Monday, October 29, 2012
Data-Gathering via Apps Presents a Gray Legal Area
While regular players are familiar with the particular destructive qualities of certain of these birds, many are unaware of one facet: The game possesses a ravenous ability to collect personal information on its users.
When Jason Hong, an associate professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, surveyed 40 users, all but two were unaware that the game was storing their locations so that they could later be the targets of ads.
“When I am giving a talk about this, some people will pull out their smartphones while I am still speaking and erase the game,” Mr. Hong, an expert in mobile application privacy, said during an interview. “Generally, most people are simply unaware of what is going on.”
What is going on, according to experts, is that applications like Angry Birds and even more innocuous-seeming software, like that which turns your phone into a flashlight, defines words or delivers Bible quotes, are also collecting personal information, usually the user’s location and sex and the unique identification number of a smartphone. But in some cases, they cull information from contact lists and pictures from photo libraries.
As the Internet goes mobile, privacy issues surrounding phone apps have moved to the front lines of the debate over what information can be collected, when and by whom. Next year, more people around the world will gain access to the Internet through mobile phones or tablet computers than from desktop PCs, according to Gartner, the research group.
The shift has brought consumers into a gray legal area, where existing privacy protections have failed to keep up with technology. The move to mobile has set off a debate between privacy advocates and online businesses, which consider the accumulation of personal information the backbone of an ad-driven Internet.
by Kevin J. Obrien, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Amazon
sry gotta bail mayb nxt tme
[ed. I would use the term 'assholeness' rather than 'flakey', but that's just me.]
Though the 20-seat studio has a month long waiting list, he had set aside two tickets for a friend. But now the friend was canceling just minutes before going live. “It didn’t happen,” the friend wrote. “Dinner going long.”
At 9 a.m. the other Monday, Paul Wilmot, a public relations executive in New York, was meeting a colleague at Cafe Cluny in the West Village. After he waited for a half-hour, an e-mail arrived from his breakfast date, saying he was on his way.
Not long before that, Leandra Medine, the 23-year-old fashion blogger behind Man Repeller, sat down at the SoHo restaurant Jack’s Wife Freda and waited for her three friends. As she nursed a glass of wine, she glanced down at her phone to learn, via text, that all of her friends had bailed.
Random missed connections? Not quite.
Texting and instant messaging make it easier to navigate our social lives, but they are also turning us into ill-mannered flakes. Not long ago, the only way to break a social engagement, outside of blowing off someone completely, was to do it in person or on the phone. An effusive apology was expected, or at least the appearance of contrition.
But now, when our fingers tap our way out of social obligations, the barriers to canceling have been lowered. Not feeling up for going out? Have better plans? Just type a note on the fly (“Sorry can’t make it tonight”) and hit send.
And don’t worry about giving advance notice. The later, the better. After all, bailing on dinner via text message doesn’t feel as disrespectful as standing up someone, or as embarrassing.
New Yorkers with social-driven ambitions and hyper schedules seem to be especially prone to this. And it is practically endemic among those in their 20s and younger, who were raised in the age of instant chatter.
“Texting is lazy, and it encourages and promotes flakiness,” Mr. Cohen said. “You’re not treating anything with any weight, and it turns us all into 14-year-olds. We’re all 14-year-olds in suits and high heels.”
Not that he is above it, either. “I’m a victim of it, and I do it, too,” he said.
Digital flakiness seems to apply equally to last-minute plans and engagements booked way in advance. Ashley Wick, the founder of Wick Communications, a firm based in New York, organized an intimate dinner this fall to introduce a designer she represents to about 10 editors. Invitations were sent out two weeks earlier, but that afternoon almost half of the confirmed attendees canceled via e-mail.
“Offline rules of etiquette no longer seem to apply,” Ms. Wick said. “People hide behind e-mail or text messages to cancel appointments, or do things that feel uncomfortable to do in person.”
The face-to-face consequences of being a flake have all but disappeared. If the unpleasantness of having to disappoint a host or dinner date was one reason commitments were honored in the past, technology has rendered that moot.
“People don’t feel bad shooting someone a text to cancel, but no one would ever pick up the phone and say, ‘Let’s have dinner next week because I want to go to this party instead,’ ” said Danielle Snyder, 27, a founder of the jewelry line Dannijo. “But when you say it out loud, you realize how bad it sounds.”
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Peeling Away Health Care’s Sticker Shock
The sticker price was one of the triumphs of consumer-rights legislation and has made buying a car an easier—though never altogether easy—experience. What’s more, window stickers made automobile pricing rational and understandable. A customer who knows the base price going in will expect more value coming out. In economic terms, the sticker turned a failed market flummoxed by information asymmetry into something resembling a functioning, price-driven marketplace.
If there is ever an industry in need of a Senator Monroney today, it is health care, in which 1950s-era thinking still rules the day, and irrational and inexplicable pricing is routine. The health care industry plays a gigantic game of Blind Man’s Bluff, keeping patients in the dark while asking them to make life-and-death decisions. The odds that they will make the best choice are negligible and largely depend on chance. Patients need to have data, including costs and their own medical histories, liberated and made freely available for thorough analysis. What health care needs is a window sticker—a transparent, good-faith effort at making prices clear and setting market forces to work.
How bad is it? Uwe Reinhardt, a leading health care economist, described the pricing of hospital services as “chaos behind a veil of secrecy.” Chaos due to lack of predictability; veil of secrecy because many organizations take a proprietary attitude toward data.
Consider a recent study of the costs of routine appendectomies performed throughout California. Though the procedures were largely identical, the charges varied more than 100-fold—from $1,529 at the cheapest to $182,955 at the most expensive.
What accounted for this bizarre spread? Good question—but efforts to discover the answer turned out to be futile. Although the research highlighted how large the bills for these hospitalizations were, various costs were declared to be trade secrets. The providers (i.e., the hospitals) and insurers involved in the study would not share how much the insurers actually paid for the visits, only what the providers charged. To me, understanding the logic here requires a chain of reasoning that could appear only in Alice in Wonderland. We don’t just need an MSRP sticker—we need a medical Freedom of Information Act!
In business, as time goes on, weak industry participants will try to improve their status, and, of course, incumbents will attempt to protect their positions. Two common ways of imposing or maintaining market power are by forming coalitions or by outright acquisitions, and that’s what has happened in medicine. Consolidation among health care providers has resulted in a number of large organizations becoming even more powerful as they’ve started to use their size and reach. And they’ve wielded this power to keep a lid on some of the information that would make for better health care.
The past several decades have seen major strides in technology of all kinds. Improvements in semiconductors have allowed faster computation and communications, as well as the construction of databases that outdo themselves every year. In many industries, technology development has spurred further improvements in efficiency—a virtuous cycle. In health care, this process is happening at a much slower rate. It has taken decades to complete even relatively simple tasks such as digitizing medical records.
by Andy Grove, Wired | Read more:
The Plot to Destroy America's Beer
One Friday night in January, Rinfret, who is now 52, stopped on the way home from work at his local liquor store in Monroe, N.J., and purchased a 12-pack of Beck’s. When he got home, he opened a bottle. “I was like, what the hell?” he recalls. “It tasted light. It tasted weak. Just, you know, night and day. Bubbly, real fizzy. To me, it wasn’t German beer. It tasted like a Budweiser with flavoring.”
He examined the label. It said the beer was no longer brewed in Bremen. He looked more closely at the fine print: “Product of the USA.” This was profoundly unsettling for a guy who had been a Beck’s drinker for more than half his life. He was also miffed to have paid the full import price for the 12-pack.
Rinfret left a telephone message with AB InBev, the owner of Beck’s and many other beers, including Budweiser. Nobody got back to him. He had better luck with e-mail. An AB InBev employee informed him that Beck’s was now being brewed in St. Louis along with Budweiser. But never fear, the rep told Rinfret: AB InBev was using the same recipe as always.
He wasn’t satisfied. In March, he posted a plea on Beck’s official Facebook page: “Beck’s made in the U.S. not worth drinking. Bring back German Beck’s. Please.” He had plenty of company. “This is a travesty,” a fellow disgruntled Beck’s drinker raged. “I’m pretty bummed,” wrote another. “I’ve been drinking this beer religiously for over 20 years.” Rinfret kept trashing Beck’s on Facebook. Until, he says, AB InBev unfriended him in May. “They banned me from their site. I can’t post anything on there any longer.”
Rinfret was only temporarily silenced. He now complains on a Facebook page called Import Beck’s from Germany. AB InBev may be paying a price for disappointing Beck’s loyalists like him. According to Bump Williams, a beer industry consultant in Stratford, Conn., sales of Beck’s at U.S. food stores were down 14 percent in the four weeks ending Sept. 9 compared with the same period last year. “They are getting their proverbial asses kicked,” Williams says. “Too many customers were turned off when the switch was made.” Sales of Budweiser in the U.S. have fallen recently, too. And yet AB InBev is extraordinarily profitable.
There has never been a beer company like AB InBev. It was created in 2008 when InBev, the Leuven (Belgium)-based owner of Beck’s and Stella Artois, swallowed Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser, in a $52 billion hostile takeover. Today, AB InBev is the dominant beer company in the U.S., with 48 percent of the market. It controls 69 percent in Brazil; it’s the second-largest brewer in Russia and the third-largest in China. The company owns more than 200 different beers around the world. It would like to buy more.
The man in charge of AB InBev is 52-year-old Carlos Brito. The Brazilian-born chief executive is a millionaire many times over. He speaks English fluently and dresses like the manager of a local hardware store. At the Manhattan headquarters, he wears jeans to work and tucks in his shirts. He keeps his company identification badge clipped to his waist where everybody can see it, even though everyone knows who he is. To the rest of the world, he keeps a low profile. He does not, for example, accept interview requests from Bloomberg Businessweek. That might be his character, and it might be calculated. The Busch family is a legendary American dynasty. Many people in the U.S. aren’t thrilled that a foreign company now owns Budweiser, America’s beer.
by Devin Leonard, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image via: Wikipedia
Your Brain on Pseudoscience
An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.
In my book-strewn lodgings, one literally trips over volumes promising that “the deepest mysteries of what makes us who we are are gradually being unravelled” by neuroscience and cognitive psychology. (Even practising scientists sometimes make such grandiose claims for a general audience, perhaps urged on by their editors: that quotation is from the psychologist Elaine Fox’s interesting book on “the new science of optimism”, Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, published this summer.) In general, the “neural” explanation has become a gold standard of non-fiction exegesis, adding its own brand of computer-assisted lab-coat bling to a whole new industry of intellectual quackery that affects to elucidate even complex sociocultural phenomena. (...)
Happily, a new branch of the neuroscienceexplains everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix “neuro” to whatever you are talking about. Thus, “neuroeconomics” is the latest in a long line of rhetorical attempts to sell the dismal science as a hard one; “molecular gastronomy” has now been trumped in the scientised gluttony stakes by “neurogastronomy”; students of Republican and Democratic brains are doing “neuropolitics”; literature academics practise “neurocriticism”. There is “neurotheology”, “neuromagic” (according to Sleights of Mind, an amusing book about how conjurors exploit perceptual bias) and even “neuromarketing”. Hoping it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon, I have decided to announce that I, too, am skilled in the newly minted fields of neuroprocrastination and neuroflâneurship.
Illumination is promised on a personal as well as a political level by the junk enlightenment of the popular brain industry. How can I become more creative? How can I make better decisions? How can I be happier? Or thinner? Never fear: brain research has the answers. It is self-help armoured in hard science. Life advice is the hook for nearly all such books. (...)
The idea that a neurological explanation could exhaust the meaning of experience was already being mocked as “medical materialism” by the psychologist William James a century ago. And today’s ubiquitous rhetorical confidence about how the brain works papers over a still-enormous scientific uncertainty. Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, says that he gets “exasperated” by much popular coverage of neuroimaging research, which assumes that “activity in a brain region is the answer to some profound question about psychological processes. This is very hard to justify given how little we currently know about what different regions of the brain actually do.” Too often, he tells me in an email correspondence, a popular writer will “opt for some sort of neuro-flapdoodle in which a highly simplistic and questionable point is accompanied by a suitably grand-sounding neural term and thus acquires a weightiness that it really doesn’t deserve. In my view, this is no different to some mountebank selling quacksalve by talking about the physics of water molecules’ memories, or a beautician talking about action liposomes.”
by Steven Poole, The New Statesman | Read more:
Photo: Getty Images
Lewis Lapham’s Antidote to the Age of BuzzFeed
Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper’s, who, beginning in the 1970s, helped change the face of American nonfiction, has a new mission: taking on the Great Paradox of the digital age. Suddenly thanks to Google Books, JSTOR and the like, all the great thinkers of all the civilizations past and present are one or two clicks away. The great library of Alexandria, nexus of all the learning of the ancient world that burned to the ground, has risen from the ashes online. And yet—here is the paradox—the wisdom of the ages is in some ways more distant and difficult to find than ever, buried like lost treasure beneath a fathomless ocean of online ignorance and trivia that makes what is worthy and timeless more inaccessible than ever. There has been no great librarian of Alexandria, no accessible finder’s guide, until Lapham created his quarterly five years ago with the quixotic mission of serving as a highly selective search engine for the wisdom of the past.
Which is why the spartan quarters of the Quarterly remind me of the role rare and scattered monasteries of the Dark Ages played when, as the plague raged and the scarce manuscripts of classical literature were being burned, dedicated monks made it their sacred mission to preserve, copy, illuminate manuscripts that otherwise might have been lost forever.
In the back room of the Quarterly, Lapham still looks like the striking patrician beau ideal, slender and silvery at 77 in his expensive-looking suit. A sleek black silk scarf gives him the look of a still-potent mafia don (Don Quixote?) whose beautiful manners belie a stiletto-like gaze at contemporary culture. One can sense, reading Lapham’s Quarterly, that its vast array of erudition is designed to be a weapon—one would like to say a weapon of mass instruction. Though its 25,000 circulation doesn’t allow that scale of metaphor yet, it still has a vibrant web presence and it has the backing of a wide range of erudite eminences.
When I asked Lapham about the intent of his project, he replied with a line from Goethe, one of the great little-read writers he seeks to reintroduce to the conversation: “Goethe said that he who cannot draw on 3,000 years [of learning] is living hand to mouth.” Lapham’s solution to this under-nourishment: Give ’em a feast.
Each issue is a feast, so well curated—around 100 excerpts and many small squibs in issues devoted to such relevant subjects as money, war, the family and the future—that reading it is like choosing among bonbons for the brain. It’s a kind of hip-hop mash-up of human wisdom. Half the fun is figuring out the rationale of the order the Laphamites have given to the excerpts, which jump back and forth between millennia and genres: From Euripides, there’s Medea’s climactic heart-rending lament for her children in the “Family” issue. Isaac Bashevis Singer on magic in ’70s New York City. Juvenal’s filthy satire on adulterers in the “Eros” issue. In the new “Politics” issue we go from Solon in ancient Athens to the heroic murdered dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 21st-century Moscow. The issue on money ranges from Karl Marx back to Aristophanes, forward to Lord Byron and Vladimir Nabokov, back to Hammurabi in 1780 B.C.
Lapham’s deeper agenda is to inject the wisdom of the ages into the roiling controversies of the day through small doses that are irresistible reading. In “Politics,” for example, I found a sound bite from Persia in 522 B.C., courtesy of Herodotus, which introduced me to a fellow named Otanes who made what may be the earliest and most eloquent case for democracy against oligarchy. And Ralph Ellison on the victims of racism and oligarchy in the 1930s.
That’s really the way to read the issues of the Quarterly. Not to try reading the latest one straight through, but order a few back issues from its website, Laphamsquarterly.org, and put them on your bedside table. Each page is an illumination of the consciousness, the culture that created you, and that is waiting to recreate you.
by Ron Rosenbaum, The Smithsonian | Read more:
Photo: Lapham's Quarterly
Saturday, October 27, 2012
A Taste of the Divine
We have taken our places. This evening’s performance, sold out months in advance, is about to begin. The programme, handwritten in a traditional script on a rolled parchment, tied with string, tells us to expect a prologue, two chapters and an epilogue, without interval. I’m nervous with anticipation but I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that it’s not because I am waiting for the curtain to rise on a Wagner opera or a Shakespeare play. I’m actually waiting for my dinner.
This is no ordinary meal, however. It’s the 19-course tasting menu at one of the world’s best restaurants, Frantzén/Lindeberg in Stockholm. Ranked number 20 in Restaurant magazine’s influential annual survey, it earned two Michelin stars in its first two years and is almost certain to get a third. Food doesn’t get much, if any, better than this. (...)
When you’re having a tasting menu, it’s a lot about the rhythm, and the speed you’re serving things,’ says Frantzén. So the frozen lemon verbena, for instance, is one of the simplest dishes on the menu, but it’s in exactly the right place at the right time.
A meal like this is not just about delicious food. Frantzén says it sounds pretentious, but ‘it’s like going to the theatre … more than just what’s on the plate, it’s a lot of other things: storytelling, ingredients, where they’re coming from, how you present it, the look and feel of the restaurant’.
Our evening was full of theatre. As soon as we took our seats we saw a glass-topped wooden box on our table containing a small baguette-shaped piece of dough, proving. It was then taken away and baked over an open fire and brought back with some buttermilk, churned in front of us. At one point the maître d’ Jon Lacotte brought a piece of raw veal to our table and blow-torched it through a piece of coal. It was then taken away to return later as a ‘tartare’, with tallow from an 11-year-old milk cow, smoked eel and black roe.
This is not the cheap theatricality of banging plates or a flamboyant chef tossing pasta. Like a good play, you see only the action that is relevant to the plot, and that moves it forward to a satisfying resolution. So the freshest, most delicious bread and butter I’ve ever eaten, the very definition of simplicity, takes its rightful place alongside the most elaborate creations, because behind both is an incredible amount of care and effort to get it exactly right.
Still, there is the nagging question of cost. How could anyone possibly justify the bill? There is at least a financial logic to it. Ingredients such as the top-grade oyster, which came with frozen rhubarb, cream and juniper, cost a fortune. Frantzén’s business partner, the pastry chef Daniel Lindeberg, told me that 40 per cent of the bill is the cost of the ingredients alone. The rest is time. One dish we were served was whole turbot, which was baked for four hours at 55°C (130°F), with white asparagus baked for three hours with pine, lemongrass and mint. It takes longer to prepare a single ingredient of a single dish than it does for us to eat the whole meal. And it takes eight people in the kitchen, and about the same again outside it, to serve a total of 25 guests for dinner. Since I visited, that proportion has been ratcheted up again, with more kitchen space and less eating room: 11 chefs to 16 guests. Like an opera that requires an orchestra, a chorus and the world’s best solo voices, it’s this expensive because it costs this much to produce.
A meal like this is not just about delicious food. Frantzén says it sounds pretentious, but ‘it’s like going to the theatre … more than just what’s on the plate, it’s a lot of other things: storytelling, ingredients, where they’re coming from, how you present it, the look and feel of the restaurant’.
Our evening was full of theatre. As soon as we took our seats we saw a glass-topped wooden box on our table containing a small baguette-shaped piece of dough, proving. It was then taken away and baked over an open fire and brought back with some buttermilk, churned in front of us. At one point the maître d’ Jon Lacotte brought a piece of raw veal to our table and blow-torched it through a piece of coal. It was then taken away to return later as a ‘tartare’, with tallow from an 11-year-old milk cow, smoked eel and black roe.
This is not the cheap theatricality of banging plates or a flamboyant chef tossing pasta. Like a good play, you see only the action that is relevant to the plot, and that moves it forward to a satisfying resolution. So the freshest, most delicious bread and butter I’ve ever eaten, the very definition of simplicity, takes its rightful place alongside the most elaborate creations, because behind both is an incredible amount of care and effort to get it exactly right.
Still, there is the nagging question of cost. How could anyone possibly justify the bill? There is at least a financial logic to it. Ingredients such as the top-grade oyster, which came with frozen rhubarb, cream and juniper, cost a fortune. Frantzén’s business partner, the pastry chef Daniel Lindeberg, told me that 40 per cent of the bill is the cost of the ingredients alone. The rest is time. One dish we were served was whole turbot, which was baked for four hours at 55°C (130°F), with white asparagus baked for three hours with pine, lemongrass and mint. It takes longer to prepare a single ingredient of a single dish than it does for us to eat the whole meal. And it takes eight people in the kitchen, and about the same again outside it, to serve a total of 25 guests for dinner. Since I visited, that proportion has been ratcheted up again, with more kitchen space and less eating room: 11 chefs to 16 guests. Like an opera that requires an orchestra, a chorus and the world’s best solo voices, it’s this expensive because it costs this much to produce.
by Julian Baggini, Aeon | Read more:
Why Hackathons Suck (and don’t have to)
I exaggerate. Most people don’t think they’ll save the world in a weekend, but sometimes they act as if they believe they can.
As software professionals, when was the last time we went to our bosses and said “No problem. I’ll build that brand new production system for you in 8-16hrs”? Probably never.
Certainly not as often as we’ve freaked-out when the boss came to us with some impossible deadline. “You can’t expect me to build something effective, reliable, great in N-months!” we scream. “Be reasonable!”
So why do we sell the myth of the 2-day app to non-profits and other mission driven organizations?
Maybe we like the buzz of seeing ourselves as heroes able to jump tall-buildings with our nerd super-powers.
Or maybe we just like the pizza.
Either way, there are several problems with the way a typical hackathon model that make it almost impossible for them to succeed. I list some specifics below, but first I can sum up the core issue:
Hackathons just aren’t serious. They are in no way up to the challenge of delivering effective, useful, impactful technology.
A little more detail:
by jwishnie, ThoughtWorks | Read more:
Photo: Ashely Ellis
Geoengineering: Testing the Waters
Bill Gates has funneled millions of dollars into geoengineering research. And he has invested in a company, Intellectual Ventures, that is developing at least two geoengineering tools: the “StratoShield,” a 19-mile-long hose suspended by helium balloons that would spew sun-blocking sulfur dioxide particles into the sky and a tool that can supposedly blunt the force of hurricanes.
The appeal is easy to understand. Geoengineering offers the tantalizing promise of a climate change fix that would allow us to continue our resource-exhausting way of life, indefinitely. And then there is the fear. Every week seems to bring more terrifying climate news, from reports of ice sheets melting ahead of schedule to oceans acidifying far faster than expected. At the same time, climate change has fallen so far off the political agenda that it wasn’t mentioned once during any of the three debates between the presidential candidates. Is it any wonder that many are pinning their hopes on a break-the-glass-in-case-of-emergency option that scientists have been cooking up in their labs?
But with rogue geoengineers on the loose, it is a good time to pause and ask, collectively, whether we want to go down the geoengineering road. Because the truth is that geoengineering is itself a rogue proposition. By definition, technologies that tamper with ocean and atmospheric chemistry affect everyone. Yet it is impossible to get anything like unanimous consent for these interventions. Nor could any such consent possibly be informed since we don’t — and can’t — know the full risks involved until these planet-altering technologies are actually deployed.
While the United Nations’ climate negotiations proceed from the premise that countries must agree to a joint response to an inherently communal problem, geoengineering raises a very different prospect. For well under a billion dollars, a “coalition of the willing,” a single country or even a wealthy individual could decide to take the climate into its own hands. Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, an environmental watchdog group, puts the problem like this: “Geoengineering says, ‘we’ll just do it, and you’ll live with the effects.’ ”
The scariest thing about this proposition is that models suggest that many of the people who could well be most harmed by these technologies are already disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Imagine this: North America decides to send sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce the intensity of the sun, in the hopes of saving its corn crops — despite the real possibility of triggering droughts in Asia and Africa. In short, geoengineering would give us (or some of us) the power to exile huge swaths of humanity to sacrifice zones with a virtual flip of the switch.
by Naomi Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Jacob Escobedo
The New Pot Barons: Businessmen Bank on Marijuana
“What’s the maximum contribution?” one of the dealers asks. “Do you take cash?” wonders another. A third man breaks into a smile. “You better,” he says, eyebrows dancing, “because the banks don’t like doing business with us.” Laughter fills the room as the envelopes are passed forward and slipped into a briefcase. “Huge thank you, everyone,” the politician says, guiding the conversation back to the next legislative session and the kinds of legal changes this group would like to see. Here again, it’s not what you’d expect: there’s talk of a youth drug-abuse-prevention program and a bill to define “drugged” driving. When the politician finally rises to leave, after more than an hour, the dealers, in their pressed shirts and suit jackets, clap heartily. The average participant looks to be about 35, white and male, and on good terms with a barber. “Thank you,” the politician says, bowing slightly. “Thank you for what you do.”
What they do is sell marijuana. And not on street corners. Colorado is the developed world’s only regulated for-profit cannabis market, and sales—to the 100,000 residents who have a thumbs up from their M.D.s—are closing in on $200 million this year, a sum that generates tens of millions of dollars in local, state, and federal taxes. (Yes, the IRS taxes marijuana operations, even as the Justice Department attempts to shut them down.) Colorado is not the world’s only experiment in free-market pot, but it’s the most sophisticated, pushing beyond the Netherlands’ confusing ban on wholesale and California’s hazy nonprofit status. Denver’s former city attorney has called it California “on steroids.”
While the cannabis market remains illegal under federal law, attitudes are changing quickly, and it’s that fact that the Colorado growers are banking on. The number of regular pot users is up by 3 million in the past five years, and the rate of high-school experimentation is at a 30-year high. When a kid first lights up at about age 16, it’s usually not with a cigarette. Twelve states now treat a personal stash like a minor traffic offense, 17 allow medical marijuana, and this Election Day, if current polls hold, voters in Washington State and Colorado will vote to legalize marijuana—not for medical purposes but, as Rolling Stone recently enthused, “for getting-high purposes.”
That would close out a 40-year fight launched by boomers and carried through by a big tent of talented reformers, growing bigger all the time. “Weed is the new gay,” says Ted Trimpa, a Democratic strategist who helped engineer Colorado’s flip from red state to blue. He’s now focused on marijuana reform. But what I saw in Colorado was something altogether new: self-described “social entrepreneurs,” the Sergey Brins and Mark Zuckerbergs of the Green Rush. They could have done almost anything with their lives—“my brother is a physician” is the kind of thing one hears from them—but they chose to enter the pot business because they see it as a boom market, miracle cure, and social movement decades in the making and suddenly, thrillingly, near.
“This is our Facebook,” says one of my hosts, Norton Arbelaez, the owner of two dispensaries and a commercial grow. “This is the same kind of environment, the same kind of setting, and the same kind of people.” He was a founding member of the Medical Marijuana Industry Group (MMIG), a powerful young lobby that’s buried the age of drum-circle activism and instead strives to partner with law enforcement and politicians. It was their board meeting in the high-rise downtown, a weekly gathering two blocks from the Capitol dome. And it is their goal to dress legal pot in a style as conservative as their own.
by Tony Dokoupil, Newsweek | Read more:
Photo: Andrew Hetherington
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