Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Bike Polo: The World's Fast Growing Sport (That's Played on Wheels with Mallets)
To my untrained eye, it looks like a game nine-year-olds would dream up one bored summer day. David Goldmiller, a court regular, likens the scene to an early episode of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary, where “a bunch of guys were drinking beer and whacking a ball around, making up rules and calling it a fucking game.” The atmosphere is genial. I'm offered a beer immediately, pot smoke hangs in the air, and onlookers talk shit to each other while tweaking bike gears. But after watching the action for a few hours, seeing cyclists weave around the court in tight spirals and shovel off no-look passes, it becomes obvious that these are athletes who know exactly what they're doing. They are playing a sport that requires balance, coordination, and endurance. They are playing a sport that they think is poised for dramatic growth. They are playing a sport one veteran calls “perfect for our time and place.”
They are also playing a sport very few people know exists.
The first hardcourt bike polo match was played 13 years ago in a Seattle stockroom at the dot-com retailer Kozmo. The small crew of bike messengers employed by the long-since-defunct company did not have grand ambitions when they came up with the idea; all they wanted was a fun way to kill time between deliveries. While the players were in no way regal, the game they concocted was nominally descended from polo, the Sport of Kings, invented by the Persians 1,500 years ago and popularized in the 19th century by British colonialists and then, later, by Ralph Lauren. It also shared similarities with cycle polo, a strain of the equine game played with bicycles instead of horses that gained traction during the turn-of-the-century cycling craze--particularly in England--and was featured as a demonstration sport at the 1908 Summer Olympics. Traditional cycle polo's popularity peaked long ago, and never spread widely outside of Europe.
The bored messengers at Kozmo weren't overly concerned with traditional bike polo, and came up with their own rules. Two teams of three lined up on either side of the stockroom straddling their work bikes and holding crude mallets made of wood or bamboo. A set of cones on each baseline served as goals. A roller hockey ball was placed at center court. [1] On the count of three, one cyclist from each side pedaled furiously to reach the ball first, “jousting” for possession. With that, the game was underway.
The messengers in Seattle did prohibit a few tactics, and those infractions haven't changed dramatically in the years that followed. To score, an offensive player must hit the ball across the goal line using only the narrow end of the mallet. (If a player knocks it in with the wide end of the mallet, it's called a "shuffle,” and his team forfeits possession.) Whenever a player's foot touches the ground, he must briefly “tap out" by slapping with his mallet a designated area on the court, either in the middle or along the boards. Contact is allowed so long as it's “like-to-like”: body-to-body, bike-to-bike, mallet-to-mallet. (No t-boning your opponent's legs with your bike, in other words.) The first team to five wins. The only other guiding principle, which almost every player I spoke with remembers learning on his or her first day, was “don't be a dick.”
by Adam Doster, The Classical | Read more:
Photo credit: unknown
What a Little Land Can Do
The poorest people in the world are those who don’t have land. In India, landlessness is a better predictor of poverty than illiteracy or belonging to castes at the bottom of society. At least 17 million rural households in India are completely landless, living on others’ land and working as sharecroppers or day laborers tending other peoples’ crops.
Landlessness is a huge problem all over the world. More equal distribution of land is a valuable goal — it is efficient in both fighting poverty and producing food.
But redistributing land is one of the most difficult and controversial of all political tasks. A history of land reform is a history of revolution. The concentration of land in the hands of the rich is a prime source of conflict. When a leftist movement has won, its first action has often been land reform — the further to the left the new government, the less likely it is to compensate landowners (and the more likely to shoot them, which was the norm in China and the Soviet Union).
But confiscatory land reform is not the only kind. Many programs have paid landowners market value for their land. Perhaps the world’s most influential architect of a more democratic land reform is the University of Washington law professor Roy Prosterman, who founded the Rural Development Institute, now known as Landesa. Prosterman and his group have worked with dozens of countries to design market-based land reform. But his ideas, too, have been used for political ends; if you know Prosterman’s name, it’s because you’ve heard of Land to the Tiller, the United States-backed land reform in Vietnam during the war. The United States adopted Prosterman’s ideas in Vietnam, the Philippines and El Salvador to turn peasants away from leftist guerrillas.
Today, political forces are arrayed against land reform. India, for example, had a land reform program since the 1960s that set ceilings on land ownership. The government could expropriate anything above the ceiling; compensation was typically well below market value. But the law was put to wide use only in the few states with Communist governments. “With very small exceptions, the ceiling surplus approach was not going anywhere because people who owned the land and stood to lose were much more politically powerful than those who were going to gain,” said Tim Hanstad, the president and chief executive of Landesa.
Democratic land reform has a different problem: buying large swaths of land at market price is too costly. But hundreds of millions of people still lack land. Is there a more politically realistic way to help them? Landesa thinks there is. (...)
In 2000, Landesa began researching the impact of microplots in India. It then took its findings to the governments of four states and encouraged them to try a different kind of land reform. “The conventional wisdom had been that in order to provide meaningful benefits you’d need a full-size farm,” said Hanstad. “But when families had a small fraction of an acre they are often able to use that as a big bump up and foundation for a path out of poverty.”
“The family gets a permanent address,” said Supriya Chattopadhyay, who manages advocacy and communications for Landesa in West Bengal. “That’s very important — if a family wants to get any support from a government program, the first thing it needs is a permanent address.” Women traditionally do not leave their homes to work, so having a garden right outside their door gives the family a second income, he said. “And they get social recognition, social dignity” — for some families the most important factor of all.
The government doesn’t have to spend much to buy a tenth of an acre — in India, between $200 and $600. And there is no expropriation, so the program does not lower property values, cause legal uncertainties about ownership or create political opposition. Landesa has worked with four state governments in India to help them set up microplot programs — so far, about 200,000 families have received one.
Landlessness is a huge problem all over the world. More equal distribution of land is a valuable goal — it is efficient in both fighting poverty and producing food.
But redistributing land is one of the most difficult and controversial of all political tasks. A history of land reform is a history of revolution. The concentration of land in the hands of the rich is a prime source of conflict. When a leftist movement has won, its first action has often been land reform — the further to the left the new government, the less likely it is to compensate landowners (and the more likely to shoot them, which was the norm in China and the Soviet Union).But confiscatory land reform is not the only kind. Many programs have paid landowners market value for their land. Perhaps the world’s most influential architect of a more democratic land reform is the University of Washington law professor Roy Prosterman, who founded the Rural Development Institute, now known as Landesa. Prosterman and his group have worked with dozens of countries to design market-based land reform. But his ideas, too, have been used for political ends; if you know Prosterman’s name, it’s because you’ve heard of Land to the Tiller, the United States-backed land reform in Vietnam during the war. The United States adopted Prosterman’s ideas in Vietnam, the Philippines and El Salvador to turn peasants away from leftist guerrillas.
Today, political forces are arrayed against land reform. India, for example, had a land reform program since the 1960s that set ceilings on land ownership. The government could expropriate anything above the ceiling; compensation was typically well below market value. But the law was put to wide use only in the few states with Communist governments. “With very small exceptions, the ceiling surplus approach was not going anywhere because people who owned the land and stood to lose were much more politically powerful than those who were going to gain,” said Tim Hanstad, the president and chief executive of Landesa.
Democratic land reform has a different problem: buying large swaths of land at market price is too costly. But hundreds of millions of people still lack land. Is there a more politically realistic way to help them? Landesa thinks there is. (...)
In 2000, Landesa began researching the impact of microplots in India. It then took its findings to the governments of four states and encouraged them to try a different kind of land reform. “The conventional wisdom had been that in order to provide meaningful benefits you’d need a full-size farm,” said Hanstad. “But when families had a small fraction of an acre they are often able to use that as a big bump up and foundation for a path out of poverty.”
“The family gets a permanent address,” said Supriya Chattopadhyay, who manages advocacy and communications for Landesa in West Bengal. “That’s very important — if a family wants to get any support from a government program, the first thing it needs is a permanent address.” Women traditionally do not leave their homes to work, so having a garden right outside their door gives the family a second income, he said. “And they get social recognition, social dignity” — for some families the most important factor of all.
The government doesn’t have to spend much to buy a tenth of an acre — in India, between $200 and $600. And there is no expropriation, so the program does not lower property values, cause legal uncertainties about ownership or create political opposition. Landesa has worked with four state governments in India to help them set up microplot programs — so far, about 200,000 families have received one.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Rockwell Kent (American, 1882-1971), Tierra del Fuego, South America [Dome Island]. Oil on canvas, 86.4 x 110.8 cm
via:
Assume Joke Dead
Why is the political class so obsessed with being funny?
“I love Big Bird,” Mitt Romney said while calling for the elimination of federal subsidies for public broadcasting. Immediately, journalists—and bloggers and pundits and regular citizens—began churning out wisecracks. “I wonder if Mitt and Ann Romney are going to celebrate tonight by eating, say, Big Bird,” The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof quipped. The punch lines were followed almost immediately by parody Twitter accounts, like @BigBirdRomney, @FiredBigBird, and @FireMeElmo. One such account, @BigBird, had nearly 14,000 followers by the end of the night—putting it in the top 1 percent of Twitter users by popularity (and on par with The New York Times Magazine national correspondent Mark Leibovich). These anonymous jokesters had some good lines, but many more bad ones. “Romney will fire Big Bird and Cookie Monster and replace them with the replacement refs #bigbird,” tweeted @FiredBigBird.
By the time someone photo-shopped an image of Big Bird strapped to the roof of the Romney family station wagon, it was clear: We Are All Andy Borowitz Now. Journalists have always tried to sneak clever turns of phrase past persnickety copy editors, but Twitter allows even those obliged to adhere to the bone-dry standards of legacy media outlets to show the entire world how witty they are—and maybe even win a pat on the back from the management types who’ve decided that social media represents the newsroom’s future. The result: a cult of cleverness, where a good joke is rewarded with retweets and new followers, the two main metrics of social-media clout. I’m certainly among those spending far too much time attempting to rack up both. Still, it often seemed as though every reporter, blogger, and pundit in the country spent every waking hour of the campaign just making fun of everything.
In elections past, the sort of stuff reporters joke about—Joe Biden telling a Virginia rally it could win North Carolina; Mitt Romney admiring clouds—might have ended up in pool reports, seen and appreciated only by other journalists. The Internet gives the campaign press ways to publicize the weird details that otherwise might not make it into print. The behind-the-curtain material that makes The Boys on the Bus and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 so readable is now more often than not shared with the world in real time.
But in those books, weird details generally served a better understanding of a candidate’s character; on Twitter, they reduce a candidate to his stupidest moments for a quick laugh. And at a certain point (let’s say that point was when Time released photos of Paul Ryan dressed like Poochie, the “cool dog” character from the “Simpsons”) the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” routine subsumed the other part of campaign coverage, where you explain the state of the race and the issues involved to normal people. At the second presidential debate on October 16, it all happened again, when Romney said “binders full of women”: @BigBirdRomney retweeted the freshly minted @Romney_Binder ten times that night. When the third presidential debate finally rolled around and Obama told Romney “we also have fewer horses and bayonets,” he was speaking in readymade hashtags.
by Alex Pareene, TNR | Read more:
Illustration: David Cowles
Attack of the Mutant Pupfish
But the biggest existential threat to the pupfish comes from its own DNA. Once upon a time, pupfish lived in a sprawling lake. Around 20,000 years ago, water levels dropped, the landscape turned to desert, and the pupfish ended up in disconnected ponds. Today, nine different species are scattered across the Southwest, and half of them are endangered. Devils Hole is the worst case; as of September 2012, there were 75 fish left. Thousands of years of adaptation have left the Devils Hole pupfish able to live only in one very particular environment: It needs 90-degree water, low oxygen, and a shallow submerged ledge on which to spawn. It’s hard enough being endangered; being endangered and picky is a deadly combination.
Endangered, picky, and unlucky? Even worse. Beginning in the 1970s, government scientists built three pools to contain backup populations of Devils Hole pupfish as a final hedge against extinction. At two of these refuges, pumps, valves, and other mechanical bits malfunctioned repeatedly, killing most of the fish. In one case, lightning struck a transformer. But at the third site, called Point of Rocks, something more interesting happened. Somehow a few pupfish of a different species managed to infiltrate the refuge and—to put it politely—their DNA quickly spread through the population. After about half a decade, every fish in the pool was descended from the invaders, who gave their offspring telltale genes and an extra set of fins. Wildlife officials moved all the hybrids to a hatchery, where, unlike captive Devils Hole pupfish, they couldn’t stop making babies. “There were floor-to-ceiling tanks of these hybrid fish,” says Andy Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who led the research into the hybrids’ DNA. “This was a population that had been sputtering away, and now it was going like mad.”
To Martin, the fact that an influx of new genes caused a population explosion suggested what was wrong: “genetic load,” a glut of defective DNA that accumulates in a small population. On the upside, that diagnosis suggests a cure—a way to save the species. Martin has a plan to bring the fish back from the brink. But to the kind of people who have battled extinctions in the past, his solution is heresy.
For half a century, conservationists have seen themselves as preservationists: Protect species X as it exists in place Y at time Z. Of course, nature has no such compunctions. Evolution is change. So the way to save the Devils Hole pupfish, Martin says, is to introduce genes from its cousin, the Ash Meadows Amargosa pupfish—C. nevadensis, the same little Casanova from the refuge—which is native to a spring just a few miles away. Martin wants to take one or two and drop them in with their endangered relatives. That simple act would have profound implications. It would protect the Devils Hole pupfish by rewriting its genome.
Whether or not you care about pupfish, this plan represents a major philosophical change in how we think about our relationship with nature—because it doesn’t end with the pupfish. It ends with us becoming architects, engineers, and contractors for entire ecosystems. The old approach involved fencing off swaths of wilderness and stepping aside. In the new order, we’d be the stewards not just of land or wildlife but of individual chromosomes. So far, in the world of Devils Hole pupfish conservation, Martin has run into a wall of no. But around the world, in other places where other species are in trouble, the answer, increasingly, is yes.
by Hillary Rosner, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Jesse Chehak
New MySpace Seems Too Good to be True
While dictating detailed notes into my iPhone during the drive, I decided that the second coming of MySpace is like an extremely beautiful woman who also possesses the intelligence of a scholar — too much to absorb.
If you can have too much of a good thing, the reincarnated MySpace is that thing, I reasoned.
But when I sat down to write this story and actually started exploring MySpace and its 53 million tracks, I got lost in the experience. Suddenly, the words of the executive brothers from earlier in the day came back to me.
“You give users a couple of days and they become hooked,” CEO Tim said. He was responding to my query as to whether MySpace was too convoluted, too complicated.
He’s right. I’ve spent a few hours with the site. I think I’m hooked.
“The Internet just became boring,” COO Chris said to a room of eight reporters (and several handlers), all of whom were hoping to hear more from Mr. Sexy-Back. “There was nothing fun anymore … I want to make it fun to use MySpace.”
It is fun, and so I have to amend my conclusion to this: Wrapped in a pretty package and equipped with brains to match, MySpace feels too good to be true. It’s not. No joke.
Gushing aside, there’s a full review to be had, not all so glowing, so let’s get to it.
The profile
Log on to MySpace and you’ll find a design so noticeably different from anything else you’ve encountered that it will be hard to look away.
Designed for artists and their fans, the new MySpace, said every executive and product manager I talked to, is not a redesign. It’s a new product with a new purpose and a design meant to evoke emotion. MySpace wants to draw people into relationships with creatives and the content they produce.
“The standout feature is the design. No doubt,” Chris said. “We really changed the level of expectations of consumers about what design is for a website.”
Monday, November 19, 2012
Deadhead
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Otherwise, I thought of the Dead at that time, if I thought of them at all, as some kind of malevolent cult, or, at least, a heavy-metal outfit, like Black Sabbath. A kid saw the iconography around—the skulls and skeletons—and imagined dark, angry noise. When I was thirteen, I bought an album of greatest hits, “Skeletons from the Closet,” and discovered that I’d been wrong. Many of the songs were delicate acoustic numbers with rustic harmonies and bouncy, if obscure, lyrics. There was some country, some folk, some blues, a Chuck Berry rocker. The lead singer, or one of them, had a delicate tenor. No Ozzy Osbourne, this guy. Maybe they really were just hippies who ate spaghetti onstage. It didn’t seem like much. Give me the guy who bites heads off bats. Give me “War Pigs.” (...)
It is very easy, and in many circles compulsory, to make fun of the Dead. “What does a Deadhead say when the drugs wear off? ‘This music sucks.’ ” The Dead, more than any band of their stature, have legions of haters—real hostility—as typified by Dave Marsh’s remark, in Playboy, that they were “the worst band in creation.”
What’s to hate? Even the fanatic can admit to a few things. The Dead were musically self-indulgent, and yet, to some ears, harmonically shallow. They played one- and two-chord jams that went on for twenty or thirty minutes. One live version of “Dark Star,” a modal vamp based on the A mixolydian scale, with two short verses and no bridge, clocked in at forty-eight minutes. (Oh, to have been in Rotterdam!) Even their straightforward songs could go on for ten or twelve minutes. Pop-craft buffs, punkers, and anyone steeped in the orthodoxy of concision tend to plug their ears to the noodling, while jazz buffs often find it unsophisticated and aimless. The Dead’s sense of time was not always crisp. It’s been said that the two drummers, in the eighties, sounded like sneakers in a dryer. For those attracted to the showy side of rock, the Dead were always an unsightly ensemble, whose ugliness went undiminished in middle age—which happened to coincide with the dawn of MTV. They were generally without sex appeal. Bob Weir, their showman and heartthrob, might be said to be an exception, but he spent much of the eighties performing in short cutoff jean shorts and lavender tank tops—a sight even more troubling, I’d submit, than that of Garcia circa 1984, drooling on his microphone as he fought off the nods. Even the high-tech light shows of later years and the spaceship twinkle of their amplifiers could not compensate for a lumpy stage presence. They could be sloppy, unrehearsed. They forgot lyrics, sang out of key, delivered rank harmonies, missed notes, blew takeoffs and landings, and laid down clams by the dozen. Their lyrics were often fruity—hippie poetry about roses and bells and dew. They resisted irony. They were apolitical. They bombed at the big gigs. They unleashed those multicolored dancing bears.
Most objectionable, perhaps, were the Deadheads, that travelling gang of phony vagabonds. As unironic as the Dead may have been, Deadheads were more so. Not for them the arch framings and jagged epiphanies of punk. They dispensed bromides about peace and fellowship as they laid waste to parking lots and town squares. Many came by the stereotypes honestly: airheads and druggies, smelling of patchouli and pot, hairy, hypocritical, pious, ingenuous, and uncritical in the extreme. They danced their flappy Snoopy dance and foisted their hissy bootlegs on roommates and friends, clearing dance floors and common rooms. The obnoxious ones came in many varieties: The frat boys in their Teva sandals and tie-dyed T-shirts, rolling their shoulders to the easy lilt of “Franklin’s Tower.” The so-called spinners, dervishes in prairie skirts and bare feet. The earnest acoustic strummers of “Uncle John’s Band,” the school-bus collective known as the Rainbow Family, the gaunt junkies shuffling around their vans like the Sleestaks in “Land of the Lost”—they came for the party, more than for the band. Sometimes they didn’t even bother to go in to the show. They bought into the idea, which grew flimsier each year, that following a rock band from football stadium to football stadium, fairground to fairground, constituted adventure of the Kerouac kind.
This is not to say that adventures were not had. At a certain point, later in the band’s career, the Dead became, especially on the East Coast, a token of entitlement squandered or lightly worn. Consider the preppy Deadhead, in his new Jetta, and his counterpart, the Jewish Deadhead, with his boxes of blank Maxells. In “Perspectives on the Grateful Dead,” a volume of scholarly writings published in 1999, one author, in an essay called “Why Are There So Many Jewish Deadheads?,” attempts to explain the affinity in terms of the Diaspora’s search for spiritual meaning (neshama) and community (chevra). The goyish trustafarians lacked that excuse. At any rate, they all quailed in the presence of the biker Deadheads, the leather-vested roughnecks crying out for “U.S. Blues,” but were heartened, in absentia, to have seen them there. The tough guys seasoned the scene with authenticity and menace.
The Dead’s reputation and press coverage have always fixated on the culture that sprouted up around the band, and that then began to choke it, like a weed. When the Dead stopped touring, many of the fans moved on to other travelling carnivals—often to the so-called jam bands that had drawn inspiration and a music-industry approach (though not quite a musical vocabulary) from the Dead. This, too, was often taken to be a kind of indictment: the Dead are sometimes damned by the company their fans keep. The conflation of the Dead with, say, the Dave Matthews Band—incongruous as the two may be musically—can really smart.
There is a silent minority, though, of otherwise unobjectionable aesthetes who, as “Grateful Dead” has become a historical record, rather than a living creative enterprise, have found themselves rekindling a fascination with the band’s recorded legacy. These are the tapeheads, the geeks, the throngs of workaday Phil Schaaps, who approach the band’s body of work with the intensity and the attention to detail that one might bring to birding, baseball, or the Talmud. They may be brain surgeons, lawyers, bartenders, or even punk-rock musicians. Really, it shouldn’t matter what they do, or what they smell like, or whether they can still take a toke without keeling over. It’s the music, and not the parking lot, that’s got them by the throat.
by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Making Cents
Not that I am naively nostalgic for the old days-- we weren't paid for that first album, either. (The record label we were signed to at the time, Rough Trade, declared bankruptcy before cutting us even one royalty check.) But the ways in which musicians are screwed have changed qualitatively, from individualized swindles to systemic ones. And with those changes, a potential end-run around the industry's problems seems less and less possible, even for bands who have managed to hold on to 100% of their rights and royalties, as we have.
Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are becoming ever more integrated into our daily listening habits. My BMI royalty check arrived recently, reporting songwriting earnings from the first quarter of 2012, and I was glad to see that our music is being listened to via these services. Galaxie 500's "Tugboat", for example, was played 7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times "Tugboat" was played there, Galaxie 500's songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).
To put this into perspective: Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one--one-- LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)
Or to put it in historical perspective: The "Tugboat" 7" single, Galaxie 500's very first release, cost us $980.22 for 1,000 copies-- including shipping! (Naomi kept the receipts)-- or 98 cents each. I no longer remember what we sold them for, but obviously it was easy to turn at least a couple bucks' profit on each. Which means we earned more from every one of those 7"s we sold than from the song's recent 13,760 plays on Pandora and Spotify. Here's yet another way to look at it: Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012. (And people say the internet is a bonanza for young bands...) (...)
Which gets to the heart of the problem. When I started making records, the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can. It was industrial capitalism, on a 7" scale. The model now seems closer to financial speculation. Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access, a piece of the action. Sign on, and we'll all benefit. (I'm struck by the way that even crowd-sourcing mimics this "investment" model of contemporary capitalism: You buy in to what doesn't yet exist.)
But here's the rub: Pandora and Spotify are not earning any income from their services, either. In the first quarter of 2012, Pandora-- the same company that paid Galaxie 500 a total of $1.21 for their use of "Tugboat"-- reported a net loss of more than $20 million dollars. As for Spotify, their latest annual report revealed a loss in 2011 of $56 million.
Leaving aside why these companies are bothering to chisel hundredths of a cent from already ridiculously low "royalties," or paying lobbyists to work a bill through Congress that would lower those rates even further-- let's instead ask a question they themselves might consider relevant: Why are they in business at all?
by Damon Krukowski, Pitchfork | Read more:
Illustration: Unknown
Living the Four Star Life
Gates may have been the civilian leader of the world’s largest military, but his position did not come with household staff. So, he often joked, he disposed of his leaves by blowing them onto the chairman’s lawn.
“I was often jealous because he had four enlisted people helping him all the time,” Gates said in response to a question after a speech Thursday. He wryly complained to his wife that “Mullen’s got guys over there who are fixing meals for him, and I’m shoving something into the microwave. And I’m his boss.”
Of the many facts that have come to light in the scandal involving former CIA director David H. Petraeus, among the most curious was that during his days as a four-star general, he was once escorted by 28 police motorcycles as he traveled from his Central Command headquarters in Tampa to socialite Jill Kelley’s mansion. Although most of his trips did not involve a presidential-size convoy, the scandal has prompted new scrutiny of the imperial trappings that come with a senior general’s lifestyle.
The commanders who lead the nation’s military services and those who oversee troops around the world enjoy an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms and track their schedules in 10-minute increments. Their food is prepared by gourmet chefs. If they want music with their dinner parties, their staff can summon a string quartet or a choir.
The elite regional commanders who preside over large swaths of the planet don’t have to settle for Gulfstream V jets. They each have a C-40, the military equivalent of a Boeing 737, some of which are configured with beds.
Since Petraeus’s resignation, many have strained to understand how such a celebrated general could have behaved so badly. Some have speculated that an exhausting decade of war impaired his judgment. Others wondered if Petraeus was never the Boy Scout he appeared to be. But Gates, who still possesses a modest Kansan’s bemusement at Washington excess, has floated another theory.
“There is something about a sense of entitlement and of having great power that skews people’s judgment,” Gates said last week. (...)
“You can become completely disconnected from the way people live in the regular world — and even from the modest lifestyle of others in the military,” Barno said. “When that happens, it’s not necessarily healthy either for the military or the country.”
Although American generals have long enjoyed many perks — in World War II and in Vietnam, some dined on china set atop linen tablecloths — the amenities afforded to today’s military leaders are more lavish than anyone else in government enjoys, save for the president.
by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Greg Jaffe, Washington Post | Read more:
Photo credit: Not indicated
Sunday, November 18, 2012
When the Nerds Go Marching In
Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.
They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, PalominoDB, was fixing databases, but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn't have time.
They'd been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.
And that was the point. "Game day" was October 21. The election was still 17 days away, and this was a live action role playing (LARPing!) exercise that the campaign's chief technology officer, Harper Reed, was inflicting on his team. "We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built."
Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master, calling out devilishly complex scenarios that were designed to test each and every piece of their system as they entered the exponential traffic-growth phase of the election. Mark Trammell, an engineer who Reed hired after he left Twitter, saw a couple game days. He said they reminded him of his time in the Navy. "You ran firefighting drills over and over and over, to make sure that you not just know what you're doing," he said, "but you're calm because you know you can handle your shit."
The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent -- by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s -- from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened."
In fact, the day after the October 21 game day, Amazon services -- on which the whole campaign's tech presence was built -- went down. "We didn't have any downtime because we had done that scenario already," Reed said. Hurricane Sandy hit on another game day, October 29, threatening the campaign's whole East Coast infrastructure. "We created a hot backup of all our applications to US-west in preparation for US-east to go down hard," Reed said.
"We knew what to do," Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. "We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca."
THE NEW CHICAGO MACHINE vs. THE GRAND OLD PARTY
Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama's perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats' vaunted ground game. Orca was going to allow volunteers at polling places to update the Romney camp's database of voters in real time as people cast their ballots. That would supposedly allow them to deploy resources more efficiently and wring every last vote out of Florida, Ohio, and the other battleground states. The product got its name, a Romney spokesperson told NPR , because orcas are the only known predator of the one-tusked narwhal.
The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn't an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company's sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine. And besides, in the scheme of a campaign, a digitized strike list is cool, but it's not, like, a gamechanger. It's just a nice thing to have.
by Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo by Daniel X. O'Neil
As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living
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But they did not actually have jobs at Apple. It was freelance work that came with nothing in the way of a regular income, health insurance or retirement plan. Instead, the Grimeses tried to prepare by willingly, even eagerly, throwing overboard just about everything they could.
They sold one of their cars, gave some possessions to relatives and sold others in a yard sale, rented out their six-bedroom house and stayed with family for a while. They even cashed in Mr. Grimes’s 401(k).
“We didn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Mr. Grimes, 32. “I’ll retire when I die.”
The couple’s chosen field is so new it did not even exist a few years ago: writing software applications for mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad. Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high and the economy struggled to emerge from the recession’s shadow, the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category. These software engineers now outnumber farmers and have almost caught up with lawyers.
Much as the Web set off the dot-com boom 15 years ago, apps have inspired a new class of entrepreneurs. These innovators have turned cellphones and tablets into tools for discovering, organizing and controlling the world, spawning a multibillion-dollar industry virtually overnight. The iPhone and iPad have about 700,000 apps, from Instagram to Angry Birds.
Yet with the American economy yielding few good opportunities in recent years, there is debate about how real, and lasting, the rise in app employment might be.
Despite the rumors of hordes of hip programmers starting million-dollar businesses from their kitchen tables, only a small minority of developers actually make a living by creating their own apps, according to surveys and experts. The Grimeses began their venture with high hopes, but their apps, most of them for toddlers, did not come quickly enough or sell fast enough.
And programming is not a skill that just anyone can learn. While people already employed in tech jobs have added app writing to their résumés, the profession offers few options to most unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers.
One success story is Ethan Nicholas, who earned more than $1 million in 2009 after writing a game for the iPhone. But he says the app writing world has experienced tectonic shifts since then.
“Can someone drop everything and start writing apps? Sure,” said Mr. Nicholas, 34, who quit his job to write apps after iShoot, an artillery game, became a sensation. “Can they start writing good apps? Not often, no. I got lucky with iShoot, because back then a decent app could still be successful. But competition is fierce nowadays, and decent isn’t good enough.”
The boom in apps comes as economists are debating the changing nature of work, which technology is reshaping at an accelerating speed. The upheaval, in some ways echoing the mechanization of agriculture a century ago, began its latest turbulent phase with the migration of tech manufacturing to places like China. Now service and even white-collar jobs, like file clerks and data entry specialists or office support staff and mechanical drafters, are disappearing.
“Technology is always destroying jobs and always creating jobs, but in recent years the destruction has been happening faster than the creation,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business.
by David Streitfeld, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times
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