How I Met My Dead Parents

Sixteen years after my father died, when I was 32, my mother died in her sleep. She was 64. The official cause of death was heart failure, but really, what she'd died from was unabashed alcoholism, the kind where you drink whatever you can get your hands on, where you're often so drunk you shit in your bed or on the floor, and you cause so much brain damage that you permanently lose the ability to walk unsupported.

Like my father's death, my mother's was a relief, though for different reasons. My mother had been slowly, and dramatically, as was her nature, killing herself for years. She'd always been a drinker, but she really committed to it after my dad died. His death either caused such a serious depression that she had to self-medicate to the point of oblivion, or it gave her the permission she'd been waiting for to throw everything away.

My father died while I was in the middle of high school, and by the end of my senior year, my mother was drinking hard. In college, she was calling me as I boarded the bus home for Thanksgiving to warn me that she was wasted, and after finding her slumped over a chair in our dark kitchen, I would have to rope my poor ex-boyfriend into helping me get her to the emergency room. Over the following years she only got worse, despite multiple trips to detox, five weeks at Betty Ford, and almost one year of sobriety. She was once visiting an old professor friend at Tufts, and she got so drunk and wild that he had to call the campus police to get rid of her — and to get back at him, she stripped naked so the police would "really have something to see." She showed up to visit me in California with a face so bruised from an accident she didn't remember having that multiple people asked if she'd just had brain surgery. She had me in a constant state of anxiety; I always worried that she was going to fall down the stairs, die helplessly, and not be found for weeks. My sister and I eventually hired home health-care workers to look after her a few days a week, which was good for all of us, but many of them quit because taking care of her was just too depressing.

After my mother died, people always wanted to know how I was doing, and I always said that I wasn't sad for myself, but that I was so, so sad for her. I was, and am, sad for her — sad that she went from being an intelligent, successful, and charismatic woman to someone who drank so much that she often shit on the floor. But was I sad that my mother, who drank so much that she often shit on the floor, was now gone? Not really. I was 16 years older, but I was right back to where I was when my father died. I felt the exact same way, and I didn't feel the exact same things.

In the weeks following my mother's death, my friends, some of whom had been around for my dad's death as well, came over to my Brooklyn apartment one by one to make me dinner on the nights my boyfriend was working late, I guess because I wasn't supposed to be able to feed myself. They would come and cook and look at me with probing eyes and open arms, ready for me to say or do whatever I needed — but all I could do was scarf down their sautéed cod and stare back and think, Why aren't I as sad as I'm supposed to be? (...)

I began my work in my mother's study, which had become a haphazard storage room for everything from mismatched shoes to years of unopened mail. I spent days bagging sweaters for Goodwill and organizing the incredible amount of clip-on earrings and pantyhose she'd purchased from Filene's Basement decades before and never worn. I'd anticipated this chore for years, and though it was surreal to finally be doing it, it was also calming.

Once I moved beyond her clothes and crappy jewelry, I got into her more personal belongings, her file cabinets, battered shoe boxes stuffed with papers, and trunks full of undated slides and photographs that my father, an accomplished photographer, left behind years ago. This was quiet, intimate territory, and I didn't know how to approach or navigate it. I certainly wasn't prepared for what I would soon discover: that in the bundles of faded telegrams, handwritten love letters, old faxes, and diaries abandoned after only a few pages, my mother had left me a window into both of my parents and their complicated marriage. Even a superficial scan of these artifacts revealed that my parents had an entirely different relationship than I'd assumed, and were, in many ways, profoundly different people than I'd long ago decided they were.

For days I sat in my mother's filthy study, surrounded by the relics of my parents' love, trying to take in their lives and thinking, I don't know these people at all. And for the first time, I wanted to.

by Anya Yurchyshyn, BuzzFeed | Read more:
Photo: uncredited

Chico Buarque and Roberta Sá

[ed. Such chemistry!]

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Eve Online

Six men in their 30s and 40s have gathered in a trendy Reykjavík hotel bar. They’re trying to stave off the brutal mid-December cold while they wait for Death. He’s their friend and the leader of the 30,000 strong Legion of Death alliance. He’s also taking far too long primping in a room upstairs. “Can somebody call and get Death down here?” says one of the group. “We need to go.”

Death’s real name is Mikhail Romanchenko, a Russian immigrant who owns a glass installation business in New York City. His nickname comes from playing Eve Online, a sci-fi video game. Players pay about $15 for a month’s worth of game time, during which they assume aliases; earn, save, and spend virtual money; and build spacecraft and band together to fight epic space battles. They also become part of a mythology that rivals anything depicted in Star Wars or Star Trek. “It’s part game and part soap opera and part shadow economy,” says Ted Brown, a video game designer and Eve aficionado. “There’s basically a whole virtual society that has emerged inside of Eve.”

During the peak of its power in 2010, the Legion of Death ruled roughly one-quarter of the Eve universe; each of Death’s 30,000 soldiers represented a person under his command, tapping away on his computer. To the winners go prime territory rich in trade and industry, while losers are pillaged and banished to lesser areas. “You don’t understand what it’s like to manage that many people,” Romanchenko reflects. “It’s not playing a game. It’s like having a second job.”

He and the others were in Iceland’s capital to meet with executives from CCP Games, the company that created Eve. The seven make up the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a group elected by other Eve players and flown by CCP to Iceland every six months or so to discuss how the game should evolve. It’s a kind of super-user focus group, but also a channel for players’ complaints. In 2011, when CCP rolled out some controversial changes, the company summoned the CSM members to Reykjavík for an emergency meeting in an effort to stem a user backlash. “At the time, I had been dating a girl for only three weeks and was terrified,” says Joshua Goldshlag (Eve name: Two Step), a 35-year-old CSM member and computer programmer from Massachusetts. “I certainly did not want to mention that I had been elected as an Internet space politician."

Released by CCP in 2003, Eve has cultivated the most loyal following of all the massively multiplayer games and turned into something of a controlled experiment in human nature and unfettered capitalism. It’s also the brightest spot in Iceland’s real-world economy. In the wake of the 2008 global credit crisis, as the country’s banking sector smoldered, CCP plotted its expansion and put the finishing touches on a new office. Last year it brought in about $65 million in revenue. The company employs close to 600 people, or 0.2 percent of Iceland’s population. (An equivalent U.S. company would have about 626,000 employees.) And unlike fishing, aluminum smelting, or Iceland’s other major industries, running a digital space empire does not deplete natural resources. About 500,000 people play Eve, more than live in Iceland; CCP employees never seem to tire of pointing that out, and other Icelanders note it with pride. In early March, New York’s Museum of Modern Art unveiled a video game installation that celebrates the artwork of about a dozen iconic titles. The exotic space cruisers of Eve were picked to sit alongside Pac-Man, Tetris, and The Sims.

by Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Photo: Courtesy CCP Games

This Bud's for You!

[ed. Happy 4/20 Day.]

In November, they basically legalized marijuana. Even if you don't pay attention to ballot initiatives or the like, you probably still possessed a fuzzy picture of where things stood. As of the past election cycle, marijuana is now totally street legal in Colorado and Washington. And possibly Oregon? And you'd been hearing for years about all those other places—there was a new state all the time—where you could buy it for medical purposes. Like California and Washington, D.C., and Connecticut and Rhode Island and, like, maybe New Mexico? Meanwhile, even in states where there is not yet a stipulation for those undergoing chemo to be able to blaze out, isn't it functionally decriminalized? Isn't it more or less okay to smoke weed right in front of a cop in New York City as long as you're not killing someone with a tire iron while simultaneously being young and nonwhite? And conventional wisdom, at least from certain purviews, holds that the social taboo surrounding marijuana is now close to zero, whether you're into older white women in Eileen fisher comfies (see: Steve Martin in It's Complicated) or rap music (see: rap music).

We've supposedly been on the cusp of this new world for a long time. And if we haven't arrived at it yet, we are now on the cusp of the cusp of the cusp of the future that stoners, libertarians, and other people you've gotten stuck talking to in bathroom lines at parties have predicted for decades: a time when marijuana becomes a normal commercial commodity. Grown safely by nice people, taxed and regulated. But also packaged and branded! The moment when weed at long last fulfills its vast potential to be one of the great—maybe even the greatest, now that tobacco is passé—American consumer products. Something, like yoga or frozen yogurt, around which distinct lifestyles can be built. Something that, like Rag & Bone blazers and the cheeses of France, can by dint of acquisitional obsession make you forget about everything bad. We may finally be nearing the moment when whether you smoke weed no longer defines you, but maybe where you shop for weedwill. The only question is: What kind of shopping bliss awaits us?

It would seem that certain precincts already know the answer to that question. In cities like Los Angeles and Seattle and Denver, where it's been gray-area legal for years, they've already built the foundations of the commercial-weed ecosystem. To know what the future holds, wouldn't one merely consult an expert in these places?

Step 1

Determine What Kind of Weed Shopper You Are

In the quest to review and systematize the nascent marijuana-shopping experience, the first place GQ's Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, visited was a medical-marijuana dispensary called Denver Relief, which provides relief for people in Denver by way of getting blazed. (GQ's Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, heard many phrases for being high while reviewing dispensaries—faded, zooted,blasted, smoked yourself cheese-dicked—but objectively the most awesome is blazed, so you should probably get used to reading it.)

Like a lot of dispensaries, Denver Relief is located somewhere most accurately described as nondescript. Critical Shopper literally does not remember where it is, except that you can see a parking lot out the window. The waiting room is the kind of place where it feels like a hot-stone massage might break out at any moment: leather sofas, oriental rugs, piped-in synthesizer music. Shopper flipped through a back issue of National Geographic and The Cannabible while he waited for the receptionist, in a cozy sweater behind a spotless Plexiglas window, to buzz him into the "bud room" when it was his turn. (...)

Shopper had on this day brought with him another Critical Marijuana Shopper: the weed reviewer for Westword, the Denver alt-weekly, a man who writes under the name William Breathes. Shopper will not physically describe William Breathes, because his important work is possible only as long as he's anonymous. Breathes confirmed Bushwhacker's information. "As far as flower goes?" Breathes said. "The best in Denver are Denver Relief, the Pink House, and the Clinic. The quality is phenomenal." (...)

So that's the first question you need to ask yourself when you start shopping for weed: How serious am I about marijuana? How erudite do I want to get on it? If this answer is "pretty freaking erudite," you should consider a place like those listed above by Breathes in Denver, or Greenworks or Dockside Co-op in Seattle, or Buds & Roses in Los Angeles. What Shopper calls the Connoisseur Class. Or Straight Nerd Spots. They offer their own brand of experience. To wit:

Once in the bud room, Ean Seeb, one of the proprietors, brought out some of his favorite strains to show Shopper. "This is our LA OG," he said, opening a glass canister filled with sculpted buds, all purplish and gnarled. Ean doesn't look like the guy who would sell you a dime bag out of the back of a Saturn Vue. He was that day fully GQ'ed out in a black cowl-neck sweater. His gray wingtips had neon pink laces. "Give it a smell," he said.

Breathes took the canister and inhaled: "That has a really nice baby powder and kind of...mint! Just a wonderful baby-powder nose on it."

"We say it's earthy with a hint of dryer sheets," Ean says.

Normally, Shopper would not be allowed in the bud room without a state-issued red card. But Ean made an exception for journalistic purposes. What was it like? A rectangle not bigger than twenty feet across, with faux-exposed-brick walls. Stretching across one side of the room was a long granite countertop with wooden partitions so no one need eyeball your merch. It called to mind the showroom of a rare-coin dealer. Only, behind the counter, lit lovingly, were thirty-two glass jars on shelves. And in each of these jars were dozens and dozens of grotesquely large, obsessively manicured marijuana blossoms. They had names like Bio-Jesus, Gumbo, Tahoe OG, Bio-Diesel, Dopium, Ghost Train Haze, Hashberry, Headband, Q3. All grown by Denver Relief itself, in its enormous grow house. (In Colorado, dispensaries must grow at least 70 percent of their product.) Having come from one of the states where places like this don't exist, Shopper realized that a pervasive sense of scarcity had always surrounded weed in most parts of society. It's something people kept in old cigar boxes in the backs of underpants drawers, something there was never that much of, and when it ran out, who knew exactly when you could get more? Even without being a particularly avid user, being in one of these rooms for the first time can trigger the same hoarding impulse a Sudanese refugee might feel in a Walmart.

by Devin Friedman, GQ |  Read more:

Photo: Maurcicio Alejo

Giuseppe Santomaso, 1988
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Douglas Prince, Gaia.
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Huguette Caland, Rossinante Under Cover XII, 2011
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The Oligopoly Problem

In a recent T-Mobile commercial, one black-hatted outlaw breaks with the rest of his gang. “Aw,” he says, “I can’t do this anymore.” The message is not subtle. Yes, we’ve all been robbing you for years, declares T-Mobile, but at least we’ve decided we’re done with it. There’s more than rhetoric here: T-Mobile recently broke with longstanding industry norms and abandoned termination fees, sneaky overage charges, and other unfriendly practices.

Although T-Mobile’s decision is welcome news for consumers, it doesn’t change the fact that the old extortions remained in place for about fifteen years, and that they remain in place for the vast majority of Americans still trapped in contracts with Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. And it sheds light on a long-standing problem with how we think about and treat anticompetitive practices in the United States. Our current approach, focussed near-exclusively on monopoly, fails to address the serious problems posed by highly concentrated industries.

If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it. For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established—just ask Microsoft or the old AT&T. But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is “competitive” and everything is fine. To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation’s oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition.

This blind spot is of particular significance during an age when oligopolies, not monopolies, rule. Consider Barry Lynn’s 2011 book, “Cornered,” which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties. He found that dominance by two or three firms “is not the exception in the United States, but increasingly the rule.” Consumers, easily misled by product labelling, often don’t even notice that products like sunglasses, pet food, or numerous others come from just a few giants. For example, while drugstores seem to offer unlimited choices in toothpaste, just two firms, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, control more than eighty per cent of the market (including seemingly independent brands like Tom’s of Maine).

The press confuses oligopoly and monopoly with some regularity. The Atlantic ran a recent infographic titled “The Return of the Monopoly,” describing rising concentration in airlines, grocery sales, music, and other industries. With the exception of Intel in computer chips, none of the industries described, however, was actually a monopoly—all were oligopolies. So while The Atlantic is right about what’s happening, it sounds the wrong alarm. We know how to fight monopolies, but few seem riled at “The Return of the Oligopoly.”

Things were not always thus. Back in the mid-century, the Justice Department went after oligopolistic cartels in the tobacco industry and Hollywood with the same vigor it chased Standard Oil, the quintessential monopoly trust. In the late nineteen-seventies, another high point of enforcement, oligopolies were investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, and during that era Richard Posner, then a professor at Stanford Law School, went as far as to argue that when firms maintain the same prices, even without a smoke-filled-room agreement, they ought to be considered members of a price-fixing conspiracy. (By this logic, the Delta and US Airways shuttles between New York and Washington, D.C., would probably be price-fixers, since their prices do vary by how far in advance you buy, but are always identical.)

Like many things from the nineteen-seventies, the treatment of oligopoly was subject to an enormous backlash in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties. (Posner actually helped lead the backlash.) And with some justification: some of the cases were quite bad, like a long-forgotten federal war on the breakfast-cereal industry. Firms shouldn’t be penalized for practices that are parallel but not actually harmful, nor for mere “parallel pricing.” An interpretation of law that makes nearly every gas-station owner into a felon is questionable.

But just as the nineteen-seventies went too far, the reaction to the nineteen-seventies has also gone too far. As part of a general retreat from prosecution of all but the most extreme antitrust violations, the United States has nowadays nearly abandoned scrutiny of oligopoly behavior, leaving consumers undefended. That’s a problem, because oligopolies do an awful lot that’s troubling.

by Tim Wu, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Marcos Chin

Holding Back the Ocean

[ed. 'Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better  than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.' ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald.]

Soon after Hurricane Sandy hit last fall, Joshua Harris, a billionaire hedge fund founder and an owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, began to fear that his $25 million home on the water here might fall victim to the next major storm. So he installed a costly defense against incoming waves: a shield of large metal plates on the beach, camouflaged by sand.

His neighbor, Mark Rachesky, another billionaire hedge fund founder, put up similar fortifications between his home and the surf. Chris Shumway, who closed his $8 billion hedge fund two years ago, trucked in boulders the size of Volkswagens.

Across a section of this wealthy town, some residents, accustomed to having their way in the business world, are now trying to hold back the ocean.

But the flurry of construction on beachfront residences since the hurricane is touching off bitter disputes over the environment, real estate and class.

Some local officials said they were worried that the owners were engaging in an arms race with nature, installing higher and higher barricades that could rapidly hasten erosion — essentially sacrificing public beaches to save private homes.

Last week, down the beach from Mr. Shumway’s home, another project was under way. Bulldozers and backhoes were carting stones and piling sand, assembling what appeared to be ramparts. It was to protect the home owned by Vince Camuto, one of the founders of the Nine West fashion brand.

These fortifications have been built along a stretch of coast just over 2,000 feet long in one of the most exclusive sections of Southampton, off Gin Lane. The houses they protect cost as much as $60 million and stand, flanked by swimming pools and tennis courts, on hedge-lined lots of three to five acres. (...)

Several of the protective barriers of boulders and bulkheads are now covered in mountains of sand so high that they obscure much of the houses when viewed from the beach. (...)

“I don’t think it’s reasonable to point to every sea wall that exists and say it’s a problem,” said Aram Terchunian, a coastal geologist who has advised some of the Southampton homeowners on their beachfront defenses.

“You need all the tools in the toolbox in order to effectively deal with these erosion problems,” Mr. Terchunian said. “And to ban them for philosophical and political purposes is shortsighted and certainly isn’t scientific.”

Others disagreed.

Robert Young, a coastal geologist hired by the Southampton trustees to evaluate these and other projects, said the beaches on Long Island were formed from sand carried from the eastern tip along westward currents. Sea walls seal off sand and sediment, preventing this drift, starving beaches farther west.

Mr. Young added that erosion became more pronounced at the edges of sea walls because water bends as it rushes off the wall face, carving out the sand on the sides.

“If you build a structure like that, the beach is going to disappear,” he said. “The sea wall is not there to protect the beach. It is there to protect the property behind the beach.”

by Michael Schwirtz, NY Times |  Read more:

Richard Perry/The New York Times

John James Audubon - Great Blue Heron (1835)

Worth noting, not only did Audubon paint this exquisite watercolour, but he was also the discoverer of the subspecies illustrated here (Ardea herodias occidentalis) in the same year as this painting.
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Pablo Picasso, Two Women Sitting at a Bar, 1902.
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Grace Hartigan - New England October, 1957
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So You Want to Be a #Longreads Superstar

When I read “My Gucci Addiction,” Buzz Bissinger’s unexpected shopaholic leather-daddy confession in GQ, the first thing I thought of was a smiling, spritely man on a computer screen, masturbating with a pair of spotless white tennis shoes. I was at a college party, huddled drinks in hand with a bunch of friends around a laptop open to the Chat Roulette. We talked to an on-duty German military officer about the Red Army Faction and watched an insistent 14-year-old prove his joint-rolling skills before we hit upon the shoe masturbator. His mic was off, but he communicated nonverbally that he wanted us to watch him jerk off using a pair of sneakers on his hands. Requests like these were blamed for the swift death of Chat Roulette, but in the obituaries we rarely heard about the exhibitionists who were successful, who found curious and willing audiences. We told him to go for it, and boy did he.

Those of us who read Bissinger’s GQ piece were giving the same go-ahead. It’s as if Bissinger invited readers to watch him try on his 41 pairs of leather pants one by one and tell him what a bad, bad boy he was for buying them. Many on the Internet who read popular long essays (often hashtagged #longform) were happy enough to join in. “My Gucci Addiction” spawned a whole ecosystem of response pieces that variously suggest he is mentally ill, trolling all of America, or a role model and spokesman for male shopaholics everywhere. He may be one or all three, but his essay is better explained as a large-scale work of exhibitionism. Instead of sneakers, he’s using expensive apparel, but it’s the same principle. (...)

Some people want celebrity for the money, some want it for the affirmation, but some just want to be watched. It’s clear from this essay that he — already part of a very small tier of commercially successful non-fiction writers who aren’t obvious frauds — doesn’t just want to be critically acclaimed or best-selling. He wants to be Us Weekly famous. You know, real famous. “My Gucci Addiction” obviously draws inspiration from the MTV show Cribs, which always includes a tour of the closet and the bedroom. Like a rock star or Hollywood leading man, Bissinger inventories his wardrobe: “I own eighty-one leather jackets, seventy-five pairs of boots, forty-one pairs of leather pants, thirty-two pairs of haute couture jeans, ten evening jackets, and 115 pairs of leather gloves.” (...)

Exhibitionists have found ways to use and even structure the development of online platforms like Tumblr, Vine, and Snapchat, but the assumption has been that their domain would stay limited to visual media. But when you hook anything up the Internet — including non-fiction — you change its nature in a way that makes it particularly attractive to show-offs of all kinds. The #longreads hashtag was supposed to be about the viability of the proud and enduring essay on the web, not the name for a new form of writing, yet “My Gucci Addiction” is a #longread through and through: The piece contains a call for its audience, a call for the reaction pieces and the controversy and the gossip. Bissinger isn’t navel-gazing; he’s talking about himself, but looking right at us.

Even though we mostly discuss online virality of pictures of cats and funny Youtube videos, the huge potential audience for long-form writing has profoundly altered the essayist’s incentive structure. For the first time, a single piece of writing can find an audience far larger than the readership of the publication in which it appears. As longform nonfiction has found a home on the Internet, an echo-chamber effect has developed by which a piece that breaks through is guaranteed a few signal boosts from aggregators like Longreads and Byliner, both of which picked up “My Gucci Addiction” within the day. If nothing else, Bissinger’s performance marks the maturity of the #longreads form. Since no one has yet taken a hard look at Mike Daisey’s sex life, Buzz heads into rehab as the first #longreads rockstar. Just the way he wanted it.

by Malcolm Harris, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Hongkou Flashers Liu Dao, 2010

Cressida Campbell, Olive Oil and Fennel
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House Passes Cispa Cybersecurity Bill

[ed. Congress: the biggest terrorist threat to America today. Kill gun control but facilitate warrantless eavesdropping and legal immunity for corporations disclosing private personal information. Pretty handy work for one week's effort. See also: Oppose Cispa if you value any privacy in our digital world.]

The House of Representatives passed a controversial cybersecurity bill on Thursday in the face of warnings that it undermined privacy and a threat from White House advisers warning they would recommend President Barack Obama veto the legislation.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (Cispa) passed by a 288-127 vote, receiving support from 92 Democrats. It will move to the Senate and then to the president's desk.

The bill allows private businesses to share customers' personal information with any government entity, including the National Security Agency.

Reintroduced in February after failing to pass Congress last year, the bill would afford legal protection to the government and businesses to share data with each other on cyber threats.

Its co-author, Mike Rogers, the intelligence committee chairman and a Republican from Michigan, argues that cyberattacks and espionage, particularly from China, where a number of high profile attacks have originated recently, are a number one threat to US economic security.

"We have a constitutional obligation to defend this nation," said Rogers, on the House floor. "This is the answer to empower cyber information sharing to protect this nation, to allow those companies to protect themselves and move on to economic prosperity. If you want to take a shot across China's bow, this is the answer."

Earlier this week, Rogers dismissed opponents of the bill as teenagers in their basements. (...)

Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority leader, expressed the same concerns shared by the White House and civil liberty groups that the bill had failed to strike a "crucial balance between security and liberty".

"Im disappointed that we did not address some of the concerns mentioned by the White House about personal information," Pelosi said. "Unfortunately, it offers no policies and did not allow any amendments or real solution that upholds Americans' right to privacy."

Last year, global protests by a coalition of internet activists and web companies, including Google and Wikipedia and Twitter, scuppered a similar bill, the Hollywood-backed Stop Online Piracy Act. At the time they warned that future attempts to push through legislation that threatened digital freedoms would be met with a similar response.

Holmes Wilson, co-founder of online advocacy group Fight For the Future, said he and other critics would continue to lobby against Cispa. "It would have been so easy to fix this bill and require sites to strip out personal information before passing them to the government." he said.

He said amendments had been made in closed sessions and it was "not out of the question" that privacy protections had been left out intentionally at the behest of the intelligence agencies.

House intelligence committee leaders addressed some privacy concerns by endorsing an amendment that gave the job of clearing house for the exchange data to the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, rather than a military agency.

The bill has attracted support from tech giants including IBM who are keen for liability protection from consumers whose information they have shared, said Wilson. "Right now if the government wants users' information, the company can say no because it opens them up to being sued," he said. "If Cispa passes, there will be no legal restraint."

by Karen McVeigh and Dominic Rushe, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

Arizona Muse for Louis Vuitton
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Photo: markk

Building a Better Bitcoin

How much is a bitcoin worth?

Well, it's worth whatever somebody will pay for a unit of the online currency, which as I write this is $209, up from $142 last Friday, $44 a month ago, and $4.93 a year ago. This huge run-up — the latest spike began with EU's botched rescue of Cyprus's banks — has led to much talk of a bitcoin bubble.

The word "bubble" has been greatly overused in recent years. My understanding is that you're in a bubble when the price of an asset becomes completely detached from its intrinsic value. It's a bubble when the price you pay for share of stock cannot conceivably be recouped from the earnings of the company (this was Cisco in 2000) or the price you pay for house cannot conceivably be recouped from rental earnings (this was Phoenix in 2005). The only way you can avoid losing money on your investment is for a greater fool to come along — in the case of real estate, a greater fool backed by an even-greater-fool lender — and take the asset off your hands.

Bitcoins have no intrinsic value. They lay claim to no stream of future earnings. A price of $198 per bitcoin is surely not justified by the fundamentals. But neither is a price of 10 cents. There are no fundamentals.

So as an asset, Bitcoin (I'm trying to follow Maria Bustillos' rule of capitalizing the system but lowercasing the coins) is clearly in a bubble, and always has been. But maybe asset pricing is the wrong lens to be looking through here. A dollar bill lays claim to no stream of future earnings, yet nobody says there's a "dollar bubble" because somebody's willing to give you a candy bar for one. This even though a dollar is almost certain to buy you less in a few years than it does now. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 2013 dollar has one-tenth the purchasing power of the 1950 version.

By contrast, bitcoins have been skyrocketing in value. This sounds like a good thing, but for a currency it's really not. An economy where bitcoins were the means of exchange would have experienced 98% deflation over the past year. No one would be able to repay any loans, or really do business at all. What we want out of a currency is not price appreciation but stability. Monetary economists differ on whether the optimal stability is inflation of 0% or in the low single digits. Nobody thinks 98% deflation is healthy, and all but a small minority seem to think any deflation at all is a bad thing.

So ... bitcoins are without intrinsic value as assets, yet they have risen too fast in value to be much use as a currency. Kind of makes your head hurt, doesn't it? But it also sounds a bit like a familiar commodity, gold, that's also been on a roll, with its dollar price quintupling over the past decade. Gold has, over time, not been the greatest of assets to invest in. It's not the greatest of currencies, either: Back when the gold standard was widely adhered to, nations struggled regularly with deflation. There's persuasive evidence that the primary cause of the Great Depression was a refusal to unlink currencies from gold until too late. Still, gold has held onto its purchasing power over time. It remains something that people turn to in times of financial uncertainty such as now. And while there are skeptics these days who talk of a gold "bubble," they don't really mean it. That is, they may expect the price of gold to decline from the current $1,575 an ounce, but they don't expect it to suddenly lose most of its value, as assets tend to do when real bubbles burst.

There are some key differences between gold and bitcoins: Gold is a shiny metal that can be made into jewelry, electronic components, and dental fillings — meaning it has some intrinsic value, albeit nowhere near $1,575 a troy ounce. Bitcoins are made of otherwise valueless digits. And while mankind has treated gold as a store of value for millennia, bitcoins were first unleashed upon the world in January 2009, by a mysterious and pseudonymous cryptographer (or cryptographers).

But there are important similarities. Both bitcoins and gold are pretty much impossible to counterfeit. (That is, whatever fakes you might be able to produce won't get past an expert.) Also, bitcoins are "mined" — by computers that have to solve a tough mathematical problem in order to free a block of 25 coins. This isn't exactly the same as gold mining, but in one crucial aspect it's the same. Unlike dollars, which can be created at will by the Federal Reserve, the supply of both bitcoins and gold is determined by forces outside the control of elected or appointed government officials. Given the long history of governments debasing their currencies to the point of worthlessness, the limited-supply, non-governmental nature of gold and of bitcoins has its attractions.

by Justin Fox, HBR |  Read more:

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