Sunday, June 9, 2013
A Letter to Verizon Customers
Today, President Obama issued the following letter to all Verizon customers:
Dear Verizon Customers,
Yesterday it came to light that the National Security Agency has been collecting millions of phone records from you each and every day. Since that news was released, many of you have called the White House with questions and concerns about this new program. To save my time and yours, here are answers to three of the F.A.Q.s (Frequently Asked Questions) we’ve been hearing from you:
1. Will I be charged extra for this service?
I’m happy to say that the answer is no. While the harvesting and surveillance of your domestic phone calls were not a part of your original Verizon service contract, the National Security Agency is providing this service entirely free of charge.
2. If I add a phone to my account, will those calls also be monitored?
Once again, the answer is good news. If you want to add a child or any other family member to your Verizon account, their phone calls—whom they called, when, and the duration of the call—will all be monitored by the United States government, at no additional cost.
3. Can the National Security Agency help me understand my Verizon bill?
Unfortunately, no. The National Security Agency has tried, but failed, to understand Verizon’s bills. Please call Verizon customer service and follow the series of electronic prompts.
Dear Verizon Customers,Yesterday it came to light that the National Security Agency has been collecting millions of phone records from you each and every day. Since that news was released, many of you have called the White House with questions and concerns about this new program. To save my time and yours, here are answers to three of the F.A.Q.s (Frequently Asked Questions) we’ve been hearing from you:
1. Will I be charged extra for this service?
I’m happy to say that the answer is no. While the harvesting and surveillance of your domestic phone calls were not a part of your original Verizon service contract, the National Security Agency is providing this service entirely free of charge.
2. If I add a phone to my account, will those calls also be monitored?
Once again, the answer is good news. If you want to add a child or any other family member to your Verizon account, their phone calls—whom they called, when, and the duration of the call—will all be monitored by the United States government, at no additional cost.
3. Can the National Security Agency help me understand my Verizon bill?
Unfortunately, no. The National Security Agency has tried, but failed, to understand Verizon’s bills. Please call Verizon customer service and follow the series of electronic prompts.
by Andy Borowitz, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Pete Souza
D-12.Apr.1993 19x39 cm. Pen drawing on parchment, collage 林孝彦. HAYASHI Takahiko. 1993 photo presented by Galerie Tokyo Humanité
via:
Don’t Take Your Vitamins
Last month, Katy Perry shared her secret to good health with her 37 million followers on Twitter. “I’m all about that supplement & vitamin LYFE!” the pop star wrote, posting a snapshot of herself holding up three large bags of pills. There is one disturbing fact about vitamins, however, that Katy didn’t mention.
Derived from “vita,” meaning life in Latin, vitamins are necessary to convert food into energy. When people don’t get enough vitamins, they suffer diseases like scurvy and rickets. The question isn’t whether people need vitamins. They do. The questions are how much do they need, and do they get enough in foods?
Nutrition experts argue that people need only the recommended daily allowance — the amount of vitamins found in a routine diet. Vitamin manufacturers argue that a regular diet doesn’t contain enough vitamins, and that more is better. Most people assume that, at the very least, excess vitamins can’t do any harm. It turns out, however, that scientists have known for years that large quantities of supplemental vitamins can be quite harmful indeed.
In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, 29,000 Finnish men, all smokers, had been given daily vitamin E, beta carotene, both or a placebo. The study found that those who had taken beta carotene for five to eight years were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.
Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.
Then, in 2004, a review of 14 randomized trials for the Cochrane Database found that the supplemental vitamins A, C, E and beta carotene, and a mineral, selenium, taken to prevent intestinal cancers, actually increased mortality.
Another review, published in 2005 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that in 19 trials of nearly 136,000 people, supplemental vitamin E increased mortality. Also that year, a study of people with vascular disease or diabetes found that vitamin E increased the risk of heart failure. And in 2011, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association tied vitamin E supplements to an increased risk of prostate cancer.
Finally, last year, a Cochrane review found that “beta carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A.”
What explains this connection between supplemental vitamins and increased rates of cancer and mortality? The key word is antioxidants.
Derived from “vita,” meaning life in Latin, vitamins are necessary to convert food into energy. When people don’t get enough vitamins, they suffer diseases like scurvy and rickets. The question isn’t whether people need vitamins. They do. The questions are how much do they need, and do they get enough in foods?Nutrition experts argue that people need only the recommended daily allowance — the amount of vitamins found in a routine diet. Vitamin manufacturers argue that a regular diet doesn’t contain enough vitamins, and that more is better. Most people assume that, at the very least, excess vitamins can’t do any harm. It turns out, however, that scientists have known for years that large quantities of supplemental vitamins can be quite harmful indeed.
In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, 29,000 Finnish men, all smokers, had been given daily vitamin E, beta carotene, both or a placebo. The study found that those who had taken beta carotene for five to eight years were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.
Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.
Then, in 2004, a review of 14 randomized trials for the Cochrane Database found that the supplemental vitamins A, C, E and beta carotene, and a mineral, selenium, taken to prevent intestinal cancers, actually increased mortality.
Another review, published in 2005 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that in 19 trials of nearly 136,000 people, supplemental vitamin E increased mortality. Also that year, a study of people with vascular disease or diabetes found that vitamin E increased the risk of heart failure. And in 2011, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association tied vitamin E supplements to an increased risk of prostate cancer.
Finally, last year, a Cochrane review found that “beta carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A.”
What explains this connection between supplemental vitamins and increased rates of cancer and mortality? The key word is antioxidants.
by Paul A. Offit, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sabine Dowek
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Make Haste Slowly: The Kikkoman Creed
[ed. The history of soy sauce.]
Directed by Academy Award™ Nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker, Make Haste Slowly: The Kikkoman Creed tells the story of the rich heritage and family creed that shaped Kikkoman for over 300 years.
Isogaba maware is a Japanese axiom that translates into "Make Haste Slowly." It means to advance and grow, but to do so with tremendous thought and care. From its meticulous six-month natural brewing process to a heritage dating back to feudal Japan, Kikkoman has exemplified this philosophy since its humble beginnings in the seventeenth century.
Isogaba maware is a Japanese axiom that translates into "Make Haste Slowly." It means to advance and grow, but to do so with tremendous thought and care. From its meticulous six-month natural brewing process to a heritage dating back to feudal Japan, Kikkoman has exemplified this philosophy since its humble beginnings in the seventeenth century.
Code Red
It’s 1:30 a.m. An orange extension cord curls out of Carleton Lounge. “It blew out,” an officer tells me. It supplies, or rather did supply, the power for a room of students who flew, bused, trained, or drove in for hackNY’s spring 2013 hackathon.
A hackathon is a 24-hour race to mash your code with other people’s data, and perhaps some hardware, to make something you hope will seem cool and won’t break when you’re onstage the next day, trying to win the approval of nine judges and hundreds of your bleary-eyed peers.
There are prizes—like Sphero, a robotic ball you can control with an Android phone—and money, but nothing more than $1,000. Tumblr and Foursquare are here, as is 4chan’s founder, Christopher Poole, aka “moot.” Most students come with friends; some work alone. Everyone is tired. A student sleeps on a windowsill, a pillow under his head and a pile of clementines at his feet. Another tells me, his blue eyes not blinking, “I’ll sleep whenever I can’t stay awake anymore.”
Twelve hours, 360 Red Bulls, and over 800 cans of soda later, the attendees crowd an auditorium to watch the demos. Some sit on the floor and some wander in and out of the lobby, crushing more free sandwiches into their mouths and backpacks. The smell of BO floats through the back of the room. The boy next to me puts his head in his lap and naps through most of the presentations. He tells me he didn’t sleep last night. His team doesn’t win a single prize.
This is a snapshot of programming at Columbia, where, as in many universities across the country, computer science is booming and hackathons like the one described here are springing up with unprecedented speed. Here, the number of students projected to graduate with a degree in CS has risen 50 percent in the past two years. So has the number of students registered for the introductory class, W1004 (commonly referred to as “ten-oh-four”). On the national level, the Computing Research Association reported an “astonishing” 29.2 percent increase in new computing undergraduate majors.
CS and programming have more widespread appeal than ever before. Startups are frequently acquired for millions of dollars—and sometimes, as in the case of Instagram, for $1 billion. Starting salaries for graduates of top schools are commonly close to six figures. CS has gained cultural appeal through The Social Network, which grossed more than $220 million worldwide. “We’re treated more and more as if we possess superpowers,” explains Sam Aarons, a School of Engineering and Applied Science junior studying CS and the owner of Print@CU. “I can’t even be at a family gathering without somebody asking me if I have any ideas for companies I want to start or if I want to be the next under-25 billionaire.”
Yet the flash and money mask, as they so often do, the sadder stories of loss and failure. Ilya Zhitomirskiy was the co-founder of Diaspora, which once threatened Facebook’s stronghold over social media. Aaron Swartz was arguably one of the co-founders of Reddit and led the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Swartz was 26 when he killed himself. Zhitomirskiy was 22.
This past February, the Engineering student council released a newsletter containing a short paragraph saying that Tejraj Antooa, a computer science student who was not enrolled at the time, “perished on January 24, 2013 near his home in Elmont, Long Island.” The coroner’s office determined the cause of death was suicide. A flutter of Facebook activity expressed grief and anger, but after an aborted attempt to draft a letter criticizing the seemingly slow-acting administration, the formal conversation on campus ended. There was no memorial service. There was no space for discussion. (...)
What follows is by no means the experience of every undergraduate in the CS department. Not everybody is suffering. Not everybody is overlooked. Instead, these stories are meant to show the perspectives of the alienated or underrepresented who, if they are not merely silenced or told they are “wrong,” are placed on a shelf labeled “We’ll get to that later.”
A hackathon is a 24-hour race to mash your code with other people’s data, and perhaps some hardware, to make something you hope will seem cool and won’t break when you’re onstage the next day, trying to win the approval of nine judges and hundreds of your bleary-eyed peers.There are prizes—like Sphero, a robotic ball you can control with an Android phone—and money, but nothing more than $1,000. Tumblr and Foursquare are here, as is 4chan’s founder, Christopher Poole, aka “moot.” Most students come with friends; some work alone. Everyone is tired. A student sleeps on a windowsill, a pillow under his head and a pile of clementines at his feet. Another tells me, his blue eyes not blinking, “I’ll sleep whenever I can’t stay awake anymore.”
Twelve hours, 360 Red Bulls, and over 800 cans of soda later, the attendees crowd an auditorium to watch the demos. Some sit on the floor and some wander in and out of the lobby, crushing more free sandwiches into their mouths and backpacks. The smell of BO floats through the back of the room. The boy next to me puts his head in his lap and naps through most of the presentations. He tells me he didn’t sleep last night. His team doesn’t win a single prize.
This is a snapshot of programming at Columbia, where, as in many universities across the country, computer science is booming and hackathons like the one described here are springing up with unprecedented speed. Here, the number of students projected to graduate with a degree in CS has risen 50 percent in the past two years. So has the number of students registered for the introductory class, W1004 (commonly referred to as “ten-oh-four”). On the national level, the Computing Research Association reported an “astonishing” 29.2 percent increase in new computing undergraduate majors.
CS and programming have more widespread appeal than ever before. Startups are frequently acquired for millions of dollars—and sometimes, as in the case of Instagram, for $1 billion. Starting salaries for graduates of top schools are commonly close to six figures. CS has gained cultural appeal through The Social Network, which grossed more than $220 million worldwide. “We’re treated more and more as if we possess superpowers,” explains Sam Aarons, a School of Engineering and Applied Science junior studying CS and the owner of Print@CU. “I can’t even be at a family gathering without somebody asking me if I have any ideas for companies I want to start or if I want to be the next under-25 billionaire.”
Yet the flash and money mask, as they so often do, the sadder stories of loss and failure. Ilya Zhitomirskiy was the co-founder of Diaspora, which once threatened Facebook’s stronghold over social media. Aaron Swartz was arguably one of the co-founders of Reddit and led the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Swartz was 26 when he killed himself. Zhitomirskiy was 22.
This past February, the Engineering student council released a newsletter containing a short paragraph saying that Tejraj Antooa, a computer science student who was not enrolled at the time, “perished on January 24, 2013 near his home in Elmont, Long Island.” The coroner’s office determined the cause of death was suicide. A flutter of Facebook activity expressed grief and anger, but after an aborted attempt to draft a letter criticizing the seemingly slow-acting administration, the formal conversation on campus ended. There was no memorial service. There was no space for discussion. (...)
What follows is by no means the experience of every undergraduate in the CS department. Not everybody is suffering. Not everybody is overlooked. Instead, these stories are meant to show the perspectives of the alienated or underrepresented who, if they are not merely silenced or told they are “wrong,” are placed on a shelf labeled “We’ll get to that later.”
by Kyla Cheung, The Eye (Columbia Daily Spectator) | Read more:
Image: Suze Meyers
Waving My Tweak Flag High
[ed. Fascinating video by Jean-Luc Godard documenting the creative process behind the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. If you find this article interesting be sure to read the comments section, too.]
In my years of writing and performing songs I’ve come to realize that small, even accidental, lyric changes can greatly improve (or screw up) a song. Sometimes I notice it in my own songs; an accident of vocal delivery on stage one night might turn a light bulb on and then remain an integral part of a song forever, leaving me to lament that my officially released album recording is weaker than the currently performed version.
This might be because of a mere couple words’ difference. Sometimes I notice it in other artists’ work when hearing an unearthed early demo version of a well-known song, or a slightly different live performance. Some tweaks are noticeable only to obsessives, but other tweaks, equally small in terms of how many words are changed, can become legendary. Woody Guthrie wrote a song in 1940 with the recurring tag line, “God blessed America for me,” and it sat ignored in his pile of unused songs for years. But with those few words changed to “This land was made for you and me,” the entire song became part of the bedrock of 20th-century songwriting.
Getting an insight into this process is part of why it’s a joy to see a songwriter’s original lyric sheet, like Bob Dylan’s 1965 original typed page of lyrics for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which became widely accessible to public view when it was acquired by Christie’s for an auction in 2011 (it was valued at more than $50,000, but was ultimately removed from the sale). All of Dylan’s ballpoint pen corrections and additions surely made it a cooler, more valuable auction piece than if it had just burst from his forehead as a complete, finished work. Why? Because you are not just getting his handwriting, you are getting a map of the inner workings of the famously elusive Dylan’s mind at a specific moment in time. (...)
Sometimes small lyric changes are due to practical circumstance, but end up meaning more than perhaps intended. On June 4, 1968, for example, the Rolling Stones entered Olympic Studios in London to begin recording “Sympathy For the Devil,” which at that time included the lyric “I shouted out ‘Who killed Kennedy?’/when after all, it was you and me.” But within 24 hours Robert Kennedy too had been murdered, and the recorded lyric had to be changed to the plural, “Who killed the Kennedys?”
The original line can be seen as asking a specific, non-rhetorical question, which we just happen to still be asking: Who did kill John Kennedy? However, because Robert Kennedy’s killer was undeniably Sirhan Sirhan, the revised line, “Who killed the Kennedys?” still asks “who,” but in the new context that “who” seems to really ask “Why?” — no longer merely a police procedural question about facts but a more deeply resonant question about human nature: Why do such assassinations happen? It can be argued that the line now more clearly questions the general human spirit — not just the specific spirit of whoever shot J.F.K.
Friday, June 7, 2013
The Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World
Joe Carcello has a great job. The 59-year-old has an annual salary of $52,700, gets five weeks of vacation a year, and is looking forward to retiring on the sizable nest egg in his 401(k), which his employer augments with matching funds. After 26 years at his company, he’s not worried about layoffs. In 2009, as the recession deepened, his bosses handed out raises. “I’m just grateful to come here to work every day,” he says.
This wouldn’t be remarkable except that Carcello works in retail, one of the stingiest industries in America, with some of the most dissatisfied workers. On May 29, Wal-Mart Stores employees in Miami, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay Area began a weeklong strike. (A Walmart spokesman told MSNBC the strike was a “publicity stunt.”) Workers at an Amazon.com fulfillment center in Leipzig, Germany, also recently held strikes to demand higher pay and better benefits. (An Amazon spokesman says its employees earn more than the average warehouse worker.) In its 30-year history, Carcello’s employer, Costco, has never had significant labor troubles.
Costco Wholesale, the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.
Despite the sagging economy and challenges to the industry, Costco pays its hourly workers an average of $20.89 an hour, not including overtime (vs. the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour). By comparison, Walmart said its average wage for full-time employees in the U.S. is $12.67 an hour, according to a letter it sent in April to activist Ralph Nader. Eighty-eight percent of Costco employees have company-sponsored health insurance; Walmart says that “more than half” of its do. Costco workers with coverage pay premiums that amount to less than 10 percent of the overall cost of their plans. It treats its employees well in the belief that a happier work environment will result in a more profitable company. “I just think people need to make a living wage with health benefits,” says Jelinek. “It also puts more money back into the economy and creates a healthier country. It’s really that simple.” (...)
Like his predecessor, Jelinek, 59, preaches simplicity, and he has a propensity for aphorisms ending with “good things will happen to you.” “This isn’t Harvard grad stuff,” he says. “We sell quality stuff at the best possible price. If you treat consumers with respect and treat employees with respect, good things are going to happen to you.” He vows to continue Sinegal’s legacy and doesn’t seem to mind a widespread characterization of himself as a “Jim clone.” “We don’t want to be casualties like some of these other big retailers, like the Sears of the world and Kmart and Circuit City. We are in for the long haul,” he says.
This wouldn’t be remarkable except that Carcello works in retail, one of the stingiest industries in America, with some of the most dissatisfied workers. On May 29, Wal-Mart Stores employees in Miami, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay Area began a weeklong strike. (A Walmart spokesman told MSNBC the strike was a “publicity stunt.”) Workers at an Amazon.com fulfillment center in Leipzig, Germany, also recently held strikes to demand higher pay and better benefits. (An Amazon spokesman says its employees earn more than the average warehouse worker.) In its 30-year history, Carcello’s employer, Costco, has never had significant labor troubles.
 |
| CEO Craig Jelinek |
Despite the sagging economy and challenges to the industry, Costco pays its hourly workers an average of $20.89 an hour, not including overtime (vs. the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour). By comparison, Walmart said its average wage for full-time employees in the U.S. is $12.67 an hour, according to a letter it sent in April to activist Ralph Nader. Eighty-eight percent of Costco employees have company-sponsored health insurance; Walmart says that “more than half” of its do. Costco workers with coverage pay premiums that amount to less than 10 percent of the overall cost of their plans. It treats its employees well in the belief that a happier work environment will result in a more profitable company. “I just think people need to make a living wage with health benefits,” says Jelinek. “It also puts more money back into the economy and creates a healthier country. It’s really that simple.” (...)
Like his predecessor, Jelinek, 59, preaches simplicity, and he has a propensity for aphorisms ending with “good things will happen to you.” “This isn’t Harvard grad stuff,” he says. “We sell quality stuff at the best possible price. If you treat consumers with respect and treat employees with respect, good things are going to happen to you.” He vows to continue Sinegal’s legacy and doesn’t seem to mind a widespread characterization of himself as a “Jim clone.” “We don’t want to be casualties like some of these other big retailers, like the Sears of the world and Kmart and Circuit City. We are in for the long haul,” he says.
by Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image: Ryan Lowry
The Most Dangerous Court in America
Much has been written recently about the four vacant seats (out of eleven) on the D.C. Circuit and the Republican filibuster on all of Obama’s nominations to the court. However, most writers have followed Obama’s lead in treating the vacancies as creating a problem of “timely access to justice,” Democrats have become so accustomed to Republican efforts to weaken legislation or federal agencies through the filibuster of key personnel that they are unable to notice when something different is happening. As the D.C. Circuit’s current constitution and body of decisions show, Republicans have effectively transformed the court, which now provides a second shot for Republicans to overturn and amend legislation and regulations, into an alternate route to defeat government regulations. What we’re witnessing is a spectacular power grab by conservative legislators, a twenty-first-century version of Marbury v. Madison in slow motion.
Some have argued that the D.C. Circuit’s character is different as a matter of historical accident—lawyers simply treat it as the proper venue for challenging (or supporting) executive power. But there are important structural qualities that distinguish it from other federal courts. For one, it is among the most politicized of the already-partisan federal courts; the D.C. Circuit is often regarded as a stepping stone for the Supreme Court, with four of the nine current justices having served there. Yet the D.C. Circuit is not just a springboard to the big leagues. It is also accorded a special privilege that other circuits are not: it has jurisdiction over any case involving a federal agency. This means that if a company is fined by the EPA in San Francisco, for example, it can choose to appeal its case in California or with the D.C. Circuit. In the term ending in 2012, over 40 percent of the D.C. Circuit’s cases involved a federal agency, compared to less than 14 percent for the remaining circuits. As a result, the D.C. Circuit has a disproportionate influence on federal regulatory power. Whether a regulation concerns banking institutions (through the Securities and Exchange Commission), labor relations (through the National Labor Relations Board), power and utility companies (through the Department of Energy), the D.C. Circuit has a hand in shaping it. This undeniable fact should cause concern for anyone who still be believes in a traditional separation of powers.
On its face, the D.C. Circuit, which hears cases in three-judge panels, appears roughly split between four Republicans and three Democrats, with four vacancies. However, this simple count ignores a key feature of the federal judiciary: senior judgeships. Many judges do not retire, but instead choose senior status, which makes their seat officially vacant but places them on part-time work.
On the D.C. Circuit, there are six senior judges, which is almost the number of active judges, with five having been appointed by Republicans. In all the cases decided in 2013, almost 70 percent of the three-judge panels included at least one senior judge. As a result, almost 80 percent of the panels in 2013 were composed of exclusively or a majority of Republicans.
by Moshe Z. Marvit, Dissent | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons, 2008
The Future of Armani
It was Giorgio Armani's obsession with health that led to his brush with death. For 10 days in May 2009, Armani, one of the most influential fashion designers and entrepreneurs of our time, lay in a hospital bed with what he describes as "a very serious" case of hepatitis. The cause of his illness wasn't the stress that comes from juggling a global empire of clothes, accessories, furniture, cosmetics and real estate. It was the supplements. Then 75 years old, he was drinking them every morning in a small glass as he hit the gym. "My doctor told me: Get rid of all this shit you're drinking," Armani recalls.
Armani won't say exactly what he was taking, only that the substance poisoned his liver. Why he was taking it, however, is clear: The house Armani has built is a reflection of himself—the trim, toned, tanned and T-shirted figure that is synonymous with the brand—and he wants to secure a long life for both.
Few people in the fashion world are as entwined with their brands. In most companies, a creative director designs and an executive manages. Armani does both. Many important designers, including Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs, work under contract for brands that aren't their own. Armani hasn't designed for anyone else in more than 30 years. Most houses are owned by large conglomerates, and for those that still belong to their founding families, ownership is usually shared. Armani owns 100 percent of Giorgio Armani SpA.
Armani takes full responsibility, and credit, for anything that bears his name. At a meeting last year about a new Armani-branded hotel in Marrakech—hotels are the designer's latest big venture—Armani sparred with the architect Jean-Michel Gathy over the layout of the rooms. "This bathroom is too big. It's a bathroom with a house on the side," Armani said in French. "I tell you this is a beautiful room. You can walk around naked, and no one will see you," insisted Gathy. "You don't need to walk around naked every day," snapped Armani. "This is too structured, too busy. I want simplicity, simplicity." The layout has since been changed.Gathy says that when he was negotiating his contract to design the hotel, Armani did not want him to be publicly recognized as the architect. Gathy, who has designed many luxury hotels worldwide, had to persist for several months before Armani backed down. (Armani did not comment on Gathy's contract.) "He's a control freak," says Gathy. "But that's what it's like to work with Armani. He's the old man, the icon, the alpha male in the room. And that's no problem."
The Armani way has bred huge success. The Italian designer revolutionized the wardrobes of professional women in the 1980s, taking them out of floral skirts and putting them into chic, deconstructed pantsuits in elegant neutral colors. He unleashed the marketing power of Hollywood and introduced high fashion to the red carpet. His company's unified direction and financial heft—it had $800 million in cash on its books as of 2010—have allowed it to remain independent, even as much of the world's fashion business has coalesced into the hands of two large French corporations. People trained at Armani are among the best recruits in the fashion business, according to executives at rival firms. More than $8 billion worth of Armani products was sold around the world in 2010. He is worth $7.2 billion, according to Forbes, and owns nine homes and two yachts.
"Giorgio is one of the few designers in the world who has always understood consumers," says Gabriella Forte, a consultant for Dolce & Gabbana who was a top executive at Armani for nearly 20 years. "His brand isn't only about fashion; it's bigger than that."
by Allasandra Galloni, WSJ | Read more:
Images: Paul Wetherell
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Seasteading
The Seasteading Institute was founded in 2008 by PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer best known for being Milton Friedman’s grandson. Although both men are outspoken libertarians, the nonprofit institute insists that it isn’t politically motivated. It claims to want more space for political experimentation—and the beauty of aquatic governance experiments is that they’re free to fail on their own merits. “If we can solve the engineering challenges of Seasteading, two-thirds of the Earth’s surface becomes open for these political start-ups,” explains Friedman, a self-styled cult leader who’s known to the community as just Patri. The Seasteaders have chosen as their motto “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom’—an apparent spin on “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,” a Maoist policy which encouraged dissidents to speak out and then used their views as a pretext to jail them.
The mantra was repeated many times during the Seasteading Institute’s third annual conference, which took place one week before Ephemerisle in the basement of the San Francisco Grand Meridien Hotel. The Institute hasn’t been officially affiliated with Ephemerisle since 2009, but a number of attendees, many of them Seasteading Institute staffers, had plans to go to the festival and encouraged me to come party with them. A few older donors to the Seasteading cause planned to make appearances at Ephemerisle, expecting to look out of place in the festival’s trippy, offbeat surroundings. There was a rumor that Peter Thiel would go, too, but no one could confirm it.The crowd at the conference was disproportionately white, male (I counted maybe ten women in the room) and wealthy (tickets started at $715), and the vast majority of attendees needed no prompting to profess their tax-hating libertarian views just minutes into a conversation. The junket also brought together a number of academics, who, I later learned, had been courted by the Seasteading Institute because their expertise—legal, environmental, or technical—happened to contribute to the greater Seasteading project. The experts had no plans to visit Ephemerisle; in fact, the movement’s radical, libertine side seemed to elude them completely.
Like Ephemerisle, the tenor of the conference was scrappy, defiant, and idealistic. The event was staffed by a group of a dozen Seasteading Institute “ambassadors,” who proselytize for the cause all over the world, and talks ranged from the highly speculative—“Seasteading for Medical Tourism,” “The Economic Viability of Large Floating Structures”—to the practical: “Seastead Security,” for instance, outlined how water cannons and noise machines can protect the cities from pirates and government agents. A panel of legal experts offered a dense explanation of the legal aspects of Seasteading, which is theoretically possible since no one nation has jurisdiction over the high seas. Still, as one lawyer on the panel pointed out, there’s no way of knowing how existing countries will react to this assault on their dignity. The Seasteaders I spoke to were undeterred by the possibility of a seastead shutting down at the hands of a belligerent country or the international community. One Institute “ambassador” who spoke of Patri Friedman in hushed, reverent tones, told me she was confident that the movement was on the right side of history, and that they would be vindicated in the end.
A Costa Rican professor of agricultural engineering named Ricardo Radulovich gave one of the session’s most impassioned talks, about how terrestrial crops like tomatoes could thrive at sea and how algae could provide a sustainable energy alternative to fossil fuels. I met Radulovich, a dapper, ponytailed man in his fifties, over breakfast on the first day of the conference. After telling me about his passion for seaweed, Radulovich pulled a small vial of dried algae from his pocket and opened it on the table. Between bites of his Continental breakfast, he assured me that the powder, which smelled like fish food, would someday “feed the world.” He described his involvement in Seasteading as a conversion: “I couldn’t care less about land anymore. I was able to transcend land. It is too limited for the solutions we need.”
by Atossa Abrahamian, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Ephemerisle, 2009. Photo by Liz Henry via flickr.
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