War Or Nothing

A tale across the years; seven lessons learned from a quarter-century in a war-oriented society, where the greatest crime is any opposition to killing.

Flying planes into buildings is a sick and vile act. It is also a terrorist act. I don't think that's controversial to say no matter what else you think about what happened before or after. Terrorism is sort of an amorphous word, but I'd say it applies to acts of mass killing of civilian populations by a person or entity that doesn't have the requisite power to wage something called war. War used to be when armies met armies and kept civilians out of it, or that was the idea, but if that was ever the case it hasn't been the case for damn near a century now; now war is a matter that touches civilian populations most of all. When you're a person or entity powerful enough to make other people validate your reason for bringing death and terror to civilian populations, then you're powerful enough to call it war and make it stick, and then it is war, and it is more official and respectable for that. If you're not the aggressor, then war isn't as distinguishable from terrorism; like terrorism, it's something that you didn't choose that is happening to you for as long as you can survive it, and then after it is over, if you survived, then its a thing that was done to you, and if you don't survive it, nothing is happening to you anymore, and you probably don't care so much which one it was.

And sure enough, here in late 2001, old what's-his-name the news anchor has been proved right: we're heading to war in Afghanistan. I reckon this was the first lesson of a war-oriented society that we are all learning. Old what's-his-name knew, with the sage wisdom of somebody living in a war-oriented society; when you are attacked, war is not optional. Killing is not only an appropriate answer to killing, it is the only appropriate answer.

Afghanistan is not the country where most of the people who attacked us hail from, incidentally. It is a country where the perpetrators have frequently operated in the 80s and 90s, and they operated there in part because we were secretly funding them with cash and weapons to help install some very bad guys into power, because doing so served our national interests, or at least the interests of those leaders in the 80s and 90s who got to decide what our national interests were and in some cases broke the law to do so. So we've already been bringing death to the region for a while now, something millions of us notice it has made us less safe, not more safe.

And millions of ace students who have already learned all a war-oriented society's lessons very well inform us that pointing this observable fact out means that we are suggesting that those who died in the terrorist attacks deserved it, that we would prefer to denigrate their memories by doing nothing.

These are the choices, we're learning: war, or nothing. The only two flavors, when you have been attacked. The only way to honor the dead is with more death.

Some millions of us notice that this alignment toward death also seems to be how terrorists seem to think about things. Our noticing this is offered as further proof that we love the terrorists. I am told that I want to invite them home for tea. I am told that I must not have any children, because if I had children, I would be willing to support maximum killing to keep them safe. Don't worry, though; speaking from the future of 2024 using the magic of narrative device, I can assure you that my children are still alive—thanks, I suppose, to maximum killing, and no thanks, I suppose, to me and my opposition to a non-optional war.

War sometimes isn't optional, it's true. When you are a weaker power and a stronger power decides to attack you, you're at war until they decide to stop or you make them stop, and you don't get to decide about that. For example, here in 2001, the people of Afghanistan aren't going to get to decide whether or not to experience the war we are bringing them. Still, there are some millions of us who wonder—do we have to go to war? And millions of others tell us with breathless certitude that even wondering that means that we are aligned with the terrorists, with the ones who want to bring death to America; that we, too, for the crime of wondering about whether war is optional, also want to bring death to America.

This strikes millions of us as odd, because the terrorists, who are not a country, do not have the ability to force us into war. This is why they attacked us in the way they did. Flying the planes into the buildings was an act of terror—everyone agrees. This suggests military or political objectives. What were they? Here in 2001, millions of us believe that it doesn't matter much; we will crush the terrorist's objectives by crushing them, which we will accomplish by showing them just how much more death we are able to deliver to them then they are able to deliver.

And millions of us wonder how increasing the killing opposes an entity that wishes to increase killing. Many of us in opposition are still fresh-faced students, and because many of us are students we have not yet learned all the lessons of a war-oriented society, and due to our inexperience we are dismissed as ignorant fools. And many of the millions of us—student or otherwise—are ignorant, to be sure, and some of us are fools, and all of us are dismissed by our institutions of power and influence, but millions of us who are not ignorant and not fools can't help but notice that within a war-oriented society, the most ignorant and foolish within any anti-war group is always given the most attention by our institutions of power and influence, and this attention is used to apply ignorance and foolishness to the whole, and then the group is dismissed on those grounds, divested of all power and influence even as they are framed as an empowered threat to the inherent safety of war. And this is the second lesson of war in a war-oriented society: the worst betrayal possible is any opposition to killing.

And now it is 2003, and we are fixing to go to war in Iraq, which means the people of Iraq will not have a choice about whether or not to experience war, and we do have a choice, but we are saying we do not. We are going to deliver something called "shock and awe" to them; not just killing, but a lot of killing. This is the third lesson of war we're all learning: the only appropriate answer to killing is not only killing—it must be disproportionate killing—a hundred times more killing, a thousand times more. This suggests that we believe almost instinctively that we are much more valuable as human beings than any other human beings from any other places—a hundred time more, a thousand times, so much more valuable, that it might be said we don't even think of those other people as human beings. We lost over 3,000 people on that terrible day of terror, so perhaps we intend to kill 300,000 terrorists. Millions of us wonder if there are even 300,000 terrorists to kill, but that's not a problem for a war-oriented society, because Iraq is a country of millions, so we'll have enough people to kill soon enough. (...)

And now it is 2005, and we have brought a lot more death to Iraq and Afghanistan than was ever brought to us, and we've brought it to people who did not attack us. It's true that some of the people to whom we delivered this death weren't involved in the attack but have been very eager to get involved in a war killing American and seem to be delighted to finally have been given such a ready and open forum. But hundreds of thousands of others (or maybe even over a million) to whom we have delivered death are just people who were hoping to live their lives, who aren't going to get to do that now, because we were attacked in 2001, and the only choices for us are war or nothing. And some 10,000 of our troops have died or will eventually die in these conflicts, and tens of thousands more have suffered or will suffer horrible physical or mental injuries, and have been or will be abandoned by the same people who were so eager to send them into danger in the name of safety. And the war has cost us most of our reputation and more money than the attacks ever did. And the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan have been broken in ways that seem irreparable, hi-ho.

And millions of us find all this death and maiming tragic. And we're told by millions more—the same people who told us that we were aligned with terrorists for predicting this exact eventuality—that finding the death and injury of foreign civilians tragic means we are aligned with the terrorists; that we hate our country and love the terrorists, because we have failed to recognize that the United States is not to blame in any way for the wars that it started and continues to wage. This is the fifth lesson of war in a war-oriented society: Any killing we do, not matter how indefensible it is, can only ever be self-defense. Anyone who suffers and dies is a victim not of us but those who threaten or harm us, or of themselves. Those who had no choice about whether or not to be at war are the ones who are blamed for not ending the war, which is not something that is in their power to do. Our violence is not only pure; it is self-purifying. It doesn't just make us safe; it is safety itself. (...)

The people who were wrong about everything are presumed to be right and normal and interested in our security and safety. The very people who created the danger, then failed to prevent the attack, then increased our danger, are still invited to opine as trusted sources on what we should do about future dangers, and their answers always involve more killing. They are considered real Americans, extended an indestructible credulity by our institutions of influence and power not in spite of wanting to create a world of killing, but because of it.

The millions of us who were right about what would happen are presumed to be wrong, not real Americans but dangerous traitors, a threat to safety; we are extended an indestructible skepticism by our institutions of influence and power, not in spite of our opposition to killing, but because of it. There are still ignorant fools among us, and they still receive the most attention, to cast us as ignorant and foolish against the wisdom of those who know that the choices are war or nothing.

And this is the sixth lesson of war in a war-oriented society: wanting to wage war makes you correct in a way that overcomes evidence or results or even coherence. You don't have to have been correct about why you wanted to kill, and you don't have to have been correct about what the result of the killing would be—simply wanting to kill is right enough to make you perpetually right. Most of all, you can act in fathomless bad faith in favor of killing, and use as rationale the exact opposite of the thing you are creating. For example, you can send Americans into two standing wars of choice and opportunity, and say you want to do it to make Americans safe. Or you can stand from a position of most power and influence and claim you are powerless, and that those with least power and influence have all power and influence, and are to blame for the reality you have created. Or (to use an example that is more speculative for the year 2007), you could spend 20 years demanding that student protests against antisemitism and every other bigotry and even literal Nazism on college campuses be quashed in the name of promoting free speech, only to turn around and use antisemitic framings to demand that student protests against killing be quashed in the name of fighting antisemitism. 

But never mind, because now it is 2020, and the police in the United States are rioting—not for the first time. (...)

On that subject, a police officer was recently waging war in one of our nations residential occupied zones—an area that just so happens to be predominantly Black—and while doing so, he murdered a Black man named George Floyd. Floyd begged for his life as he was being killed, but the officer killed him all the same, using practices that were standard practice for cops, we all later learned, which is how you can tell that murdering Black people is sort of standard operating protocol. And this was in no way the first such murder, nor has it in any way been the last.

In 2020, millions of us all over the country have found, almost to our surprise in some cases, that we are opposed to this, and in response millions of us all over the country took to the streets and demonstrated for an end to police brutality.

The police have taken this questioning of their right to kill as an act of violence. In response, the police are rioting and waging war all over the country against American citizens. All over the country, all summer long, they are brutalizing protesters. They've welcomed white supremacist militias toting massacre weapons as unofficial deputies and kettled large groups of unarmed people into tiny inescapable areas, then demanded the people leave those inescapable areas, then drove their heads into the concrete with their knees for not complying, tased them, shot them with rubber bullets, hog tied them and left them bleeding on the ground, hauled them into prison, pushed them to the ground, and more.

Millions of us are horrified by all this. And we are told by millions of others that this means we are aligned with crime and murder and death, that because we want to abolish this standing army of white supremacy and stop waging war against our neighbors, we want to leave ourselves open to danger, even as we further empower the force that creates danger for us all. We are asked: what is our solution—nothing?

In the minds of millions, opposing the violence of the police justifies any violence the police might do against any of us.

This is the seventh and final lesson of war in our war-oriented society. Killing is the only thing that will keep us safe from killing. Therefore, anyone who opposes killing represents a threat justifying further killing.

And millions of us, who have been watching since 2001 or even before, can see how framing the apparatus of killing as indistinguishable from safety helps the apparatus of killing, but not how it helps make us safe. We can see how framing a country as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the country. We can see how framing all a county's citizens as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the people. And we can see clearly how framing killing as the only way to bring safety, and any act other than killing as nothing favors those who want to see a world of death, but not how it helps honor the dead or keeps any of the living safe.

Millions of us think the bigger problem might be the killing. It seems to us war as the only option represents the greatest possible failure of human imagination there can be, and our wealth and resources and ingenuity seem to present many other options. Perhaps if we put our heads together, we might think of something else to do, that isn't nothing but isn't war, either. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant about what that something might be, we think that seeking that something is better than not seeking it. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant, many of us are not, and even those of us who are ignorant fools can see the way the suggestions and solutions presented by those who are not ignorant fools are ignored while those of us who are the most ignorant and the most foolish receive the most attention from our institutions of influence and power, to frame this whole act of imagination as ignorant and foolish.

And even those of us who are ignorant fools can see how this helps promote the ideal of war or nothing, but we don't see how it helps us find something that is not killing but isn't nothing, either.

Maybe the terrorists in 2001 and the ones who came after weren't anticipating our response. Maybe they didn't realize we had a powerful military, or that we had a history of using it extensively in retaliation for attacks. But millions of us think it's safe to assume they knew, that they might have been expecting a violent response, and it's always been curious to us that people who understand that the terrorists wanted to create a world of violence were always so eager to create far more of it than the terrorists themselves were ever equipped to deliver.

It makes me wonder: who is aligned, practically speaking, with terrorists? Who is endangering us? The ones who oppose using our fear as a pretext for increasing war and killing, however ignorant or foolish many of us may be? Or is it the ones who fund the terrorists for political advantage and then use the danger of them as a pretext to bring the war they want to bring?

Some days it seems to me that what the terrorists most feared is that their work would be for nothing, and we wouldn't have a maximally violent response—which would have been something other than decades of war, but I'm hard pressed to say it would be nothing. It's hard to say. People who bring violent death to civilian populations aren't always upfront about what they intend. Not being upfront about what you intend is called bad faith, by the way, as is deliberately mis-framing somebody else's position, like for example saying that people who don't want to give terrorists exactly what they seem most likely to want are aligned with the terrorists, or pretending that they have nobody in their number who are not threatened or harmed parties, and none who are not ignorant fools. (...)

But never mind, because now it is 2024, and the protesters against killing are coming out once again, and the police are coming to meet them and brutalize them for the crime of asking what are you doing? And those who want the killing to continue are equating a country's entire population with its violent government, as if doing so protects the people rather than the government. And they are equating Jewishness with allegiance to Israel, as if doing so isn't a foundation of antisemitism. And none of the protesters have power or influence to stop the killing they would like to see stopped, but all of them are being treated by our institutions of power and influence as if they have all power and influence, particularly those who are most ignorant and foolish, even though most protesters are not ignorant fools. All those opposed to the killing are being told that opposing killing means that they love terrorists, and hate safety. And all of those opposed to the killing are being told that their opposition means that they think that the victims of a terrorist attack deserved it. All of the protesters are being told that they don't understand the danger, even though many of them are the ones most in danger. All of them are being told that they don't care about the victims of an attack, even though many of their number identify directly with those attacked. All of them are being told that opposing killing means they love war, even though many of them have no choice as to whether or not war is something they experience. All of them are being asked what exactly it is they want, if they want the war to stop—nothing?

by A.R. Moxon, The Reframe |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Man Who Killed Google Search

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.

In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses” existed in search.

I should note that I’ve previously — and erroneously — referred to the “code yellow” as something that Gomes raised as a means of calling attention to the proximity of Google’s ads side getting too close to search. The truth is much grimmer — the Code Yellow was the rumble of the Rot Economy, with Google’s revenue arm sounding the alarm that its golden goose wasn’t laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of 19 years that built the foundation of modern search engines, should go down as one of the few people in tech that actually fought for a real principle, destroyed by and replaced with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one of the problems was that there was insufficient growth in “queries,” as in the amount of things people were asking Google. It’s a bit like if Ford decided that things were going poorly because drivers weren’t putting enough miles on their trucks.

Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1 2019, Kristen Gil, then Google’s VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google’s VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a “code yellow” to “close the search gap [it was] seeing,” vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an unnamed “company plan.” To be clear, this email was in response to Thakur stating that there is “nothing” that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that ads had demanded.

Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there was any way to discuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and declaring that there was no way he’d sign up to a “high fidelity” business metric for daily active users on search. Thakur also said something that I’ve been thinking about constantly since I read these emails: that there was a good reason that Google’s founders separated search from ads.

On February 2, 2019, just one day later, Thakur and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox, a Vice President of Search and Google Assistant, entering a multiple-day-long debate about Google’s sudden lust for growth. The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between the ads and search teams, discussing how the search team wasn’t able to finely optimize engagement on Google without “hacking engagement,” a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to “abandon work on efficient journeys.” In one email, Fox adds that there was a “pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want” and what search was doing.

When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.”

On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about.”

On March 22 2019, Google VP of Product Management Darshan Kantak would declare the end of the code yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory emails until Gomes responded congratulating the team, saying that the plans architected as part of the code would do well throughout the year.

Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google’s Head of Ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, would respond curtly, saying that the current revenue targets were addressed “by heroic RPM engineering” and that “core query softness continued without mitigation” — a very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth wasn’t happening. (...)

Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow debacle, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dischler taking his place as head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.

A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.

But do you know who has? Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin. McKinsey has paid nearly $1bn over several settlements due to its work with Purdue. I’m getting sidetracked, but one last point. McKinsey is actively anti-labor. When a company brings in a McKinsey consultant, they’re often there to advise on how to “cut costs,” which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing. McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.

These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.

These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want. (...)

Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo's search and ads products.

When Raghavan joined the company, Yahoo held a 30.4 percent market share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4 percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten even by the newly-released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding nearly 2,000 employees — or 14% of its overall workforce. (...)

A Near-Anonymous Villain

It’s very, very difficult to find much on Raghavan’s history — it took me hours of digging through Google results to find the three or four articles that went into any depth about him — but from what I’ve gleaned, his expertise lies primarily in “failing up,” ascending through the ranks of technology on the momentum from the explosions he caused. In a WIRED interview from 2021, Steven Levy said Raghavan “isn’t CEO of Google— he just runs the place,” and described his addition to the company as “a move from research to management.” (...)

Under Raghavan, Google has become less reliable, less transparent, and is dominated by search engine optimized aggregators, advertising, and outright spam.

As I’ve argued previously, we — with good reason — continually complain about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk, but I’d argue Raghavan (and, by extension, Google CEO Sundar Pichai) deserve as much criticism, if not more, for the damage they’ve done to society. Because Google is the ultimate essential piece of online infrastructure, just like power lines and water mains are in the physical realm.

by Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At? |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Google search has been so awful for so long that I've given up. I'm using DuckDuckGo now and couldn't be happier. See also: Managing Up, Google's rebuttal and a follow-up reply re: "rot economics":

"Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions of a managerial class.

These vile management consultants — like Sundar Pichai and Sheryl Sandberg — and their acolytes who exhibit the same destructive traits (in particular Raghavan) are the faithful foot soldiers in the war to ruin technology products, dampen innovation, and destroy otherwise-flourishing companies in the name of short-term market gains that benefit only the investor class. They didn’t build these products, and they certainly don’t use them - all they care about is market share, revenue and organizational power."

***

[ed. This seems like a good example: Search Engine Land:]

What are RSAs?

RSAs are responsive search ads. Advertisers upload multiple headlines and descriptions, then let Google’s machine learning optimize the ad versions in real-time. The goal is to increase engagement (click-through rate).

Google allows up to 15 different headlines and up to four different descriptions to be considered when creating the ad combinations shown in the search results.

Think of all the possibilities for Google’s machine learning to optimize ad messages. There are more than 43,000 different variations available to keep your messages fresh and keep the ad engagement on an uphill trajectory.

Worried About Bird Flu? Welcome to The Party. You're Late.

Everyone's talking about bird flu now.

It's an evolving situation. Right now, the mainstream news media is desperately trying to catch up on a story that's been happening for two years now. It would be funny if so many lives weren't at stake. The public reaction? Look at the discourse: Is it in pasteurized milk? Is it in hamburgers? Is it in hot wings? Do we have a vaccine? Does it work? Is there enough?

Apparently, the most recent official word is that 1 in 5 milk samples is now testing positive for avian flu, but pasteurization is killing it. Officials are trying to spin this as a good thing.

Well, okay...

I've noticed something about the way the news media covers these things. Whether it's bird flu or another unfolding disaster, they do the same thing. They design these stories now to simultaneously trigger a fear response, only to dismiss that fear and assure everyone that everything's okay "for now." They conveniently omit or downplay any proactive measure that anyone could take. So they work everyone up into a frenzy, then tell us not to worry, and then don't provide anyone with any useful framework for action, at all.

Let's save ourselves some time:

First off, assume bird flu is airborne. Why? Because that's what viruses do. They spread through the air. You can thank aerosol scientists and environmental engineers like Linsey Marr for bringing that one to everyone's attention. I've spent the last two years learning a lot from engineers and scientists who study how germs move through the air. Maybe you did, too.

By the time the CDC or the WHO confirms airborne spread of bird flu, it's going to be far too late for millions and millions of people. It's really not fear-mongering, and it's not that big of a deal, to just assume we're dealing with an airborne virus and wear a decent mask. Not a cloth mask. Not a surgical mask. An FFP2 or FFP3 mask like the 3M Aura or Flo Mask. (No, I'm not making commissions off those. They're just examples of comfortable, effective masks.)

Second, understand why humans haven't been spreading bird flu (yet). It's not luck, magic, or a positive attitude.

There's one or two proteins standing between us and doom. These proteins protect humans from infection. An article in Nature talks about our natural defenses against strains of avian flu, and how they eventually fail. Scientists have a lot of evidence telling us the 1918 pandemic was caused by an avian flu virus that evolved resistance to the BTN3A3 AND MX1 proteins. Those are the only two protections we have, and they eventually give out.

This bird flu isn't new. We've been watching H5N1 decimate wild bird populations for two solid years now. It has wrecked the poultry industry. We've watched it cause bad outbreaks in several other mammal populations, from seals to minks. The public only cares now because it's going to impact their precious milk supply.

So:

Assume that bird flu will evolve to spread among humans. Ignore all the hemming and hawing from scientists that it "may" or "might" happen or "hopefully won't happen."

It has already happened, plenty of times. Once an avian flu learns how to jump to mammals, it's not going to decide it's happy with cows and retire on a dairy farm. If we've learned anything about diseases, it's that they're incredibly opportunistic. This bird flu is trying to jump to people. It's already practicing. Its grandparents have already jumped to humans and caused pandemics. It would be stupid to sit around hoping it doesn't happen.

Assume there will be a problem with the vaccine. Assume it either won't work against the particular mutated version that starts spreading, or there won't be enough, or that our government will botch the rollout. We've seen this movie before. You can change the party in power. It doesn't matter. They're all incompetent. And they don't care about us.

If you want to stay safe, just quit drinking milk if you can. Give up dairy products. You know someone is going to get sick and die from tainted milk or cheese before the alarms go off, and that someone could be you. My family switched to oat milk and vegan cheese years ago, for a range of reasons.

We don't miss dairy.

If you really want to stay safe, just wear an N95 mask (or better) in public. Get over your fear of masks. Most of you already know this part, but most of your friends and family have willed themselves into complete ignorance here. That's gonna have to change.

by Jessica Wildfire, Ok Doomer |  Read more:

Image: CDC on Unsplash
[ed. See also: Cats suffer H5N1 brain infections, blindness, death after drinking raw milk (Ars Technica):]

"In a study published today in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers in Iowa, Texas, and Kansas found that the cats had H5N1 not just in their lungs but also in their brains, hearts, and eyes. The findings are similar to those seen in cats that were experimentally infected with H5N1, aka highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI). But, on the Texas dairy farm, they present an ominous warning of the potential for transmission of this dangerous and evolving virus. (...)

The early outbreak data from the Texas farm suggests the virus is getting better and better at jumping to mammals, and data from elsewhere shows the virus is spreading widely in its newest host. On March 25, the US Department of Agriculture confirmed the presence of H5N1 in a dairy herd in Texas, marking the first time H5N1 had ever been known to cross over to cows. Since then, the USDA has tallied infections in at least 34 herds in nine states: Texas, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Idaho, Ohio, South Dakota, North Carolina, and Colorado.

The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, has detected genetic traces of H5N1 in roughly 20 percent of commercial milk samples. While commercial milk is still considered safe—pasteurization is expected to destroy the virus and early testing by the FDA and other federal scientists confirms that expectation—the finding suggests yet wider spread of the virus among the country's milk-producing cows.

Cows are only the latest addition to H5N1's surprisingly broad host range. Amid a global outbreak over the past several years that has devastated wild bird populations and poultry farms, researchers have documented unexpected and often deadly outbreaks in mammals. Since 2022, the USDA has found H5N1 in over 200 mammals, from big cats in zoos to harbor seals, mountain lions, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, polar bears, black bears, foxes, and bottlenose dolphins.

"The recurring nature of global HPAI H5N1 virus outbreaks and detection of spillover events in a broad host range is concerning and suggests increasing virus adaptation in mammals," the authors wrote. "Surveillance of HPAI viruses in domestic production animals, including cattle, is needed to elucidate influenza virus evolution and ecology and prevent cross-species transmission."

via:

Why Is Biden Struggling? Because America Is Broken.

Recently, Gallup released the latest edition of its longstanding survey measuring “satisfaction with the way things are going in the U.S.” Three out of four Americans (75 percent) claimed to be dissatisfied. The long-term trend tells a clear story: From the mid-1990s to late 2004, the level of satisfaction bounced around between 39 percent and 71 percent. But in the aftermath of the George W. Bush administration’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and during a yearslong violent insurgency challenging American military occupation of the country, numbers began to slide. They would reach a low of 9 percent satisfaction in October 2008, in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

What followed was a very slow 12-year recovery of satisfaction across almost the entirety of the Obama and Trump administrations, with a post-2004 high of 45 percent reached in February 2020, on the eve of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. By January 2021, the level of satisfaction was back down to 11 percent, just two points off its historical low. Under Joe Biden, Americans briefly became somewhat more upbeat — but figures have sunk again from the mid-30s to the high teens and low 20s in recent months. (...)

In January 2021, Alana Newhouse published an essay in Tablet, “Everything Is Broken,” that gave voice to this incredibly widespread (but underreported) sentiment. Why did so many people in the United States believe that, as Ms. Newhouse put it in a follow-up essay, “whole parts of American society were breaking down before our eyes”?

The examples are almost too numerous to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.

That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very little to acknowledge or take responsibility for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that aim to fix what’s broken. That’s no doubt why angry anti-establishment populism has become so prominent in our politics over the past decade — with Mr. Trump, a political outsider, taking over the Republican Party in 2016 by running against the elites of both parties, and Senator Bernie Sanders giving the establishment favorite Hillary Clinton a run for her money that same year by taking on the banking and finance sectors of the economy, along with their Democratic and Republican enablers.

Mr. Biden has never been that kind of politician. Most of the time he speaks and acts as if he thinks American institutions are doing perfectly fine — at least so long as Mr. Trump doesn’t get his hands on them. Part of that is undoubtedly because Mr. Biden is an incumbent, and incumbents always find themselves having to defend what they’ve done in office, which isn’t compatible with acting like an insurgent going to war against the system.

Then there’s the fact that Mr. Biden has worked within our elected institutions since the Nixon administration, making him deeply invested in them (and implicated in their failures). Finally, as a Democrat who came of age during the heyday of mid-20th-century liberalism, Mr. Biden is wedded to the idea of using a functional, competent and capable federal government to improve people’s lives — whether or not more recent history validates that faith.

This places him badly out of step with the national mood, speaking a language very far removed from the talk of a broken country that suffuses Mr. Trump’s meandering and often unhinged remarks on the subject. The more earnest statements of the third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein also speak to aspects of our brokenness, taking ample and often nostalgic note of what’s gone wrong and promising bold, if vague, action to begin an effort of repair.

That leaves Mr. Biden as the lone institutionalist defender of the status quo surrounded by a small army of brokenists looking for support from an electorate primed to respond to their more downcast message. (...)

Still, there are things the Biden campaign could do to help the president better connect with voters.

First, he should stop being so upbeat — about the economy in particular — and making the election entirely about the singular awfulness of his opponent. While the latter sounds evasive, the former makes the president seem hopelessly out of touch and risks antagonizing people who aren’t in the mood for a chipper message.

Mr. Biden should instead try to meet Americans where they are. He should admit Washington has gotten a lot of things wrong over the past two decades and sound unhappy about and humbled by it. He could make the argument that all governments make mistakes because they are run by fallible human beings — but also point out that elected representatives in a democracy should be upfront about error and resolve to learn from mistakes so that they avoid them in the future. Just acknowledging how much in America is broken could generate a lot of good will from otherwise skeptical and dismissive voters.

Even better would be an effort to develop a reform agenda: Mr. Biden could declare it’s long past time for America to put its house in order, to begin cleaning up the messes of the past two decades, to face our problems and return to our own best national self. He might even think of adapting and repurposing for the center-left a few lines from Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural Address: “It’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”

In concrete terms, this means pledging to reform existing institutions and programs, not promising to build new ones on top of the ambitious legislation and substantial spending Congress passed during Mr. Biden’s first two years in office. It means, instead, a commitment to pause and begin assessing what government has been doing at all levels, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, over the past two decades.

It means, more specifically, a resolution to continue and expand existing reviews into what worked and what didn’t during the pandemic — in red states and blue states, in cities, suburbs and small towns — in order to prepare for a better response the next time we confront a public-health emergency. It means talking honestly about the surging and unsustainable national debt and what it will take to begin reining it in. It means trying to help government function better, including a concerted effort to increase state capacity, eliminate regulations that constrain the nation’s housing supply and build on the administration’s attempts at permitting reform to streamline or remove regulations that slow down and increase the cost of private as well as public development.

These projects will far outlast a second Biden term. But the president can promise to get them started, with the remaining work to be completed by presidents and generations to come.

Taking this approach may help to neutralize the populist advantages Mr. Trump enjoys (at least when he isn’t running as an incumbent). However much voters appreciate his denunciations of a corrupt and rigged system, as well as his management of the economy over the first three years of his presidency, they have no love for the G.O.P.’s obsession with pairing cuts to entitlement programs and upper-income tax rates with draconian restrictions on abortion — not to mention Mr. Trump’s focus on personal grievances and legal recklessness. That leaves plenty of room for Mr. Biden to make a case for himself as the guy who can enact the sweeping reforms American needs, and without all the unnecessary and dangerous drama a second Trump administration would surely bring.

by Damon Linker, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ben Jones

[ed. Sounds about right, but the prescriptions seem debatable. After all, Jimmy Carter got pilloried for suggesting the country might be suffering from a national malaise (it was), whereas Reagan won on a platform of promising a new "Morning in America" (as Obama did with "Hope and Change"). I'd certainly dial down the upbeat meter but I wouldn't replace it with some kind of dry, bureaucratic pragmatism, either. There has to be a sweet spot, and finding that will be the trick. Slogans like Make America Great Again (like Morning in America), gain traction because people really want to believe things can and will get better, especially if they can envision and personally feel the effects. Focusing on how that might be achieved, outside of implementing more government programs or wallowing in the weeds with agency/regulatory details is as much a messaging challenge as a practical one. Personally, so much of my time is spent on just trying not to get punked (ie. extorted) by powerful forces - hospitals, banks, phone companies, drug companies, cable/internet providers, insurance companies, utilities, etc. etc. (add your favorites) - that anybody who actually did something to help with that would get my vote.]

Taylor Swift Needs to Become Other People

The biggest cultural news of the month is that a lot of people are kind of “meh” about Taylor Swift’s latest album (or albums, if you prefer to treat the 31-song release as a twofer). After spending the past few years illustrating how internet-era culture encourages a singular kind of superstardom, to the point where Swift has sometimes felt like the only celebrity singer in the world — or maybe that’s just how it feels when you’re driving a minivan with tween-age daughters making song requests — we’ve maybe, maybe finally hit a point of overextension and oversaturation.

Two takes on this interested me. One is from Damon Linker, who argues that Swift badly needs an editor and that her art is suffering because nobody is manufacturing scarcity, forcing her to kill her darlings and otherwise imposing what the limits of vinyl LP technology used to impose on singer-songwriters — namely, a requirement of curation:

"If a band records 20 songs for a project, but only has room for 12 on the final album, decisions need to be made. Which are the 12 best songs — not just in absolute terms, but in terms of the whole (the album) being constructed out of the parts (the songs)? What kind of statement are the artists trying to make? What kind of sound and mood do they want to become immortalized at this moment in their career? Which of these songs do they want to play live dozens of times on their upcoming concert tour? Which song would make for the best opening track, and which the best closer? And how about pacing? How many upbeat tunes, how many ballads, and in which order?"

Linker goes on to suggest that this process helps define an artist’s aesthetic, forcing them toward their greatest strengths and their most original material. For this reason, someone like Bruce Springsteen, who recorded many more songs than appeared on his most famous albums, might have been a weaker cultural presence — or so Linker argues — if he had just dumped every song he ever wrote in the laps of his most eager fans. The best work would have been lost inside the pretty good work, and the sense of Springsteen as a very specific kind of rock music legend might have been diminished.

For a very different analysis of Swift, consider these comments on X from Katherine Boyle, an Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist, repurposing a take she offered in 2023. In our cultural environment, Boyle argues, being prolific is everything: “You can’t cede ground to competitors. You have to keep producing, keep sending a constant wave of stuff, that again, follows a consistent formula which helps your fans anticipate when it’s coming.”

So the fact that Swift constantly “ships” is a feature, not a bug: “A continuous stream of shipping must be maintained,” Boyle says. You can’t worry about having your best material lost in the churn, because the “most successful people in competitive industries win by taking more shots, not fewer. If Taylor writes 31 songs and 3 are memorable, she’s written three epic songs. No one remembers the bad ones, even if there’s more of them on a double album.”

These arguments seem diametrically opposed, but one could synthesize them by saying that Linker could be more correct about art (the requirements of curation might yield a more refined oeuvre) and Boyle could be more correct about commerce (the requirements of the media environment don’t allow the luxury of holding potential hits and bangers back).

Supposing that to be true, what should superstars do when they follow Boyle’s advice and people — well, some people at least, if not the truest fans — suddenly claim to feel exhausted? Or more specifically, what should Swift do if she feels like she needs to ship but the shipping hits a saturation point?

I feel vaguely qualified to address this since I’m not a passionate Swiftie, but I am someone who has been required to listen to almost all of her music, many times over, and taken pleasure from it even though it isn’t always my first choice. Which means I’m the kind of listener who’s most likely to feel the oversaturation first — and I’m inclined to agree with the provisional consensus that the new album underwhelms.

My prescription is that if Swift is going to be this prolific, she needs more leaven in her content. The core of her brand will always be the personal drama of Being Taylor Swift, but that story’s cycle of infatuation, love, rapture, disappointment, pain, revenge has hit a limit of interest in her current work.

One escape from this limit is, of course, to change the story by marrying Travis Kelce and inspiring a new American baby boom. But pending that happy possibility, another way to escape a personal cul-de-sac as an artist is to ship fewer stories about her own ’shipping (if you will) and tell more stories about other people — or more subtly, to expand what Being Taylor Swift means musically to encompass more lives besides her own.

This was of course always the basis of Springsteen’s success — the fact that his music wasn’t dependent on real events in the life of Bruce Springsteen, and instead he inhabited a wide range of characters who were recognizably connected to his brand as a blue-collar balladeer.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Joel Carrett/EPA, via Shutterstock

[ed. See also: Lament for the Declining Art of Editing (NFTM).]

Golf Fashion

Tony Finau on the PGA tour looking like your grandmother’s couch

via:

[ed. Which is nothing compared to Jason Day's current sponsor Malbon Golf (who's sweater at the Masters tournament this year was so awful that the green jackets asked Day to remove it, thereby saving him from further prolonged embarrassment of looking like a pack of cigarettes - see below). MG is an interesting story. I've been following them ever since they started out - a rich couple in LA with lots of celebrity friends and an overriding desire to be "edgy" (and of course, expensive!). Collaborating with other well-known brands appears to be one of their main strategies, which mostly means slapping their name on someone else's well-known clothing and equipment. Anyway, as you might expect given our debased, status-driven culture and their connections, they've become quite successful - in everything except taste).

Marlboro Man

Images via: here and here 

Super Cute Please Like

For another five hours and forty-seven minutes, I can buy a royal blue Twist Front Cloak Sleeve Slit Back Dress for $5.90, a Striped Pattern High Neck Drop Shoulder Split Hem Sweater for $8.50, or a Solid Sweetheart Neck Crop Tube Top for $1.90. When today’s 90 percent-off sale ends at 8 PM, the crop top will revert to its original price: $4.00. There are 895 items on flash sale. On today’s “New In” page, there are 8,640 items. (Yesterday there were 8,760.) The most expensive dress of the nearly nine thousand new arrivals — a floor-length, long-sleeved, fully sequined plus-size gown, available in five sparkly colors — is $67.00. The cheapest — a short, tight piece of polyester with spaghetti straps, a cowl neckline, and an all-over print of Renaissance-style flowers and cherubs — is $7.00.

I can buy casual dresses, going-out tops, workout leggings, winter parkas, pink terry-cloth hooded rompers, purple double-breasted suit jackets with matching trousers, red pleather straight-leg pants, cropped cardigans with mushroom embroidery, black sheer lace thongs, and rhinestone-trimmed hijabs. I can buy a wedding dress for $37.00. I can buy clothes for school, work, basketball games, proms, funerals, nightclubs, sex clubs. I see patchwork-printed overalls and black bikinis with rhinestones in the shape of a skull over each nipple designated as “punk.” I click through knockoff Paloma Wool sweaters and Levi’s-style denim jackets. I can buy Christian-girl modesty clothing and borderline fetish wear.

In the grid of product listings, a yellow rectangle indicates if a product is trending: “Trending–Plazacore,” “Trending–Western,” “Trending–Mermaidcore,” and “Trending–Y2K” tags all appear in the new arrivals. “Plazacore” is blazers and faux-tweed in pastels and beige. “Mermaidcore” means a pileup of sequins and glitter. “Western” brings up fringe jackets and bustier tops, fake leather cowboy boots and leopard-print silk blouses. The collection is unimpressive in small doses but starts feeling remarkable as you click through the pages: more than 3,900 items, astoundingly, are “Western.” If I search the word trending, there are 4,800 items to scroll through, labeled with trends I’ve never heard of even after a decade-plus of closely following fashion blogs and Instagram accounts: Bikercore, Dopamine Dressing, RomComCore, Bloke Core. Each phrase alone generates hundreds or thousands of search results of garments ready to purchase and ship.

SHEIN is the world’s most googled clothing brand, the largest fast-fashion retailer by sales in the United States, and one of the most popular shopping apps in the world. Its website is organized into dozens of categories: WOMEN, CURVE, HOME, KIDS, MEN, and BEAUTY, among others, though the women’s clothing section anchors the site. There are hundreds of thousands of products available, and many of them are sorted into SHEIN’s collections. There’s SHEIN EZwear, which is solid-color knitwear and sweatpants with cutouts, and SHEIN FRENCHY, which means delicate floral prints, lace, and bows. SHEIN Modesty shows conservative, long-sleeve dresses worn by Middle Eastern–looking models, and SHEIN SXY, which is indistinguishable from SHEIN VCAY and SHEIN ICON, features garments so skimpy they’re closer to napkins than clothes. SHEIN Belle, the copy at the top of the page tells me, “offers the best dress for your best memory.” It’s incoherent to me at first, but the collection begins to make sense as I scroll: it’s clothing for wedding guests and promgoers, who can buy a velvet dress in the collection for $5.49. (...)

By the early 2010s, the phrase fast fashion had been in circulation for a couple of decades but had yet to acquire a widespread pejorative connotation. Though the 1990s saw the rise of a robust anti-sweatshop movement, the public consensus a few decades later was that fast-fashion stores were a different kind of retail experience, but not necessarily an evil one... The rare hesitations — like a 2008 New York Times article that considered “a feeling of unease at how the ultra-cheap clothes can be manufactured” — were afforded significantly less space.

The sewing bloggers, however, were already voicing their concerns. They called out the chains who ripped off styles by independent designers to a comically exact degree (clothing isn’t copyrightable under current laws, so the chains got away with it) and cited Overdressed, a 2012 Fast Food Nation–style exposé about the fast-fashion industry that brought the horrors of speedy garment production to light. I learned that any new clothing I could ever afford would be far from a fair price for all the skill and labor involved in its creation. Garment workers were toiling in bleak conditions, working sixteen-hour days, seven days per week for pennies in crumbling factories full of toxic chemicals in China, India, and Vietnam; cheaper price tags pointed to worse conditions and, unimaginably, even worse pay. I also learned about the environmental costs — the oil to run the equipment, the factory pollution spewed into the air, the energy required to fly and ship garments around the globe, and the billions of pounds of fabric waste destined for landfills, never to decompose. (...)

TikTok was where I learned about SHEIN. For a while my For You page, which had accurately identified my interest in fashion’s more material impacts, served me videos of sustainable fashion influencers decrying SHEIN’s wretched labor and environmental practices. The textile industry is the second-largest polluter in the world, they said, and of all the fast-fashion producers, SHEIN is by far the worst offender. SHEIN uses toxic chemicals in their clothing production; SHEIN mass-produces fabrics like spandex that never decompose (at this point an image would flash across the screen: an overflowing clothing landfill, or a mountain of discarded clothes in the Chilean desert so large it is visible from space); SHEIN exploits and endangers its factory workers. Employees earn $556 a month to make five hundred pieces of clothing every day, work eighteen-hour days, and use their lunch breaks to wash their hair — a schedule they repeat seven days per week with only one day off per month. A more nuanced TikToker might point out, briefly, that conditions in SHEIN factories are not necessarily unique, or that focusing on suppliers — rather than the larger systems of Western consumption and capitalism that create these conditions — is a fool’s errand, but the platform isn’t built for that kind of dialogue. I clicked on the comments and invariably read ones with several dozen likes saying, “I’m so willing to die in shein clothes.” (...)

Usually brand familiarity accrues in a slow drip, building from obscurity to instant recognizability over the course of months or years as a designer’s work intersects with the zeitgeist and gains traction on social media. SHEIN was different. One day I’d never heard of the retailer and the next it was inescapable: in thousands of outfit videos, on millions of social media feeds. The clothes weren’t distinct or cohesive; what united them wasn’t style but price. All those SHEIN hauls entered my feeds with such ubiquity that they began to feel like they’d always been there. I’d opened a door to a new part of the fashion internet: a place where girls bragged about their ultra-fast-fashion purchases, delighting in the cheapness of the garments. Here, SHEIN was the obvious choice for new clothes. Why not, when you could buy on-trend pieces at lightning speed for less than the price of a cup of coffee?

It was uncanny to bounce between videos: here was a girl showing off her new halter, here was another girl giving a litany of reasons why it was unconscionable to buy clothes for so little money. Didn’t these TikTokers hear one another? But then again, how could they? “This is what we keep missing here in the whole conversation about sustainability in the industry,” Nick Anguelov, a professor of public policy from UMass Dartmouth, said to a Slate journalist writing about SHEIN in June. “We keep failing to understand that our customers are kids and they don’t give a fuck.” (...)

The rise of SHEIN marks a new era in the fast-fashion industry. The company produces garments at a rate incomprehensible to its predecessors, all of which were already producing a world-historical quantity of products at an incredible clip. In a recent twelve-month period in which former fast-fashion giants Gap, H&M, and Zara listed twelve to thirty-five thousand new products on their websites, SHEIN listed 1.3 million. Last year, the company brought in $22 billion in revenue, a staggering statistic for a corporation that’s been around in its current form for less than a decade.

SHEIN spent years cultivating relationships with producers. At first factories were reluctant to take orders from the company — like Zara, SHEIN wanted to place orders of just one hundred pieces and scale up or down depending on demand for each style, which was risky because it’s more profitable for factories to produce in bulk; typical orders from clothing companies number in the thousands per style. But SHEIN rapidly developed a reputation for paying factories on time, an industry rarity that generated powerful goodwill and a willingness on the part of factories to take the risk. SHEIN quickly developed the high-tech version of Zara’s small-order, quick-response production method, in which store managers collect data about sales and customer preferences and report it back to the factories to adjust production runs. The company’s custom-built production software identifies which products are selling well on the SHEIN website and reorders them from manufacturers automatically. Similarly, the software reportedly halts production automatically for any products selling poorly. It’s a flexible system built for the internet’s microscopic attention span: all products are tested on SHEIN’s website and app in real time. Garments go from concept to finished product in less than two weeks, allowing SHEIN to be the first retail company to market on every trend, even the most micro ones. The system has proven massively successful.

SHEIN works both with “original design manufacturers” that design and produce the clothes on the SHEIN website, and “original equipment manufacturers” that make SHEIN-designed clothing under the watchful eye of the brand. By some reports the company has close to six thousand factories making its clothes, many of which are centralized in a single geographic area. The company puts an unusual amount of money and trust into its suppliers, providing them access to the brand’s data and IT systems and requiring very little to start doing business: no deposits or entry fees, just an agreement that the factory will provide stable and reliable delivery. Meanwhile SHEIN has invested nearly $1 million making “standardized factory buildings” designed by SHEIN for the maximally efficient production of SHEIN clothing, with plans to invest nearly $14 million more. 

SHEIN has made unorthodox choices on the marketing side, too. The company was early to the influencer game, sending promotional products to bloggers as far back as 2012. SHEIN advertised on social media and relied on digital word of mouth to move merchandise — obvious strategies a decade later, but novel ones at the time. Today, SHEIN contracts thousands of influencers around the globe, sending them enormous amounts of free product in exchange for social media posts. In turn, influencers earn commissions on the SHEIN products sold with their unique discount codes; some earn a flat-rate fee from the company, too. As a result SHEIN is the most talked-about brand on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, the centers of the Gen Z internet. More posts beget more attention beget more posts, from influencers and regular consumers alike. SHEIN even figured out how to maximally capitalize on that attention beyond social media by gamifying the shopping experience. The more you buy, the more SHEIN points you receive, and the more you save on future purchases. It’s purposefully addictive. You can get points by just opening the app, watching live streams, or playing mini games on the SHEIN website. In one game, the user moves a shopping basket from left to right, collecting an abundance of shoes, dresses, and sunglasses falling like magic from the top of the screen while avoiding increasingly fast sobbing emojis.

In some respects, SHEIN resembles Amazon more than a fast-fashion retailer: its catalog of merchandise is so expansive that it functions more like a search engine than a clothing store. It maintains no permanent physical storefronts, and as such is unconstrained by square footage, retail labor, or rent. Low overhead means low prices, and in the same way Amazon always offers the cheapest available option for any product, SHEIN is the place for the cheapest clothes in the industry. Shirts at Forever 21 are scandalously inexpensive — easily less than $20, though generally more than $10 — but comparable shirts at SHEIN sell for loose change. Even the user experience is similar, in the way that both Amazon and SHEIN feel junkified: pages are unpolished, with varying product listings and completely unpredictable product qualities. For all the environmental and labor horrors of H&M, at least shopping at hm.com feels like shopping at a real clothing store. SHEIN, conversely, is a microcosm of the internet and a sibling of the internet’s other most powerful retailer: weird, clunky, and seemingly thrown together. (...)

The reviews are typical for a SHEIN item. Customers add photos of themselves, holding phone cameras to mirrors to capture their outfits. Every image is a selfie. “OBSESSED!!!!” they write, adding, “(likes are appreciated <3).” Likes are a currency, convertible into SHEIN points. Posting a review earns five points, a review with pictures earns ten, and a review with size information earns an additional two. Every dollar spent on SHEIN earns a point, and every one hundred points turns back into a dollar. The economy flourishes: “Please like I need points to buy this in a different color.” “Please LIKE MY REVIEW and help your broke girl out. (Sorry I can’t post wearing the items- broke shoulder- thanks for understanding!)” “Absolutely in love with these pants wearing them right now super cute please like I’m broke LOL.” “(pls like I need points).”

Other customers focus on the quality of the garments. Pieces are “surprisingly good,” “really well made,” “not see through.” Texture points to quality: “Feels nice for the price.” “Doesn’t feel cheap.” “Im autistic and i hve sensory issues and if actually doesn’t itch at all.” They read like preemptive defenses, or maybe expressions of genuine surprise. (...)

Taken en masse, there’s a feeling of camaraderie found in the reviews, of people sharing tips, suggestions, and advice. But sometimes, the advice is bot to person. A comment on a mint-green dress: “Nice one and beautiful size size and beautiful dress size size and beautiful beautiful size and beautiful dress size size and beautiful dress nice size and beautiful dress size size and beautiful dress dress and dress dress size size and beautiful dress.” Deep in the product reviews for a pair of $15 gray sweatpants, one commenter writes, bafflingly: “I love these grey sweatpants ever since i received them out of the shein package. They go with almost everything and nice and baggy on my body. The color is easy to wash and can go with coloreds and whites which is very helpful in laundry.” Below, three photos are attached. They show three different women in three different pairs of pants, none of which match the product listing. (...)

Away from the computer, I began to look more closely at strangers’ outfits, trying to imagine where they’d come from. That checkerboard-patterned pair of pleated trousers on the straphanger across from me — were they from SHEIN? What about those pink hair clips in the shape of flowers, or that national park–themed T-shirt? Was the company already manufacturing garments with Brooklyn-specific references and knockoff New Yorker tote bags? The neon-green bikini my friend from high school wore once on Instagram, never to be seen again — SHEIN? (OK, almost definitely.) But that sweater, which looked suspiciously like a minor designer piece I saved up for months to purchase for myself — was that SHEIN, too? Was the whole world shopping at SHEIN?

by Nicole Lipman, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Hart Hallos
[ed. Reminds me of Temu, another rising Chinese/Amazon-type online business (for cheap everything, not just fashion).

Steel Man Technique

How To Argue Better And Be More Persuasive

Modern-day debates tend to be incredibly frustrating.

If you listen to the language used to assess any debate, you’ll find that there’s always an element of “winning”. The aim, to most people, is thus to have an argument that is better than the opponent’s. Failing which, you present one that sounds better than your opponent’s.

The incentive to come out ahead in a zero-sum game causes a lot of us to commit logical fallacies, whether intentional or not. The most common example of this is the straw man, where one side creates a caricature of the other side’s argument and engages with that. They undermine the opposition by attacking the weakest part of the argument.

That’s what happens when the sole purpose is to win. But if you’re interested in more than winning, and want to convince, there’s a better way.

Introducing The Steel Man

Instead of substituting what someone else is saying with a lousy proposition, we’ll do better by reinforcing their basic argument.

This is known as the Steel Man Technique. Put simply, it’s building the best form of the other side’s argument and then engaging with it. It’s being charitable and patching up the weaknesses in the other side’s proposition so that he can bring the best counter-argument to your point of view.

It’s a simple idea, but incredibly difficult in practice. Most of the time we’re interested in being the winner rather than being correct. What reason is there to build a steel man for the other party then?

First, you’ll have a better chance of persuading the other party. People want to have their thoughts taken seriously and not brushed aside. The best way to do this is to show that you understand the thrust of their arguments by improving on the way the core idea is expressed. Anything less and you’ll merely be attacking a weak manifestation of an idea, and not the idea itself.

Second, and more importantly, you need to constantly test our assumptions and beliefs in order to build a better mental model of the world. If you can’t respond to the strongest argument from the other side, there’s a good chance you’re wrong. That’s okay, as long as you’re willing to adjust to the evidence and change your worldview.

How To Listen (Or The Ideological Turing Test)

The steel man technique isn’t perfect.

One problem is that the best form of the argument often doesn’t make sense to the other person. This doesn’t mean he’s stupid. An argument can make more or less sense to a person depending on his worldviews, values, and the premises that he works with.

What this means is that we need to listen and understand where others are coming from. The best way to do this is what Bryan Caplan calls the Ideological Turing Test.

by Louis Chew, Constant Renewal | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. Why politics are so boring - the objective being mostly to win (usually with bad faith Straw Man arguments). See also: Steel-manning vs. Straw-manning (Medium).]

Tiger and Jack

via:

[ed. Issues.]

The Rise and Impending Fall of the Dental Cavity

[ed. More information than I care to know (or untangle) about a promising new bacterial treatment that appears to (somewhat - maybe completely) eliminate cavities. You can read the back story and debates here and in the links below. Form your own conclusions.]

Brighter Smiles Through Biotechnology

If you’ve been on Twitter lately, you might have seen when I made this post:

Link

I’m one of the latest people to have had this wonderful living caries vaccine applied to their teeth. Given the incredible human toll of caries, you might be wondering when you, too, can get this healthier form of S. mutans in your mouth.

The answer is now. Orders just went live and you can place them here for just $250.

BCS3-L1 will soon be home-delivered in the U.S. for the price of a single dental filling, and there are plans to expand to other locations in the works too. The scourge of poor dental health that has wracked humanity for 10,000 years might soon be behind us.

A lucky part of all of this is that we’ll only need to try our hand at eradication once.

Like smallpox, S. mutans doesn’t have some natural reservoir that will crop up to re-infect humans with a wild strain that brings caries back. After we’ve gotten rid of it, it’s likely that caries will simply be diminished to the point of irrelevance for the vast majority of mankind. What’s more, because of the parent-to-child transmission described at this article’s outset, if a would-be parent is colonized, their kids will end up living a life that’s likely to include far fewer or zero caries.

The benefits for the poor, the old, infirm, and incapable of taking care of themselves, and the Third World are so large that there ought to be a public health initiative to spread this around. Such an effort would ultimately save many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands, millions, or—in the long-enough run—potentially billions of human lives.

If you would like to read more about BCS3-L1 (also known as Lumina or SMaRT), please see Defying Cavity on AstralCodexTen. [ed. Here: Defying Cavity: Lantern Bioworks FAQ; and, Updates on Lumina Probiotic (ACX).]

by Cremieux, Cremieux Recueil |  Read more:

Images: Cross et al. (2009); Twitter/X

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

I'm fond of effective altruists. When you meet one, ask them how many people they’ve killed.

Effective altruism is the philosophy of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind now sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud and money laundering. Elon Musk has said that EA is close to what he believes. Facebook mogul Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn have spent mega-millions on its causes, and EAs have made major moves to influence American politics. In 2021, EA boasted of $46 billion in funding—comparable to what it’s estimated the Saudis spent over decades to spread Islamic fundamentalism around the world.

Effective altruism pitches itself as a hyperrational method of using any resource for the maximum good of the world. Here in Silicon Valley, EA has become a secular religion of the elites. Effective altruists filled the board of OpenAI, the $80 billion tech company that invented ChatGPT (until the day in November when they nearly crashed the company). EA is also heavily recruiting young people across rich universities like Stanford, where I work. Money is flowing from EA headquarters to entice students at Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, Penn, Swarthmore—if you went to a wealthy school, you’ll find EAs all over your alma mater.

Before the fall of SBF, the philosophers who founded EA glowed in his glory. Then SBF’s crypto empire crumbled, and his EA employees turned witness against him. The philosopher-founders of EA scrambled to frame Bankman-Fried as a sinner who strayed from their faith.

Yet Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect prophet of EA, the epitome of its moral bankruptcy. The EA saga is not just a modern fable of corruption by money and fame, told in exaflops of computing power. This is a stranger story of how some small-time philosophers captured some big-bet billionaires, who in turn captured the philosophers—and how the two groups spun themselves into an opulent vortex that has sucked up thousands of bright minds worldwide.

The real difference between the philosophers and SBF is that SBF is now facing accountability, which is what EA’s founders have always struggled to escape.

***

If you've ever come across effective altruists, you’re likely fond of them too. They tend to be earnest young people who talk a lot about improving the world. You might have been such a young person once—I confess that I was. A decade before the founding of effective altruism, I too set out to save the world’s poorest people.

I grew up like today’s typical EA. White, male, a childhood full of Vulcans and Tolkien, Fortran and Iron Man. I went into philosophy because it felt like a game, a game played with ideas. In 1998, with a freshly minted Harvard PhD, I was playing with the ideas of Peter Singer, today’s most influential living philosopher.

The idea of Singer that excited me was that each of us should give a lot of money to help poor people abroad. His “shallow pond” thought experiment shows why. If you saw a child drowning in a shallow pond, you’d feel obliged to rescue her even if that meant ruining your new shoes. But then, Singer said, you can save the life of a starving child overseas by donating to charity what new shoes would cost. And you can save the life of another child by donating instead of buying a new shirt, and another instead of dining out. The logic of your beliefs requires you to send nearly all your money overseas, where it will go farthest to save the most lives. After all, what could we do with our money that’s more important than saving people’s lives?

That’s the most famous argument in modern philosophy. It goes well beyond the ideas that lead most decent people to give to charity—that all human lives are valuable, that severe poverty is terrible, and that the better-off have a responsibility to help. The relentless logic of Singer’s “shallow pond” ratchets toward extreme sacrifice. It has inspired some to give almost all their money and even a kidney away. (...)

Aid organizations, I learned, have been through many cycles of enthusiasm since the 1960s. Every few years, an announcement—“We’ve finally found the thing that works to end poverty”—would be followed by disillusionment. (In the early 2000s, the “thing” was microfinance.) Experts who studied aid had long been at loggerheads, with Nobel laureates pitted against one another. Boosters wrote books like The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime. Skeptics wrote books like The White Man's Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Hundreds of millions of people were living each day on less than what $2 can buy in America. Fifty thousand people were dying every day from things like malaria and malnutrition. Each of those lives was as important as mine. Why was it so hard to figure out what can help—to find out what works to reduce extreme poverty?

While I was learning about aid, real progress was made on the “What works?” question. People started testing aid projects like drugs. Give half of the villages bed nets, make the other villages the “control group,” and you can get a better idea of what benefits the bed nets are bringing. Experts still debate how much weight to give these results. But the drug trial innovation in aid was encouraging.

Still, even “control group” testing, I learned, gives only a close-up view of what’s happening. Extremely poor people live in complex environments—just as complex as our own, and usually more chaotic. Sending in extra resources can have all sorts of effects beyond what a close-up shows. And that’s the real problem in finding “what works.”

Say I give some money to a charity that promises to better the health of poor people in Africa or Asia. And let’s say that, in a close-up view, it works. What else might my money have done? Lots of things. Maybe bringing in the charity will boost the power of a local potentate. Maybe the charity’s donated medicines will just free up money in the budget of an oppressive regime. Maybe the project will weaken the social contract between the people and their government—after all, why would the state care for the health of its citizens, and why would citizens even demand health care from the state, if rich foreigners are paying for it?

Aid experts know all about these negative impacts, plus many others—they’re like the side effects of drugs. A blood-thinning drug may lower the risk of stroke, but it can also keep wounds from healing. Taking lots of painkillers might damage your kidneys. (...)

It took me, a philosopher, years to learn what might be obvious to you. The “close-up” effects of pills or bed nets are easy to advertise, but the side effects—political, economic, psychological—are just as important. Most important, of course, will be what the local people think about interventions into their lives. Yet their very poverty means they can’t hold anyone accountable for harms they suffer.

I drafted an article on what I’d learned about aid and called it “Poverty Is No Pond.” Making responsible choices, I came to realize, means accepting well-known risks of harm. Which absolutely does not mean that “aid doesn’t work.” There are many good people in aid working hard on the ground, often making tough calls as they weigh benefits and costs. Giving money to aid can be admirable too—doctors, after all, still prescribe drugs with known side effects. Yet what no one in aid should say, I came to think, is that all they’re doing is improving poor people’s lives.

***

Just as I was finishing my work on aid, a young philosopher from Oxford gave a lecture at my university, saying that all he was doing was improving poor people’s lives. This was Toby Ord, who was just then starting effective altruism.

Like me a dozen years earlier, Ord was excited by Peter Singer’s “shallow pond” argument. What he added to it, he said, was a way of measuring how many people’s lives he could save. The simple version goes like this. Say there’s a pill that adds a year of life to anyone who takes it. If Ord gives $50 to an aid charity, it will give out 50 pills to poor foreigners. So with his donation, he has added a total of 50 years of life. And adding 50 years is like saving the life of one child drowning in a pond. So by giving $50, he has “saved the life” of one poor child.

Onstage with Ord that day was a former director of Christian Aid who’d written a massive book called Does Foreign Aid Really Work? This expert tried to persuade Ord that aid was much more complex than “pills improve lives.” Over dinner I pressed Ord on these points—in fact I harangued him, out of frustration and from the shame I felt at my younger self. Early on in the conversation, he developed what I’ve come to think of as “the EA glaze.”

It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, said Upton Sinclair, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. And all the more when his self-image does. Ord, it seemed, wanted to be the hero—the hero by being smart—just as I had. Behind his glazed eyes, the hero is thinking, “They’re trying to stop me.”

Not long before then, two hedge-fund analysts in their twenties quit their jobs to create an “effective giving” website, with an aim similar to the website I’d abandoned years earlier. They called it GiveWell. Like me in 1998, the two had no background in aid. But they’d found a charity that gave out bed nets in Madagascar. They checked how much it cost to give out bed nets and how likely bed nets are to prevent malaria. They used a method like Ord’s for measuring “lives saved” per dollar spent, with calculations that unfurled in a 17-row table of precise, decimal-pointed numbers. They put on their website that this charity could save a life for $820.

I added a bit about GiveWell to “Poverty Is No Pond,” asking about the possible side effects of its bed net charity. For instance, had its charity been taxed to support Madagascar’s corrupt president? Had their charity weakened the social contract by supplanting Madagascar’s health service, which had been providing bed nets for its own citizens?

I sent my draft to GiveWell. Its then codirector, Holden Karnofsky, replied he was confident that well-run charities, like the one that gave out bed nets, were beneficial overall—that the benefits to poor people minus the harms to poor people (maybe not the same poor people) was a positive number. I asked whether they’d be willing to mention possible harms on their website every time they asked for money. Karnofsky said it made sense to highlight harms, and they’d make a better effort to make the website clear about what went into their calculations.

That was more than a dozen years ago. Today, GiveWell highlights detailed calculations of the benefits of donations to recipients. In an estimate from 2020, for example, it calculates that a $4,500 donation to a bed nets charity in Guinea will pay for the delivery of 1,001 nets, that 79 percent of them will get used, that each net will cover 1.8 people, and so on. Factoring in a bevy of such statistical likelihoods, GiveWell now finds that $4,500 will save one person.

That looks great. Yet GiveWell still does not tell visitors about the well-known harms of aid beyond its recipients. Take the bed net charity that GiveWell has recommended for a decade. Insecticide-treated bed nets can prevent malaria, but they’re also great for catching fish. In 2016, The New York Times reported that overfishing with the nets was threatening fragile food supplies across Africa. A GiveWell blog post responded by calling the story’s evidence anecdotal and “limited,” saying its concerns “largely don’t apply” to the bed nets bought by its charity. Yet today even GiveWell’s own estimates show that almost a third of nets are not hanging over a bed when monitors first return to check on them, and GiveWell has said nothing even as more and more scientific studies have been published on the possible harms of bed nets used for fishing. These harms appear nowhere in GiveWell’s calculations on the impacts of the charity.

In fact, even when GiveWell reports harmful side effects, it downplays and elides them. One of its current top charities sends money into dangerous regions of Northern Nigeria, to pay mothers to have their children vaccinated. In a subsection of GiveWell’s analysis of the charity, you’ll find reports of armed men attacking locations where the vaccination money is kept—including one report of a bandit who killed two people and kidnapped two children while looking for the charity’s money. You might think that GiveWell would immediately insist on independent investigations into how often those kinds of incidents happen. Yet even the deaths it already knows about appear nowhere in its calculations on the effects of the charity.

And more broadly, GiveWell still doesn’t factor in many well-known negative effects of aid. Studies find that when charities hire health workers away from their government jobs, this can increase infant mortality; that aid coming into a poor country can increase deadly attacks by armed insurgents; and much more. GiveWell might try to plead that these negative effects are hard to calculate. Yet when it calculates benefits, it is willing to put numbers on all sorts of hard-to-know things. (...)

Think of a drug company that’s unwilling to report data on harmful side effects, and when pressed merely expresses confidence that its products are “overall beneficial.” GiveWell is like that—except that the benefits it reports may go to some poor people, while the harms it omits may fall on others. Today GiveWell’s front page advertises only the number of lives it thinks it has saved. A more honest front page would also display the number of deaths it believes it has caused.

by Leif Wenar, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Bill Mayer