Your Student Loan Isn’t Really a Loan

It’s becoming an annual ritual. Every June, Congress debates what to do about the interest rate on federally subsidized student loans, to avert what this year will be the imminent doubling from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. But interest rates alone don’t tell the whole story.

At a time when overall student debt approaches $1 trillion, the facts reveal that student loans aren’t loans, not in the traditional sense. They exhibit none of the qualities of modern consumer financial instruments, and are often sold under false pretenses, with the promise of a lifelong benefit that never materializes. We need to change how these loans work and have a broader conversation about what we should be doing — including bankruptcy and refinancing — to help future generations obtain a quality, affordable education, which is critical to our economic future.

The roughly two-thirds of U.S. students who take out loans to finance their college education can end up in a situation most resembling the historical concept of indenture. In medieval times, peasants would sign deeds to work land, which would then get cut in a jagged line (looking like teeth, or “dentures”). Each party would get half, and rejoining them would prove the authenticity of the contract. Colonial indentures would trade years of labor for the opportunity of transportation to the New World. The indentured could not alter the terms of the contract, no matter their circumstances. One way or another, the debt would get paid.

This is basically how student loans work. A college student might remember freshman orientation, when an instructor told them to look to their left and right, explaining, “One of you won’t graduate.” But student loans aren’t extinguished for those who don’t finish college; instead, the debt becomes a burdensome reminder of this early mistake in life. This is also true for students snookered into matriculating at sketchy for-profit colleges, which offer almost no marketable skills or career preparedness to justify the cost. And it further describes recent college graduates who, through an accident of timing, entered the real world during the Great Recession and its aftermath, finding it difficult to obtain work in their field of study.

Due to these combined factors, delinquency rates for student loans – unlike auto, credit card or even mortgage debt – have risen the past two years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But student debt is something you carry for the rest of your life. It’s nearly impossible to refinance student loans, despite the current low-rate environment, primarily because of the high credit risk and lack of collateral. And unlike most other loans, you cannot get rid of student debt through bankruptcy.

This happened almost by accident. Before 1976, student debt was treated the same as any other in the bankruptcy process. Amid rising default rates – yes, even back then – Congress got it in its head that people were ripping off the government for a free education and then shedding the loans (a couple of well-placed stories about doctors declaring bankruptcy after graduating from medical school added to the panic). In an effort to stop this, Congress passed a law permitting students only to discharge loans in bankruptcy five years after origination, unless they demonstrated undue hardship.

In 1990 the five-year rule was extended to seven years, and then in 1998 Congress dropped that requirement altogether, making undue hardship the only way to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. And undue hardship is a very large chore to prove, according to Bob Lawless, law professor at the University of Illinois. “The courts require proof of an inability to get by without a modification,” Lawless told Salon. “They’re reluctant to allow a discharge if someone just has a lower-paying job and can’t afford the payment.” So the bankruptcy law has become harsher at the same time that college tuition has ballooned, increasing demand for student loans. As then-law professor Elizabeth Warren said in 2007, “Why should students who are trying to finance an education be treated more harshly than someone … who racked up tens of thousands of dollars gambling?”

In addition to having no escape from their loans, students must deal with aggressive creditors that can get to virtually any income source to secure payment – paychecks and tax refunds included. The Department of Education uses an “army of private debt collectors,” some of the most notorious financial operators out there, to intimidate and harass student borrowers. These collectors earned $1 billion in commissions from taxpayers in 2011. They get paid bonuses for extracting higher payments, and they can also rack up additional fees virtually endlessly. That’s because student debt has no statute of limitations on collectors, unlike most other forms of debt. The government can even collect student loan payments from Social Security checks, thanks to a 1996 law (this is not theoretical, as growing numbers of seniors are entering retirement with student debt).

So, through a series of bad laws, student debt has become an inescapable trap, a terrible burden on those whose higher education dreams don’t pan out, and a significant burden even on successful graduates. Loan debt now averages $26,000 per student, up 40 percent in seven years, with significant chunks owing $50,000 or $100,000. Princeton professor Jesse Rothsteinargued  in a recent working paper that graduates burdened by debt will choose higher-paying jobs to pay off the loans, draining the talent pool for lower-paid, but critical, “public interest” job sectors like education, government or nonprofits. This further erodes the nation’s seed corn and funnels the best and brightest into the financial industry or other higher-paying power centers, reducing entrepreneurship in the bargain. Student debtors also put off major purchases like houses or cars, and the Federal Reserve believes this is having a serious negative effect on our economy.

How do we quit loading up 18-year-olds with a risky gamble that could impact the rest of their lives? It will take more than just a low interest rate, though a variable rate that changes over time (the House Republican plan) or one that isn’t capped (the Obama administration plan) will just make things worse. Obviously a lower rate translates into lower payments, but it’s time to dismantle the treatment afforded student loans, and to eliminate the extreme dependence on them.

by David Dayden, Salon |  Read more:

Image: hxdbzxy via Shutterstock/Salon

Marco Arduini , At Golf. 1969
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I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Like scabies and syphilis, Manic Pixie Dream Girls were with us long before they were accurately named. It was the critic Nathan Rabin who coined the term in a review of the film Elizabethtown, explaining that the character of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures". She pops up everywhere these days, in films and comics and novels and television, fascinating lonely geek dudes with her magical joie-de-vivre and boring the hell out of anybody who likes their women to exist in all four dimensions.

Writing about Doctor Who this week got me thinking about sexism in storytelling, and how we rely on lazy character creation in life just as we do in fiction. The Doctor has become the ultimate soulful brooding hero in need of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to save him from the vortex of self-pity usually brought on by the death, disappearance or alternate-universe-abandonment of the last girl. We cannot have the Doctor brooding. A planet might explode somewhere, or he might decide to use his powers for evil, or his bow-tie might need adjusting. The companions of the past three years, since the most recent series reboot, have been the ultimate in lazy sexist tropification, any attempt at actually creating interesting female characters replaced by... That Girl. (...)

Manic Pixies, like other female archetypes, crop up in real life partly because fiction creates real life, particularly for those of us who grow up immersed in it. Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who know better, and men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of a girl they met in a book one day when they were young and longing.

For me, Manic Pixie Dream Girl was the story that fit. Of course, I didn't think of it in those terms; all I saw was that in the books and series I loved - mainly science fiction, comics and offbeat literature, not the mainstream films that would later make the MPDG trope famous - there were certain kinds of girl you could be, and if you weren't a busty bombshell, if you were maybe a bit weird and clever and brunette, there was another option.

And that's how I became a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The basic physical and personality traits were already there, and some of it was doubtless honed by that learned girlish desire to please - because the posture does please people, particularly the kind of sad, bright, bookish young men who have often been my friends and lovers. I had the raw materials: I’m five feet nothing, petite and small-featured with skin the color of something left on the bottom of a pond for too long and messy hair that’s sometimes dyed a shocking shade of red or pink. At least, it was before I washed all the dye out last year, partly to stop soulful Zach-Braff-a-likes following me to the shops, and partly to stop myself getting smeary technicolour splotches all over the bathroom, as if a muppet had been horribly murdered.  (...)

I’m fascinated by this character and what she means to people, because the experience of being her - of playing her - is so wildly different than it seems to appear from the outside. In recent weeks I’ve filled in the gaps of classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl films I hadn’t already sat through, and I’m struck by how many of them claim to be ironic re-imaginings of a character trope that they fail to actually interrogate in any way. Irony is, of course, the last vestige of modern crypto-misogyny: all those lazy stereotypes and hurtful put-downs are definitely a joke, right up until they aren’t, and clearly you need a man to tell you when and if you’re supposed to take sexism seriously.

by Laurie Penny, TNS |  Read more:

Image: Zooey Deschanel, uncredited

The Rock ’n’ Roll Casualty Who Became a War Hero

I asked if he ever talked about it. Jason shook his head no. Did they find out anyway? “Always.”

The first time was at Fort Benning in 1994, in the middle of the hell of basic training. The ex-cop recruits in boot camp with him said that prisoners had more freedom than they did. There were guys who faked suicide attempts to get out of basic. But Everman never had any doubts. “I was 100 percent,” he told me. “If I wasn’t, there was no way I’d get through it.”

He had three drill sergeants, two of whom were sadists. Thank God it was the easygoing one who saw it. He was reading a magazine, when he slowly looked up and stared at Everman. Then the sergeant walked over, pointing to a page in the magazine. “Is this you?” It was a photo of the biggest band in the world, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain had just killed himself, and this was a story about his suicide. Next to Cobain was the band’s onetime second guitarist. A guy with long, strawberry blond curls. “Is this you?”

Everman exhaled. “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

And that was only half of it. Jason Everman has the unique distinction of being the guy who was kicked out of Nirvana and Soundgarden, two rock bands that would sell roughly 100 million records combined. At 26, he wasn’t just Pete Best, the guy the Beatles left behind. He was Pete Best twice.

Then again, he wasn’t remotely. What Everman did afterward put him far outside the category of rock’n’roll footnote. He became an elite member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, one of those bearded guys riding around on horseback in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

I’ve known Jason Everman since we played rock shows together nearly 25 years ago. What happened to him was almost inexplicable, a cruel combination of good luck, bad luck and the kind of disappointment that would have overwhelmed me even at my most brashly defiant. After having not seen him since the early ’90s, I ended up hanging out with him in his apartment in Brooklyn last summer. We had drinks, retraced steps. We once were in the same place in our lives. But mine had since quietly transitioned from rock to parenthood. My changes were glacial. His were violent.

None of it is easy for him to talk about. Jason is one of the most guarded people I have ever met. But when I pulled up to his remote A-frame cabin near Puget Sound last winter, there he was, a sturdy, tall figure in a Black Flag sweatshirt holding a glass of red wine. This was his private place, and he was letting me into it.

Books and action figures covered one wall. Guitars and drums were scattered on the floor. But the far wall almost looked like a memorial: medals, artifacts, war photos. I took it all in, asking about a hand-decorated gun on the fireplace. “That’s how the Taliban trick out their weapons,” he said. Then I picked up his Army helmet. It seemed heavy to me. “Dude, that’s light,” he said. “That’s state of the art.” It had his blood type still written on the side: O positive.

by Clay Tarver, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ian Tilton

Bush and Mountain Flying in Alaska

Wassily Kandinsky, Green Composition, 1923

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IMG_0033 by stevenbley on Flickr.
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Elton John

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Calculating Risks

In the eyes of the law, Amy Hudon’s story was pointless, but she told it anyway, for the last time before a familiar courtroom.

“Have you ever had anybody break into your house, put tape around your head and hold a knife to your throat?” she said, sobbing. “I beg you: Don’t let another woman go through this.”

It was a Wednesday morning in May at the Asotin County Superior Courthouse, and the state was moving to release Hudon’s former captor. Monte Hoisington, 61, would soon leave the high-security compound where he’d lived for the previous 12 years among hundreds of the state’s most detested pariahs including sexual sadists and serial rapists like him and move to Spokane.

The presiding judge seemed reluctant (and said as much), but his job was to uphold the law and he couldn’t ignore the evidence: Three forensic psychologists had assessed Hoisington and concluded that by law, the thrice-convicted rapist no longer posed a threat to society.

For Hudon, hearing the judge read the expert testimony was troubling, and she wasn’t alone.

The process used to release civilly committed sex offenders is not without its critics. While the majority of committed sex offenders refuse to be treated, many decline on the advice of attorneys to even speak with clinicians, so as to avoid self-incrimination. As a result, when offenders petition for release, the evidence against them is often stale and outdated putting further pressure on prosecutors who must prove offenders suffer from mental abnormalities and can’t control their behavior.

“I think that’s essentially not a very scientific process, and one can’t confidently say that someone is cured or reformed as one does, for instance, if they were confined for tuberculosis or a communicable disease,” says Ronald Page, a clinical psychologist in Walla Walla who has diagnosed hundreds of sex predators throughout his career, including Hoisington. “There are laboratory tests to rule those [illnesses] out, and that simply doesn’t exist here.” (...)

The most widely used tool for measuring an adult male sex offender’s relative risk for recidivism in legal cases is a 10-item assessment known as a Static-99. It is based on statistical averages of sexual offender recidivism research. When assessing an offender, it considers, among other things, his age at release, any prior sexual offenses and whether or not his victims were strangers.

The Static-99 was revised and reissued as the Static-99R in 2009, after researchers pointed out that older sex offenders are at a lower risk to reoffend than younger offenders. In the updated assessment, age is weighted. Turning 60 trims three points from an offender’s score.

“One can talk about averages and about statistics with confidence as it applies to groups,” Page says. “But any individual can be an outlier within a population.”

Hoisington turned 60 three days after his 2010 annual review. These yearly reports are assembled by Department of Social and Health Services psychologists, tasked with evaluating a committed offender’s mental condition and ultimately determining whether or not he continues to qualify as a “sexually violent predator.” If an offender no longer meets the criteria of a so-called “SVP,” the court can can decide to release him into the community.

But residents at McNeil aren’t required to participate in interviews with forensic evaluators. “Therefore, any of the resulting diagnostic impressions are based solely on a review of records, which may be inaccurate, biased, or lacking sufficient detail or clarity to be helpful,” McNeil psychologist Dr. Daniel Yanisch explains in an email. “While it is generally helpful if a person interviews, it is not always required to be able to answer the forensic questions that the law is asking be reviewed.”

by Deanna Pan, PN Islander |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Ugo Rondinone
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Hokusai (1760 - 1849) Japanese Woodblock Reprint
Aoigaoka Waterfall in Edo
Series; A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls

Adventures with “Free” Checking

[Warning: this post starts off with a long and self-indulgent complaint about my bank. Feel free to scroll down to the bit where I actually get to the point.]

On March 11 of this year, I borrowed $200 from Citibank. Four days later, on March 15, Thomson Reuters was kind enough to directly deposit a substantial paycheck into my account — one which was much, much larger than $200. And ever since then, I’ve been steadily paying back Citibank the money they so kindly lent me, at an interest rate of 13.25%. On April 25, I paid $11.52. On May 23, I paid $12.15. And on June 26, I paid $12.23. At this rate, I am informed on page 5 of my most recent statement, I will pay off the balance in about 18 months.

Citibank, I hasten to add, is doing me a favor here: the standard interest rate on this kind of loan is significantly higher than what I’m paying, at 18.25%. Still, my behavior doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. I have many thousands of dollars in the bank, earning an interest rate of basically zero. In fact, I had many thousands of dollars in the bank on March 11, when I borrowed that two hundred bucks. So, what was I thinking? Why did I borrow the money in the first place, and why have I been so miserly in terms of paying it back? Do I want to maximize the amount of money that Citibank extracts from me in interest payments? It certainly seems that way.

The truth, of course, is more mundane: I had no idea that I borrowed $200 on March 11, and Citibank certainly never saw fit to inform me of the fact directly. Instead, they buried the details of the loan on page 5 of my (unopened) bank statement. Meanwhile, they quietly and automatically deducted those small minimum payments out of my checking account — payments which were small enough that I failed to notice them until this morning.

As for the $200 loan, well, it turns out that March 11 was a very busy day for my checking account. I deposited a small check for $17.75, I made two different ATM withdrawals, I automatically transferred $1,000 to an investment account, I paid my Amex bill, I made another automatic payment which goes out every week — and, on top of all that, a $250 check which I wrote on February 12 was finally cashed that day as well. All of which was enough to push me $112.56 into the red. Citibank then immediately took the opportunity to round that number up to the nearest $100 — because hey, why lend me $112.56 when you can lend me $200 instead — and automatically deposited that sum into my account, leaving me with an account balance, at the end of the day, of $87.44.

This is a yuppie overdraft: rather than charge me $35 a pop for overdrawing my account, Citibank just rounds any negative balance up to the nearest $100, and transfers that sum over from something wonderfully called a “Checking Plus” account. Which is what they call an overdraft line of credit. Naturally, when my paycheck arrived four days later, it went into my checking account, which is separate from my Checking Plus account . As a result, ever since then, I’ve had a steadily positive balance in my checking account which has been larger than the amount I owe on its overdraft facility. And ever since then, Citi has been quietly paying off the loan at a rate of $12 or so a month, in the hope that I would never notice it. After all, any sentient being, upon seeing this situation, would of course pay the entire loan off immediately.

When I discovered what had been going on, my first reaction was of course to just pay the loan off in full. But my second reaction was that I wanted to ensure that I didn’t end up in this situation again. So I phoned up Citibank. “I see that you’re automatically deducting the minimum payment from my checking account every month,” I said; “do you think I could switch that to the maximum payment, instead?” If I ever have a balance on my Checking Plus account, I would very much like that balance to be paid off in full.

You know the answer, of course: no, Citi couldn’t possibly do that. Automatic payments can only be for the minimum amount due, not for the full balance.

by Felix Salmon, Reuters |  Read more:

Image: Wikimedia

My Mother, Gardening

“Can you see anything inside?” his companions cried out to the archaeologist Howard Carter when he opened King Tut’s tomb, secreted in the sands for thirty centuries. “Yes!” Carter called back, “Wonderful things!” It was November 4, 1922: two and a half years before my mother was born. Carter and the others dizzily wandered the chambers where the young pharaoh had been buried, his sandals exquisitely carved, braided in solid gold to simulate woven reeds. All of Tut’s organs, his heart and his liver, each kidney and his stomach, were embalmed and laid in stoppered canopic jars, then fitted into golden coffinettes. Coffers of fish and assorted meats, thirty jars of wine, four complete board games, one hundred thirty-nine ebony, ivory, silver, and gold walking sticks, fifty linen garments—for the Egyptians believed that earthly human affairs continued in the afterlife—were preserved in the airless, crowded rooms.

I wonder what my mother would wish to take with her on such a journey, a journey beyond time. Surely she would hope to leave behind the damaged lungs that are slowing her down in her eighties, though she has already lived so much longer than the Boy King, dead at nineteen. Without a doubt she would have her Scrabble board folded up and set beside her, the soft old cotton sock still filled with worn tiles, the little wooden racks on which she’d sorted and re-sorted so many letters, made so many words. Her tennis racquet, just in case strength and flexibility should be granted to her once again. Perhaps she would keep the autumn leaves that I ironed in grade school between sheets of waxed paper and cut into bookmarks; and the clove-studded oranges that I made with my Girl Scout troop, shrunken and fragrant as the aged, perfumed offerings surrounding Tut in his tomb.

And she’d want to take the flowers she had gloriously preserved all her life: the light blue salvia that she’d grown and hung to dry in pipe-cleanered bunches over the kitchen sink, the Queen Anne’s Lace that she’d collected on weekend walks in the country. She always saved the loveliest of the roses from gift bouquets, at Mother’s Day and birthdays, and sank them one by one into finely sifted sand. When she gently drew them out, the fragile blossoms would be perfectly fixed, hovering forever at the grayish edge of pink. Wonderful things.  (...)

In Eden, it was God’s voice—“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:8)—that called Adam and Eve back to their bodies. They were not just deep in the garden, they suddenly realized with alarm, but intimate with it, their own delicate, fresh skin close to the plants and trees growing there, brushing directly against rough stems and leaves. “I heard the sound of you in the garden,” Adam tried, lamely, to explain, “and I was afraid, because I was naked.” In that place, no longer untouched by time, their human flesh was revealed among the blossoming trees as what it really was: a fragile servant of appetite; mortal, likely to be wounded. The garden, as well, was revealed as vulnerable to violation, unequal to its own promise. And yet, many generations later, Eden would still color the prophets’ imagining of release from exile: “my people Israel . . . shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them . . . they shall make gardens and eat their fruit” (Amos 9:14). What lonely men those prophets must have remained! Wandering ministers of abandoned gardens, their fantasy of remaking the wounded world forever threaded with anger and doubt; layered over an unyielding assurance of abandonment. 

by Joanne Jacobson, NER |  Read more:

Image: Alleged location of the Garden of Eden, Wikimedia

Joe Zawinul

Joe Zawinul - Mountain Waters feat. Czech State Phylarmonic Orchestra (Stories of the Danube) from Pascal ONoff on Vimeo.

In the Line of Wildfire

I roll out of my sleeping bag at 5 A.M., waking to the smell of dry grass and woodsmoke. I spent last night in the open, camped on rodeo grounds in the tiny Northern California town of Stonyford. Flames are visible on a ridge half a mile away. Time to go to work.

It’s July 12, 2012, and I’m about to be sent to my first forest fire of the season. I arrived yesterday to meet up with the Tahoe Hotshots, an elite group of wilderness fire-fighters based about 120 miles east of here, in a Sierra foothills town called Camptonville. The Tahoe team is part of a sprawling, multifaceted army: 177 federal, state, and county crews who must try and stop a fast-moving, 17,000-acre blaze before it spreads into Stonyford. Known as the Mill Fire, it was started on July 7 by lost hikers and raced east through the Coast Range and the Mendocino National Forest. Drought conditions and 60-mile-per-hour Pacific winds have fueled its advance; already, five buildings have burned on the edge of town.

The U.S. Forest Service, which usually runs the show when a big fire breaks out on federal land, has declared the Mill to be a national priority, and there are 1,500 wildland firefighters from around the West assembled to battle it. Some work on engine crews, manning the trucks that deliver water to the front lines. Others are smoke jumpers, who parachute straight into burning forests from cargo planes to stop small fires from growing. Some, like my group, are hotshots, backcountry firefighters who use chainsaws, Pulaskis, and rakes to cut firebreaks of bare earth around a blaze.

At the moment, though, all of us seem to be standing in the same line waiting for coffee and breakfast, which is being served at a mess tent staffed by high school students from inner-city Oakland. I work my way to the front, fill a Styrofoam cup, and head toward a set of rodeo bleachers to meet my boss, Rick Cowell, the 55-year-old superintendent of the Tahoe Hotshots.

“Dickman, you should have been here yesterday!” he says when he sees me. “We had a hell of a shift!”

Back before I had a desk job, I was a full-time hotshot. In 2006, I worked with the Tahoe crew, and this year Cowell agreed to let me rejoin. I arrived here too late for yesterday’s action, when the crew cut a line around a spot fire that started after an ember flew over a firebreak.

A six-foot, 170-pound man of Karuk Indian descent, Cowell has a broad chest, a beaked nose, and hands that feel like elephant hide. He’s fought nearly 800 blazes in his 36-year career, and his experience and leadership are a big part of why Tahoe is one of the best hotshot crews in the country.

Our job today is to cut and dig a line while engine crews hose down the fire, air tankers dump chemical retardant, and helicopters drop water from above. Once the Mill is surrounded by firebreaks and established logging roads, hotshots will intentionally burn brush and trees inside the perimeter, starving the fire of fuel. The stakes are high. If we succeed the flames stop. If we don’t, Stonyford, a town of about 150, and a forest the size of Boston will burn.

by Kyle Dickman, Outside |  Read more:

Photo: Kyle Dickman

Technical Difficulties

[ed. We're experiencing technical difficulties so please be patient; posts may be erratic for a while. Every time Blogger changes something you have to figure out what they're changing then find a workaround that will make things work again. In this case, it seems posts without a title can't be posted anymore (which I've done for some time with photos and art). So, I'll add titles (although you can't use the same title twice, apparently). Or try to figure some other workaround. I have no idea what this means for all the un-named posts that have been archived.]

Tim Fitzharris/Minden/Solent (via Pictures of the day: 25 June 2013 - Telegraph)
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The Watchers

Forty years after humans first saw pictures of a blue and white marble taken from space, it’s remarkable how few new images of Earth we get to lay eyes on. Of the 1,000 or more satellites orbiting the planet at any given time, there are perhaps 100 that send back visual data. Only 12 of those send back high-resolution pictures (defined as an image in which each pixel represents a square meter or less of ground), and only nine of the 12 sell into the commercial space-based imaging market, currently estimated at $2.3 billion a year. Worse still, some 80 percent of that market is controlled by the US government, which maintains priority over all other buyers: If certain government agencies decide they want satellite time for themselves, they can simply demand it. Earlier this year, after the government cut its imaging budget, the market’s two biggest companies—DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, which between them operate five of the nine commercial geoimaging satellites—were forced to merge. Due to the paucity of satellites and to the government’s claim on their operations, ordering an image of a specific place on Earth can take days, weeks, even months.

Because so few images make their way down from space every day, and even fewer reach the eyes of the public—remember how dazzled we were when Google Earth first let us explore one high-definition image of the planet?—we can fool ourselves into thinking that the view from space barely changes. But even with the resolutions allowed by the government for commercial purposes, an orbiting satellite can clearly show individual cars and other objects that are just a few feet across. It can spot a FedEx truck crossing America or a white van driving through Beirut or Shanghai. Many of the most economically and environmentally significant actions that individuals and businesses carry out every day, from shipping goods to shopping at big-box retail outlets to cutting down trees to turning out our lights at night, register in one way or another on images taken from space. So, while Big Data companies scour the Internet and transaction records and other online sources to glean insight into consumer behavior and economic production around the world, an almost entirely untapped source of data—information that companies and governments sometimes try to keep secret—is hanging in the air right above us.

Here is the soaring vision that Skybox’s founders have sold the Valley: that kids from Stanford, using inexpensive consumer hardware, can ring Earth with constellations of imaging satellites that are dramatically cheaper to build and maintain than the models currently aloft. By blanketing the exosphere with its cameras, Skybox will quickly shake up the stodgy business (estimated to grow to $4 billion a year by 2018) of commercial space imaging. Even with six small satellites orbiting Earth, Skybox could provide practically real-time images of the same spot twice a day at a fraction of the current cost.

But over the long term, the company’s real payoff won’t be in the images Skybox sells. Instead, it will derive from the massive trove of unsold images that flow through its system every day—images that, when analyzed by computer vision or by low-paid humans, can be transmogrified into extremely useful, desirable, and valuable data. What kinds of data? One sunny afternoon on the company’s roof, I drank beers with the Skybox employees as they kicked around the following hypotheticals:

- The number of cars in the parking lot of every Walmart in America.

- The number of fuel tankers on the roads of the three fastest-growing economic zones in China.

- The size of the slag heaps outside the largest gold mines in southern Africa

- The rate at which the wattage along key stretches of the Ganges River is growing brighter.

Such bits of information are hardly trivial. They are digital gold dust, containing clues about the economic health of countries, industries, and individual businesses. (One company insider confided to me that they have already brainstormed entirely practical ways to estimate major economic indicators for any country, entirely based on satellite data.) The same process will yield even more direct insight into the revenues of a retail chain or a mining company or an electronics company, once you determine which of the trucks leaving their factories are shipping out goods or key components.

Plenty of people would want real-time access to that data—investors, environmentalists, activists, journalists—and no one currently has it, with the exception of certain nodes of the US government. Given that, the notion that Skybox could become a Google-scale business—or, as one guy on the roof that afternoon suggested to me, an insanely profitable hedge fund—is not at all far-fetched. All they need to do is put enough satellites into orbit, then get the image streams back to Earth and analyze them. Which is exactly what Skybox is planning to do.

The most important thing to understand about Skybox is that there is nothing wonderful or magical or even all that interesting about the technology—no shiny new solar-reflecting paint or radiation-proof self-regenerating microchip, not even a cool new way of beaming signals down from orbit. Dozens of very smart people work at Skybox, to be sure, but none of them are doing anything more than making incremental tweaks to existing devices and protocols, nearly all of which are in the public domain or can be purchased for reasonable amounts of money by anyone with a laptop and a credit card. There is nothing impressive about the satellites they are building until you step back to consider the way that they plan to link them, and how the resulting data can be used.

by David Samuels, Wired |  Read more:

Photo-illustration: Jeff Lysgaard

Rory vs. the Robot

[ed. Rory McIlroy vs. a mouthy robot.]