Saturday, September 30, 2023
Thursday, September 28, 2023
The Least Bad Choice
I have been watching various sentiment polls and Right/Wrong Track questionnaires with detached bemusement. Bemused because they are so silly, and detached because I know I can’t change human nature. What I can do is share a few modest insights; hopefully, these will allow you to gain a fresh perspective you might not have otherwise considered or perhaps even garner a better understanding of what is happening right here and now.
As we have discussed, in ordinary times, sentiment polls tend to be problematic: But these do not seem to be ordinary times. We are in a post-pandemic, popular-uprising environment. I wouldn’t call these issues unprecedented, but they are somewhat unusual.
People are unaware of what they believe, they have no idea what is going to happen in the future. Their expectations as to what will make them happy or satisfied in life are often misguided. This is why asking people what they will do, think, or feel in the future, or how they might behave is a nearly impossible task.
Since the worst of the pandemic began to wind down last year, we have been wrestling with two key issues: 1) Inflation, or the rate at which prices are rising; and 2) Costs, meaning the absolute level of prices.
Even as inflation peaked in June of 2022 and fell from 9% to 3%, people remained angry. The rate of change may have fallen, but everything remains more expensive. Absolute price levels are now 10-20% higher on everything from cars to houses to energy to rent. No wonder people whose wages rose a fraction of that are pissed off.
Now for the shocker: As bad as that sounds, the alternatives were much worse.
The nuanced, counterintuitive truth is that the pandemic presented policymakers with a series of terrible options. To their credit, they made the least bad choice. Those choices are still resonating today, impacting stock markets, bonds, inflation, and as we saw at the GOP debate last night, politics. The public wants someone (anyone!) to blame, but I want to suggest that the 2021-22 Inflation surge and resulting higher prices were the cost of avoiding a different fate. Had policymakers chosen differently, the net result would have been much, much worse.
Let’s consider a few potential counterfactuals.
Without funding for vaccines, treatments, or tests, COVID-19 would have spread like wildfire, with no way to stop it. And without those government-ordered mitigation measures, cases and deaths would have surged uncontrollably. The entire overwhelmed healthcare system would have collapsed, making the debacle even worse. Total US death count: 10 or 20 million.
Oh, and the economy would have hurtled into the worst depression since the Great Depression of 1929. Recall that the Atlanta Fed’s GDP Now in June 2020 showed the economy had been cut in half, down -52.8%. Major industries – Travel & Hospitality, Retail, Entertainment, and Services – would have completely broken down. Companies would disappear, and the bankruptcy courts would have spent the next decade unraveling up the mess.
Had the government done appreciably less, the results would have been disproportionately worse. It would have been a blood bath…
The Fed began its policy of ZIRP and QE while Congress put forth a puny extension of unemployment insurance and a modest temporary tax cut. A tiny infrastructure build was also included. Net result: more than 90% of the stimulus was monetary and appreciably less than 10% was fiscal.
The result of this emphasis on low rates helped capital owners; anything priced in dollars and credit soared, while those that did not have portfolios filled with stocks, bonds, real estate or businesses (e.g., middle and lower classes) struggled. Job creation was soft, wage gains nonexistent, consumer spending was punk, durable goods sales far below average.
It was a weak recovery, made all the worse because Congress elected to skip the textbook Keynesian stimulus such as we saw following 9/11 or the Pandemic. The entire post-GFC economy was poor; no wonder it set up an environment for a populist uprising in the United States.
The reality is the world is nuanced and complex, and simple answers to complicated questions are usually neither precise nor accurate.
As we have discussed, in ordinary times, sentiment polls tend to be problematic: But these do not seem to be ordinary times. We are in a post-pandemic, popular-uprising environment. I wouldn’t call these issues unprecedented, but they are somewhat unusual.
Since the worst of the pandemic began to wind down last year, we have been wrestling with two key issues: 1) Inflation, or the rate at which prices are rising; and 2) Costs, meaning the absolute level of prices.
Even as inflation peaked in June of 2022 and fell from 9% to 3%, people remained angry. The rate of change may have fallen, but everything remains more expensive. Absolute price levels are now 10-20% higher on everything from cars to houses to energy to rent. No wonder people whose wages rose a fraction of that are pissed off.
Now for the shocker: As bad as that sounds, the alternatives were much worse.
The nuanced, counterintuitive truth is that the pandemic presented policymakers with a series of terrible options. To their credit, they made the least bad choice. Those choices are still resonating today, impacting stock markets, bonds, inflation, and as we saw at the GOP debate last night, politics. The public wants someone (anyone!) to blame, but I want to suggest that the 2021-22 Inflation surge and resulting higher prices were the cost of avoiding a different fate. Had policymakers chosen differently, the net result would have been much, much worse.
~~~
Recall the situation 42 or so months ago. Covid-19 was running amuck, and nobody had the slightest clue what was going on. We were washing our grocery deliveries to stop the spread of a respiratory disease. Flying blind, with things about to get much worse, the government responses were: 1) Operation Warp Speed, a commitment to getting a COVID vaccine ready; 2) CARES Act 1, a $2.2 trillion fiscal stimulus putting cash into the bank accounts of 100 million families; 3) CARES Act II & III, another $1.8 trillion in spending, plus a focus on testing and vaccination, eviction halts.Let’s consider a few potential counterfactuals.
- Scenario 1: Do nothing: Don’t snicker, there were people who suggested that as an option. The claim was the free market would sort out personal protective equipment (PPE) andother supply chain issues. No state authorized lockdowns, just allow the virus to “burn itself out” after it infected 80% of the population. “Herd Immunity” was the watchword.
- Scenario 2: Go small: Extend unemployment benefits for 3 or 6 months. Support vaccinations but don’t mandate them or masks or state lockdowns. Revisit to see if we need to repeat.
- Scenario 3: CARES Act 1 but not 2 or 3: Do a big initial fiscal spend to get the problem down to a manageable size, then let the private sector do what it does best.
Without funding for vaccines, treatments, or tests, COVID-19 would have spread like wildfire, with no way to stop it. And without those government-ordered mitigation measures, cases and deaths would have surged uncontrollably. The entire overwhelmed healthcare system would have collapsed, making the debacle even worse. Total US death count: 10 or 20 million.
Oh, and the economy would have hurtled into the worst depression since the Great Depression of 1929. Recall that the Atlanta Fed’s GDP Now in June 2020 showed the economy had been cut in half, down -52.8%. Major industries – Travel & Hospitality, Retail, Entertainment, and Services – would have completely broken down. Companies would disappear, and the bankruptcy courts would have spent the next decade unraveling up the mess.
Had the government done appreciably less, the results would have been disproportionately worse. It would have been a blood bath…
~~~
You don’t need to do a thought experiment to see what happens when the government elects to skip fiscal stimulus during or after a financial crisis. Look no further than the response to the Great Financial Crisis — nearly all monetary and almost no fiscal stimulus. [ed. fiscal stimulus = help for general public vs. monetary stimulus = help for banks.]The Fed began its policy of ZIRP and QE while Congress put forth a puny extension of unemployment insurance and a modest temporary tax cut. A tiny infrastructure build was also included. Net result: more than 90% of the stimulus was monetary and appreciably less than 10% was fiscal.
The result of this emphasis on low rates helped capital owners; anything priced in dollars and credit soared, while those that did not have portfolios filled with stocks, bonds, real estate or businesses (e.g., middle and lower classes) struggled. Job creation was soft, wage gains nonexistent, consumer spending was punk, durable goods sales far below average.
It was a weak recovery, made all the worse because Congress elected to skip the textbook Keynesian stimulus such as we saw following 9/11 or the Pandemic. The entire post-GFC economy was poor; no wonder it set up an environment for a populist uprising in the United States.
~~~
The public tends not to do thought exercises like counterfactuals. They like things simple, perhaps even oversimplified to black-and-white options. They point fingers, demand that heads roll. This is how crowds operate, and it is why they can become so dangerous.The reality is the world is nuanced and complex, and simple answers to complicated questions are usually neither precise nor accurate.
by Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. I've been waiting for someone to connect the dots/put it all together in a way that's easily understandable. Finally someone has (with counterfactuals). But notice, it's not by anyone running for political office. Why aren't more politicians using this messaging (especially Democrats)?]
The Big One, Times Two
With the Cascadia Subduction Zone parked off the coast and shallow faults lurking under most major cities, the Puget Sound area already faces a daunting array of seismic scenarios. A new study adds another: the possibility of a one-two earthquake punch.
Using state-of-the-art tree ring and radiocarbon dating methods, researchers found the most recent major earthquake on the Seattle Fault wasn’t a solo act. The Saddle Mountain Fault, which slices across the Olympic Peninsula near Lake Cushman, ruptured at about the same time.
The team also was able to zero in on the date with stunning precision, narrowing it to a six-month window between the fall of 923 A.D. and the spring of the following year — almost exactly 1,100 years ago.
Their results were published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
The project, which spanned more than five years and included divers with underwater chain saws to sample trees drowned by the quakes, is a scientific tour de force nearly unprecedented in seismology, said Harold Tobin, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington. To help nail down the date, the team used a new approach that detects traces of ancient solar storms captured in tree rings.
But the findings add a new worst-case possibility to the seismic threats facing a region that’s home to 4 million people, said Tobin, who did not participate in the study. A seismic double whammy would be much more damaging than any single quake, especially to old brick and concrete buildings, and vulnerable bridges and infrastructure. It’s a scenario that hasn’t been factored into hazard maps, building codes and emergency planning — but it needs to be, Tobin added.
“The chance in any given year is not high, and there’s no reason to freak out because of this study,” Tobin said. “But it underscores that these are things that we need to be prepared for.”
A 2005 analysis estimated a relatively modest magnitude 6.7 quake on the Seattle Fault could kill 1,600 people, destroy nearly 10,000 buildings and cause up to $50 billion in economic losses. If the Seattle and Saddle Mountain faults ruptured simultaneously, the new study estimates, the resulting quake would clock in at magnitude 7.8 — nearly 40 times more powerful — and affect a much bigger area. (...)
Seismologists used to categorize most clustered quakes as aftershocks, and assumed they occurred on the same fault, said John Cassidy, a senior seismologist for Natural Resources Canada who was not involved in the project. But over the past several years, more has been learned about how a slip on one fault can put stress on others. February’s devastation in Turkey was caused by a powerful quake that triggered the rupture of an adjacent fault nine hours later.
Shallow quakes near urban areas can be especially nasty because they are so close to the surface. Shaking would be far more intense than from Washington’s most recent big earthquake — the magnitude 6.8 Nisqually event in 2001, which originated more than 20 miles underground.
“An earthquake on the Seattle Fault is … likely to be much, much more catastrophic,” Tobin said.
Tree rings can yield much more precise dates than radiocarbon, Black explained. But the samples have to be in good condition, with bark and extensive ring sequences.
One of the most daunting tasks was rounding up dozens of cores and wood slices collected over the years by other researchers. Eventually, Black corralled usable samples from 47 Douglas firs at six sites where trees were drowned by the earthquakes. Some of the samples recorded nearly three centuries of history.
The team had to collect new samples from Price Lake, where stumps of the quake-killed Douglas firs remain visible. USGS divers struggled in the murky water to slice usable samples with intact bark from the bases of the trees. “It would take up to an hour to cut a single wedge from a tree, because they were working with almost zero visibility,” said Black, lead author of the study.
To anchor the tree rings in time, he used a reference sequence from 1,300-year-old firs collected on Vancouver Island in the early 1990s — so the date of the outermost ring is known.
Black sanded each sample multiple times, including with micron-level diamond grit sheets called lapping films. “It’s sanded to the point where you can see the individual cells within the wood under a microscope,” he said.
As he lined up his samples and compared them with the reference trees, the answer was unmistakable.
The validity of the date was confirmed through radiocarbon analysis of individual tree rings, looking for evidence of cosmic timestamps called Miyake events. Named for the Japanese physicist who discovered them, the events represent spikes of radiation from solar flares or exploding stars centuries or millennia ago. Luckily for dendrochronology, spikes in cosmic radiation generate spikes in atmospheric levels of carbon-14, the isotope whose slow decay is the clock that anchors radiocarbon dating.
Even luckier for Black and his colleagues, a Miyake event occurred in the year 774 A.D. and showed up in their Douglas fir samples, providing an absolute benchmark from which to count.
“Boom,” he said. “Everything came together, and we saw that these trees all died with the last completely formed ring being the year 923.”
by Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times | Read more:
Images: Stephani Gordon / Oregon Public Broadcasting; ESRI, Brian Black, Univ. of Arizona; Mark Nowlin
[ed. Science.]
Using state-of-the-art tree ring and radiocarbon dating methods, researchers found the most recent major earthquake on the Seattle Fault wasn’t a solo act. The Saddle Mountain Fault, which slices across the Olympic Peninsula near Lake Cushman, ruptured at about the same time.
Their results were published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
The project, which spanned more than five years and included divers with underwater chain saws to sample trees drowned by the quakes, is a scientific tour de force nearly unprecedented in seismology, said Harold Tobin, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington. To help nail down the date, the team used a new approach that detects traces of ancient solar storms captured in tree rings.
But the findings add a new worst-case possibility to the seismic threats facing a region that’s home to 4 million people, said Tobin, who did not participate in the study. A seismic double whammy would be much more damaging than any single quake, especially to old brick and concrete buildings, and vulnerable bridges and infrastructure. It’s a scenario that hasn’t been factored into hazard maps, building codes and emergency planning — but it needs to be, Tobin added.
“The chance in any given year is not high, and there’s no reason to freak out because of this study,” Tobin said. “But it underscores that these are things that we need to be prepared for.”
A 2005 analysis estimated a relatively modest magnitude 6.7 quake on the Seattle Fault could kill 1,600 people, destroy nearly 10,000 buildings and cause up to $50 billion in economic losses. If the Seattle and Saddle Mountain faults ruptured simultaneously, the new study estimates, the resulting quake would clock in at magnitude 7.8 — nearly 40 times more powerful — and affect a much bigger area. (...)
Seismologists used to categorize most clustered quakes as aftershocks, and assumed they occurred on the same fault, said John Cassidy, a senior seismologist for Natural Resources Canada who was not involved in the project. But over the past several years, more has been learned about how a slip on one fault can put stress on others. February’s devastation in Turkey was caused by a powerful quake that triggered the rupture of an adjacent fault nine hours later.
Shallow quakes near urban areas can be especially nasty because they are so close to the surface. Shaking would be far more intense than from Washington’s most recent big earthquake — the magnitude 6.8 Nisqually event in 2001, which originated more than 20 miles underground.
“An earthquake on the Seattle Fault is … likely to be much, much more catastrophic,” Tobin said.
Tree rings can yield much more precise dates than radiocarbon, Black explained. But the samples have to be in good condition, with bark and extensive ring sequences.
One of the most daunting tasks was rounding up dozens of cores and wood slices collected over the years by other researchers. Eventually, Black corralled usable samples from 47 Douglas firs at six sites where trees were drowned by the earthquakes. Some of the samples recorded nearly three centuries of history.
The team had to collect new samples from Price Lake, where stumps of the quake-killed Douglas firs remain visible. USGS divers struggled in the murky water to slice usable samples with intact bark from the bases of the trees. “It would take up to an hour to cut a single wedge from a tree, because they were working with almost zero visibility,” said Black, lead author of the study.
To anchor the tree rings in time, he used a reference sequence from 1,300-year-old firs collected on Vancouver Island in the early 1990s — so the date of the outermost ring is known.
Black sanded each sample multiple times, including with micron-level diamond grit sheets called lapping films. “It’s sanded to the point where you can see the individual cells within the wood under a microscope,” he said.
As he lined up his samples and compared them with the reference trees, the answer was unmistakable.
The validity of the date was confirmed through radiocarbon analysis of individual tree rings, looking for evidence of cosmic timestamps called Miyake events. Named for the Japanese physicist who discovered them, the events represent spikes of radiation from solar flares or exploding stars centuries or millennia ago. Luckily for dendrochronology, spikes in cosmic radiation generate spikes in atmospheric levels of carbon-14, the isotope whose slow decay is the clock that anchors radiocarbon dating.
Even luckier for Black and his colleagues, a Miyake event occurred in the year 774 A.D. and showed up in their Douglas fir samples, providing an absolute benchmark from which to count.
“Boom,” he said. “Everything came together, and we saw that these trees all died with the last completely formed ring being the year 923.”
by Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times | Read more:
Images: Stephani Gordon / Oregon Public Broadcasting; ESRI, Brian Black, Univ. of Arizona; Mark Nowlin
[ed. Science.]
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
After a Hurricane: Rebuilding Is Only Affordable for the Wealthy
Despite their intent to make coastal communities safer and more resilient, Florida’s building codes can actually complicate resilience efforts in the long term. Buildings constructed with concrete and other stiff materials represent a doubling down on Gulf Coast living as climate change makes Atlantic hurricanes more powerful, and more likely to hit that very coast. And taxpayers, along with the federal, state and local governments, must foot the bill to maintain structures on eroding beaches and flood-prone coasts. (...)
A few bigger hotels, like the Lani Kai, a pastel-colored resort once popular with spring breakers, dotted choice beachfront lots. But as the cleanup efforts finally give way to planning and rebuilding, it looks as if the large, high-end hotels and condos will eventually dominate the beachfront. The new version of local color is best embodied by the 254-room Margaritaville Resort, which broke ground in 2021 and has been built, fittingly, on property that was cleared out by Hurricane Charley in 2004. On the beachfront beyond, the construction of multimillion-dollar homes, condos and tourist lodging will undoubtedly soon rev up. (...)
But upscaling is also a consequence of confronting climate change, especially in the aftermath of a devastating storm like Ian. Stringent building codes and dysfunction in the insurance industry have driven the cost of rebuilding beyond the reach of many current property owners, including small-scale developers. (...)
Building up to code is costly — far more so than building wood-frame beach bungalows. It also requires a tolerance for risk that often only money can buy — when insurance no longer covers full rebuilding costs, mainly those with deep pockets can build on the water. That means existing property owners like those of the Silver Sands, Red Coconut and countless private homes end up cutting their losses and selling. What will go up are apparently second homes and luxury resorts that can turn a profit in a few years before another hurricane hits. (A new hotel typically pays for itself in five to 15 years, obviating the need to think about 30 years down the line, when sea levels will have risen even further.) For well-funded developers, the risk and expense can be worth it, even if it means betting on a potentially doomed parcel of land.
They’re also banking on the infinite desirability of the beachfront, as are the state authorities responsible for the building codes that allow redevelopment after hurricanes and floods. And when these homes have to be fortified against beach erosion and sea level rise, taxpayers and governments are stuck with the bill.
by Sarah Stodola, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Damon Winter
[ed. Imagining Lahaina and other coastal communities. Definitely an issue we'll see replayed many times in the future. Also..."a new hotel typically pays for itself in five to 15 years"? Wow.]
But upscaling is also a consequence of confronting climate change, especially in the aftermath of a devastating storm like Ian. Stringent building codes and dysfunction in the insurance industry have driven the cost of rebuilding beyond the reach of many current property owners, including small-scale developers. (...)
Building up to code is costly — far more so than building wood-frame beach bungalows. It also requires a tolerance for risk that often only money can buy — when insurance no longer covers full rebuilding costs, mainly those with deep pockets can build on the water. That means existing property owners like those of the Silver Sands, Red Coconut and countless private homes end up cutting their losses and selling. What will go up are apparently second homes and luxury resorts that can turn a profit in a few years before another hurricane hits. (A new hotel typically pays for itself in five to 15 years, obviating the need to think about 30 years down the line, when sea levels will have risen even further.) For well-funded developers, the risk and expense can be worth it, even if it means betting on a potentially doomed parcel of land.
They’re also banking on the infinite desirability of the beachfront, as are the state authorities responsible for the building codes that allow redevelopment after hurricanes and floods. And when these homes have to be fortified against beach erosion and sea level rise, taxpayers and governments are stuck with the bill.
by Sarah Stodola, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Damon Winter
[ed. Imagining Lahaina and other coastal communities. Definitely an issue we'll see replayed many times in the future. Also..."a new hotel typically pays for itself in five to 15 years"? Wow.]
FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power
The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.
The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance. Amazon’s far-reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars in retail sales every year, touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses big and small and affect over a hundred million shoppers.
“Our complaint lays out how Amazon has used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The complaint sets forth detailed allegations noting how Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them. Today’s lawsuit seeks to hold Amazon to account for these monopolistic practices and restore the lost promise of free and fair competition.”
“We’re bringing this case because Amazon’s illegal conduct has stifled competition across a huge swath of the online economy. Amazon is a monopolist that uses its power to hike prices on American shoppers and charge sky-high fees on hundreds of thousands of online sellers,” said John Newman, Deputy Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Seldom in the history of U.S. antitrust law has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people.”
The FTC and states allege Amazon’s anticompetitive conduct occurs in two markets—the online superstore market that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers. These tactics include:
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin joined the Commission’s lawsuit. The Commission vote to authorize staff to file for a permanent injunction and other equitable relief in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington was 3-0.
"The Federal Trade Commission has named three senior Amazon executives in an amended complaint in its case against the company for its years-long effort to enroll consumers into its Prime program without their consent while knowingly making it difficult for consumers to cancel their Prime subscriptions.
Named in the amended complaint are Neil Lindsay, who served as senior vice president overseeing Prime and now serves on the company’s overall leadership team; Russell Grandinetti, who also serves as a senior vice president overseeing Prime; and Jamil Ghani, a company vice president who oversees the Prime subscription program. (...)
The unredacted complaint’s allegations also revealed:
"In its early years, Amazon was good to its users. It sold products affordably, and shipped them swiftly and reliably. It attended closely to the authenticity of the reviews that appeared on its site and operated an “honest search” that populated results pages with the best matches for each query.
Then Amazon started locking everyone in. Through Prime, it presold customers a year’s worth of shipping. With its digital publishing ventures, it nudged customers toward subscriptions, building a captive base of readers and deploying technology and expansive readings of obscure copyright laws to stop them from moving their books to other platforms. It opened Prime shipping at a low rate to its suppliers, relieving businesses of messy fulfillment logistics.
Meanwhile, its heavy subsidies, made possible by its investors’ appetite for backing an incipient monopoly, made it increasingly difficult for rival retail sites to gain traction, because Amazon’s seemingly bottomless coffers meant that it could sell goods below cost and extinguish any upstart that dared to compete with it. This created another form of lock-in for Amazon: It became progressively harder not to shop there.
The more locked in we were, the less Amazon needed to offer us. The customer-friendly, honest search degraded as the company began to allow retailers to buy their way to the top of listings, and by 2021, ads generated $31 billion in revenue. As sellers became increasingly reliant upon Amazon to display and deliver their goods, the company was free to drain money from them, too, piling fee upon fee and reportedly copying best-selling products.
The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance. Amazon’s far-reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars in retail sales every year, touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses big and small and affect over a hundred million shoppers.
“We’re bringing this case because Amazon’s illegal conduct has stifled competition across a huge swath of the online economy. Amazon is a monopolist that uses its power to hike prices on American shoppers and charge sky-high fees on hundreds of thousands of online sellers,” said John Newman, Deputy Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Seldom in the history of U.S. antitrust law has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people.”
The FTC and states allege Amazon’s anticompetitive conduct occurs in two markets—the online superstore market that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers. These tactics include:
- Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet. For example, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bury discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible.
- Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service, which has made it substantially more expensive for sellers on Amazon to also offer their products on other platforms. This unlawful coercion has in turn limited competitors’ ability to effectively compete against Amazon.
- Degrading the customer experience by replacing relevant, organic search results with paid advertisements—and deliberately increasing junk ads that worsen search quality and frustrate both shoppers seeking products and sellers who are promised a return on their advertising purchase.
- Biasing Amazon’s search results to preference Amazon’s own products over ones that Amazon knows are of better quality.
- Charging costly fees on the hundreds of thousands of sellers that currently have no choice but to rely on Amazon to stay in business. These fees range from a monthly fee sellers must pay for each item sold, to advertising fees that have become virtually necessary for sellers to do business. Combined, all of these fees force many sellers to pay close to 50% of their total revenues to Amazon. These fees harm not only sellers but also shoppers, who pay increased prices for thousands of products sold on or off Amazon.
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin joined the Commission’s lawsuit. The Commission vote to authorize staff to file for a permanent injunction and other equitable relief in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington was 3-0.
by Victoria Graham (media contact), FTC | Read more:
Image: Lina Khan, FTC
[ed. The spectacular Lina Khan at the FTC. This, the Google antitrust lawsuit, and the following post show how government oversight and accountability should actually work. Finally. A watershed moment. Monopolies are killing competitive business practices, pricing and innovation just so the rich and powerful can get a little (a lot!) more rich and... powerfuller. She'd better work fast though, because... well, we all know why. See also: Lina Khan vs. Jeff Bezos: This Is Big Tech’s Real Cage Match (NYT):
"Jeff Bezos made his fortune with one truly big idea: What if a retailer did everything possible to make customers happy?
His forcefully nurtured creation, Amazon, sold as many items as possible as cheaply as possible and delivered them as quickly as possible. The result is that $40 out of every $100 spent online in the United States goes to Amazon and Mr. Bezos is worth $150 billion.
Lina Khan made her reputation with a very different idea: What if pleasing the customer was not enough?
Low prices, she argued in a 95-page examination of Amazon in the Yale Law Journal, can mask behavior that stifles competition and undermines society. Published in 2017 while she was still a law student, it is already one of the most consequential academic papers of modern times.
These two very different philosophies, each pushed by an outsider unafraid of taking risks, at last have their much-anticipated confrontation."
"Jeff Bezos made his fortune with one truly big idea: What if a retailer did everything possible to make customers happy?
His forcefully nurtured creation, Amazon, sold as many items as possible as cheaply as possible and delivered them as quickly as possible. The result is that $40 out of every $100 spent online in the United States goes to Amazon and Mr. Bezos is worth $150 billion.
Lina Khan made her reputation with a very different idea: What if pleasing the customer was not enough?
Low prices, she argued in a 95-page examination of Amazon in the Yale Law Journal, can mask behavior that stifles competition and undermines society. Published in 2017 while she was still a law student, it is already one of the most consequential academic papers of modern times.
These two very different philosophies, each pushed by an outsider unafraid of taking risks, at last have their much-anticipated confrontation."
***
and, FTC Adds Senior Executives Who Played Key Roles in Prime Enrollment Scheme to Case Against Amazon (FTC):]
"The Federal Trade Commission has named three senior Amazon executives in an amended complaint in its case against the company for its years-long effort to enroll consumers into its Prime program without their consent while knowingly making it difficult for consumers to cancel their Prime subscriptions.
Named in the amended complaint are Neil Lindsay, who served as senior vice president overseeing Prime and now serves on the company’s overall leadership team; Russell Grandinetti, who also serves as a senior vice president overseeing Prime; and Jamil Ghani, a company vice president who oversees the Prime subscription program. (...)
The unredacted complaint’s allegations also revealed:
- Excerpts from an Amazon document that uses the term “misdirection” to refer to the company’s practice of forcing consumers to find a small blue text link to make a purchase without joining Prime, while using a far more prominent button saying “Get FREE Two-Day Shipping” that actually enrolls consumers in Prime.
- Information about tactics used by the company to force consumers into the complex Iliad cancellation flow, such as a company policy that required Amazon customer service employees to direct consumers who called to cancel Prime to the Iliad flow online, even though customer service agents had the ability to process the cancellation.
- Findings highlighted in a company newsletter that said, “The issue of accidental Prime-sign ups is well documented” and acknowledging that Prime customers “sign[] up accidentally and/or [don't] see auto-renewal terms.”
- Statements from Amazon employees acknowledging the company’s use of user flows “designed to mislead or trick users to make them do something they don’t want to do, like signing up for a recurring bill.” Amazon employees began raising this issue for company leaders, who refused to take action, as early as 2016.
- Details about Amazon’s attempts to delay and hinder the FTC’s investigation of these issues, including attempting to apply legal privilege to documents that were not privileged and concealing the existence of other relevant, damaging documents."
***
Finally, see also: Amazon Is the Apex Predator of Our Platform Era (NYT):"In its early years, Amazon was good to its users. It sold products affordably, and shipped them swiftly and reliably. It attended closely to the authenticity of the reviews that appeared on its site and operated an “honest search” that populated results pages with the best matches for each query.
Then Amazon started locking everyone in. Through Prime, it presold customers a year’s worth of shipping. With its digital publishing ventures, it nudged customers toward subscriptions, building a captive base of readers and deploying technology and expansive readings of obscure copyright laws to stop them from moving their books to other platforms. It opened Prime shipping at a low rate to its suppliers, relieving businesses of messy fulfillment logistics.
Meanwhile, its heavy subsidies, made possible by its investors’ appetite for backing an incipient monopoly, made it increasingly difficult for rival retail sites to gain traction, because Amazon’s seemingly bottomless coffers meant that it could sell goods below cost and extinguish any upstart that dared to compete with it. This created another form of lock-in for Amazon: It became progressively harder not to shop there.
The more locked in we were, the less Amazon needed to offer us. The customer-friendly, honest search degraded as the company began to allow retailers to buy their way to the top of listings, and by 2021, ads generated $31 billion in revenue. As sellers became increasingly reliant upon Amazon to display and deliver their goods, the company was free to drain money from them, too, piling fee upon fee and reportedly copying best-selling products.
Now we are at the final stage of monopolistic decay. The nation’s dominant online retail marketplace not only claws away much of its sellers’ revenues but also now penalizes them if they sell their products for lower prices at other retail outlets (including at its archrivals Target and Walmart). Amazon gets the American consumer coming and going, providing worse goods at higher prices while receiving vast sums in subsidies from state and local governments.
Speaking for his landmark antitrust bill of 1890, Senator John Sherman said: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.”
This suspicion of corporate power died in the Reagan era, when regulators adopted a new posture grounded in the idea that monopolies were evidence of efficiency and should be nurtured, and that “consumer welfare” in the form of low prices was an absolute good of antitrust law. Amazon is surely the king of our time. Our antitrust laws were fashioned specifically to guard against this overwhelming corporate power — both its accumulation and its abuse."
Speaking for his landmark antitrust bill of 1890, Senator John Sherman said: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.”
This suspicion of corporate power died in the Reagan era, when regulators adopted a new posture grounded in the idea that monopolies were evidence of efficiency and should be nurtured, and that “consumer welfare” in the form of low prices was an absolute good of antitrust law. Amazon is surely the king of our time. Our antitrust laws were fashioned specifically to guard against this overwhelming corporate power — both its accumulation and its abuse."
[ed. Actually, one more Final note: does anyone actually get two-day Prime shipping anymore? I know I don't.]
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
"Cha-Ching!"
Lina Khan attacks private equity and monopolization in health care [ed. and finally goes after real people with their hands in the till.]
That’s the phrase that an executive at private equity-owned financial firm U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) used after acquiring yet another Texas anesthesiology practice, with the intent of hiking prices on Texas patients. And “Cha-ching!” was the right way to put it, since the excess profits amounted to tens, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, in just one medical specialty, in just one state.
But the new quote should be ‘uh oh.’ Because today, the Federal Trade Commission, led by Chair Lina Khan, filed suit against USAP for monopolization, as well as its owner, New York City-based private equity firm Welsh Carson, which from its offices on Park Avenue engineered the entire strategy of gouging patients in Texas. It’s an important suit, for reasons I’ll go into, and it also reflects a more aggressive antitrust enforcement regime, and skepticism of private equity in health care.
It’s the Prices, Stupid
America spends at least twice as much on health care per capita as nearly every other wealthy country, and gets much less for it in terms of doctor visits, hospital capacity, and life expectancy. Why? Where is all the money going?
“Spoil the Entire Market.”
And that’s what they did, hiring Dean and Company, a consulting firm, to identify anesthesia practices throughout the state they could purchase. Rizzo and Regan brought in the CEO of an existing Welsh Carson roll-up, Kirsten Bratberg of Pediatrix, to run the new venture. Bratburg had spent eight years at Pediatrix rolling up over 100 neonatology practices, which was similar to anesthesiology, because it’s a medical practice that sells to hospitals. Though Rizzo and Bratburg would likely argue otherwise, they are specialists, not in medicine, but in the financialization of medicine.
The FTC noted what happened next.
In 2017, USAP bought MetroWest, a significant rival with relationships at Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital and Memorial City Hospital. The two practices had been in competition, but that changed after the acquisition, and reimbursement rates went significantly higher. Blue Cross noted that the the firm “[a]ccounted for . . . 69% of cases and 83% of cost in Houston” and that it “leverag[ed] market share” into getting double what others Houston anesthesiologists got.
But this acquisition was about more than just price hikes, as a potential competitor was thinking about buying MetroWest and entering the industry in Houston. A USAP executive told the CEO that large player entering into Houston would “spoil the entire market,” so USAP encouraged MetroWest to sell out and “preserve the protected market” both enjoyed.
Welsh Carson and USAP engaged in the same monopolization scheme throughout Texas, but they tacked on two additional tactics, both of which are variants of price-fixing. First, they cut deals with independent anesthesia groups at key hospitals in Houston and Dallas to work together to charge higher prices. Second, according to the FTC, they “secured a promise from another large anesthesia services provider to stay out of USAP’s territory,” which is illegal market allocation.
The scheme cost Texans tens of millions of dollars, if not much more. Welsh Carson got $350 million of dividends between 2012 and 2020, and physicians who sold their practices likely reaped significant profits as well. Indeed, one insurance executive noted the goal of USAP’s acquisition strategy was to take its massively inflated prices - far higher than anyone else in the industry - “and then peanut butter spread that across the entire state of Texas.”
Consolidation is Contagious
So that’s the story. USAP violated every single antitrust law out there - monopolization, conspiracy to monopolize, lessening competition, tend to create a monopoly, agreements in restraints of trade, unfair methods of competition. The emails are pretty damning, and the complaint is persuasive. But what I found most interesting, and important, is that the consolidation of health care, even within a single PE firm, is contagious.
As I mentioned above, to run the scheme, Welsh Carson hired the CEO of Pediatrix, who had experience consolidating neonatology practices. And then, in the middle of this roll-up, Welsh Carson “entered the emergency medicine market and engaged in a similar roll-up strategy to the one it deployed with USAP.” In 2017, it entered yet another market in radiology, noting that “[G]iven our success to date with USAP and [in emergency medicine], we would like to . . . deploy[] a similar strategy to consolidate the market . . . .”
As the FTC continued, “U.S. Radiology Specialists, which describes itself as ‘founded jointly’ by Welsh Carson and ‘one of the nation’s largest’ radiology groups, covers over 80 hospitals in more than a dozen states. Two of its directors are affiliated with Welsh Carson, and one of them is Brian Regan—the same partner who led Welsh Carson’s investment and involvement in USAP.”
The importance of this suit is not lost on anyone in private equity, or in the enforcement world. The language used by Welsh Carson is used in every single McKinsey deck, every single investment bank pitch deck, in every private equity roll-up from 2012-2021, as enforcers looked the other way, or even blessed the deals overtly. (...)
[ed. For more antitrust news (or lack thereof), see also: How to Hide a $2 Trillion Antitrust Trial (BIG); and, Meet the Law Geeks Exposing Google’s Secretive Antitrust Trial (Wired).]
That’s the phrase that an executive at private equity-owned financial firm U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) used after acquiring yet another Texas anesthesiology practice, with the intent of hiking prices on Texas patients. And “Cha-ching!” was the right way to put it, since the excess profits amounted to tens, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, in just one medical specialty, in just one state.
It’s the Prices, Stupid
America spends at least twice as much on health care per capita as nearly every other wealthy country, and gets much less for it in terms of doctor visits, hospital capacity, and life expectancy. Why? Where is all the money going?
As one medical journal article put it years ago, “it’s the prices, stupid.” In every area of health care - hospitals, pharmaceutical distribution, ambulances, emergency physician services, insurance - there has been massive consolidation, which increases prices and lowers the amount of care delivered. Private equity, a financial model focused on ruthless extraction, came into health care in a big way after the financial crisis of 2008, and it super-sized this trend. PE funds look specifically for areas where they can acquire pricing power, and then they squeeze.
As the New York Times noted:
The story starts in 2012, when an anesthesiologist executive named John Rizzo emailed a Welsh Carson partner, D. Scott Mackesy, observing that the market for such services in Texas was fragmented, with firms competing against each other for hospital and insurance business based on lower prices and better quality.
A competitive and healthy market, to Rizzo, was bad. And so he proposed a monopolization strategy where the PE firm would buy up a whole bunch of clinics in specific cities, like Dallas and Houston. The idea was, as Welsh Carson partner Brian Regan put it, to “consolidate practices with high market share in a few key markets,” and then use “leverage with commercial payors” to raise prices for anesthesia care.
As the New York Times noted:
A recent study from researchers at the Petris Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank in Washington, found that private equity-funded consolidation had led to price increases in gastroenterology, dermatology and other medical specialties.What Welsh Carson did is ripped from that playbook. And the FTC’s suit against it, similarly, calls out that playbook as wholly illegal. The complaint is good reading, chock full of incriminating emails.
The story starts in 2012, when an anesthesiologist executive named John Rizzo emailed a Welsh Carson partner, D. Scott Mackesy, observing that the market for such services in Texas was fragmented, with firms competing against each other for hospital and insurance business based on lower prices and better quality.
A competitive and healthy market, to Rizzo, was bad. And so he proposed a monopolization strategy where the PE firm would buy up a whole bunch of clinics in specific cities, like Dallas and Houston. The idea was, as Welsh Carson partner Brian Regan put it, to “consolidate practices with high market share in a few key markets,” and then use “leverage with commercial payors” to raise prices for anesthesia care.
“Spoil the Entire Market.”
And that’s what they did, hiring Dean and Company, a consulting firm, to identify anesthesia practices throughout the state they could purchase. Rizzo and Regan brought in the CEO of an existing Welsh Carson roll-up, Kirsten Bratberg of Pediatrix, to run the new venture. Bratburg had spent eight years at Pediatrix rolling up over 100 neonatology practices, which was similar to anesthesiology, because it’s a medical practice that sells to hospitals. Though Rizzo and Bratburg would likely argue otherwise, they are specialists, not in medicine, but in the financialization of medicine.
The FTC noted what happened next.
Since its creation, USAP has acquired more than a dozen anesthesiology practices in Texas. As it bought each one, the FTC says, USAP raised the acquired group’s rates to USAP’s higher rates—resulting in a substantial mark-up for the same doctors as before. This roll-up strategy has made it the dominant provider of anesthesia services in Texas and in many of the state’s metropolitan areas, including Houston and Dallas. USAP’s size and prices now dwarf those of its rivals.Their scheme began buying up practices in Houston, where Welsh Carson acquired Greater Houston Anesthesiology, which billed itself as “20 times the size of the second largest local competitor.” The doctors weren’t innocent here, as Welsh Carson explicitly pitched them on the roll-up strategy. After securing the purchase, the private equity firm renamed the company U.S. Anesthesia Partners, and crafted a strategic plan in 2013 explaining that USAP would “Roll Up Houston” through a series of “tuck-in acquisitions.” For the next four years, USAP bought several practices, and raised prices after each purchase.
In 2017, USAP bought MetroWest, a significant rival with relationships at Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital and Memorial City Hospital. The two practices had been in competition, but that changed after the acquisition, and reimbursement rates went significantly higher. Blue Cross noted that the the firm “[a]ccounted for . . . 69% of cases and 83% of cost in Houston” and that it “leverag[ed] market share” into getting double what others Houston anesthesiologists got.
But this acquisition was about more than just price hikes, as a potential competitor was thinking about buying MetroWest and entering the industry in Houston. A USAP executive told the CEO that large player entering into Houston would “spoil the entire market,” so USAP encouraged MetroWest to sell out and “preserve the protected market” both enjoyed.
Welsh Carson and USAP engaged in the same monopolization scheme throughout Texas, but they tacked on two additional tactics, both of which are variants of price-fixing. First, they cut deals with independent anesthesia groups at key hospitals in Houston and Dallas to work together to charge higher prices. Second, according to the FTC, they “secured a promise from another large anesthesia services provider to stay out of USAP’s territory,” which is illegal market allocation.
The scheme cost Texans tens of millions of dollars, if not much more. Welsh Carson got $350 million of dividends between 2012 and 2020, and physicians who sold their practices likely reaped significant profits as well. Indeed, one insurance executive noted the goal of USAP’s acquisition strategy was to take its massively inflated prices - far higher than anyone else in the industry - “and then peanut butter spread that across the entire state of Texas.”
Consolidation is Contagious
So that’s the story. USAP violated every single antitrust law out there - monopolization, conspiracy to monopolize, lessening competition, tend to create a monopoly, agreements in restraints of trade, unfair methods of competition. The emails are pretty damning, and the complaint is persuasive. But what I found most interesting, and important, is that the consolidation of health care, even within a single PE firm, is contagious.
As I mentioned above, to run the scheme, Welsh Carson hired the CEO of Pediatrix, who had experience consolidating neonatology practices. And then, in the middle of this roll-up, Welsh Carson “entered the emergency medicine market and engaged in a similar roll-up strategy to the one it deployed with USAP.” In 2017, it entered yet another market in radiology, noting that “[G]iven our success to date with USAP and [in emergency medicine], we would like to . . . deploy[] a similar strategy to consolidate the market . . . .”
As the FTC continued, “U.S. Radiology Specialists, which describes itself as ‘founded jointly’ by Welsh Carson and ‘one of the nation’s largest’ radiology groups, covers over 80 hospitals in more than a dozen states. Two of its directors are affiliated with Welsh Carson, and one of them is Brian Regan—the same partner who led Welsh Carson’s investment and involvement in USAP.”
The importance of this suit is not lost on anyone in private equity, or in the enforcement world. The language used by Welsh Carson is used in every single McKinsey deck, every single investment bank pitch deck, in every private equity roll-up from 2012-2021, as enforcers looked the other way, or even blessed the deals overtly. (...)
Unhinged Rage
At this point, despite her rational approach to policy, or rather because of it, Khan is absolutely loathed on Wall Street. And actions like this - systemic work to change market-shaping incentives instead of performative talk tough but act weak bullshit - are why. For instance, earlier this week, the FTC unveiled charges against specific Amazon executives - Neil Lindsay, Russell Grandinetti, and Jamil Ghani - who orchestrated deceptive practices surrounding Amazon Prime. The penalties against individuals can be significant; these men can be fined, or thrown out of the industry, if they are found guilty of willfully making decisions to deceive customers.
Going after large firms is unusual, but going after the actual decision-makers is, well, simply not done. The FTC has, or I should say had, an unwritten rule not to enforce laws against individuals unless they are powerless diet supplement scammers. Big powerful Amazon executives, they must be treated with respect, especially since they are often represented by former FTC officials now in private practice. Khan broke the unwritten rule, in which enforcers are not supposed to go after the powerful by name for breaking the law.
The same dynamic is at work in this private equity case. If this suit is successful, it means the party is over for doing roll-ups and raising prices, which is easy money for a lot of Yale graduates like Brian Regan. And so the response - the FTC are a bunch of losers and radicals - isn’t a surprise. Indeed, given the whole ecosystem of deal-makers that thrive on these kinds of deals, it would be weird if Khan were anything but despised.
At this point, despite her rational approach to policy, or rather because of it, Khan is absolutely loathed on Wall Street. And actions like this - systemic work to change market-shaping incentives instead of performative talk tough but act weak bullshit - are why. For instance, earlier this week, the FTC unveiled charges against specific Amazon executives - Neil Lindsay, Russell Grandinetti, and Jamil Ghani - who orchestrated deceptive practices surrounding Amazon Prime. The penalties against individuals can be significant; these men can be fined, or thrown out of the industry, if they are found guilty of willfully making decisions to deceive customers.
Going after large firms is unusual, but going after the actual decision-makers is, well, simply not done. The FTC has, or I should say had, an unwritten rule not to enforce laws against individuals unless they are powerless diet supplement scammers. Big powerful Amazon executives, they must be treated with respect, especially since they are often represented by former FTC officials now in private practice. Khan broke the unwritten rule, in which enforcers are not supposed to go after the powerful by name for breaking the law.
The same dynamic is at work in this private equity case. If this suit is successful, it means the party is over for doing roll-ups and raising prices, which is easy money for a lot of Yale graduates like Brian Regan. And so the response - the FTC are a bunch of losers and radicals - isn’t a surprise. Indeed, given the whole ecosystem of deal-makers that thrive on these kinds of deals, it would be weird if Khan were anything but despised.
by Matt Stollar, BIG | Read more:
Image: Lina Khan, FTC[ed. For more antitrust news (or lack thereof), see also: How to Hide a $2 Trillion Antitrust Trial (BIG); and, Meet the Law Geeks Exposing Google’s Secretive Antitrust Trial (Wired).]
Monday, September 25, 2023
We’re Teaching Music to Kids All Wrong
Each fall, as school starts up again, music educators witness a familiar ritual: Eager first-time students squeak on a clarinet, suppress giggles at the noises coming from the tubas and zealously hit a bass drum a little too hard. It’s a moment characterized by excitement, enthusiasm and the anticipation of new beginnings — which is why it’s so disheartening to know that many of those kids will eventually quit their instruments.
The fact that many children don’t stick with music is bad news not only for the state of self-expression and joy but also for education. Studies show that students who play an instrument do better in science, English and math and are more likely to want to attend college. They also may have less anxiety and be more conscientious — they are the kids you want your kids to be friends with. I have never met an adult who is expressly thankful to have quit music as a child, but I’ve met many who have regrets. So why haven’t we, as parents and educators, been better able to encourage our own kids to continue?
In my 15 years as a musical educator, talking to countless teachers, I’ve learned one thing: There is no magical fix. Making music education more successful doesn’t need to involve expensive digital accessories or fancy educational platforms (and I say that as someone who developed an online educational platform). There’s no technological or financial program that will convert children into lifelong music lovers.
Instead, we need to start by rethinking how we teach music from the ground up, both at home and in the classroom. The onus is on parents and educators to raise the next generation of lifelong musicians — not just for music’s sake, but to build richer, more vibrant inner personal lives for our children and a more beautiful and expressive world. (...)
Educators lament that, as with other courses, band can frequently fall prey to “teaching to the test” — in this case, teaching to the holiday concert. A class that by definition is meant to be a creative endeavor winds up emphasizing rigid reading and rote memorization, in service of a single performance. We need to abandon that approach and bring play back into the classroom by instructing students how to hear a melody on the radio and learn to play it back by ear, and encouraging students to write their own simple songs using a few chords. (The dirty secret of pop music, as Ed Sheeran has explained, is that most chart-topping songs can be played by using only four chords: G, C, D and E minor.) So start with just one chord, a funky beat and let it rip — and, voilà , you’re making music.
It’s often been repeated that “music is a language,” yet we’re reluctant to teach it that way. When we learn a language, we don’t simply memorize phrases or spend all day reading — we practice the language together, sharing, speaking, stumbling but ultimately finding ways to connect. This should happen in music class, too. Music should be a common pursuit: Ask any dad rock weekend band or church ensemble how it experiences music, and the performers are likely to tell you it’s not a chore but a way of building community.
Most important, we need to let kids be terrible. In fact, we should encourage it. They’ll be plenty terrible on their own — at first. But too often kids associate music in school with a difficult undertaking they can’t hope to master, which leads them to give up. Music does not have to be, and in fact, shouldn’t be, about the pursuit of perfection. And the great musicians have plenty of lessons to teach students about the usefulness of failure.
Miles Davis couldn’t hit the high notes his hero Dizzy Gillespie did, so what did he do? He found a new mellow, cool way to speak the language of jazz. Billie Holiday’s range was just over one octave — very limited for a professional singer — but that didn’t stop her from creating the definitive versions of so many American classics. Tell students these stories and watch them get excited to fail. We should let them do that, over and over again. That’s the only way they’ll learn what sounds awful but also what goes well together, what they like and what kind of music they want to make.
We also teach language through immersion, so let’s focus on creating an immersive experience in the language of music. Kids learn best when they’re part of communities filled with people of all skill levels for them to play along with, listen to music with, mess up with and just be silly with. Parents, this means you. Don’t let instrument instruction simply be something you nag your kids to endure. Music was never meant to be a lonely vigil. Play together. Make noise together. Find joy together. Take out an instrument and learn a song that you and your child both love.
The fact that many children don’t stick with music is bad news not only for the state of self-expression and joy but also for education. Studies show that students who play an instrument do better in science, English and math and are more likely to want to attend college. They also may have less anxiety and be more conscientious — they are the kids you want your kids to be friends with. I have never met an adult who is expressly thankful to have quit music as a child, but I’ve met many who have regrets. So why haven’t we, as parents and educators, been better able to encourage our own kids to continue?
Instead, we need to start by rethinking how we teach music from the ground up, both at home and in the classroom. The onus is on parents and educators to raise the next generation of lifelong musicians — not just for music’s sake, but to build richer, more vibrant inner personal lives for our children and a more beautiful and expressive world. (...)
Educators lament that, as with other courses, band can frequently fall prey to “teaching to the test” — in this case, teaching to the holiday concert. A class that by definition is meant to be a creative endeavor winds up emphasizing rigid reading and rote memorization, in service of a single performance. We need to abandon that approach and bring play back into the classroom by instructing students how to hear a melody on the radio and learn to play it back by ear, and encouraging students to write their own simple songs using a few chords. (The dirty secret of pop music, as Ed Sheeran has explained, is that most chart-topping songs can be played by using only four chords: G, C, D and E minor.) So start with just one chord, a funky beat and let it rip — and, voilà , you’re making music.
It’s often been repeated that “music is a language,” yet we’re reluctant to teach it that way. When we learn a language, we don’t simply memorize phrases or spend all day reading — we practice the language together, sharing, speaking, stumbling but ultimately finding ways to connect. This should happen in music class, too. Music should be a common pursuit: Ask any dad rock weekend band or church ensemble how it experiences music, and the performers are likely to tell you it’s not a chore but a way of building community.
Most important, we need to let kids be terrible. In fact, we should encourage it. They’ll be plenty terrible on their own — at first. But too often kids associate music in school with a difficult undertaking they can’t hope to master, which leads them to give up. Music does not have to be, and in fact, shouldn’t be, about the pursuit of perfection. And the great musicians have plenty of lessons to teach students about the usefulness of failure.
Miles Davis couldn’t hit the high notes his hero Dizzy Gillespie did, so what did he do? He found a new mellow, cool way to speak the language of jazz. Billie Holiday’s range was just over one octave — very limited for a professional singer — but that didn’t stop her from creating the definitive versions of so many American classics. Tell students these stories and watch them get excited to fail. We should let them do that, over and over again. That’s the only way they’ll learn what sounds awful but also what goes well together, what they like and what kind of music they want to make.
We also teach language through immersion, so let’s focus on creating an immersive experience in the language of music. Kids learn best when they’re part of communities filled with people of all skill levels for them to play along with, listen to music with, mess up with and just be silly with. Parents, this means you. Don’t let instrument instruction simply be something you nag your kids to endure. Music was never meant to be a lonely vigil. Play together. Make noise together. Find joy together. Take out an instrument and learn a song that you and your child both love.
by Sammy Miller, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Scientists Successfully Maneuver Robot Through Living Lung Tissue
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. Some tumors are extremely small and hide deep within lung tissue, making it difficult for surgeons to reach them. To address this challenge, UNC -Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University researchers have been working on an extremely bendy but sturdy robot capable of traversing lung tissue.
Their research has reached a new milestone. In a new paper, published in Science Robotics, Ron Alterovitz, PhD, in the UNC Department of Computer Science, and Jason Akulian, MD MPH, in the UNC Department of Medicine, have proven that their robot can autonomously go from "Point A" to "Point B" while avoiding important structures, such as tiny airways and blood vessels, in a living laboratory model.
"This technology allows us to reach targets we can't otherwise reach with a standard or even robotic bronchoscope," said Dr. Akulian, co-author on the paper and Section Chief of Interventional Pulmonology and Pulmonary Oncology in the UNC Division of Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine. "It gives you that extra few centimeters or few millimeters even, which would help immensely with pursuing small targets in the lungs." (...)
The robot is made of several separate components. A mechanical control provides controlled thrust of the needle to go forward and backward and the needle design allows for steering along curved paths. The needle is made from a nickel-titanium alloy and has been laser etched to increase its flexibility, allowing it to move effortlessly through tissue.
As it moves forward, the etching on the needle allows it to steer around obstacles with ease. Other attachments, such as catheters, could be used together with the needle to perform procedures such as lung biopsies.
To drive through tissue, the needle needs to know where it is going. The research team used CT scans of the subject's thoracic cavity and artificial intelligence to create three-dimensional models of the lung, including the airways, blood vessels, and the chosen target. Using this 3-D model and once the needle has been positioned for launch, their AI-driven software instructs it to automatically travel from "Point A" to "Point B" while avoiding important structures.
"The autonomous steerable needle we've developed is highly compact, but the system is packed with a suite of technologies that allow the needle to navigate autonomously in real-time," said Alterovitz, the principal investigator on the project and senior author on the paper. "It's akin to a self-driving car, but it navigates through lung tissue, avoiding obstacles like significant blood vessels as it travels to its destination."
The needle can also account for respiratory motion. Unlike other organs, the lungs are constantly expanding and contracting in the chest cavity. This can make targeting especially difficult in a living, breathing subject. According to Akulian, it's like shooting at a moving target.
The researchers tested their robot while the laboratory model performed intermittent breath holding. Every time the subject's breath is held, the robot is programmed to move forward.
"There remain some nuances in terms of the robot's ability to acquire targets and then actually get to them effectively," said Akulian, who is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, "and while there's still a lot of work to be done, I'm very excited about continuing to push the boundaries of what we can do for patients with the world-class experts that are here."
Their research has reached a new milestone. In a new paper, published in Science Robotics, Ron Alterovitz, PhD, in the UNC Department of Computer Science, and Jason Akulian, MD MPH, in the UNC Department of Medicine, have proven that their robot can autonomously go from "Point A" to "Point B" while avoiding important structures, such as tiny airways and blood vessels, in a living laboratory model.
The robot is made of several separate components. A mechanical control provides controlled thrust of the needle to go forward and backward and the needle design allows for steering along curved paths. The needle is made from a nickel-titanium alloy and has been laser etched to increase its flexibility, allowing it to move effortlessly through tissue.
As it moves forward, the etching on the needle allows it to steer around obstacles with ease. Other attachments, such as catheters, could be used together with the needle to perform procedures such as lung biopsies.
To drive through tissue, the needle needs to know where it is going. The research team used CT scans of the subject's thoracic cavity and artificial intelligence to create three-dimensional models of the lung, including the airways, blood vessels, and the chosen target. Using this 3-D model and once the needle has been positioned for launch, their AI-driven software instructs it to automatically travel from "Point A" to "Point B" while avoiding important structures.
"The autonomous steerable needle we've developed is highly compact, but the system is packed with a suite of technologies that allow the needle to navigate autonomously in real-time," said Alterovitz, the principal investigator on the project and senior author on the paper. "It's akin to a self-driving car, but it navigates through lung tissue, avoiding obstacles like significant blood vessels as it travels to its destination."
The needle can also account for respiratory motion. Unlike other organs, the lungs are constantly expanding and contracting in the chest cavity. This can make targeting especially difficult in a living, breathing subject. According to Akulian, it's like shooting at a moving target.
The researchers tested their robot while the laboratory model performed intermittent breath holding. Every time the subject's breath is held, the robot is programmed to move forward.
"There remain some nuances in terms of the robot's ability to acquire targets and then actually get to them effectively," said Akulian, who is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, "and while there's still a lot of work to be done, I'm very excited about continuing to push the boundaries of what we can do for patients with the world-class experts that are here."
by Science Daily | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. For more on the various complexities involved in robotic development, see also: Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics (YouTube/Lex Fridman):]
Highlights From Comments On Elon Musk
[Original post: Book Review: Elon Musk]
1: Comments From People With Personal Experience
2: ...Debating Musk's Intelligence
3: ...Debating Musk's Mental Health
4: ...About Tesla
5: ...About The Boring Company
6: ...About X/Twitter
7: ...About Musk's Mars Plan
8: ...Comparing Musk To Other Famous Figures
9: Other Comments
10: Updates
1: Comments From People With Personal Experience
BlueSilverWave writes:
Image: YouTube
2: ...Debating Musk's Intelligence
3: ...Debating Musk's Mental Health
4: ...About Tesla
5: ...About The Boring Company
6: ...About X/Twitter
7: ...About Musk's Mars Plan
8: ...Comparing Musk To Other Famous Figures
9: Other Comments
10: Updates
1: Comments From People With Personal Experience
BlueSilverWave writes:
I remember the days when SpaceX was really ramping up university recruitment. They were the table at the career fair everyone wanted to give their resume to. Naturally, SpaceX sent a spectacular a-hole who yelled at and belittled most of the students applying. It got so bad they actually apologized about it when they held a talk at the next career fair. Turned quite a few folks off, it was a real embarrassment. Took a couple of years to wash that one out.Paul T writes:
I sometimes think about the people that knew the type of behavior going on and still stood in line and applied. I think a large part of why all those ex Musk employees and etc. still excuse various behaviors and defend him so fervently is that there is approximately no one who goes to work at one of his companies just to work a job. No one would put up with that crap for a 9-5, and now that it's so well known, no one would apply for it. It's all starry-eyed (mostly recent college grad) true believers. And the turnover rates speak pretty well for themselves […]
Some more thoughts after sleeping on this review. It's very strange... so being an automotive engineer for several of those "staid, evil" Big3 companies, one gets a very direct view of Tesla and how they have been over the years.
Something that probably ought to get talked about more: for large companies, we are among the first few hundred to buy the newest hotness from our competitors. I saw a Model X Founders' Edition fully disassembled on tables, with the welds drilled out and sectioned so we could see every single part. I've done side-by-sides with Teslas and various other vehicles, where we literally will put our part and the competitor part next to each other in a giant warehouse (all of them for a series of vehicles) and do side-by-sides. When you do that, abstract questions of genius kind of fade to the background, and you get to actual real world questions like "is this part good? Is it better than mine? What is it trying to do? How does it try to do them? What does this say about the engineer's constraints? What does this say about the company organization behind it? Where are the organizational seams? Where are the hard points that could not be changed? How do those reflect on my company, my program, what we're trying to do and the things we have to work around?"
This isn't just idle navel-gazing. Akins' Law about system interfaces is quite relevant here. Where you draw organizational and system boundaries and the restrictions you put on certain hard points can drive significant differences in a component on a table.
But out of all of that, my biggest take-away was that Teslas..... just aren't very good? Their structures up to the Model 3 are quite inefficient and don't have great rigidity. The dimensional variation is shocking (far beyond even SBU, IYKYK). The hang-on parts are generally relatively poorly performing on their own. They can't touch our structural or powertrain durability tests. Rate and handling is bad, ergonomics fails to meets package targets, NVH and sound quality are poor, and we pay JD Power far too much to find out just how bad the quality numbers are (hilariously bad). I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most other OEMs can't make a Tesla, because our systems and processes prevent us from releasing something that half-baked.
It really makes you question the customer sometimes, because if we put out a touchscreen that failed like that, we'd rightly be ridiculed. CEOs have lost their jobs over far less.
I think Musk's genius is in two very closely related areas: getting investors to give him an unlimited checkbook, and in getting customers to believe they're doing something new, novel, and important, in a way that lets him walk past screwing up things that legacy players get right as an inevitability. The technical side? Most engineers I've met can probably accomplish it.
P.S. the interface is so slow and laggy, holy cow
>> “Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?Traditional_Leg_6938 writes:
Part of the answer must come from that story above about him taking over people’s jobs. His strategy is to demand people do seemingly impossible things, then fire them if they fail. To pull that off, you need to really understand the exact limits of impossibility.”
I agree with this, and would add that it's not specific to his strategy of micromanaging folks and taking over their audaciously-scoped tasks if they can't complete them. For any tech company, a technical CEO has superpowers compared to a non-technical one (but are predisposed to a fairly standard set of weaknesses too).
Even beyond just the CEO role, in the tech industry there is a very widely discussed challenge of "technical vs. non-technical managers". The engineers doing Individual Contributor (IC) work can grow to resent non-technical managers if they don't have a sense for how hard a given ask will be to implement, and a common anti-pattern is for the non-technical product, marketing, sales, and scheduling decisions to be made without a deep understanding of the actual feasibility as it bottoms out in the technical implementation. At worst this can lead to myopic leadership ("MBA management" etc.).
At the end of the day, a non-technical manager/CEO must be good at synthesizing the team's estimates and opinions, and knowing when to defer to concerns about tactical considerations, vs. take a tactically more difficult path which will advance strategic aims. (Aluminum chassis is a great example of this kind of tactically-painful but strategically visionary decision where a non-technical leader might struggle.) In a normal tech org the CEO has to trust the CTO, and then the CTO works through layers of managers to enact their technical vision, so there are multiple hops where the CEO's vision can be lost in translation. At Tesla Musk is collapsing both CEO-CTO and CTO-manager-IC communication down to him directly talking to ICs, which (while having other obvious organizational issues) allows him to make bold technical bets and stay very aligned on what is actually possible for his ICs to do.
Coming at the same issue from the bottom-up direction, technical ICs often don't have the context of the full strategic vision, and non-technical leaders often struggle to communicate it downwards in ways that are meaningful to the technical implementors. This is another thing Musk is better than almost anyone at; taking a lofty objective and chaining it down to an individual's role. I heard a SpaceX employee giving an answer in an interview like "Our mission is to become an inter-planetary species. To do that we must first colonize Mars. To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship). To do that we need to build a more powerful engine. To build our new engine we need this valve assembly to work; my mission is to optimize this valve to X performance requirement".
Having said all that, why not just use technical managers? The answer is that it's usually not the best use of a strong IC's time; managing is very hard, requires strong empathy, is hard to teach, and training is criminally underfunded and under-appreciated. Managing is very different than IC work; it's meetings and interrupt-driven communications and performance management, whereas ICs usually thrive on "Maker Time" where they (optimally) get long blocks of uninterrupted time to get into the flow state and think about one problem. So while a good senior IC starts to get involved in communications and scheduling and other "outwards-facing" non-technical activities, there isn't an obvious universal progression from IC to manager. It used to be quite standard to have "senior IC" as the pinnacle of technical career progression, and the only way to get promoted further was to become a manager; this turns your best ICs (technical leads, mentors, or whole-system generalists) into normally-distributed managers (i.e. some good some bad, with no expectation for them to be better-than-average). Now at least in software it's more common to have a strong IC progression track that's parallel to managers, but you still see some degree of "strong IC -> mediocre manager" career paths.
The reasons you'd favor non-technical managers also apply to why non-technical CEOs are usually better at their jobs; in most organizations, the technical work is one or maybe a handful of roles in the C-suite (you might have a CTO and a Chief Scientist, say), while there are more non-technical roles (Sales, Operations, Marketing, Legal, HR, fundraising, and so on), and the CEO needs to be something of a jack-of-all-trades between all of those; in aggregate, non-technical skills are required more than technical ones. Musk's successful companies are outliers in that they benefit from being heavily technology-focused; they are applying tech company style iterative innovation and experimentation to historically non-software/non-"tech" domains, which I believe increases the importance of the CEO->CTO->IC chain, and is why Musk's strength in that area is disproportionately impactful. Having a Musk-style technical CEO would not be useful in a traditional car company, or a sales-driven enterprise software company like SAP. (...)
I don't think most people know the general state of aerospace industry CEO's and managers. Boeing is currently run by a former hedge fund guy with a degree in accounting. Relative to the industry, Elon Musk's public statements demonstrate enormous engineering acumen for an exec. I've got a master's degree in AE and whenever he's said something in aerodynamics or structures I'm like yep, that's about right. I remember a while back Musk said something about the 787's batteries catching on fire and some MIT prof, world expert on batteries, was quoted saying, "I would have said exactly the same thing."by Various Commenters, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
I've worked along former SpaceXers and hung out with current ones (mostly in outdoors sports). If you work in the industry, especially in LA, you run into them. I was also interviewed by Brogan at Hyperloop a while back (super nice guy). The SpaceX hiring bar for technical talent is super high and I wouldn't exaggerate to say the average SpaceX engineer is twice as talented and hardworking as the average Boeing guy. Also, pretty arrogant in my experience (versus Googlers I've met tend to be humble even if they went to Stanford). I think this really started from the top of the company and he couldn't have built this pyramid of insane talent if he didn't have an informed, critical understanding of mechanical engineering.
Image: YouTube
[ed. An enigma. If you have the interest and stamina (which I imagine few do), read the original book review referenced at the beginning of this post: Book review: Elon Musk (based on the 2017 book by Ashlee Vance titled "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" (Amazon).]
Carbon Credits Explained: Alaskan Style
Gov. Mike Dunleavy persuaded Alaska’s Legislature to create a carbon offset program that monetizes the carbon dioxide that trees on state land breathe in and the carbon they store through photosynthesis. His 10-year budget plan relies heavily on filling gaps from dwindling oil revenues with carbon credit cash. Speaking with journalist Nathaniel Herz, he made it clear that the program had nothing to do with climate change mitigation.
As Herz wrote of Dunleavy: “Rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, he said the growing markets for carbon storage offer the state something it needs: money … ‘A lot of people’ believe that carbon emissions are driving global warming.” Herz wrote that Dunleavy is not one of them, but he wrote that the governor added, “Alaska is here to help them.”
People who do believe aren’t fooled into thinking that Alaska’s program will be helping to move toward the goal of zero net carbon by 2050 that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned will be necessary to prevent ecosystems from unraveling and severe weather from becoming catastrophic. The credits are a pay-to-pollute mechanism for offsetting “new” carbon emissions (including from the combustion of “old” fossil fuel carbon) or a greenwashing opportunity for companies to claim virtue while avoiding using less energy or the shift to clean, renewable energy sources.
Dunleavy projects that the state will receive billions of dollars in revenue by comparing the 145 million acres of state lands to the $100 million that the Sealaska Corporation was paid to “leave trees standing” on 165,000 acres for 100 years. Of the state’s 145 million acres, however, only about 125 million are inventoried forest lands. Four and a half million are classified commercial forestlands. Legislators were assured by Dunleavy the state will have its forest cake and eat it too; timber harvests won’t decrease. The threat to trees that are storing carbon which the state must prove for certification of carbon credits comes credibly only from the state itself. It’s more of a hostage bluff situation.
The Dunleavy administration is unlikely to leave a lot of trees standing for 100 years except for the ones they actually never planned to harvest. (...) The carbon offsets would presumably be sold on the regrowing trees. A preemptive cut-first approach will remove carbon storage that has to be recaptured through photosynthesis, setting back a carbon “break-even” point by decades.
The state can’t trade in the California mandatory cap-and-trade market. The voluntary international forestry carbon market is proving ineffective at actually offsetting emissions. A series of investigations reported by the nonprofit Guardian news outlet in January 2023, found “phantom” offsets in more than 90% of tropical forest projects certified by the industry’s leading standard and overestimates of the actual forest saved from removal by 400% per project. In August, they reported that since many of the offsets were “worthless,” demand had slumped. A whistleblower fraud and misconduct warning was issued in June 2023.
In the context of the goal of zero net carbon by 2050, the state carbon offset program has a good chance of complete irrelevance. The only reason for hope lies in the 10% of revenues the new law requires go into a renewable energy fund.
People who believe that carbon emissions are driving climate change can do the math. Companies who are greenwashing their continuing and new emissions don’t care.
[ed. Never understood the support for carbon credits (except by developers). Seemed like potential abuse was baked into the system. Money for nothing and your trees for free.]
As Herz wrote of Dunleavy: “Rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, he said the growing markets for carbon storage offer the state something it needs: money … ‘A lot of people’ believe that carbon emissions are driving global warming.” Herz wrote that Dunleavy is not one of them, but he wrote that the governor added, “Alaska is here to help them.”
Dunleavy projects that the state will receive billions of dollars in revenue by comparing the 145 million acres of state lands to the $100 million that the Sealaska Corporation was paid to “leave trees standing” on 165,000 acres for 100 years. Of the state’s 145 million acres, however, only about 125 million are inventoried forest lands. Four and a half million are classified commercial forestlands. Legislators were assured by Dunleavy the state will have its forest cake and eat it too; timber harvests won’t decrease. The threat to trees that are storing carbon which the state must prove for certification of carbon credits comes credibly only from the state itself. It’s more of a hostage bluff situation.
The Dunleavy administration is unlikely to leave a lot of trees standing for 100 years except for the ones they actually never planned to harvest. (...) The carbon offsets would presumably be sold on the regrowing trees. A preemptive cut-first approach will remove carbon storage that has to be recaptured through photosynthesis, setting back a carbon “break-even” point by decades.
The state can’t trade in the California mandatory cap-and-trade market. The voluntary international forestry carbon market is proving ineffective at actually offsetting emissions. A series of investigations reported by the nonprofit Guardian news outlet in January 2023, found “phantom” offsets in more than 90% of tropical forest projects certified by the industry’s leading standard and overestimates of the actual forest saved from removal by 400% per project. In August, they reported that since many of the offsets were “worthless,” demand had slumped. A whistleblower fraud and misconduct warning was issued in June 2023.
In the context of the goal of zero net carbon by 2050, the state carbon offset program has a good chance of complete irrelevance. The only reason for hope lies in the 10% of revenues the new law requires go into a renewable energy fund.
People who believe that carbon emissions are driving climate change can do the math. Companies who are greenwashing their continuing and new emissions don’t care.
by Marilyn Sigman, Alaska Beacon | Read more:
Image: Yareth Rosen
Friday, September 22, 2023
Your NFTs Are Actually — Finally — Totally Worthless
A team of researchers have crunched the numbers to explain why you don’t see people hawking ugly cartoon apes on the internet as much anymore: NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, once vaunted as a revolution in crypto and digital art, are largely worthless.
“Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market” is a new report from dappGambl, a community of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH), the second most-popular cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin. In practical terms, that means 95 percent of NFTs wouldn’t fetch a penny today — a spectacular crash for assets that reached a trading volume of $17 billion amid a frenzied bull market in 2021. The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value.
What’s more, supply vastly outstripped demand for NFTs. Just 21 percent of the collections included in the study can claim full ownership, meaning around four out of every five collections remains unsold. With buyers becoming more discerning, the report notes, “projects that lack clear use cases, compelling narratives, or genuine artistic value are finding it increasingly difficult to attract attention and sales.”
And, while headlines during the heyday of NFT speculation focused on individual pieces that sold for the equivalent of millions of dollars in crypto, almost none are so exorbitantly priced today. Less than one percent are listed at more than $6,000, and the bulk of the most expensive collections are priced between $5 and $100. Almost a fifth of the “top” collections have a floor price of zero. Even among the more expensive NFTs, the report notes, such prices may be set “without any bearing on tangible, real demand,” reflecting wishful thinking from sellers and potentially distorting investors’ view of an NFT’s meager inherent value.
The dappGambl researchers conclude that while we may never see an NFT boom like the one in 2021-2022, the assets may evolve in a way to survive the wipeout. For example, they could be given a specific function, becoming a pass for special event access or a virtual item to be purchased and traded in video games.
“Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market” is a new report from dappGambl, a community of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH), the second most-popular cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin. In practical terms, that means 95 percent of NFTs wouldn’t fetch a penny today — a spectacular crash for assets that reached a trading volume of $17 billion amid a frenzied bull market in 2021. The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value.
And, while headlines during the heyday of NFT speculation focused on individual pieces that sold for the equivalent of millions of dollars in crypto, almost none are so exorbitantly priced today. Less than one percent are listed at more than $6,000, and the bulk of the most expensive collections are priced between $5 and $100. Almost a fifth of the “top” collections have a floor price of zero. Even among the more expensive NFTs, the report notes, such prices may be set “without any bearing on tangible, real demand,” reflecting wishful thinking from sellers and potentially distorting investors’ view of an NFT’s meager inherent value.
The dappGambl researchers conclude that while we may never see an NFT boom like the one in 2021-2022, the assets may evolve in a way to survive the wipeout. For example, they could be given a specific function, becoming a pass for special event access or a virtual item to be purchased and traded in video games.
by Miles Klee, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Manuel Candela/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Succession: Fox Style
The ludicrous agony of Rupert Murdoch
It’s nice to know that Fox News, which has so deranged America while making Rupert Murdoch ungodly sums of money, has in the end made Murdoch miserable, at least if the journalist Michael Wolff is to be believed. But the consolation is a small one.
Murdoch’s unhappiness and befuddlement is the throughline of Wolff’s amusingly vicious and very well-timed book, “The Fall: The End of Fox News,” which is to hit shelves next week, days after Murdoch, 92, announced his retirement from the Fox Corporation and News Corporation boards. Wolff paints Fox’s owner as embarrassed by the channel’s vulgarity and horrified by its ultimate political creation, Donald Trump. Murdoch apparently very much wants to thwart the ex-president, just not at the price of losing a single point in the ratings.
In his tortured enabling of Trump, Murdoch seems the ultimate symbol of a feckless and craven conservative establishment, overmatched by the jingoist forces it encouraged and either capitulating to the ex-president or shuffling pitifully off the public stage. “Murdoch was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal,” writes Wolff. The difference is that Murdoch’s helplessness was a choice.
Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump’s rise. (Many people have described losing loved ones to Fox’s all-consuming alternative reality.) After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. (It was as part of that settlement, Wolff writes, that Fox fired its biggest star, the demagogic troll Tucker Carlson.)
In Wolff’s telling, Murdoch is a sort of hapless Frankenstein, abominating the monster he set loose on the world but unsure how to fight him. This waffling, however, is a product of the same venality that has always undergirded Murdoch’s old-fashioned right-wing politics. In his farewell letter, Murdoch, the Oxford-educated son of a wealthy Australian media executive, poses as a populist, decrying a media that’s in “cahoots” with elites, “peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” This is pure projection: Fox exists to peddle self-serving political narratives, deceiving its audience under the guise of respecting it. In “The Fall” — a book that isn’t for anyone who doesn’t want to encounter casual slurs — Murdoch says of the celebrity anchor Sean Hannity, “He’s retarded, like most Americans.” The last thing Murdoch wants to do is risk lower ratings by leveling with the audience he looks down on. (...)
Though “The Fall” is peppered with references to HBO’s “Succession,” Murdoch comes off as the anti-Logan Roy, desperate for the approval of his mostly liberal children, with the hateful Fox News standing between them. “He just wants his kids to love him,” Roger Ailes is quoted saying. “And they don’t.” In a chapter set in the winter of 2022, Wolff describes Murdoch fantasizing about giving up Fox, which his friends urge him to do. They emphasize “how much better his relationship with his children would be without the curse of Fox News.”
But breaking that curse would have meant turning Fox over to his son James, who feels the stain of Fox especially acutely and longs to remake it into a “force for good,” a phrase Wolff repeats with contempt. “James had become the avenging Murdoch — avenging what his family had wrought,” writes Wolff. “It was not enough to save himself and his family and the Murdoch brand from Fox. He had to save the nation.” Wolff sneers at James’s grandiosity, but if Rupert Murdoch truly wanted a redemptive final act, his younger son was probably the only one who could have given it to him.
Instead, Murdoch has done the predictable thing and handed Fox to his son Lachlan, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, widely seen as the only true conservative among the Murdoch heirs. Wolff challenges the common perception of Lachlan as a right-wing ideologue, painting him instead as essentially apolitical and mostly interested in spear fishing. Nevertheless, of the Murdoch children, Lachlan is the one most likely to let Fox continue in its current groove. The network may keep boosting Trump’s Republican primary opponents, but once the primaries are over, we can expect it to once again be the lucrative propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential campaign.
[ed. Crocodile tears. See also: Meet the New Murdoch, Same as the Old Murdoch (RS).]
Murdoch’s unhappiness and befuddlement is the throughline of Wolff’s amusingly vicious and very well-timed book, “The Fall: The End of Fox News,” which is to hit shelves next week, days after Murdoch, 92, announced his retirement from the Fox Corporation and News Corporation boards. Wolff paints Fox’s owner as embarrassed by the channel’s vulgarity and horrified by its ultimate political creation, Donald Trump. Murdoch apparently very much wants to thwart the ex-president, just not at the price of losing a single point in the ratings.
Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump’s rise. (Many people have described losing loved ones to Fox’s all-consuming alternative reality.) After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. (It was as part of that settlement, Wolff writes, that Fox fired its biggest star, the demagogic troll Tucker Carlson.)
In Wolff’s telling, Murdoch is a sort of hapless Frankenstein, abominating the monster he set loose on the world but unsure how to fight him. This waffling, however, is a product of the same venality that has always undergirded Murdoch’s old-fashioned right-wing politics. In his farewell letter, Murdoch, the Oxford-educated son of a wealthy Australian media executive, poses as a populist, decrying a media that’s in “cahoots” with elites, “peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” This is pure projection: Fox exists to peddle self-serving political narratives, deceiving its audience under the guise of respecting it. In “The Fall” — a book that isn’t for anyone who doesn’t want to encounter casual slurs — Murdoch says of the celebrity anchor Sean Hannity, “He’s retarded, like most Americans.” The last thing Murdoch wants to do is risk lower ratings by leveling with the audience he looks down on. (...)
Though “The Fall” is peppered with references to HBO’s “Succession,” Murdoch comes off as the anti-Logan Roy, desperate for the approval of his mostly liberal children, with the hateful Fox News standing between them. “He just wants his kids to love him,” Roger Ailes is quoted saying. “And they don’t.” In a chapter set in the winter of 2022, Wolff describes Murdoch fantasizing about giving up Fox, which his friends urge him to do. They emphasize “how much better his relationship with his children would be without the curse of Fox News.”
But breaking that curse would have meant turning Fox over to his son James, who feels the stain of Fox especially acutely and longs to remake it into a “force for good,” a phrase Wolff repeats with contempt. “James had become the avenging Murdoch — avenging what his family had wrought,” writes Wolff. “It was not enough to save himself and his family and the Murdoch brand from Fox. He had to save the nation.” Wolff sneers at James’s grandiosity, but if Rupert Murdoch truly wanted a redemptive final act, his younger son was probably the only one who could have given it to him.
Instead, Murdoch has done the predictable thing and handed Fox to his son Lachlan, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, widely seen as the only true conservative among the Murdoch heirs. Wolff challenges the common perception of Lachlan as a right-wing ideologue, painting him instead as essentially apolitical and mostly interested in spear fishing. Nevertheless, of the Murdoch children, Lachlan is the one most likely to let Fox continue in its current groove. The network may keep boosting Trump’s Republican primary opponents, but once the primaries are over, we can expect it to once again be the lucrative propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential campaign.
by Michelle Goldberg, New York Times | Read more:
Image: Mike Segar/Reuters
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Steve Jobs Loved Walking Meetings
New research shows why he was right.
He was onto something. Conducting a meeting while walking has clear health benefits for the participants, but it turns out it benefits the meeting, too. New research from the University of Hong Kong shows that walking side by side helps people connect to each other. This effect is so powerful that it works on people who've never met before, even while they aren't speaking to each other. And it happens in less than five minutes.
To do this, they matched up a total 257 pairs of people and invited them to give impressions of each other before taking about a quarter-mile walk together. (Participants took the walk multiple times, but each time with a new partner. They were told the experiment was about their perceptions of how long the walk took.) At the end of the quarter mile, they again reported their impressions of each other and then walked back to the starting point. One group of pairs was forbidden from conversing on the first part of the walk but allowed to chat on the way back. In a second experiment, they were told to stay silent for the entire walk. And a control group of participants simply sat in a room together working on a simple task for about the same amount of time as the walk, to test the social effect of simply being in another person's presence.
Falling into step.
Researchers used sensors to measure how participants walked and found that participants tended to synchronize their walking--"fall into step" with each other--even if they were strangers and even if they weren't allowed to talk. They found that participants' impressions of their partners grew more favorable after the first part of the walk--which took only 3 to 4 1/2 minutes--even though they weren't allowed to speak to each other. Those who were allowed to converse on the return trip got to like each other even more.
by Minda Zetlen, Inc. | Read more:
Image: Getty via
[ed. Seems intuitive (some might disagree). I wonder if the informal benefits of this might extend to educational situations, too.]
Velvet Underground and Nico
[ed. See also Screen Tests (an art project by Andy Warhol, who was VU's manager at the time), where subjects "attempted to sit motionless for around three minutes while being filmed." For example, here's an uncomfortable Bob Dylan, and also Lou Reed drinking a coke. And, if that's not weird enough, check out this "Mod Wedding" in Detroit around the same time.]
Monday, September 18, 2023
The Stuffiest Country Club Stories We've Ever Heard
One story that best encapsulates country club point-missing has circulated for years. The setting is an old, eastern golf club, with one of the best courses in the state. The club is notorious for its men-only policy. Forget about women joining as members or playing the golf course. Only a few days a year are they even allowed on the property.
One day a member having lunch at the club abruptly falls ill at the table. He grabs his chest, falls to his knees. A concerned scrum gathers around his table. Word reaches his wife, who arrives at the club gates within minutes.
“I’m afraid it is true,” one longtime member of the club says. “I’ve heard it, too,” a frequent guest of the club confirmed.
“It’s true.”
A similar story comes from another elite club. You would know it if you heard it. Another lunch, another golfer topples over. (Is there something in the food at these clubs?) In this case the man regains consciousness. “Please contact my wife,” he says from the floor, and hands his friend his phone.
The friend starts dialing, then stops. He is also a member and is now saddled with an inconvenient thought. “I can’t,” he says. “No cellphones in the grillroom.”
You will not find a set definition of country club stuffiness. As with pornography and a vanity handicap, you know it when you see it: rules for the sake of rules, a rigid adherence to tradition, an outsized emphasis on the superficial. This attitude is also, hopefully, in decline. This collection of stories, most from within the past 15 years, represents a side of golf the game has made efforts to shake, with at least some degree of success. Golf today is more modern, more inviting. Golf might still have its share of snobs, killjoys, and Judge Smails disciples, embracing priorities that range from archaic to laughably misguided, but at least the narrative has shifted. Once a statement, This is just a part of golf, it is now a question: This is still a part of golf?
Short answer: not as much.
Longer answer: maybe still a little.
There is at least one counterintuitive element to the American dream, which is if you work hard and advance in your chosen profession, you might be lucky enough to join the sort of club where you will always feel on edge. This is not how it’s planned, of course, but it is an outcome nonetheless. The typical municipal course might have scruffier conditions and longer rounds, but at least you won’t be ostracized for using the wrong fork. Sometimes the more exclusive the address, the more precarious the footing. Once, a golfer joined a blue-blood Connecticut club and was excited to jump into his membership. He played both weekend days and showed up during the week to practice. This went on for a short time until one evening a member of the golf staff greeted him on the practice green. The conversation began with some innocuous small talk but then led to a message. “You’re showing up here too much,” the new member was informed. It was time to scale it back. (...)
At some top-of-the-pyramid clubs, the membership process follows the logic of high school courtships, which says the best way to secure interest from the other party is to express as little interest as possible. Your microscopic chances of an Augusta National membership are contingent on you never confiding to anyone—not to your significant other, not to your clergyman, perhaps not even to yourself—that you would ever want to join. Even when in the door, though, you remain on guard. As the story goes, a member invited a guest for a dream weekend of golf and lodging in one of the club’s cabins. When a high-ranking green jacket approached during cocktail hour one evening, it was not to solicit feedback on the green speeds. “Please tell your guest we wear socks here for dinner,” the green jacket told the other green jacket, never once looking in the bare-ankled offender’s direction.
Broadly, guest experiences at clubs can be divided into two categories—one in which they strive to make you feel at home, the other in which they work hard to remind you that you’re not. At some of the country’s A-list clubs, guests can show up ahead of a member and are treated as if they are the ones writing the checks, with access to locker rooms, the practice range, perhaps even a bite to eat. At other places, you’re encouraged to wait in the parking lot, if not the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street.
At a Northern California club with holes along the Pacific, a guest showed up one day and wandered innocently into the golf shop to buy a gift for his wife. The shop attendant informed him unaccompanied guests were prohibited from buying anything.
“OK, then,” the guest replied, “I’ll just hit balls.” When he asked to be pointed to the practice area, the attendant directed him to the range at a different course, a mile down the road. (...)
At many clubs rules persist about where one can change shoes, as if the appearance of socks in broad daylight is a form of indecent exposure. At a name-brand club outside New York City, a guest showed up wearing sneakers, which he was told weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, so he then sought to change his shoes by his car.
“Amazingly, out of nowhere, an employee pops up from the trees and says, ‘Sir, you aren’t allowed to change your shoes in the parking lot,’ ” his friend recalled. “We tried to solve this issue and kept asking the employee what to do. His response, ‘Figure it out.’ ”
Briefly stumped, the guest resolved to walk back down the driveway of the club in his sneakers until he was outside the gates, changed into his golf shoes, then walked back. Problem solved, calories burned.
For an inanimate stretch of asphalt, a parking lot can provide a telling window into a club’s worldview in other ways. At a posh Palm Beach club, a guest arrived in a pickup truck and was asked if he was there to make a delivery.
“No, I have a tee time,” he replied. He returned from his round to learn the valet parked his truck in the service lot.
At a different club in the North Carolina mountains, the staff didn’t even pretend to make a mistake when a guest arrived in a new Ford pickup. “I kept it pretty,” the owner said of his vehicle. “This was no beater with rust.” Still, a club employee ran frantically into the locker room to report that pickup trucks aren’t allowed to be visible in the top parking lot and that it needed to be moved. “My nice truck had been banished to oblivion where apparently it belonged,” the guest continued. “They seemed to have stretched the traditional club etiquette to include well-behaved vehicles, too.” (...)
Sometimes it’s not the rule that is so unreasonable but the way it’s enforced. Consider the time a guest arrived at a top-100 course in Pennsylvania wearing cargo shorts, and his host decided the best way to spare his friend embarrassment was to tee off hoping no one would notice. He was wrong. On the third hole a staff member came with a letter from the club manager issuing a formal warning and a suggestion to buy new shorts in the golf shop as soon as possible. However, the letter’s delivery couldn’t be topped. The staff member was in a tuxedo, carrying the letter on a silver platter.
“The sight will be burned in my memory,” a third member of the group recalled. (...)
Play enough golf and these stories are not difficult to uncover. They travel freely because no one ever forgets them. The harder part is explaining them because a thorough unpacking should probably draw on insight from a broad assortment of anthropologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts and locker-room attendants.
A charitable view is that many golfers look to their club as a sanctuary from the disorder of their everyday lives, so they hold themselves and others to a standard that can’t be maintained anywhere else. That’s the nice way of framing it. Another perspective says some golf clubs make you feel privileged to be there, and others want you to feel unworthy. In that sense, the enforcement of silly rules about where you park or tie your shoes has the subtle benefit of putting visitors—members, too—on their heels from the start.
The simplest answer might be that as with any other organization of people, a golf club does not boast one personality but several. The problem isn’t always institutional but often individual. That’s why the manager of a Colorado private club has a letter framed on his wall from a member who wrote complaining about the club’s toilet paper unrolling the wrong way and why a golfer from a private club in Kansas enjoys recalling the story of another player yelling over from another hole to tell the man his son’s shirttail needed to be tucked in. The lesson: The world has its share of petty people, and some of them still happen to play golf.
One day a member having lunch at the club abruptly falls ill at the table. He grabs his chest, falls to his knees. A concerned scrum gathers around his table. Word reaches his wife, who arrives at the club gates within minutes.
“He is inside,” she is told as she tries to pass through. “Unfortunately,” the attendant continues, “no women are allowed on property. Please wait here.”
No way this is true.
No way this is true.
“It’s true.”
A similar story comes from another elite club. You would know it if you heard it. Another lunch, another golfer topples over. (Is there something in the food at these clubs?) In this case the man regains consciousness. “Please contact my wife,” he says from the floor, and hands his friend his phone.
The friend starts dialing, then stops. He is also a member and is now saddled with an inconvenient thought. “I can’t,” he says. “No cellphones in the grillroom.”
You will not find a set definition of country club stuffiness. As with pornography and a vanity handicap, you know it when you see it: rules for the sake of rules, a rigid adherence to tradition, an outsized emphasis on the superficial. This attitude is also, hopefully, in decline. This collection of stories, most from within the past 15 years, represents a side of golf the game has made efforts to shake, with at least some degree of success. Golf today is more modern, more inviting. Golf might still have its share of snobs, killjoys, and Judge Smails disciples, embracing priorities that range from archaic to laughably misguided, but at least the narrative has shifted. Once a statement, This is just a part of golf, it is now a question: This is still a part of golf?
Short answer: not as much.
Longer answer: maybe still a little.
There is at least one counterintuitive element to the American dream, which is if you work hard and advance in your chosen profession, you might be lucky enough to join the sort of club where you will always feel on edge. This is not how it’s planned, of course, but it is an outcome nonetheless. The typical municipal course might have scruffier conditions and longer rounds, but at least you won’t be ostracized for using the wrong fork. Sometimes the more exclusive the address, the more precarious the footing. Once, a golfer joined a blue-blood Connecticut club and was excited to jump into his membership. He played both weekend days and showed up during the week to practice. This went on for a short time until one evening a member of the golf staff greeted him on the practice green. The conversation began with some innocuous small talk but then led to a message. “You’re showing up here too much,” the new member was informed. It was time to scale it back. (...)
At some top-of-the-pyramid clubs, the membership process follows the logic of high school courtships, which says the best way to secure interest from the other party is to express as little interest as possible. Your microscopic chances of an Augusta National membership are contingent on you never confiding to anyone—not to your significant other, not to your clergyman, perhaps not even to yourself—that you would ever want to join. Even when in the door, though, you remain on guard. As the story goes, a member invited a guest for a dream weekend of golf and lodging in one of the club’s cabins. When a high-ranking green jacket approached during cocktail hour one evening, it was not to solicit feedback on the green speeds. “Please tell your guest we wear socks here for dinner,” the green jacket told the other green jacket, never once looking in the bare-ankled offender’s direction.
Broadly, guest experiences at clubs can be divided into two categories—one in which they strive to make you feel at home, the other in which they work hard to remind you that you’re not. At some of the country’s A-list clubs, guests can show up ahead of a member and are treated as if they are the ones writing the checks, with access to locker rooms, the practice range, perhaps even a bite to eat. At other places, you’re encouraged to wait in the parking lot, if not the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street.
At a Northern California club with holes along the Pacific, a guest showed up one day and wandered innocently into the golf shop to buy a gift for his wife. The shop attendant informed him unaccompanied guests were prohibited from buying anything.
“OK, then,” the guest replied, “I’ll just hit balls.” When he asked to be pointed to the practice area, the attendant directed him to the range at a different course, a mile down the road. (...)
At many clubs rules persist about where one can change shoes, as if the appearance of socks in broad daylight is a form of indecent exposure. At a name-brand club outside New York City, a guest showed up wearing sneakers, which he was told weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, so he then sought to change his shoes by his car.
“Amazingly, out of nowhere, an employee pops up from the trees and says, ‘Sir, you aren’t allowed to change your shoes in the parking lot,’ ” his friend recalled. “We tried to solve this issue and kept asking the employee what to do. His response, ‘Figure it out.’ ”
Briefly stumped, the guest resolved to walk back down the driveway of the club in his sneakers until he was outside the gates, changed into his golf shoes, then walked back. Problem solved, calories burned.
For an inanimate stretch of asphalt, a parking lot can provide a telling window into a club’s worldview in other ways. At a posh Palm Beach club, a guest arrived in a pickup truck and was asked if he was there to make a delivery.
“No, I have a tee time,” he replied. He returned from his round to learn the valet parked his truck in the service lot.
At a different club in the North Carolina mountains, the staff didn’t even pretend to make a mistake when a guest arrived in a new Ford pickup. “I kept it pretty,” the owner said of his vehicle. “This was no beater with rust.” Still, a club employee ran frantically into the locker room to report that pickup trucks aren’t allowed to be visible in the top parking lot and that it needed to be moved. “My nice truck had been banished to oblivion where apparently it belonged,” the guest continued. “They seemed to have stretched the traditional club etiquette to include well-behaved vehicles, too.” (...)
Sometimes it’s not the rule that is so unreasonable but the way it’s enforced. Consider the time a guest arrived at a top-100 course in Pennsylvania wearing cargo shorts, and his host decided the best way to spare his friend embarrassment was to tee off hoping no one would notice. He was wrong. On the third hole a staff member came with a letter from the club manager issuing a formal warning and a suggestion to buy new shorts in the golf shop as soon as possible. However, the letter’s delivery couldn’t be topped. The staff member was in a tuxedo, carrying the letter on a silver platter.
“The sight will be burned in my memory,” a third member of the group recalled. (...)
Play enough golf and these stories are not difficult to uncover. They travel freely because no one ever forgets them. The harder part is explaining them because a thorough unpacking should probably draw on insight from a broad assortment of anthropologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts and locker-room attendants.
A charitable view is that many golfers look to their club as a sanctuary from the disorder of their everyday lives, so they hold themselves and others to a standard that can’t be maintained anywhere else. That’s the nice way of framing it. Another perspective says some golf clubs make you feel privileged to be there, and others want you to feel unworthy. In that sense, the enforcement of silly rules about where you park or tie your shoes has the subtle benefit of putting visitors—members, too—on their heels from the start.
The simplest answer might be that as with any other organization of people, a golf club does not boast one personality but several. The problem isn’t always institutional but often individual. That’s why the manager of a Colorado private club has a letter framed on his wall from a member who wrote complaining about the club’s toilet paper unrolling the wrong way and why a golfer from a private club in Kansas enjoys recalling the story of another player yelling over from another hole to tell the man his son’s shirttail needed to be tucked in. The lesson: The world has its share of petty people, and some of them still happen to play golf.
by Sam Weinman, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Javi Aznarez
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