t bother concealing their faces, and they could look like anybody. Some of them are young, some old, every race, men and women. I asked Wegman whether or not he thought all these videos might trigger relapse in people trying to quit, or possibly encourage them to smoke more. He said that if people were looking up a drug they used to abuse online, it was only a matter of time before they relapsed again.

“If you’re trying to stay clean and you do anything related to the drug you’re abstaining from, you are starting to relapse. Period.”

As for the videos encouraging people to use more, Wegman was skeptical. He admitted that a lot of addicts are sexually aroused by seeing other people use, and that this might “excite someone to take a few more hits,” but nothing more than that. According to Wegman:

The thing that encourages you to do more meth is the meth itself. You take a hit, it feels so good immediately you want another and take it. The higher you get the more you want it until you are literally screaming inside your head “fucking give me more yes!!!” And you are not rationally deciding to take more, you're giving in to the insanely powerful urge the drug creates. You are aware of this and you find it absolutely captivating and you love letting the drug tell you what to do. Really what it is, is you lose control over your rational thoughts, of your conscience. You are still aware of your rational self and are aware you are parting ways with it. That your willpower is being unassigned to operate through the moral conscious, and is being put on standby so your high self can take over. Once this happens, and it happens every single time, the real fun begins. Meth highs are about losing control to what the meth wants you to do.

Some of the content is extremely concerning. Here, a user asks if he’s having an overdose. A year ago he was posting pictures of his cat and talking about video games and music. He’s 14. I asked Wegman if he thought that people were better or worse for r/meth existing at all. He said:

The bad are already bad and getting worse without reddit. The good are good and also getting worse without reddit, but the good’s stronger rationale and moral compass digs its claws in deeper into the slippery incline, so it's a slower descent into complete debauchery and self-destruction. Note the claws can be forced, with great willpower, deep enough into the slippery meth incline that the user is able to stay at one altitude, but the strain is very great, and the position awkward.

Methamphetamine is a complicated and cumbersome drug that requires a lot of time and effort to manage somewhat, or even to just stay alive. It is a high maintenance drug par excellence. Like owning a dragster or something. It needs maintenance (your body) after every race or it falls apart.

Then he gave me a list of pros and cons.

by River Page, Pirate Wires |  Read more:

Image: r/meth

via:

The United States of Bed Bath & Beyond

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is the story of grown men, rapacious men, whose nature is to bust-out the weak men as cruelly and certainly as possible, over and over again.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is our story, the story of the United States here in the fin de siecle of The Long Now, where our entire country has been busted out and stripped for parts by grown men, rapacious men, different from Tony Soprano only in that they plunder legally within a system of courts and laws and regulatory agencies.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is a story of loss and sadness.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is the story of what happens when Story ends, when the reality of the bust-out — crappy stores and crappy management and overwhelming debt — finally swamps the narratives of Stock Buybacks!TM and Turnaround!TM and Short Squeeze!TM.

And maybe a story of hope.

Hope how?

Hope that the reality of the American bust-out — crappy institutions and crappy leaders and overwhelming debt — will begin to swamp the narratives of Yay, Stock Market! and Yay, College! and Boo, MAGA! and Boo, Wokeism!.

Hope that the assignment of losses here at the end of an age will force us to call things by their proper names, to identify weakness as weakness and rapaciousness as rapaciousness and narrative as narrative. Hope that we will have the courage to reject them all. Hope that we will choose to be more clear-eyed and more full-hearted as we move forward with resolve to Make/Protect/Teach in the world beyond bust-out.

So here is the story of the weak and the rapacious and the narrative-driven. Here is the story of Bed Bath & Beyond. Not for shame or schadenfreude, but for hope.

***

There are at least three distinct phases of the Bed Bath & Beyond bust-out.

Bust Out 1 was orchestrated by the original founders and management of the company. This is where most of the money was sucked out of the company, and by the time the original founders and management were deposed in May 2019, the company was already dead.

Bust Out 2 was orchestrated by the management team that replaced the Bust Out 1 team, together with an external investor, Ryan Cohen.

Bust Out 3 is so outrageous – a self-proclaimed functionally bankrupt company selling self-proclaimed worthless equity to meme investors, degenerate gamblers all – that I just call it the lulz period.

Both Bust Out 2 and the lulz period were quite speedy looting operations, so I’ve zoomed in on the past 12 months to show the stock price moves more clearly. In particular, the exit spike for Ryan Cohen’s Bust Out 2 sale was so fast that his exit price of $22+ per share doesn’t even register on the long-term chart above!

In general, I think this is a common factor in all bust-out processes, whether of a company or a country, that the individual bust-out episodes become shorter, sharper and more ridiculous as there’s less and less juice to squeeze out of the orange. (...)

Bust Out 1 was orchestrated by CEO Steve Temares and company founders Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg after the disastrous 2013 Christmas shopping season. (...)

In response, Temares and the board announced a Strategic Plan! TM to reinvigorate the company, complete with a $1.5 billion bond offering, the first debt in company history. What was at the core of this grand plan, you ask? Well of course there were words like “building a leading e-commerce presence” and “targeted acquisitions” and “commitment to excellence”, but the main plank of the 2014 strategic plan and the only thing management actually executed on was simply this: Stock Buybacks! TM. (...)

Over the 6-year period of Bust Out 1, the board and management of Bed Bath & Beyond spent $4.4 billion buying back their own stock on total free cash flow of $3.6 billion. As their stores deteriorated and their margins collapsed, this company spent ALL of their free cash flow and then $800 million MORE buying back stock.

Now that’s a bust-out!

How did this personally benefit Temares, Feinstein and Weisenberg? Well, I compiled the 100+ SEC filings from these gentlemen to find out.

Steve Temares is a real estate lawyer who was hired by the company as their general counsel in 1992 and worked his way up the ranks. He’s not a founder. He’s not an entrepreneur. He’s a real estate lawyer who went from general counsel to executive VP to COO to CEO in 2004. I do not think it was an accident that Bed Bath & Beyond also instituted their stock buyback plan when Temares was named CEO.

As CEO, Temares was granted a total of 5.2 million shares of stock over his tenure, either as options that he immediately sold on exercise or as stock grants at no cost. He never bought a single share of Bed Bath & Beyond on the open market, but was reloaded by the board of directors every few years.

As CEO, Temares sold 4.3 million shares of stock for $148.4 million. This is net of all option exercise costs. This is in addition to his cash salary, bonuses and benefits, which averaged more than $4 million per year during the Bust Out 1 period. This is solely in connection with his personal holdings and is separate from the dozens of transactions associated with the family trust he established to exercise and sell additional BBBY options. After being fired as CEO, Temares sold an additional 900,000 shares for an estimated $18 million. This is in addition to his cash severance package of $36 million. In sum, Steve Temares received well in excess of $200 million in cash from Bed Bath & Beyond shareholders, the majority of this during or after Bust Out 1.

As for co-founders Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg, after the stock buyback program was introduced they each sold more than 10 million shares for an estimated $300 million. Each. This is in addition to the CEO-level salaries, bonuses and benefits they received as Co-Chairmen of the Board (my fave benefit was $230,000 in car service allowances per year; I mean, how is that possible?). This is in addition to the millions spent to make all-cash acquisitions of retail operations started by their sons, most famously $86 million in cash to acquire buybuy Baby from Leonard Feinstein’s son, including the retirement of $19 million in debt owed to the Feinstein family.

Honestly I don’t get as worked up over founders taking huge amounts of money out of a company as I do over managers, and if Bed Bath & Beyond had remained a private company that the founders decided to suck dry and leave to their kids … more power to ’em. But that wasn’t what Feinstein and Eisenberg did. They took the company public, dominated the board with Steve Temares, and used stock buybacks to prop up the stock price and sell tens of millions of shares into the open market. Feinstein and Eisenberg were old school merchants! You’ll never convince me that they didn’t understand exactly what was happening with the accelerated operational decline of the company from 2014 forward and exactly what were the consequences of spending 122% of free cash flow on stock buybacks.

It’s no wonder that Temares, Feinstein and Eisenberg were all kicked out of the company in 2019, but by then the fatal damage was already done.

by Ben Hunt, Epsilontheory |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. More American capitalism TM at its finest.]

An Anthropologist of Filth

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32.

By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with significant experience: he had spent three years of his adolescence in a reformatory for armed robbery; been a boxer and a janitor; worked in an automobile factory and an ammunition plant; trained as a hair stylist and a beautician; been married for nearly seven years; and been industrious and canny enough to purchase a pretty three-room house for himself and his wife, Themetta, known as Toddy. He had one existence chalked up, and was headed out toward several more.

“Maybellene” is classic Chuck Berry: a boy driving a Ford V-8 is chasing a girl in a Cadillac DeVille, the two cars potent symbols for sexual jockeying and pursuit. A rhythm of negotiated feint, never crossing into anything too obvious or vulgar—bumper-to-bumper, side to side, until finally the man-machine gives up the ghost. “The Ford got hot and wouldn’t do no more.” But then he suddenly revives and catches Maybellene “at the top of the hill.” Crest, cusp, plateau. The world spread out before him, waiting to be embraced.

This revving, frisky 45 is a logbook containing the codes and call signs of the postwar dispensation. As RJ Smith puts it in his new biography, Chuck Berry: An American Life, the artist “invented images and they came alive in the world.” He would be adored and imitated by the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and countless others. The world of teenage desire had found its poet laureate—and he was not young or white or innocent. (...)

Berry never claimed that he invented rock and roll, and was always quite happy to point out where he’d gotten his inspiration: from the great hinterland and invisible college of rhythm and blues. He happily fessed up to his influences, such as Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker. There was a lot of guilt-free recycling involved—transplanting a riff or a lick, a line or a trope, into fresh new settings. (Jordan’s guitarist Carl Hogan was the source for the famous opening guitar riff of “Johnny B. Goode.”) Even the execrable (but insanely popular) late hit “My Ding-A-Ling” was a virtual xerox of a roiling 1952 R & B side by the marvelous Dave Bartholomew. He tinkered, customized, and retooled songs as if giving an old car a new coat of paint, adding horsepower, then taking them back out on the open road again.

What he did do, indisputably, was visualize a whole new postwar landscape, and provide a soundtrack for its leisure time: a hybrid somewhere between white pop and black R & B. Smith has a lovely phrase for this: “Scraps and rags and things given away for free were pulled together and made into a brand new flag.” Rhythm and blues had always referenced highways and trains (even that dark Faust of the Delta blues, Robert Johnson, name-checks Greyhound buses and Terraplane cars), but Berry was the first person to give it a pop art twist. “Up to the corner and ’round the bend / Right to the juke joint, you go in / Drop the coin right into the slot / You gotta hear something that’s really hot.” All the fetishes of the emerging teenage culture of ready consumption appear in the mind’s eye: car radios, bright milkshakes, sizzling burgers, blaring jukeboxes. Dating and driving and disposable income. There is far more clamor about travel and consumer goods in Berry’s music than there is about sex and/or love. Also notable: the number of songs that reference marriage. (If he were a book, he’d, improbably, be Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties.) He doesn’t really write what you would call love songs—beautiful souls, pining hearts—rather, his songs are about things pursued, purchased, possessed. Various makes of cars. A “hi-fi phono.” High-heeled shoes. Skyscrapers. A TWA flight. “A model on the cover of a magazine.” Berry understood that technology would change everything, would shape the very nature of desire. “She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call / ’Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall.” Sharp and punchy and streamlined, his songs are like episodes of a TV series that had yet to be made by anyone.

From an early age, Berry loved to tinker: junior handyman, hipster bricoleur. “Taking things apart explained the way the world worked far better than a sermon,” Smith writes. Berry comes to see everything, including learning the guitar, as a matter of mathematics. Radios, guitars; he wants to see the nuts and bolts behind the magical sound. Central to his development were what he called the “magic boxes,” the family piano and the Victrola record player. There was nothing he liked to do more than take something apart and put it back together again—which is just what he did with his music. He took the reigning spirit of R & B—raucous, gritty, nasty, alternately melancholy and murderous—and toned down its saturnine aspects while buffing up and emphasizing its Saturday-night shine.

If his scientific bent was one thing that marked him out, the other crucial difference between Berry and his musical contemporaries is that he wrote his own songs. Most performers at the time relied for their material on managers, publishing companies, pals of pals, or pals of heavy guys in fedoras. Berry wanted to rely on no one but himself. Even if you’re not a big Chuck Berry fan, there’s no arguing with his back catalogue. To list just the best-known songs from his impeccable run between 1955 and 1964 is to survey an unparalleled achievement: “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” “School Day,” “Rock And Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Carol,” “Sweet Little Rock and Roller,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” “Let It Rock,” “No Particular Place to Go,” “You Never Can Tell,” “Promised Land.” (...)

Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee sang as if they had something trapped inside of them that was so combustible it could only escape as a staggered hiss of stutters, moans, and squeals. When Berry sings, he enunciates crisply, as if he is still reciting poetry in his mother’s parlor. He never smears or elides his words, everything is clear and precise, milk teeth in the mouth of a cartoon character, pebbles in a stream. As an exercise, try reading out the lyrics of “Promised Land” yourself—even slowly, never mind at Berry’s kind of clip. The song communicates a feeling of travel as a breathless rush—and yet every name vibrates, every word rings like a bell. He’s a vaudeville comic who makes sure the whole audience, right to the back of the hall, registers every last hint, wink, and syllable.

Watch TV clips of Berry from his pomp (my favorite is a black-and-white one from Belgian TV, circa 1965, in which a sharp-suited Berry seems to be playing with a full-on jazz combo), and you realize that he was more of a natural all-round entertainer than most of his contemporaries. He managed to transfer the spirit of the traveling tent show into the compressed television age. He had an innate sense of what was required—something cool in both the jazz and the McLuhanite sense. He acts out his songs, using his exceptionally mobile face and beanpole body and cheese straw limbs. There is something almost unreal about him, like a zoot-suited roué out of a Tex Avery production. The country cousin and the city slicker in one and the same body. A walking contradiction. (...)

There was a paradox in the way the blues was framed by its early white enthusiasts: in order to be considered “authentic,” bluesmen had to remain bowed down, angry, bereft, defeated by the miseries of black life under American capitalism. Its practitioners, however, saw playing music precisely as a way out of that cul-de-sac. They wanted all the available spoils: shiny weekend suits, not tattered dungarees. Berry’s “poor boy” is no longer cooling his heels down on the farm, he’s being served food and drinks by an air hostess. There was no blues or church in Berry. His music may have been dashboard light to the crossroads darkness of the blues, but this wasn’t a sanctified light. It was more like a neon sign on a night out. It’s impossible to imagine him ever singing anything like Howlin’ Wolf’s “When I Laid Down I Was Troubled.”

Berry’s peers had a sense of sin and damnation in common, to the degree that their music might be taken for a form of speaking in tongues. Songs such as “Lucille” and “Great Balls of Fire” are metabolic eruptions; Berry’s music lacked any comparable sense of imminent demise. What it did convey was his own feeling of “ridin’ along in my automobile”: the roll and sway of a big car on an open road on a sunny day. One hand—or maybe just a pinkie—on the wheel. Not creeping along in a traffic jam to work, but driving for the sheer pleasure of it, without a destination, taking in the scenery. This is a man at ease.

Did anyone else write songs that were quite so visual? “They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale / The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.” Elvis might sing about being down at the end of lonely street, but Berry would give you directions to the hotel parking lot, the bellhop’s name, and the color of the lobby carpet. His songs might almost be the memory-jog notes of someone scouting locations or pitching a sharp new road movie. They seem less like the cinema of the late Fifties and early Sixties than like advertisements or MTV-era music videos. Deft cuts from scene to scene. Traveling shots and bright flashbulb edits. “Promised Land” traverses the continent in two minutes and twenty-four seconds, via Greyhound bus, train, and plane. Berry’s motto is not “I’m a soul man,” but “I am a camera.”

It was his cousin Harry who introduced him, as a teenager, to the joys of photography (and much more besides: chemistry, rockets, astronomy, hypnotism). Harry “provided a conduit of science and rational thought to Chuck, plus also plenty of dirty pictures.” At this point we hear an ominous organ note on the soundtrack: “Over the years, Berry would amass a vast collection of cameras, video monitors, darkroom technology, and assorted recording devices.” Even after the success of “Maybellene,” his personal business cards read CHARLES BERRY, PHOTOGRAPHER. In tandem, Berry developed what might be termed an interest in, shall we say, the wilder shores of love. You get the impression that music was never really the place where he lost, found, or explored himself and his deepest desires. That place existed in the center of a Venn diagram whose twin cheeks were sex and tech.

This was consonant with his long-term taste for DIY, and just a different form of tinkering, of seeing things from all angles. An anthropologist of filth, Berry was fascinated by bodily waste, fore and aft. Boundary fetish: a moment between inside and outside. Berry owned and maintained several properties in the Hollywood Hills, and by the late Eighties visitors to one house in particular might find more than they bargained for in terms of interior design:

In the living room was an exotic table. A plate of glass was spread atop a bronzed naked woman who was lying on her back, her left arm and her knees holding up the table top. Her bare breasts pointed to the ceiling. A switch when toggled sent a hot, golden oil flowing down the statue’s legs.

Remember: this was a rental property. The troubadour mythos of rock and roll posits sex as a wild adventure; Berry is far more niche. He does not invite any kind of Dionysian cult. Despite their manifold flaws—the dead wives, drug insanity, and batty religious conversions—men like Elvis and Jerry Lee retain their patina of glamour, their plinth and their worshippers. In comparison, Berry is generally viewed as beyond the pale, his predilections distinctly un-wild, un-chic, un-romantic. Berry’s appetites were widely seen as excessive—or at least, excessive in the wrong way; he sculpted his own lurid, loopy world of fantasy, but it proved way too “real” for public taste.

by Ian Penman, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Chuck Berry on the road to Mobile, Alabama, October 1964.© Jean-Marie Périer/Photo12