Crashing the Car of Pax Americana

[ed. Excellent.]

My ask of you in reading this note is that we make an effort to hold several conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time. Like, for example, that the American socioeconomic system desperately needs fixing after decades of venal corruption from (mostly) Democratic but (also) Republican Administrations AND there is an underlying global system worth preserving that gives the United States enormous privilege, wealth and freedom of action in the world. Or, for example, that there’s no reason to doubt the authentic intentions of Donald Trump and his Administration to improve the position of the United States AND their economic policies can have the unintended consequence of blasting the underlying global system to smithereens, making it impossible to achieve their goals. It’s really not easy to hold all of these ideas simultaneously! Every bit of party propaganda from the left and the right, every big voice on social media, everyone wants you to give yourself over to a single idea of party purity and ignore everything else. But it’s just not true.

The truth is that the United States became as sclerotic and bloated under Joe Biden as the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, and that Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and its obscene cover-up made the United States government a global patsy and a domestic feeding trough. The truth is that our border policy was stupidly permissive. The truth is that we really do need to eliminate vast swaths of the Federal bureaucracy and the Christmas tree funding programs that always grow and never shrink. The truth is that a Department of Government Efficiency is a really good idea.

AND the truth is that the purpose of government is not efficiency for efficiency’s sake. AND the truth is that the quality of mercy is not strained and neither is due process, so that justice may be sure but never cruel. AND the truth is that spending money to curry political favor abroad through CIA USAID programs is a lot cheaper and a lot more efficient than sending in the Marines, AND is a lot more profitable than seeing the Chinese take our place in the world. AND the truth is that we have three co-equal branches of government, where the unconstitutionality of a President ‘vetoing’ Congressionally-authorized spending programs through Executive Order is well-settled law. AND the truth is that government debt isn’t like our own personal debt, so that we can’t go broke as a nation AND we’re nowhere near having a budget crisis AND we have the strongest, most vital economy in the world AND we can still grow our way to a more equitable prosperity without breaking a global system that works so formidably to our advantage.

This underlying global system has a name. It’s called Pax Americana.

• Pax Americana is the Bretton Woods monetary system and the Plaza Accords and the SWIFT banking system and the unquestioned dominance of the USD as the world’s reserve currency.

• Pax Americana is the NATO alliance and the Pacific Fleet and CENTCOM and the NSA and the unquestioned dominance of the US military as the world’s security arbiter.

• Pax Americana is the American brands, American universities, American entrepreneurialism, and most of all the American stories that have dominated the hearts and minds of everyone on Earth for the past 50 years.

• Pax Americana is the ability of the United States to set the rules for every coordination game in the world. The rules of trade, the rules of intellectual property, the rules of money, the rules of culture, the rules of war … all of those rules were made by us. Only by us! And in return we gave the rest of the world two things: global peace (pretty much) enforced by a blue-water navy with force projection capabilities anywhere in the world, and unfettered access (pretty much) to the buying power of the American consumer.

The results of Pax Americana?

• The United States has seen more than 300 million citizens lifted into the highest standard of living in the history of the world, as we have exchanged intangible things like services and the full faith and credit of the US government for tangible things like oil and semiconductors and food at an unimaginable scale.

• The world has seen more than a billion people lifted out of crushing poverty, mostly in China and India but everywhere else, too, as the capacity to make tangible things has shifted permanently (yes, permanently) from West to East.

My strong, unwavering belief is that Pax Americana is a damn good deal for the United States AND the world, especially as American leadership in AI opens up an entirely new realm of intangible things that the United States can trade for tangible things. Is it a perfect deal for the United States? No. Do other countries free ride on our provision of security and an end-market of the American consumer? Absolutely. Has the system been internally captured by oligarchs and professional politicians, so that the distribution of this great wealth flowing to the United States goes less and less to ‘average’ Americans? 100%. Should we aggressively prune and reform the Pax Americana system? Should we root out its foreign free riders and domestic leeches? Yes, please!

But that’s not what this Administration believes. Neither Donald Trump nor his key advisors believe that Pax Americana is a good deal at all, much less a damn good deal like I believe. They believe the United States is being cheated and taken advantage of without end, both internationally and domestically. They don’t want to fix the Pax Americana regime of coordination through multilateral rule-setting. They want to blow up the entire deal and replace it with an America First regime of competition through bilateral engagement.

I appreciate their frustration. I share a lot of it. But I am desperately opposed to crashing the Pax Americana car, Annie Hall style, because the America First system that this Administration wants to have as a replacement is not a stable system that is possible to have as a replacement. The end result of blowing up Pax Americana and its – yes – globalist system of rules and institutions and alliances that coordinates the flow of capital, labor, goods, services and culture without ‘winning’ any head-to-head relationship will be a system that is both worse for the United States AND the world. Here’s why: 

by Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:
Image: Annie Hall

[ed. From the comments:]

***

I spent almost eight years working in the Appalachian Basin. You have no idea just how bad it is and how deep the pain runs. (You also probably don’t know just how hilariously well armed the Amish are in that part of Ohio; some of those guys could put on a gun show by doing nothing more than opening their barn doors)

How can we keep Pax Americana going in a way that benefits all Americans - and by benefit I mean offers lives of dignity with meaningful work, meaningful relationships and recognition of value?

What if that’s not what a lot of those people want? Because in my experience down there this was not a universal goal, nor would it even carry the majority of the population on any given day.

When the shale boom came it brought with it billions of dollars of absolutely free money that was handed out in exchange for what the residents previously believed was damn near worthless land. Tens of billions flowed from the ground and into the pockets of landowners. All the hotels and motels were full every night for years. Every restaurant was packed day and night. Energy companies paved roads, donated to every local community organization, soccer team, bought every animal from every 4H kid at every county fair. Every county courthouse was filled with landmen who spent all day making copies of deed records, at 25¢ a page. Thousands of pages, by 15-20 guys, every day. The Recorder’s office was running a machine that spat out $5,000/d, every day, for months. Companies cut checks directly to the county for expanded hours so their people could work before and after regular closing times. They paid tens of thousands for a few extra hours a day over the course of a few months. Government revenues ballooned.

Then what happened?

Hundreds of good paying jobs were created overnight…and most went to workers from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, not Ohio or Pennsylvania. Know why? Nobody could pass a drug test. No, I’m not shitting you. I had a friend who had a wireline company and he tried to hire two locals. Both didn’t even show up for the drug test. That was the last time he bothered to even advertise his job opening in the area. He hired professionals from out of state. Less hassle.

Before a single cubic foot of gas or barrel of oil came out of the ground the local Ford dealership made news as it catapulted to the top of the list of highest volume dealers in the state. It seemed like every farm large and small had a new F-150 in the gravel driveway.

The casinos across the river had multiple record years in a row after a decade of a slow decline. Strip clubs boomed.

And nobody really built anything. The families who were rich before were simply even more rich after. One prominent local attorney—whose conduct would have gotten him disbarred in any other place—tightened his grip on the area, and after a particularly major payout bought a second home in Lake Como, Italy.

The old men dying of black lung kept on dying. The young men continued their drift into addiction, which had started to take hold years before that. Crime went up despite poverty going down.

The local wastewater treatment plants were at least smart enough to make deals with the service companies to clean the used frac water. Again, government receipts grew, but how much of that made it to the people? (Not much)

Nobody bothered to clean up the brownfields and open a new facility making drill pipe. That ended up happening an hour north instead. It took two years for the owner of a previously defunct gravel yard to open back up, despite the fact that he was sitting on a gold mine. (I know this because I tried to buy part of it from him and he not only wouldn’t sell but quite literally did not understand the magnitude of what was about to happen)

Very little changed because the people didn’t want anything to change. Many of them talked about Weirton Steel as if it was still 1981, and cursed the foreigners (ArcelorMittal) who owned what was left of it. (And in a small twist of irony the man who bought that bankrupt company off of the employees in 2002–for a hilariously low ball price—would go on to be the Secretary of Commerce under the first term of the president that they voted for in overwhelming numbers) It’s been 15 years of oil and gas money steadily flowing to the area, and nothing has changed. The complaint that “there aren’t any jobs” is old enough to drink. Some people had the good sense to leave. Everyone else was just more comfortable staying and watching everything die.

I’m not unsympathetic, but the way these folks are talked about—and talk about themselves—you’d think they had no agency of their own. They think their salvation is just around the corner, if only we’d just blew up every working institution around the globe they’d make it to the other side of this mess. It’s paternalistic horseshit that Trump is selling and they’re lining up around the block to get their wheelbarrow full of it.

'Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’

In March of last year, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, published a book called “The Anxious Generation,” which caused, let’s call it, a stir.

I always found the conversation over this book to be a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad.

This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.

So I stayed out of that debate, because, on the one hand, I couldn’t settle it, and on the other hand, I didn’t think I should come in and say it wasn’t important.

But a year later, two things have happened. One: Haidt’s book has never left the best-seller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord.

Two: Policy is moving in Haidt’s direction. We are seeing a genuine policy revolution, happening in places governed by both Republicans and Democrats, in how we treat children in this era of social media. And I feel a lot more confident, as a parent, that we’re going to figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter.

But then, of course, the truck of artificial intelligence is about to T-bone whatever consensus we come to socially — which, to be quite honest, scares the hell out of me. (...)

Ezra Klein: Jon Haidt, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Haidt: Ezra, it’s great to be back with you.

I want to begin with the big question: What is childhood for?

Childhood is evolution’s answer to: How do you have a big-brained cultural creature?

You have to play a lot. You have to practice all sorts of things — all sorts of maneuvers and social skills — in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form.

If you focus on brain development, especially for a big-brained cultural species like ours, there’s a plastic period where stuff comes in and shapes who you are. And once you’ve got that, you’re ready to convert to the adult form — be reproductive, have a baby.

But if you don’t have play in childhood, you’re not going to reach adulthood properly.

You had one statistic in the book that I think I’ve actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew, maybe now because I have a 5-year-old who just turned 6: At 5 years old, the human brain is 90 percent of its adult size, and it has more neurons than it will when you’re an adult.

That’s right. We’re used to thinking of bodily growth as just: Time equals bigger. But the brain is this amazing thing that has all these neurons, which have the potential to connect in all kinds of ways. And as neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together wire together.

So if you repeatedly climb trees or do archery, systems will form in your brain that make you really good at that. Whereas if you repeatedly swipe and tap, swipe and tap, and just respond to emotional stimuli, your brain is going to wire to do that.

I guess you’re an older millennial. How did you grow up?

I am among the eldest of millennials.

The millennial elders. Tell me: At what age could you go out on your bicycle with your friends and go around the neighborhood?

I don’t remember exactly, but I lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburb, and I do remember I spent a lot of time as part of a roaming pack of kids who lived on my street. We would be playing kickball on somebody’s garage door. The other thing I remember about it that I feel like I see less of now is that it was highly age diverse.

Exactly. So this is what human childhood has always been. There are periods, like the Industrial Revolution, where maybe kids didn’t have a childhood. But Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist who co-founded Let Grow with me, has some writing on hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers raise their kids in that way. There’s no thought that the mother has to be supervising the 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 9-year-olds. They’re all off playing with the other kids.

And there are 9- and 10-year-olds there. So they learn to look out for each other. The older kids learn to care for the younger kids. And remember, the younger kids are trying to wire up their brain to: What is a functional member of this society? And the best role models for them are not kids their age — it’s kids a few years older.

In America, in the West, we’ve got these factory kinds of schools where we put all the 8-year-olds together and then all the 9-year-olds together. But the healthiest is what you just said.

So my point is: Everyone before the millennials had this childhood. Millennials are the transitional generation. So you were on the elder side — you got it. Even though the rates are microscopic in this country, and even though crime was plummeting in this country in the ’90s — you can see it in the charts — that’s the decade when we really pulled our kids in.

We thought: They’ll get abducted. We can’t let them go in a different aisle of a supermarket. Or a man with a white van — all this crazy stuff comes in in the ’90s.

Something you mentioned about the ’90s in the book: I am familiar with this statistic that, despite working two jobs much more often than they did in the past, despite fathers being more involved, both parents spend much more time with their kids than they did before.

But I hadn’t realized that was not a steady increase over the decades. It sharply increased in the ’90s.

That’s right. There’s this weird graph that I have in the book that shows the number of hours that women spend parenting — what you would consider time with your kid doing something.

And the astonishing thing is that in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, women were not spending five hours a day parenting because the kids were raised the way that you just said.

It’s not the parent’s job to socialize the child all along. It’s the parent’s job to provide the right environment to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks.

But the real work of brain development doesn’t happen when you’re with your parents. Your parents are home base — they’re your attachment figure. When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore. That’s what other mammals do. You go off progressively farther from your home base, and that’s where the learning happens.

It’s playing kickball. It’s trying to decide: What do we do today? Or: Oh, he broke the rules. No, he didn’t.

I want to get at a tension in there, at least with the culture of modern parenting. I think a lot of parents believe that the simplest way to ask whether you were a good parent this week is how much time you spent with your children.

Yes. Quality time.

Quality time. I feel that. And you’re saying here that’s not true?

It’s definitely not true. You want to give your kids a quality childhood. You want to be a quality parent. But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid.

You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship. You need to provide structure and order and discipline. But this is what changed in the ’90s, and it’s in part because we stopped trusting our neighbors.

If you think of all the Robert Putnam stuff about “Bowling Alone” and the loss of social capital, we used to at least trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them. If something really went wrong, they could knock on a door, and someone would help. But we begin losing that trust.

This is really bad for the kids because they don’t grow as much if their attachment figure is there. And it’s really bad for the adults — especially women. Mothers pick up a lot of this, even though they’re working outside the home.

So yes, modern parenting is not good for the kids — and certainly not good for the adults.

If you’re tracking dynamics here: In the ’90s, we’re getting more afraid of danger. You’re having this deterioration in social trust, this deterioration of the idea that the whole is community parenting your kid.

And it’s right about now that you begin having an explosion in screen possibilities. When I was younger, I remember Nickelodeon emerging. Before then, there wasn’t a TV channel that was programming for children at all times. There were kids’ shows, but not all the time. And obviously from there, you get an explosion of cable channels. And then, eventually, the internet, iPads, iPhones and video game consoles and all the rest of it. So talk about the handoff.

It’s the conversion over to this smartphone-based, tablet-based childhood. That’s when all the indicators of mental illness start rising, around 2012, 2013.

Now, I focused on the 2010 to 2015 period. But I think your question points out something I hadn’t really thought much about, which is cable TV.

I was born in 1963, so I grew up in the late ’60s and early ’70s on “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gilligan’s Island.” And I showed those shows to my kids, and I said: This is so stupid. They were really simple plots. But that’s all we had.

Whereas you had cable, which was more engaging. (...)

When you look at old movies from the ’30s and ’40s, there was a really tight moral order. It would be dramatic whether a woman could go into a man’s apartment. So there was a really intense moral order around gender, around all sorts of things.

And that, of course, begins to loosen up in the ’60s. And there are many good things that happened because of that. But one of the concerns about modern secular society has been that you gradually lose this moral framework within which to raise children.

I’m really aware now of how we’re all influenced by our parents and just maybe a little bit by our grandparents. Culture has always come down vertically through generations. But that link is getting weakened.

So I think there is a progressive weakening of a sense of a moral order, which affects how you parent. And then we end up with an amoral focus on grades and, I guess, be nice and a few other things. But it’s a very thin moral gruel, I’d say.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Klein podcast, NY Times

In Praise of Communitarian-not Corporate-Baseball

Peak professional baseball arrived in 1949, when more than thirty-nine million fans sat on splintery bleachers and under leaky grandstands in support of their local minor-league nines. They watched in San Diego and Stroudsburg, Fort Worth and Fond du Lac, Louisville and Lumberton—448 towns and cities in total, across all forty-eight states, Canada, Cuba, and Mexico. The teams for which they cheered played in one of fifty-nine Major League–affiliated leagues, ranging from Class D to Triple-A. At least as many clubs played outside that structure, including black, semipro, American Legion, industrial, and town teams. There were even eight entries in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, then at or near the height of its popularity.

Mickey Mantle made his professional debut in 1949—with the Class D Independence Yankees. Arky Vaughan made his departure—with the Triple-A San Francisco Seals. Lew Burdette, Joe Adcock, Whitey Ford, and Carl Erskine tantalized on their way up to the bigs. Bobo Newsom and Doc Cramer took another shot at glory on their way down. Frank Saucier hit .446 for the Wichita Falls Spudders. Leo “Muscle” Shoals hit fifty-five home runs for the Reidsville Luckies. Max West drove in 201 runs for the San Diego Padres. One-armed outfielder Pete Gray played the last game of his career in Dallas. Former Negro League stars Ray Dandridge, Luke Easter, and Harry “Suitcase” Simpson set fire to their respective leagues while waiting with varying degrees of patience for a chance in the majors—a chance that, in Dandridge’s case, would never come.

Minor-league baseball, like life in general, was less regulated, less secure, more unpredictable, more exciting, and, not coincidentally, more violent than the baseball (and life) we have come to know. In Hagerstown, a guard shot at a fan for pocketing too many foul balls. In Cedar Rapids, a melee was halted only when the national anthem was played over the loudspeakers. In Havana, Pepper Martin was suspended for the season for choking an umpire. In San Bernardino, Forrest “Frosty” Kennedy went two-for-five at the plate even though both of his wrists were taped. On the previous night he had attempted suicide.

The next year total minor league attendance declined dramatically—by more than seven million. Nineteen fifty-one saw the same massive decline. By 1959 only twenty-one leagues were operating. Three years later, the minors reached their attendance nadir, having lost on the order of thirty million fans in just thirteen years. American progress had unraveled the fabric of American community, of which the vast minor league system was a manifestation. Television, Interstate highways, suburbanization, and air conditioning, among other culprits, combined to cool Americans’ ardor for sitting in the hot and humid twilight to watch teams that included nary a national celebrity. By the 1960s the average American’s life had become less local and more mediated. An entire American age of lusty communitarianism had crested.

Not until the late 1970s did the minor leagues begin to emerge from the death spiral that had gripped them just when they seemed to be at their healthiest. At about the same time there began to emerge a minor-leagues literature, consisting most typically in wistful memoirs, literary travelogues, or combinations thereof. (...)

By the time Dirk Hayhurst’s The Bullpen Gospels (2010) and Lucas Mann’s Class A (2013) were published, the minor leagues were once again riding high. There were no longer nearly so many teams as in the 1940s (and earlier), but the attendance record of 1949 was eclipsed in 2004, and in 2019 the 176 minor league clubs that were formally affiliated with Major League Baseball drew about 41.5 million fans. There were no longer so many weird statistical accomplishments, nor so many colorful nicknames, nor so many oddball characters, nor so much uniqueness, period, but by the 2000s the minor leagues were nevertheless once again great fun—much more fun than MLB.

Not only that, but much like the local high school, the county fair, or the fire company, minor league teams, at least at their lower levels, functioned as core community institutions, and at a time when such institutions were sorely needed. Teams networked local residents, allowed for regular but informal interactions, showcased community organizations and initiatives and businesses, offered entry-level and part-time jobs for local youth, and provided something for the community to collectively support and rally around that was utterly apolitical and noncontroversial.

Then Major League Baseball did what Major League Baseball can be reliably expected to do: it acted with gobsmacking stupidity. Having blithely canceled the 2020 minor league season—but not, of course, the MLB season—due to purported COVID concerns, in 2021 MLB announced that in the name of efficiency it was reducing the number of minor league affiliates by more than 25 percent, down to 120. Forty-two towns, mostly out-of-the-way, working-class sorts of places, would lose their baseball teams. These were “some of the few remaining places where people could still find happiness and connection, for affordable prices, as they had for generations,” Will Bardenwerper reminds us, and now they would be extinguished, “merely to save the equivalent of one major league minimum salary.”

by Jeremy Beer, Front Porch Republic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Pentagon Keeps Pouring Cash Into Golf Courses — Even As Trump Slashes Government Spending

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he has a singular mission. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense,” he said at a Pentagon town hall, demanding a “laser focus on readiness, lethality, and warfighting.”

Not everyone at the Defense Department seems to have gotten the message. Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Contracting documents show that Air Force Special Operations Command also wants to purchase sterile mushroom compost for the golf course greens at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. It is also looking into hydroseeding at that same course. The Army, for its part, plans to issue a service contract that will cover maintenance in the golf course clubhouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.

What golf has to do with lethality is a question that the Defense Department failed to answer. Nor would the Pentagon weigh in on the hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in, or swallowed up by, military golf courses over decades. The Pentagon did not provide a full tally of its current inventory of golf courses, which The Intercept put at around 145. What is clear is that critics have been raising alarms about the military’s golf obsession for at least 60 years, and, despite claims of a new dawn at the Pentagon, putting-green pork is still par for the course.

“The military shouldn’t be in the golf resort business,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. 

The courses instead tend to serve a clientele of military retirees and dependents. Some are open to public membership. Service members, he said, are seldom primary beneficiaries. “They don’t have the spare time to go golfing for hours during the week,” Murphy said. [ed. not so, they're actually primary beneficiaries with much reduced greens fees and priority tee times.]

Even at a time of rampant cost-cutting across the federal government — including calls from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to cut as many as 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs — the U.S military’s golf habit is not on the chopping block.

“This is reflective of a broader disconnect between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and its actions, particularly when it comes to Pentagon spending,” Murphy said. “Just like you don’t pour money into sand traps if your goal is defense, you don’t give Congress the go-ahead to boost Pentagon spending by $100 billion if your goal is to cut wasteful spending at the Pentagon.” (...) [ed. the Pentagon hasn't been able to pass an audit in the last seven years, and has no idea where the nearly $1 trillion it receives each year is going. It ain't because of golf courses.]

Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., said in 1975 that the $14 million a year spent on the Defense Department’s 300 courses, including 19 in foreign countries, was a “waste of the taxpayers money.” He complained that the funds came “directly out of the defense budget.” It took until the late 1980s for Con­gress to finally curb the use of such appropri­ated funds for military golf courses.

In the decades since, the Pentagon’s golf courses — run by the military’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation as well as Marine Corps Community Services programs — have shrunk in number. The Intercept counted about 145 golf courses, although this is something of an understatement. The Army owns 54 separate golf courses, and while some are just nine holes, many others have the standard 18 holes and still others boast 27 or even 36 holes. The Intercept also counted 51 courses for the Air Force, 29 for the Navy, and 10 for the Marine Corps.

Military courses are classified as revenue-generating programs that should provide “for a majority” of their operating expenses or be supported by other sources of revenue, such as military bowling alleys and eateries, as well as outside donations. Golf course funding is not supposed to come from congressional appropriations, and Pentagon boosters have long wielded this as a cudgel in defense of the military’s golf obsession. But critics question why such funds are used for putting greens instead of troops. (...)

Whether military golf courses actually generate profit and conduct repairs and improvements exclusively with non-appropriated funds has also been as much aspiration as a hard and fast rule. When the General Accounting Office examined Defense Department golf courses in the 1990s, investigators found courses losing money or using taxpayer funding at 40 percent of the bases analyzed. Of 10 bases inspected, two had courses that lost $43,645 and $225,546, respectively, in a single year. Another two bases used congressionally appropriated funds for their golf courses, including maintenance of a golf clubhouse and repairs to golf course structures. (...) [ed. In the 90s? C'mon...in the present overall Pentagon budget this is just lint, or random change you find under couch cushions. The cost of just one sidewinder missle (and hundreds are used in training and other military uses every day), is $400-500k per missle.]

Profligate spending on golf is de rigueur under President Donald Trump, who reportedly played at least 289 rounds of golf, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $150 million for travel and security, during his first term. In 2019, Trump also faced corruption allegations following reports that U.S. military personnel were frequently staying at a Trump golf resort in Scotland. He countered that he was not enriching himself, but that he was instead losing money as a result.

Trump had, by the middle of last month, already spent around $11 million in taxpayer dollars on golf this year. Each trip to his Florida country club Mar-a-Lago costs, on average, $3.4 million, including travel on Air Force One, limousines for Trump’s motorcade, and the stationing of armed boats nearby, according to a 2019 GAO report. The DoD incurred most of these costs. Ironically, Trump could save taxpayers money by playing at the many military golf courses closer to the White House, such as the two 18-hole championship golf courses at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the Marine Corps’ Medal of Honor Golf Course in Virginia, the two championship 18-hole golf courses at the Army’s Fort Belvoir Golf Club also in Virginia, or at the Armed Forces Retirement Home course in Washington, D.C. [ed. so these are ok, but all others are not?]

While critics have called out the Pentagon’s frivolous focus on golf for at least 60 years, the DoD has consistently played through. During that time, the U.S. military has been mired in losses and stalemates from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. In each conflict, the U.S. military killed far more people than it has lost on the battlefield, but in none was it able to achieve victory. Despite this, Hegseth remains obsessed with the idea of lethality at all costs. His department, however, continues to divide its attention between the battlefield and the fairway.

by Nick Turse, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Fei Liu/The Intercept; Getty Images
[ed. Remember when Obama went golfing once or twice a week and the Wingers went crazy? Now, crickets. Anyway, this is one Pentagon program I can actually get behind. Military personnel need R&R, that's obvious, even if they aren't always fighting, fighting, fighting against... whatever. In Alaska they closed one of the oldest and best courses in the state (Elmendorf AFB) for supposedly budgetary reasons (everybody thinks the base commander just hated golf). Now there are only three courses left in the entire Anchorage area, two of them military (with wall to wall civilian participation). Think they're losing money? Hardly.]

Never Gamble With Strangers

[ed. Will be in LV later this month (but definitely not playing cards).]

Q&A: Kevin Kisner on the Ryder Cup, NBC and What He Wants From PGA Tour Stars

The PGA Tour’s resident trash-talker — the de-facto leader of the “tell it like it is” movement in pro golf — has a big year ahead of him. Kevin Kisner is not only set to be the lead NBC golf analyst this tour season, but on Wednesday he was announced as one of U.S. captain Keegan Bradley’s assistants for the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black.

Since he first earned his tour card in 2011, Kisner’s fiery game has been just as much of a fixture as his unfiltered charm. Now, the four-time PGA Tour winner has one more shot at continuing his playing career at 40 years old, while simultaneously diving more fully into the broadcast media realm. In 2025, Kisner, known as “Kiz” to everyone on the PGA Tour, will make use of the tour’s career money exemption for the top 50 all-time earners on tour. He’s exactly No. 50 on that list.

That schedule will allow the player-turned-analyst to be in the booth for some of the biggest tournaments of the year, including but not limited to: U.S. Open, Open Championship, Players Championship and FedEx Cup playoffs. He, however, won’t be a part of NBC’s broadcast of the Ryder Cup, choosing the team room over the booth. NBC supported that decision, Kisner said.

Kisner first spoke to The Athletic in December about this pivotal moment in his career, then agreed to answer two more questions on Wednesday about the Ryder Cup decision. Those answers begin this Q&A, followed by his thoughts on his playing career, the role broadcast partners have in golf and more. (...)

You’re going to be one of NBC’s lead golf analysts this year. When did you get that call?

As soon as we got done with the playoffs last year, (NBC golf head) Sam Flood and I talked a couple of times. He said he wanted to come to Aiken and see me with Rick Cordella, the president of NBC Sports, and Tommy Roy the producer. We worked out a date and they came and spent three or four hours with my wife Brittany and I. We chatted about life and they basically asked if I had any interest in taking a job full-time. We discussed it for a while, and I told them I still wanted to play on my top-50 career money (exemption), but I loved the opportunity. I liked the team. I was grateful for it. And if they’re willing to work with me through 2025 — that if I wasn’t good on the golf course, I’d give them my all in 2026. And if I was good on the course, then they’d have to find somebody else in 2026. (...)

In 2025, what do you think the role of the color commentator is? Has it shifted over time?

Well, I think the role of TV and tour players is a partnership. I think that hasn’t been adequately displayed over the course of the last 30 years on the PGA Tour. The player’s biggest partner in money is their media obligations and their media rights — their persona or “aura.” I don’t know if that’s the right word, I’ve just been on a four-day hunting trip. Whatever you want to call it, the players should not be thinking that the media is out to get them anymore, especially the TV media guys. Because if you don’t have them, the next media deal is not going to be big. So that’s what I always talk to the guys about. I’m like, man, I will never do anything to disrespect you or to hurt your career or hurt your brand. But you have to give us some more access, and I think that’s going to be my kind of M.O. in this role. Try to bring the two together more often. (...)

What is something that you had no idea about broadcasting that you learned for the first time last year?

Just the flow of it. How little prep they gave me for going on. I thought I’d have to go to school or something. Obviously, I’m not a broadcaster. A 20-minute phone call led them to give me a mic on a national program, which is kind of scary. Tommy Roy gave me a 20-minute rundown of how it works and do’s and don’ts. Then I flew to Maui, and I sat in the truck the first day of The Sentry and watched. Then I went into the booth and watched for a couple of hours. The next day they were handing me a microphone.

What have you learned about golf since starting to commentate pro golf?

The best players every week are doing the same stuff. It’s just about who doesn’t make mistakes, and who makes the putts. If you watch from our point of view, they all hit it in the general area of the green on every hole. At the end of the day, I know exactly what a certain putt does because I’ve watched it 15 times from all these good players hitting the same spot. The really good players hit it in the same spot on the greens. When you’re playing really well, it’s like robotic golf.

Scottie (Scheffler), he had an incredible year. What did he make? $70 million? I got to spend a lot of time with him at the Presidents Cup. Him and Russell Henley were my guys. We had a ball together all week. I just love the way Scottie can focus. He can focus as well as any player I’ve ever seen, like Tiger. Tiger wore it all the time, but Scottie smiles more than Tiger used to. They have the same laser focus when it’s time to hit a golf shot.

As a player, what do you want from the guy talking about you in the booth? Do you emulate that when you’re up there?

I want my 12 handicap buddies sitting at home to say, “Yes, he’s right” or “I’m going to try that.” And I also want Scottie Scheffler to say, yeah, I did pull the heck out of that putt. Kiz is right. So if I can get both sides of the equation to understand and know that I’m right, then I’m doing my job.

by Gabby Herzig, The Athletic |  Read more:
Image: uncredited via:

The Eddie, 2024

Barry Sweet has a front seat to the mass of humanity that descends on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, for the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational.

“If you watch from early morning until early afternoon, it’s like a pilgrimage,” he said of the crowds for the surf competition, better known as the Eddie.

Alongside his wife, Janelle, and her sister, Deann Sakuoka, he watches from the vantage point of Pupukea Grill, a food truck run by his family that is parked off the two-lane Kamehameha Highway, a 10-minute walk from Waimea Bay and one of the few restaurants within miles.

When the Eddie is called some 48 hours before the contest is set to begin, a prestigious list of invitees — 45 competitors and 25 alternates — begins scrambling. Surfers from Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, South Africa and Tahiti had a host of logistics to work out to make it to Waimea Bay in time on Sunday.

They are joined by tens of thousands of spectators who crowd a small strip of beach and the surrounding cliffs, many camping out as soon as the ubiquitous event is called. Kamehameha Highway, which hugs the bay, is clogged long before the sun comes up. It is the only road to and from the bay.

Like many big-wave competitions, the Eddie has a holding period that lasts for a few months, between mid-December and mid-March, meaning it could run at any point in that period if the conditions are right. But unlike most such events, the Eddie rarely happens, giving rise to the slogan “the bay calls the day.”

The face of the wave, the part of the wave that can be surfed, must reach heights of 40 feet, or the size of a four-story building. That’s unusual, and it’s rarer for those conditions to sustain a full day of competition.

This year’s conditions were created by a big storm that formed in the west Pacific Ocean, east of Japan, late on Thursday, said Kevin Wallis, director of forecasting at the surf forecasting website Surfline. It’s a Goldilocks-type scenario: If the storm had been too far away, the waves would have been too small. If the storm came too close, it could have brought bad wind and weather, he said.

The event was last held in January 2023, weeks after a false start sent dozens scrambling to the North Shore of Oahu before the competition was canceled because of changing conditions. In 2016, it was called off the morning of the event because of a swell change, and was eventually held weeks later.

The big-wave surfer Felicity Palmateer decided to begin her long journey from Perth, Australia before the event was even called. She has long chased unpredictable swells but she didn’t want to risk missing this event.

“It’s so much more than a surf contest,” she said.

It’s a sentiment echoed by surfers, like Ms. Palmateer, who are stepping into their first Eddie, and by veterans of the event like Peter Mel, a big-wave surfer who will be surfing his ninth Eddie, a remarkable accomplishment considering this is only the 11th time the contest is running.

“It’s a celebration of not just surfing itself but of the culture, of life-saving, of watermen, and the heritage of Hawaii,” Mr. Mel said.

The event was founded in 1984 to honor Eddie Aikau, a surfer from Hawaii and the first lifeguard on the North Shore of Oahu. He was revered as a surfer who would paddle into waves no one else would attempt, and he saved more than 500 people as a lifeguard.

In 1978, Mr. Aikau joined the crew of a canoe voyage retracing the ancient Polynesian migration route between Hawaii and Tahiti. The vessel, the Hokulea, capsized off the coast of Lanai hours after setting sail. Mr. Aikau took his surfboard and paddled toward shore to get help. The rest of the crew was rescued, but Mr. Aikau was never seen again.

Being invited to the event is a sign of respect and recognition from the Aikau family, and for many big wave surfers, it’s the pinnacle of their careers. Even if the event doesn’t run, an Aikau nod is equivalent to a trip to the Super Bowl.

by Talya Minsberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brian Bielmann/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
[ed. See also (for a good sense of the vibe): Landon McNamara Wins the 2024 Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational (Yahoo News).]

The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed

Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers I have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer got a high quality product. I knew it wasn’t the most socially valuable enterprise, but I certainly thought it was net positive. When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.

It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.

The Short Answer

Joe Weisenthal: Why is it that sports gambling, specifically, has elicited a lot of criticism from people that would otherwise have more laissez faire sympathies?

This full post is the long answer. The short answer is that it is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors. That predation, due to the costs of customer acquisition and retention and the regulations involved, involves pushing upon them terrible products offered at terrible prices, pushed throughout the sports ecosystem and via smartphones onto highly vulnerable people. This is not a minor issue. This is so bad that you can pick up the impacts in overall economic distress data. The price, on so many levels, is too damn high.

Paper One: Bankruptcies

We start with discussion of one of several new working papers studying the financial consequences of legalized sports betting. The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!).

Brett Hollenbeck: *Working Paper Alert*: “The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling” by Poet Larsen, @dade_us and myself. We study how the widespread legalization of sports gambling over the past five years has impacted consumer financial health. In 2018, SCOTUS ruled that states cannot be prohibited from allowing sports betting, and 38 states have since legalized sports gambling. This has led to a large new industry and a large increase in gambling accessibility. Roughly $300 billion has been bet and is growing fast. (...)

Paper Two: Reduced Household Savings
Paper Three: Increased Domestic Violence

The Product as Currently Offered is Terrible

Meanwhile, frankly, the product emphasis and implementation sucks. Almost all of the legal implementations (e.g. everyone I know about except Circa) are highly predatory. That’s what can survive in this market. Why? Predation is where the money is. There is no physical overhead at an online casino, but after paying for all the promotions and credit card payments and advertisements and licenses and infrastructure, the only way to make all that back under the current laws and business models is the above-mentioned 10%-style hold that comes from toxic offerings. Thus high prices even on the main lines, even higher ones on parlays and in-game betting. Whenever I see lines on the TV I usually want to puke at how wide the prices are. In game odds are beyond obnoxious. (...)

All this is complemented by a strategy centered around free bet promotions (which makes the bonuses sound a lot bigger than they are), advertisements, promotional texts and emails and especially a barrage of push notifications. Anyone showing any skill? They are shown the door.

Things Sharp Players Do

I don’t think this is central to the case that current legal sports betting is awful, but it is illustrative what pros do in order to disguise themselves and get their wagers down. That to do that, they make themselves look like the whales. Which means addicts. I’m used to stories like this one, that’s normal:

Ira Boudway (Bloomberg): If I open an account in New York, maybe for a few weeks I just bet the Yankees right before the game begins,” says Rufus Peabody, a pro bettor and co-host of the Bet the Process podcast. If this trick works, the book sees these normie, hometown bets as a sign that it’s safe to raise his limits.

It seems players have upped their game.

One pro bettor I know set up a bot which logs in to his accounts every day between 2 and 4 a.m., to make it seem like he can’t get through the night without checking his bets. Another withdraws money and then reverses those withdrawals so it looks like he can’t resist gambling. Simulating addictive behavior, says Peabody, is an effective way to get online sportsbooks to send you bonus money and keep your accounts open. This isn’t necessarily because operators are targeting problem bettors, he says; they’re simply looking to identify and encourage customers who are likely to spend—and lose—the most. This just happens to be a good way to find and enable addicts, too.

The rest of the post is filled with the usual statistics and tragic stories. What I find interesting about these examples is that they are very level-1 plays. As in, this is exactly what someone would do if they thought they were up against a system that was looking for signs of what type of player you are, but only in the most mechanical and simple sense. For this type of thing to work, the book must not be looking at details or thinking clearly or holistically. If you had tried this stuff on me when I was watching customers, to the extent I noticed it at all, I am pretty sure I would if anything have caught you faster.

People Cannot Handle Gambling on Smartphones

Vices and other distractions are constant temptations. When you carry a phone around with you, that temptation is ever present. Indeed, I recently got a Pixel Watch, and the biggest benefit of it so far is that I can stay connected enough to not worry, and not be tempted to check for things, without the pull of what a phone can do. And we have repeatedly seen how distracting it is for kids in school to have the smartphone right there in their pocket. I have learned to be very, very careful with mobile games, even ones with no relevant microtransactions. Putting gambling in your pocket makes the temptation to gamble ever-present. Even for those who can resist it, that is a not so cheap mental tax to pay, and likely to result in the occasional impulse bet, even without the constant notifications. First hit’s free. Constant offers that adjust to your responses, to get you to keep coming back. Now consider that at least several percent of people have an acute gambling addiction or vulnerability. For them, this is like an alcoholic being forced to carry a flask around in their pocket 24/7, while talk of what alcohol to choose and how good it would be to use that flask right now gets constantly woven into all their entertainment, and they by default get notifications asking if now is a good time for a beer. You can have the apps back up and running within a minute, even if you delete them. It was plausible that this was an acceptable situation, that people could mostly handle that kind of temptation. We have now run the experiment, and it is clear that too many of them cannot.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Less Wrong | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: ‘A serious disease’: Congress weighs federal gambling crackdown amid growing concerns (Guardian).]

Epic Games' Unreal Engine

Epic Games is the maker of Unreal Engine, which is one of the biggest and most capable game engines. What is a game engine? Well, all games, no matter how diverse their play style or visual presentation, have certain functionality in common. Developers used to code all of that from scratch (and still can, if they so choose), but it makes sense to bundle all of those capabilities into one piece of software so that devs can work on the things that make their projects unique instead of continually re-inventing a thousand different kinds of wheels. This is what game engines do.

There’s a feedback loop that has now been running for decades between companies like Epic that make the engines, and developers who come up with new ways to use them. Engines become more capable as companies like Epic say “hey, a lot of devs are implementing Feature X, we should just add that to the next release.”

Meanwhile the hardware that people use to run games becomes much more powerful. Developers think up interesting ways to take advantage of all of these improvements.

Game engines are really a general infrastructure for immersive experiences—by which I mean, audiovisual productions that you can move around in and interact with. Many of the applications built on this foundation fit cleanly into established genres such as first-person shooter games, but increasingly people use these things to make art projects, movies, and commercial/industrial applications.

Nick Whiting, a former studio head and engineering director at Epic, has co-founded a company called Kumikai that, among other things, helps developers who are using Unreal Engine to create applications that are not games. Part of his inspiration came from this brain aneurysm surgery simulator. Nick generously provided me with a list of links to other non-game projects that I can’t fully do justice to here, so I’ll just drop them in:

• The “Guided Ureterovesical Anastomosis” section of this page on the Surgical Science site. Maybe a better and quicker view here though

• Tesla’s use of Unreal Engine to generate synthetic data for training AI. If you’re teaching an AI to deal with conditions that arise in three-dimensional space, you can get data much more easily and cheaply by simulating it photorealistically than by going out into the real world and shooting video.

• The inevitable NASA link. Label says it has been taken down but it seems to play.

• Helping architects design buildings

• A mining construction simulator. “By changing things like lighting and tunnel sizes to give a bit more "breathing room"…before they blast holes in the ground, they were able to save large amounts of money and have better safety for folks that are already in incredibly hazardous environments.”

Fortnite and the Metaverse

So if there’s going to be a Metaverse, game engines are going to run it. And game developers—the people who are proficient at using those engines and the toolchains that feed assets into them—are going to build it.

In 2017 Epic released Fortnite Battle Royale, which most people just refer to as Fortnite. It is an immensely successful game. In any given month, 70 - 80 million people play it. At peak it generated $5 - 6 billion a year in revenue.

This is relevant to the Metaverse because Fortnite is an online, multi-player game. 100 avatars parachute onto an island at about the same time and fight each other until only one team remains. The players can be anywhere on Earth. So in order for Epic’s engineers to make this game work, they had to solve a host of technical problems around synchronizing those 100 players’ perceptions and experiences of the same virtual space.

They’re not the first or the only engineers to have tackled such challenges. MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) are a genre unto themselves and have been around since long before Fortnite. More recently Minecraft and Roblox have achieved phenomenal success enabling users to craft experiences that can be experienced by multiple players at once.

Tim Sweeney, however, has been openly stating for a long time that the goal is to develop all of this into something like the Metaverse. He’s been personally working on a new programming language called Verse that is tailored to the needs of Metaverse builders. After years of development Verse has recently broken the surface in UEFN, Unreal Editor for Fortnite, which is a system that Epic has released in order to make it possible for developers to extend the base Fortnite experience into games of their own design, and to make money doing so.

by Neal Stephenson, Graphomane |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Unreal Engine

[ed. If you find this topic interesting, spend some time on the Unreal Engine website (which provides the introductory video at the top of this post. Coupled with AI it's easy to see how the long imagined (and much hyped) 'metaverse' might evolve.]

Good, Free, Fun: The Simple Formula That Made Duolingo a Daily Habit for Millions

The day I started working on this story about Duolingo it seemed to be everywhere. I heard from a friend who was celebrating her 800-day Spanish practice streak on the app. I read about a journalist from The Guardian who became addicted to learning Italian. A Sri Lankan waitress in Brooklyn switched from English to Spanish when she heard my mother and I speaking, crediting Duolingo for her skills.

But my deep interest in the world's most downloaded language-learning app truly began last year when I saw first-hand its significant impact on new migrants to the US, a country undergoing one of the largest migration waves of the decade. At some point in their long journeys, Duolingo becomes an essential tool for these people on the move.

John Jairo Ocampo, a former bus driver from Colombia, recalls struggling to find work in his first days in the US in 2023, when a boss at a construction site in New York City explained simply, "More English, more money." He used Duolingo to learn. Now, the family lives in Indianapolis, and John’s wife is using the app to get along better at her job in an elementary school kitchen; she says her boss is using it, too, to learn Spanish.

The migrant experience is not foreign to Duolingo's CEO and co-founder, Luis von Ahn, who was born and raised in Guatemala, a Central American country with over 55% of its population living in poverty.

"In a Latin American country, and in Guatemala in particular, if you have money, you can buy a very good education, but if you don't have money, sometimes you don't even learn how to read and write," Von Ahn told the BBC in a recent interview at Duolingo's brand new office in downtown New York. "That made a big impression on me."

So when non-native English speakers Von Ahn and Severin Hacker, Duolingo's CTO and co-founder, started their company in 2012, they knew that learning languages, and in particular learning English, has the potential to change people's lives. "This is why we've worked really hard to keep Duolingo free, because we want to give access to education to everybody."

To maintain the promise of an open and free app, Von Ahn and Hacker developed a hybrid business model that combines ad-supported access and "freemium" elements, while also offering a paid subscription with extra benefits, like an ad-free experience and a family plan. And it worked. "The main way in which we grow is by word of mouth, so people tell their friends," he says. One such word of mouth moment came from Bill Gates, who said in a Reddit chat back in 2015 that he regretted not speaking more languages and had tried Duolingo.

In the intervening years the app has found its way onto many, many screens. According to Duolingo's shareholders letter, in 2023 the company's revenue was $531m and the forecast for the full-year 2024 is $731m. Roughly 8% of Duolingo users pay for a subscription, contributing to 80% of the company’s revenue. Meanwhile, the vast majority, 90%, use the free version and see ads, which account for only 8% of the earnings.

The app combines short, engaging lessons and game-like elements to help users develop speaking, reading, writing and listening skills in 41 languages. Around half of users are practicing English, and Duolingo can be used to learn other major world languages like Spanish and Chinese, as well as some lesser-spoken languages, such as Esperanto, Navajo and even High Valyrian, a fictional language developed for HBO's Game of Thrones. There was some controversy last year when Duolingo paused its Welsh language course. The app now offers maths and music courses, as well.

To keep people coming back daily, Duolingo created a streak system and fashioned characters with strong personalities, such as the infamous green owl, Duo, and a goth purple-haired teen, Lilly. These characters send daily practice reminders and, based on social media posts, are magnetic to users. (...)

Today, Duolingo serves 34 million daily users worldwide and employs 850 people across six cities: Detroit, Seattle, Berlin, Beijing, New York, and their headquarters in Pittsburgh, where you can discover the company's culinary spin-off, Duo's Taqueria. This global presence affirms the company's accelerated growth. In October 2024, Duolingo's market capitalisation was $12.27bn, a significant rise from 2022, when its market cap was $2.85bn.

The CEO's journey to becoming a tech-founder billionaire began when he was an eight-year-old boy in Guatemala City, where his single mother, a doctor, gifted him a computer instead of the Nintendo he had wanted. He left Guatemala in 1996 to study mathematics at Duke University. He went on to pursue a PhD in computer science, and it was during his first year at Carnegie Mellon University, in 2000, when a pivotal moment occurred.

The young doctoral student attended a talk in which Yahoo!'s head scientist shared 10 problems the company couldn't solve. "At the time [Yahoo!] was the biggest internet company, it was huge. Yahoo! gave free email accounts to people, and there were malicious people that were writing programs to obtain millions of email accounts, and they didn't know how to stop them. I went home, I thought about it, and came up – along with my PhD advisor – with the idea of a Captcha, that is the distorted characters that people have to see online [to prove that you’re a human]," he reveals.

Captcha, an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", served as the foundation for ReCaptcha – best known today as Google's I am not a robot verification system. It was not only a technological improvement, but also a company founded and solely owned by Von Ahn. In 2009, Google acquired it for an undisclosed eight-figure sum, along with a game that helped improve the accuracy of Google Image Search. By his early-30s, von Ahn had become a millionaire.

Although Luis von Ahn didn't become the mathematics teacher he dreamt of being as a teenager in Guatemala City, these milestones, and the awards he has won along the way, allowed him to create an educational platform that now lives in the pockets of millions worldwide. Here, he tells the BBC more about his un-put-downable app and how a self-proclaimed "people-pleaser" gets by in the C-suite.

What do you think sets Duolingo apart from its competitors?

Duolingo's free version is really good, and I think that matters. And the second one is that we early on understood that the hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated, so we have spent a lot of time making Duolingo fun. With Duolingo it feels like you're playing a game as opposed to education apps which are just trying to teach you something without engaging you.

How does Duolingo keep users engaged and coming back?

Gamification is probably the most important thing. We try to turn the whole thing into a game, but we try to use storytelling. From the beginning, I wanted to have a mascot. I thought that it would make the whole thing more accessible. And having it doing weird things online really helps. But it's not like it started in one day. This is an evolution. It all works together to create a brand that people love. Most of the [features] we have now, we got to by trial and error. We've tried too many things that didn't work. The ones that are now there is because we tried them, and they did work.

by Natalia Guerrero, BBC | Read more:
Images: BBC/ Klawe Rzeczy; Duolingo

Against Slop

Beyond the failure market in video games

It's usually understood that time wasted is art wasted. To edit down to the lean core, that’s often considered in most mediums the mark of quality (or, perhaps more accurately, and sometimes to a fault, professionalism). Historically, that’s been part of the cultural stigma against video games: not only is wasted time a given, it’s an integral part of the experience. Interactivity inverts the responsibility for moving the plot forward from storyteller to audience. A linear, self-propulsive story squanders the medium’s artistic potential. In games, the tension comes from not only the uncertainty about how the plot will resolve but also whether it even can. When the player fails, the story ends without ever having reached a conclusion. The work necessarily has to reset in some manner. Which creates a minor paradox: How can time discarded not also be time wasted? Isn’t this all noise and nonsense for the purpose of keeping a couch potato on the couch so long they sprout roots?

Repetition is usually dramatic poison, and it’s no wonder such failing without finality is erased from representations of gaming in other media. Whether in 1982’s Tron, or the “First Person Shooter” episode of The X-Files, or Gerard Butler’s turn in 2009’s Gamer, the “if you die in the game, you die for real” trope is understandable. Games can be complex, multifaceted cultural objects and are more frequently being covered that way, yet the accusation that games are action for the sake of action with little consequence or meaning is uncomfortably accurate much of the time. The source of the stigma stems from the early arcade days, when games primarily leveraged failure: every loss shook down the player for another quarter to send rattling into the machine. To beat the game and see it in its entirety took a mountain of coins, dedication, and skill—rendering play play, which is to say, largely divorced from narrative or the kinds of emotional experiences other art forms explored.

The pastime became less sport and more medium when home consoles and personal computers allowed games to experiment on a mass scale. Developers had no profit incentive to induce defeat once a cartridge or CD-ROM had been sold. Failure became instead the primary driver of tension within an emerging narrative, allowing story to flourish alongside gameplay from text adventures to action shooters. These stories were, save for those played with perfect skill, littered with loops. With every trap that fatally mangles a player in Tomb Raider, every police chase in Grand Theft Auto that ends in a brick wall instead of an escape, the narrative goes backward, the protagonist character’s story caught in a cyclical purgatory until the player-protagonist achieves a better result.

The sensation of breaking through those barriers is one of the most cathartic experiences that games offer, built on the interactivity that is so unique to gaming as a medium. Failure builds tension, which is then released with dramatic victory. But the accusation that these discarded loops are irrecuperable wastes of time still rings true, as modern game audiences have become comfortable consuming slop. In the past few years, games have trended toward becoming enormous blobs of content for the sake of content: an open world, a checklist of activities, a crafting system that turns environmental scrap into barely noticeable quality-of-life improvements. Ubisoft’s long-running Far Cry franchise has often been an example of this kind of format, as are survival crafting games like Funcom’s Conan Exiles or Bethesda’s overloaded wasteland sim Fallout 76. Every activity in a Far Cry or its ilk is a template activity that only comes to a finite end after many interminable engagements: a base is conquered, just to have three more highlighted. Failure here is a momentary punishment that can feel indistinguishable from success, as neither produces a sense of meaning or progress. These failure states are little moments of inattention and clumsy gameplay that lead only to repeating the same task better this time. Then when you do play better mechanically, you are rewarded with the privilege of repeating the same task, a tiny bit more interesting this time because the enemies are a little tougher in the next valley over. Within games that play for dozens of hours but are largely defined by mechanical combat loops that can last just seconds, everything can boil down to the present-tense experience so detrimentally that it’s hard to remember what you actually did at the end of those dozens of hours.

There is no narrative weight to liberating the same base in Far Cry across multiple attempts, no sense of cumulative progression to repeatedly coming at the same open-world content from different angles. There is only a grim resignation to the sunk-cost fallacy that, if you’ve already invested so much time into the damn thing already, you might as well bring it to some kind of resolution. Cranking up difficulty can make those present-tense moments more dramatic or stressful, but in the end it’s just adding more hours to the total playtime by adjusting the threshold for completing a given segment to a stricter standard. The game does not care if you succeed or fail, only that you spend time with it over its competitors.

As the industry creates limbos of success, the failure market itself has also mutated. See mobile gaming, a distorted echo of the coin-operated era, where players are behaviorally channeled to buy things like extra Poké Balls in Pokemon Go or “continue” permissions in Candy Crush and keep playing just a little longer. In 1980, failure cost a cumulative $2.8 billion in quarters; in 2022, the mobile games market made $124 billion by creating artificial barriers and choke points within their game mechanics, either making things more actively difficult or just slowing them down to prompt impulse spending.

In video games like the ubiquitous Fortnite or Blizzard’s recent Diablo 4, major releases often have “seasons” that heavily encourage cyclical spending. Every three months the game adds new content and asks the player to repeat the experience. The player exchanges between seven to twenty-five dollars to gild the stories they’ve already completed with extra objects, materials, and costumes—real money spent only for the privilege of sinking in the requisite time to acquire these virtual items, creating yet another loop of increasingly meaningless time usage. Fortnite came out in 2017. In 2023 the game generated all by itself a total $4.4 billion of income. A sum larger than the GDP of some countries, generated in one year, six years after release, off the impulse not to look like a scrub with no money in front of your friends even if those friends are dressed as Peter Griffin and the Xenomorph from Alien.

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“Live service” is used to describe these games that attempt to stay evergreen with seasonal systems and intermittent small content drops. These seasonal titles and mobile cash shops have created feedback loops and cyclical repetitions that, by design, do not resolve. In recent years, however, there has been a counterreaction that tries to integrate these consumerist tendencies in the pursuit of something greater. (...)

Besides its beautiful portrayal of a declining, melancholy world of perpetual autumn, what sets aside Elden Ring is its complexly layered difficulty. Elden Ring is quite eager to kill you, with a million ways to put a player down. But it is not meanly difficult, or insurmountably difficult. Most importantly, it is not difficult as part of a profit-seeking monetization loop. Instead, the failure states that are so often leveraged to extend playtime and coerce spending in most other games are here used as friction to build atmosphere. The constant starting again is exhausting, often stressful, sometimes infuriating. It is never meaningless, however: it confidently contradicts the worries of other mediums and the too-often-true accusations of slop with its deep understanding of how to create drama within any individual moment. Participating in its loops of death and rebirth as a player is to be fully within the Lands Between. Elden Ring presents a once-flourishing kingdom literally consumed by creeping nihilism and reflexive despair, which gives sympathetic resonance to the player’s determined and confident attempts to surmount these challenges. The most powerful or villainous enemies withdraw into themselves and let the world rot, while the weakest literally cower from the player, so exhausted by the idea of another painful death. Not the player, though: they exist in deliberate dramatic contrast to these characters by virtue of their own interactive participation with the world, making them the hero as both part of the text and as a meta-textual frame for the whole story.

By persisting in a world that trends downward, your own failures take on a defiant quality. The failure loop of the game incentivizes the player to loop again. This is where Elden Ring’s difficulty is particularly clever: because a player pays no consequence besides dropping experience points on the ground where they died, there is a hard limit on what the game can take away from them. There is an interactive choice and freedom even within these fail states, as you can abandon them or return again, fighting through all you had before; this in turn creates an incredible carrot-and-stick effect that, should you gamble on reclaiming your hard-won gains, doubles the stakes. While it is repeating the same content on the surface, there is a tangible and meaningful sense of cumulative progress and tactical variation on every death.

Once you’ve spent those points on an upgrade, that’s yours for the rest of the game—a permanent token of your dedication. A player is only ever risking the immediate next step, which adds weight to the fantasy of the gameplay, but not so much actual consequence that failure would crush a player’s spirit to continue. Holding onto your advancements even after dying and coming back makes your arc of progression stand in exciting contrast to the world around you. From a stagnant place, you are rising as something new, something vibrant. By incorporating these meta-textual elements into the mechanical play, there is a sense of individuality and ownership of the experience that more typical open-world check-listing games do not have. When I fail in Far Cry, it feels dramatically evaporative and impersonal. When I fail in Elden Ring, I feel like it’s because I made an active choice to risk something and I come back more engaged and determined than ever. (...)

The expansion’s price tag is less about monetizing the players than it is a reflection of the developmental effort involved. Elden Ring was certainly in a position to cash in at any time. The initial release was as successful as any game using more manipulative methods of extracting value. It was so popular that it sold twelve million copies in two weeks, moving on to over twenty million sold within a year of release. By any metric, but particularly by the metric where you multiply twenty million by the sixty-dollar retail price, the game was a massive success for art of any sort in any medium, doing so without relying on in-app purchases, artificial game resource scarcity, or making certain weapons and armor premium-purchase only.

For the health of video games as an artistic medium, this needs to be enough. That’s plenty of money. That’s such an enormous goddamn pile of money it even justifies the multimillion-dollar cost of developing modern flagship titles. Perhaps the problem with Elden Ring as an example is that it’s a masterpiece. It captured the imagination of millions. Games as an industry, instead of an artistic medium, don’t want that kind of success for only the games that are worthy of it. The industry needs to make money like that on the games built without subtlety, or craft, or heart. The industry needs to pull a profit off the slop too, and there is nothing they won’t gut or sell out to do it. If the old way was to tax failure, the new way is to dilute success, to treadmill the experience such that it never reaches a destination. (...)

This is just the era we live in, our own stagnant age in the Lands Between. With Disney and its subsidiaries sucking all of the air out of the room to repackage the same concept over and over, Hollywood has reached the stale conclusion that the same story can be told repetitively. The embrace of AI across multiple mediums just intensifies this dilution of what feels meaningful. 

by Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: From Elden Ring.|Bandi Namco

Lawn-Mowing Games Uncut

There’s a school of thought that insists video games are purely about escapism. Where else can you pretend you’re a US Marine Force Recon (Call of Duty), a heroic eco warrior preventing a dodgy company from draining a planet’s spiritual energy (Final Fantasy), or a football manager (Football Manager) – all from the comfort of your sofa?

But the antithesis of these thrills-and-spills experiences are the so-called anti-escapist games. Farming Simulator, PowerWash Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator – these hugely successful titles challenge the whole concept of interactive entertainment as something, well, exciting. Now we have what at first glance appears the most boring of all, Lawn Mowing Simulator. (...)

Lawn Mowing Simulator, created by Liverpool-based studio Skyhook Games, is not an April fool joke. It strives for realism and has its own unique gaggle of fans. But why would you want to play a game about something you could easily do in real life? As a journalist, I had to know, so I decided to consult some experts.

Lesson one – the joy of repetition

“It’s weird that this genre not only exists, but is so popular,” explains Krist Duro, editor-in-chief of Duuro Plays, a video game reviews website based in Albania – and the first person I could find who has actually played and somewhat enjoyed Lawn Mowing Simulator. “But you need to be wired in a particular way. I like repetitive tasks because they allow me to enter into a zen-like state. But the actual simulation part needs to be good.”

Duro namechecks some other simulators I’ve thankfully never heard of: Motorcycle Mechanic 2021, Car Mechanic Simulator, Construction Simulator, Ships Simulator. “These games are huge,” says Duro. “Farming Simulator has sold 25m physical copies and has 90m downloads. PowerWash Simulator sold more than 12m on consoles. As long as the simulators remain engaging, people will show up.”

Duro reviewed the latest VR version of Lawn Mowing Simulator but wasn’t a fan. “Your brain can’t accept that you’re moving in the game while in real life you’re staying still. It made it impossible to play for more than 30 minutes without feeling like I was about to die,” he says. But otherwise, he liked it.

by Rich Pelley, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. See also: The Age of the ‘Status’ AC: Are these related? For some reason it feels like it.]

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"Last year, during the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, Dan Medley installed hundreds of new air-conditioners in apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

These were not the unglamorous window units familiar to Mr. Medley, 35, a handyman in Manhattan. His wealthier clients seemed to be upgrading to ACs that looked as if they had gotten plastic surgery: their harsh edges softened, their faces sculpted and smoothed.

On Park Avenue, he installed an air-conditioner from July, a start-up that sells gracefully rounded window units with pastel covers. He scoured Home Depots for six curvy Midea ACs for a single client on the Upper West Side. Others went for Windmill, which bills its minimalist unit on Instagram as a “sleek and chic transformation moment.”

Several companies are trying to capitalize on increasingly unbearable summers with a fleet of photogenic window ACs, targeted toward flush and fashionable customers in buildings without central air-conditioning. Their products are more expensive than the average window unit — ranging from $340 to nearly $600 — and their marketing sometimes elides the nitty-gritty, emphasizing svelte exteriors over B.T.U.s.

“These types of things, you’re paying for the aesthetic,” Mr. Medley said.

Coverage of these products has been breathless, occasionally bordering on erotic. “Help! I’m Sexually Attracted to My New Smart Air Conditioner,” read a recent headline in Vice’s product recommendation vertical. The Wall Street Journal described a wave of refreshed ACs as “sexy.”

As air-conditioning becomes less of a luxury and more of a necessity, it follows that some customers will shell out for a unit that looks like an iPad or the robotic love interest in “Wall-E.” But there’s something unsettling about the air-conditioner growing so covetable thanks to the combined efforts of deft marketing and extreme heat. We’re used to it-bags and it-girls; is there any eerier sign of the climate crisis than the arrival of the it-air-conditioner? (...)

The air-conditioners are all over social media, in part because the companies behind them sometimes provide free units to influencers who make home décor- and fashion-focused content. Anna B. Albury, 28, a rug designer in Brooklyn and a founder of the “coolstuff.nyc” newsletter, contacted July last month and received two free air-conditioners in exchange for sharing an Instagram Reel with her 10,000 followers.

“It’s kind of clear who they’re targeting,” she said. “It’s a young person living in a city that doesn’t have central AC, but cares about the way their home looks.”

That customer can now choose from spruced-up versions of all kinds of workhorse home products: There are televisions framed to look like paintings, and fridges that are disguised as cabinetry. Air-conditioner companies seem newly eager to distance their products from such unfashionable company as microwaves and ceiling fans.

by Callie Holtermann, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Graham Dickie, NYT