Tuesday, June 12, 2012
The Last Days of MF Global
At about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 25, David Schamis, a director of a once-obscure futures brokerage company called MF Global, placed a call to his friend, Jacob Goldfield.
Goldfield, 52, was a former trading superstar who had spent 15 years at Goldman Sachs—brilliant and impeccably connected (Bob Rubin and Larry Summers loved him), but equally quirky and unassuming. Raised in the South Bronx, he'd majored in physics at Harvard before dropping out of law school there to start at Goldman, where he made partner in record time.
After leaving the partnership with a fortune in 2000, Goldfield helped manage U.S. Senator Jon Corzine's blind trust and spent a year and a half as chief investment officer for George Soros' $11-billion hedge fund. Now on his own, he periodically journeyed west to Stanford, where he conducted economics research at a university think tank.
Goldfield was a crisis junkie. He exuded a childlike fascination with economic events, especially disasters. He found himself summoned to the scene of each new meltdown—AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers—by desperate men seeking his aid in the often-hopeless struggle to save a balance sheet under siege. Sometimes he stood to make some money, if a private rescue actually went through. Sometimes it was just volunteer work. Goldfield did it for his friends, or simply because he found it interesting.
Goldfield held a singular notion of how to think about a financial crisis. He viewed it as a predator, intelligent and merciless, hunting you. If you didn't move fast enough, you'd meet a swift and certain end.
Now MF Global needed his advice.
The collapse of MF Global in October 2011 was a remarkably powerful event: It destroyed the reputation of a famous man; it elevated a firm that no one had ever heard of to infamy; and it shattered public trust in the belief that brokerage customers' money is always safe.
In the months that followed, America's eighth-largest bankruptcy has become a spectacle and public scandal. Jon Corzine, the former U.S. senator, governor, and chief of Goldman Sachs who rode MF Global into the abyss, finds his legacy in tatters. And the hunt for the money continues, with investigators chasing $1.6 billion in customer cash that went missing—something that's never happened before on Wall Street.
A six-month Fortune investigation into the failure of MF Global reveals a mismatch of tragic proportions: how a too-small company came together with a too-big CEO. Combining their mutual shortcomings—in ambition, controls, and discipline—simply proved toxic.
This story is based on more than seventy interviews with regulators, industry executives, legislators, lawyers, friends and family of Corzine, and people at all levels of MF Global. Fortune also gained access to hundreds of pages of confidential board minutes, internal reports, company emails, and other documents.
by Peter Elkind with Doris Burke, Fortune | Read more:
Photo: Chip Somodovilla/Getty Images
Is Stretching Useful?
Today we have a guest post from author Alex Hutchinson. Alex writes a
monthly column in Runner’s World (they also host his excellent Sweat Science blog) and is a Senior Editor at Canadian Running magazine. You can find more on Alex at the bottom of this post.
As Alex mentions below, he recently published a fantastic book which has a rather large section on the health benefits of stretching (or lack thereof). As a longtime skeptic of stretching myself, I was very excited when he agreed to summarize the research evidence in a guest post. Enjoy the post!
I guess I should start by stating my bias: I don’t like stretching.
For over a decade, I stretched every day, usually twice a day – but I
never enjoyed it. I still try to be as impartial as possible in
analyzing the evidence for and against stretching, but I figure you have
the right to know that I’m a stretching skeptic!
So what is this evidence I refer to? Over the past decade or so, there has been a complete change in how coaches and exercise scientists view stretching. It’s the biggest change in elite training that I’m aware of during that time, and these days it’s the biggest gap between elite athletes and the average person at the gym. I devote an entire chapter to the topic in my recent science-of-exercise book, Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?, and I’m going to draw on that to present a few highlights of the recent research.
1. Does stretching help you avoid injury during exercise?
This is very difficult to “prove” one way or the other, because every person and every injury is unique. Still, a 2004 systematic review that analyzed 361 studies concluded that “stretching was not significantly associated with a reduction in total injuries.” Other reviews have reached similar conclusions. The early studies that suggested stretching would help always included stretching as part of a warm-up; it now appears that a warm-up (e.g. five minutes of gentle jogging) is important but stretching isn’t.
2. Does stretching help you avoid soreness after exercise?
No. A 2011 Cochrane review of 12 randomized studies with more than 2,000 subjects in total concluded that “muscle stretching, whether conducted before, after, or before and after exercise, does not produce clinically important reductions in delayed-onset muscle soreness.” This is not a surprise: post-exercise soreness is thought to result from microscopic damage to muscle fibres; you can’t “undamage” the muscles by stretching them.
by Travis Saunders, Plos Blogs | Read more:
As Alex mentions below, he recently published a fantastic book which has a rather large section on the health benefits of stretching (or lack thereof). As a longtime skeptic of stretching myself, I was very excited when he agreed to summarize the research evidence in a guest post. Enjoy the post!
I guess I should start by stating my bias: I don’t like stretching.
For over a decade, I stretched every day, usually twice a day – but I
never enjoyed it. I still try to be as impartial as possible in
analyzing the evidence for and against stretching, but I figure you have
the right to know that I’m a stretching skeptic!So what is this evidence I refer to? Over the past decade or so, there has been a complete change in how coaches and exercise scientists view stretching. It’s the biggest change in elite training that I’m aware of during that time, and these days it’s the biggest gap between elite athletes and the average person at the gym. I devote an entire chapter to the topic in my recent science-of-exercise book, Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?, and I’m going to draw on that to present a few highlights of the recent research.
1. Does stretching help you avoid injury during exercise?
This is very difficult to “prove” one way or the other, because every person and every injury is unique. Still, a 2004 systematic review that analyzed 361 studies concluded that “stretching was not significantly associated with a reduction in total injuries.” Other reviews have reached similar conclusions. The early studies that suggested stretching would help always included stretching as part of a warm-up; it now appears that a warm-up (e.g. five minutes of gentle jogging) is important but stretching isn’t.
2. Does stretching help you avoid soreness after exercise?
No. A 2011 Cochrane review of 12 randomized studies with more than 2,000 subjects in total concluded that “muscle stretching, whether conducted before, after, or before and after exercise, does not produce clinically important reductions in delayed-onset muscle soreness.” This is not a surprise: post-exercise soreness is thought to result from microscopic damage to muscle fibres; you can’t “undamage” the muscles by stretching them.
by Travis Saunders, Plos Blogs | Read more:
Return to Sender
On a warm evening in the middle of march, V.A. Shiva Ayyudarai sat in the front row of a packed auditorium at the MIT media lab.
Dressed in a black blazer and T-shirt, Ayyadurai was on comfortable turf. He had four degrees from the Institute, lectured in two of its departments, and, at 48, had earned his place on a campus where success is measured in the number of businesses launched and millions earned.
Ayyadurai — known to everyone as Shiva — has been a Fulbright scholar, a Lemelson-MIT student prize nominee, and the entrepreneurial brains behind seven businesses, including EchoMail, a $200 million company that counted Nike, the U.S. Senate, and the Clinton White House as customers. But his greatest achievement came when he was just 14 and living with his immigrant parents in New Jersey. Back then, toiling away in his spare time, Shiva had invented e-mail, an accomplishment that would, in time, change the course of human communication — a fact not lost on Shiva, whose personal website is called inventorofemail.com.
For all his spectacular successes, Shiva was most proud of devising e-mail. Yet he’d been plagued for decades by a guilty sense that his invention had led to the unraveling of another great component of human — or at least American — communication: the United States Postal Service. Since as far back as 1997, Shiva had been trying to get the post office to imagine a world beyond merely delivering letters and packages, to embrace and profit from the growing business of e-mail. But for reasons he’d never understood, the U.S. Mail had been content to keep things as they were. Last fall, when the post office announced massive layoffs and service cuts in a desperate scramble to deal with its billions in debt, Shiva had had enough. “I think that if the Postal Service dies,” Shiva said at the time, “it will be the end of democracy as we know it.” He proposed that the post office create a new form of e-mail, one that was safe, private, and subject to the same federal regulations that protect the bills and junk mail that are delivered to our mailboxes. He was flummoxed by the agency’s ineptitude: “What the f*#@ was the #USPS management doing for 10 years?” he tweeted. “They should have owned EMAIL …. ” Caustic comments like these coming from the inventor of e-mail sparked the interest of the media, and soon Shiva was being quoted in Fast Company and Time magazines.
Then, in a breakthrough, the post office’s inspector general came calling, asking Shiva for his ideas on how they could enter the digital age. A few weeks later, the Smithsonian announced that it was accepting the documents from Shiva’s adolescent e-mail work into its archives, where they would be counted among other great inventions like the telegraph, the light bulb, and the artificial heart. While he was in DC to hand off his papers, the Washington Post recorded a video series with Shiva and published a fawning profile of him.
Now he was at the MIT Media Lab with a group of experts he’d assembled for a panel discussion on “The Future of the Post Office.” Among the participants was the Postal Service’s inspector general himself, David Williams. Thirty years after inventing e-mail, Shiva had now positioned himself to solve a national crisis. His moment had arrived. But he kept looking nervously around the room. (...)
The truth is, I’m somewhat surprised, given all the controversy, that the Institute has gone forward with this event at all. Shiva’s detractors contacted several of the panelists, demanding that it be canceled to save the reputation of the school.
You can feel the tension in the room as David Thorburn, director of MIT’s communications forum, steps to the podium.“I’ve received a number of thoughtful and sometimes not-so-thoughtful messages on e-mail in the past weeks from MIT alumni and others,” Thornburn says. “But today’s event is not about the history of e-mail, nor about Shiva himself. It’s about the future of the post office.”
by Janellle Nanos, Boston Magazine | Read more:
Photo by Miller Mobley
The Small Cardboard Box
For as long as archivists at Rutgers University could remember, a small cardboard box marked with the letter W in black ink had sat unopened in a dusty corner of the special collections of the Alexander Library. Next to it were 60 sturdy archive boxes of papers, a legacy of the university’s most famous scientist: Selman A. Waksman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1952 for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic to cure tuberculosis.
The 60 boxes contained details of how streptomycin was found — and also of the murky story behind it, a vicious legal battle between Dr. Waksman and his graduate student Albert Schatz over who deserved credit.
Dr. Waksman died in 1973; after Dr. Schatz’s death in 2005, the papers were much in demand by researchers trying to piece together what really happened between the professor and his student. But nobody looked in the small cardboard box.
The story of streptomycin is no ordinary tale of discovery. It began in August 1943, when Dr. Schatz, a 23-year-old graduate student at the Rutgers College of Agriculture, isolated the powerful antibiotic produced by a bacterium, Streptomyces griseus, that had been found in a pot of farmyard soil.
His supervisor, Professor Waksman, arranged for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., to test the substance in guinea pigs, and then in humans. It worked. Streptomycin, cleared up infections, including TB, that had defied even the first wonder drug, penicillin.
As word of the discovery spread, reporters flocked to Rutgers to record the amazing event. But in telling and retelling the story, Dr. Waksman slowly began to drop Dr. Schatz’s name and claim sole credit. He also arranged with Rutgers to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from the patent that he and Dr. Schatz were awarded; Dr. Schatz received nothing.
Dr. Schatz became aware of the deal when Dr. Waksman started sending him $500 checks — $1,500 altogether — that he said came from funds he had been receiving for the sales of streptomycin. Dr. Schatz wanted to know more, but the professor wouldn’t tell him.
by Peter Pringle, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries
Monday, June 11, 2012
Who’s Got Your Back?
In a city with more than 20,000 registered real estate agents, is it any wonder that choosing one can be a difficult and sometimes fraught process?
There’s the agent who sold your best friend’s apartment for 20 percent more than she dreamed possible. But what about the downstairs neighbor who never misses a chance to remind you that he’s a broker? And what would Aunt Myra say if you didn’t use Cousin Bob, who just got into real estate and hasn’t sold anything yet? (“He just needs a little confidence.”)
A good broker can help you make sound decisions and guide you through what might easily be the most expensive and emotionally charged transaction of your life. So, how to weed out brokers who can’t stop talking about themselves, or who can’t tear their eyes from their BlackBerrys long enough to answer a question, and perhaps more important, know shockingly little about their listings or the market?
Whether you’re buying or selling, interviewing an agent is the best way to figure all of that out and to determine whether you would get along over the course of an intense several months. The interview can be as informal as a quick conversation at an open house and a follow-up phone call.
Find out what a broker has already sold and how he or she would help you sell or find a home. Dottie Herman, the chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman, also suggested asking what the broker would do “if not everything goes right” and an apartment doesn’t sell quickly or a board rejects a buyer. “You want someone who has confidence and knowledge and who you have a rapport with,” she said. At the same time, she added, “You don’t want a know-it-all, because nobody knows it all.”
Sellers sign contracts with their listing agents, and many buyers also work with specific agents in finding a home. A buyer’s agent is paid by the seller in a deal, but will shepherd the buyer’s bid through to the closing, which could be especially helpful in the notoriously enigmatic co-op board process.
“For buyers, you’re not getting the discount or saving a commission,” said Diane M. Ramirez, the president of Halstead Property, “so if you don’t have a broker, you’re just on your own. Do you really want not to be represented when the other side is?”
Buyers who don’t work with a specific agent sometimes agree to “dual agency,” in which the seller’s broker also represents the buyer. But Frederick Peters, the president of Warburg Realty, recently wrote a blog post in which he challenged the notion of dual agency, saying what many brokers believe but are reluctant to admit. “The buyer wants to pay as little as he can; the seller wants to net as much as he can,” he wrote. “What agent can fight simultaneously for both those outcomes?”
In the end, both buyers and sellers should have representatives. People tend to gravitate to agents with whom they feel comfortable. It could be their Type A personality, a shared love of the opera, or a favorite neighborhood deli. Or maybe they vacation in the same place, or have children in the same school. Maybe the agent tells hilarious jokes. New York City’s legion of real estate agents can be categorized in many ways. Here are a few of them.
The Hand-Holder
Some agents are better than others at anticipating a client’s needs and at catering to people who need a little more attention through the machinations of a real estate deal. Someone who is patient and a good listener can play that part, be it for a jittery first-time buyer or a high-strung owner who needs frequent calming down.
Brian Lewis, an executive vice president of Halstead Property, is an easygoing Southerner who knows how to take the edge off the most frenzied real estate transaction.
“I take my cues from the client,” he said. “I understand that buying or selling a home is an emotional thing. When you add that emotion to the kind of money we’re dealing with, you get a perfect storm of crazy.”
by Vivian S. Toy, NY Times | Read more:
Wising Up to Facebook
After a period of idealizing social media, the public is beginning to recognize that these are enterprises with ambitions and appetites. They are businesses. Public companies have an imperative to grow profits, which Facebook will do by monetizing you and me — serving us up as the targets for precision-guided advertising.
One of the most interesting stories I’ve read in the recent, more aggressive spate of coverage was Somini Sengupta’s report in The Times about Facebook’s entry into the Washington influence game. Every company, of course, protects its interests in the places where laws are made and adjudicated, so in hiring its corps of Washington insiders and dispensing cash from its political action committee, Facebook is just joining the mainstream. But Facebook’s way of friending the powerful is original. It ingratiates itself with members of Congress by sending helpers to maximize the constituent-pleasing, re-election-securing power of their Facebook pages. “If you want to have long-term influence, there’s nothing better than having politicians dependent on your product,” one envious Silicon Valley executive told me.
What might Facebook want from its new friends in Washington? It’s not hard to imagine. Since Facebook’s most promising path to prosperity is selling ads based on your likes and dislikes, the company will be wary of any government attempt to enforce privacy standards that interfere with the company’s ability to mine your information. Since the company is jostling for dominance with the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter and Amazon, it will be paying attention to antitrust actions that could curtail its ability to use its market muscle. (Jonathan Zittrain sent me a graphic that gives you a little sense of Facebook’s power in the marketplace. In 2010 Facebook was displeased with the developers of a game called Critter Island, one of many online games and services that basically rent space and services in the Facebook condominium. Facebook simply disabled the game, and the chart shows the user base collapsing from 14 million to zero in a couple of days.)
Beyond Washington, activists for various causes have upbraided Facebook for failing to protect dissidents who use the site to expose and mobilize against oppressive regimes. Critics say the company’s policy of forbidding pseudonyms — intended to assure more civil behavior online (and, a cynic might speculate, to enrich the value of the user base to advertisers) — makes it a risky communications tool in authoritarian states.
“That’s fine if you live in an ideal world,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, whose recent book, “Consent of the Networked,” examines the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace. “If you’re an activist in China, it leaves you extremely vulnerable.”
Her book persuaded one high-profile journalist, Steve Coll, to announce in The New Yorker that he was renouncing his citizenship in “Facebookistan,” which he had come to see as a highhanded corporate autocracy.
MacKinnon herself is not encouraging an exodus. She favors sticking around to help Facebook become more responsible. “It’s kind of like China — do you engage, or disinvest?” she said. “I’m still at the engagement stage. The main thing is that people need to act more as constituents, not as passive residents.”
by Bill Keller, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Nicholas Blechman
One of the most interesting stories I’ve read in the recent, more aggressive spate of coverage was Somini Sengupta’s report in The Times about Facebook’s entry into the Washington influence game. Every company, of course, protects its interests in the places where laws are made and adjudicated, so in hiring its corps of Washington insiders and dispensing cash from its political action committee, Facebook is just joining the mainstream. But Facebook’s way of friending the powerful is original. It ingratiates itself with members of Congress by sending helpers to maximize the constituent-pleasing, re-election-securing power of their Facebook pages. “If you want to have long-term influence, there’s nothing better than having politicians dependent on your product,” one envious Silicon Valley executive told me. What might Facebook want from its new friends in Washington? It’s not hard to imagine. Since Facebook’s most promising path to prosperity is selling ads based on your likes and dislikes, the company will be wary of any government attempt to enforce privacy standards that interfere with the company’s ability to mine your information. Since the company is jostling for dominance with the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter and Amazon, it will be paying attention to antitrust actions that could curtail its ability to use its market muscle. (Jonathan Zittrain sent me a graphic that gives you a little sense of Facebook’s power in the marketplace. In 2010 Facebook was displeased with the developers of a game called Critter Island, one of many online games and services that basically rent space and services in the Facebook condominium. Facebook simply disabled the game, and the chart shows the user base collapsing from 14 million to zero in a couple of days.)
Beyond Washington, activists for various causes have upbraided Facebook for failing to protect dissidents who use the site to expose and mobilize against oppressive regimes. Critics say the company’s policy of forbidding pseudonyms — intended to assure more civil behavior online (and, a cynic might speculate, to enrich the value of the user base to advertisers) — makes it a risky communications tool in authoritarian states.
“That’s fine if you live in an ideal world,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, whose recent book, “Consent of the Networked,” examines the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace. “If you’re an activist in China, it leaves you extremely vulnerable.”
Her book persuaded one high-profile journalist, Steve Coll, to announce in The New Yorker that he was renouncing his citizenship in “Facebookistan,” which he had come to see as a highhanded corporate autocracy.
MacKinnon herself is not encouraging an exodus. She favors sticking around to help Facebook become more responsible. “It’s kind of like China — do you engage, or disinvest?” she said. “I’m still at the engagement stage. The main thing is that people need to act more as constituents, not as passive residents.”
by Bill Keller, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Nicholas Blechman
Stranglehold
Amazon Infographic: How a Single Company Gained a Stranglehold over Online Shopping and the Future of Retail.
Amazon is doubling in size every 2-3 years, putting it on pace to be bigger than Walmart by decade's end.
by Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local-Self Reliance
Amazon is doubling in size every 2-3 years, putting it on pace to be bigger than Walmart by decade's end.
by Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local-Self Reliance
Why Japan Prefers Pets to Parenthood
In a smart and expensive neighbourhood of Tokyo, Toshiko Horikoshi relaxes by playing her grand piano. She’s a successful eye surgeon, with a private clinic, a stylish apartment, a Porsche and two pet pooches: Tinkerbell, a chihuahua, and Ginger, a poodle. “Japanese dog owners think a dog is like a child,” says Toshiko. “I have no children, so I really love my two dogs.”
Many Japanese women like Toshiko prefer pets to parenthood. Startlingly, in a country panicking over its plummeting birthrate, there are now many more pets than children. While the birthrate has been falling dramatically and the average age of Japan’s population has been steadily climbing, Japan has become a pet superpower. Official estimates put the pet population at 22 million or more, but there are only 16.6 million children under 15.
Tinkerbell and Ginger have their own room and a wardrobe full of designer clothes. They have jumpers, dresses, coats and fancy dress outfits, neatly hung on jewelled hangers; hats, sunglasses and even tiny shoes. Toshiko says she shops for her dogs most weekends and they get new clothes each season.
In Japan designer labels such as Chanel, Dior, Hermès and Gucci offer luxury dog products. This canine couture doesn’t come cheap. A poodle pullover can cost $250 (around £160) or more. In many parts of Tokyo, it is easier to buy clothes for dogs than for children. Boutiques sell everything from frilly frocks to designer jeans, from nappies to organic nibbles, and smart “doggie bags” and buggies or pushchairs to transport them in. (...).
Despite the economic stagnation, people seem happy to spend any spare money on photo sessions, massages and treats for their four-legged “babies”. The average fertility rate is now 1.39 children per woman – well below the number needed to keep the population stable. Japan has, in effect, a self-imposed one-child policy. Government projections show if current trends continue, today’s population of 128 million will fall to 43 million over the next century.
“The most important reason for Japan’s declining birthrate is less sex,” says Dr Kunio Kitamara, director of Japan’s Family Planning Research Centre. His annual surveys indicate that the nation’s libido has been lagging in the last decade. The birthrate has declined, but fewer contraceptives are being used and there are fewer abortions and lower rate of sexually transmitted diseases. “Why?” asks Dr Kitamara: “Less sex!”
by Ruth Evans and Roland Buerk, The Long Good Read | Read more:
Photo: Flickr / lauriepix1 via:
Many Japanese women like Toshiko prefer pets to parenthood. Startlingly, in a country panicking over its plummeting birthrate, there are now many more pets than children. While the birthrate has been falling dramatically and the average age of Japan’s population has been steadily climbing, Japan has become a pet superpower. Official estimates put the pet population at 22 million or more, but there are only 16.6 million children under 15. Tinkerbell and Ginger have their own room and a wardrobe full of designer clothes. They have jumpers, dresses, coats and fancy dress outfits, neatly hung on jewelled hangers; hats, sunglasses and even tiny shoes. Toshiko says she shops for her dogs most weekends and they get new clothes each season.
In Japan designer labels such as Chanel, Dior, Hermès and Gucci offer luxury dog products. This canine couture doesn’t come cheap. A poodle pullover can cost $250 (around £160) or more. In many parts of Tokyo, it is easier to buy clothes for dogs than for children. Boutiques sell everything from frilly frocks to designer jeans, from nappies to organic nibbles, and smart “doggie bags” and buggies or pushchairs to transport them in. (...).
Despite the economic stagnation, people seem happy to spend any spare money on photo sessions, massages and treats for their four-legged “babies”. The average fertility rate is now 1.39 children per woman – well below the number needed to keep the population stable. Japan has, in effect, a self-imposed one-child policy. Government projections show if current trends continue, today’s population of 128 million will fall to 43 million over the next century.
“The most important reason for Japan’s declining birthrate is less sex,” says Dr Kunio Kitamara, director of Japan’s Family Planning Research Centre. His annual surveys indicate that the nation’s libido has been lagging in the last decade. The birthrate has declined, but fewer contraceptives are being used and there are fewer abortions and lower rate of sexually transmitted diseases. “Why?” asks Dr Kitamara: “Less sex!”
by Ruth Evans and Roland Buerk, The Long Good Read | Read more:
Photo: Flickr / lauriepix1 via:
Empire of Ice
The island is named Oooguruk, an Inupiaq word meaning “bearded seal,” an animal plentiful on the shores of Alaska’s North Slope. The Slope is where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline starts, where the crude gets pumped up from more than a mile inside the earth, then gets sent on the 800-mile journey south to Valdez, Alaska, where the pipeline ends and tankers come and load the crude up and deliver it down the coast. There, in places like northern Washington and Long Beach, California, it gets processed into the fuel America now so grudgingly remembers makes the world go round.
People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska’s North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho. For centuries native Eskimos cut blocks of oil-soaked tundra from natural seeps to use as fuel. In the 1920s, explorers arrived and began poking holes. In 1968 they discovered Prudhoe Bay State No. 1, the largest oil field in North America and one of the largest in the world, and a year later the adjacent Kuparuk field, the second-largest. Today, five of our ten largest oil fields are on Alaska’s North Slope, where twenty-four separate fields pump out about 16 percent of our total domestic oil supply.
A person can’t just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches. The gateway to the oil fields is the town of Deadhorse, where the airport is, and where security restricts passage to anyone but workers who fly in and get bused to camps for two-week hitches.
It took nearly a year for me to gain access to the Slope. The corporate giants who control the fields—BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil—have little to gain from public scrutiny. Rarely do stories of Alaska’s oil emerge unless there is a freak accident to talk about—the odd spill, usually set against a snowy backdrop featuring a winsome caribou looking dismayed about the greedy nature of the human race. But Pioneer Natural Resources—the company that built the island, where TooDogs is in charge of the rig and Kung Fu plays the fiddle and Turtle fake-hates Jason for lying to him about being married to a stripper named Onyx—was willing to allow me in. Pioneer is the first independent operator to produce oil on the Slope, a market cornered by the three majors for its entire history. In many ways, it represents a glimmer of hope. Everyone knows the oil up here is running out; production is declining 6 percent a year, down from an all-time high of 2 million barrels a day in 1988 to 700,000 today. But everyone also knows the oil isn’t really running out—it’s just a lot harder to get to. It is a common story in the saga of natural resources, whether you are talking coal or gas or oil: The big companies suck out the easy, vast reservoirs, and then in come the little companies nimble enough to pick away at the leftovers.
The ongoing debate over whether or not we should be drilling for oil in Alaska—onward to ANWR to the east—typically leaves out one factor: We are drilling for oil in Alaska, every hour of every day for the past thirty years, drilling in some of the most extreme conditions on earth, where the windchill can easily reach minus ninety-eight degrees, so cold that you have to leave your pickup running twenty-four hours a day or you’ll never get it started again, where it is pitch dark for nearly two months each winter, where people live without families, without homes, without access to so much of what most of us think of when we think of what it means to be human.
by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ (2008) | Read more:
Photo: Christopher Lamarca
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?
We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now. We don’t have computers we can have an interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take our clothes to the Laundromat.
As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them. (...)
Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”
That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new. (...)
Why did the projected explosion of technological growth everyone was expecting—the moon bases, the robot factories—fail to happen? There are two possibilities. Either our expectations about the pace of technological change were unrealistic (in which case, we need to know why so many intelligent people believed they were not) or our expectations were not unrealistic (in which case, we need to know what happened to derail so many credible ideas and prospects).
by David Graeber, The Baffler | Read more:
Illustration Mark Fisher
Sunday, June 10, 2012
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