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How It Works (and So It Goes)

Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.

One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.

In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)

The lobbying campaign shows how, three years after Congress passed the most comprehensive overhaul of regulation since the Depression, Wall Street is finding Washington a friendlier place.

The cordial relations now include a growing number of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, whose support the banks need if they want to roll back parts of the 2010 financial overhaul, known as Dodd-Frank.

This legislative push is a second front, with Wall Street’s other battle being waged against regulators who are drafting detailed rules allowing them to enforce the law.

And as its lobbying campaign steps up, the financial industry has doubled its already considerable giving to political causes. The lawmakers who this month supported the bills championed by Wall Street received twice as much in contributions from financial institutions compared with those who opposed them, according to an analysis of campaign finance records performed by MapLight, a nonprofit group.

In recent weeks, Wall Street groups also held fund-raisers for lawmakers who co-sponsored the bills. At one dinner Wednesday night, corporate executives and lobbyists paid up to $2,500 to dine in a private room of a Greek restaurant just blocks from the Capitol with Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a co-sponsor of the bill championed by Citigroup.

Industry officials acknowledged that they played a role in drafting the legislation, but argued that the practice was common in Washington. Some of the changes, they say, have gained wide support, including from Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reservechairman. The changes, they added, were in an effort to reach a compromise over the bills, not to undermine Dodd-Frank.

“We will provide input if we see a bill and it is something we have interest in,” said Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr., a former lawmaker turned Wall Street lobbyist, who now serves as president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or Sifma.

The close ties hardly surprise Wall Street critics, who have long warned that the banks — whose small armies of lobbyists include dozens of former Capitol Hill aides — possess outsize influence in Washington.

“The huge machinery of Wall Street information and analysis skews the thinking of Congress,” said Jeff Connaughton, who has been both a lobbyist and Congressional staff member.

Lawmakers who supported the industry-backed bills said they did so because the effort was in the public interest. Yet some agreed that the relationship with corporate groups was at times uncomfortable.

“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” said Representative Jim Himes, a third-term Democrat of Connecticut, who supported the recent industry-backed bills and leads the party’s fund-raising effort in the House. A member of the Financial Services Committee and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, he is one of the top recipients of Wall Street donations. “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”

by Eric Lipton and Ben Protess, Dealbook |  Read more:

Image: hristopher Gregory/The New York Times

Li-Han Lin 林立漢, Our Dreaming Space is Open
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A field turns from orange to green as harvesters pick marigold flowers in Los Mochis, Mexico, 1967. W. E. Garrett, National Geographic.
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Aging Boomers Opt for City Life

Robert Solymossy doesn’t remember when he last gassed up his one remaining car. His other two cars are blissfully consigned to memory, along with his lawn, his driveway and “a lifetime’s worth of furniture” accumulated over the 23 years he lived in a detached single-family house in a wooded part of Oakton.

In 2005, Solymossy, now 67, and his wife Diana Sun Solymossy, 58, traded all that in to live in a condo in Clarendon with a gym, a rooftop pool and dozens of shops and restaurants right downstairs.

They bought it unbuilt, choosing from a floor plan. “It was a leap of faith, to say the least, but the location was really good,” Solymossy said. “After we moved in, I realized that this is really, really great; this really rocks.”

The Solymossys were front-runners of a mini-trend now taking root in some parts of the nation and particularly in the Washington metro area: baby boomers swapping out their single-family suburban homes for the bustle of urban life.

Reversing the trajectory of the Eisenhower generation, which fled cities for the suburbs, these boomers are following a path that younger people have embraced in droves. Many are empty nesters, and freed of the need to factor in school districts and yard sizes, they are gravitating to dense urban cores near restaurants, shops, movie theaters and Metro stations. (...)

“The millennials and the boomers are looking for the same thing,” said Amy Levner, manager of AARP’s Livable Communities.

Surveys of boomers’ preferences show that they are more interested in “smart growth” areas than in sprawl. And they are such a large generation that even if only a small percent of them embrace urban life, the effect could be dramatic, Levner said.

“This is just the tip of it,” she said.

by Tara Bahrampour, WP |  Read more:

Image: Maddie Meyer / The Washington Post

Bon Dance Season

Bon dance season in Hawaii is now under way. The Japanese custom of o-bon — Hawaii shortens the word to bon —honors the spirits of family members who have passed away.

You'll find o-bon festivals slated for just about every weekend at Hawaii hongwanji missions and temples, from June through August. According to tradition, it is believed the summer months are when ancestral spirits return to visit family and friends. (...)

In Japan, the tradition of summer o-bon festivals dates back more than 500 years. Here in the Islands, the festivals serve as both a ceremony of spiritual remembrance and a celebration of cultural heritage and community. Everyone is welcome at an o-bon festival, regardless of religious background or ethnicity. As such, each temple's festival — and there are dozens throughout summer — is often well-attended.

O-bon festivals are best known for group dances known as bon-odori. The dance differs depending on the Japanese prefecture of origin, but generally involves dancers circling around a high wooden scaffold called a yagura (pictured, above) while swaying to the rhythms of folk songs and other music.

Note to novice dancers: the dance leaders are usually in the innermost circle. Just try to follow their moves. Beginners and children are welcome to take part in the dancing, which is intended to invite the ancestral spirits to visit family homes for the duration of the festival, which sometimes continues through two evenings.

The festivals are also known for serving up delicious Japanese foods such as andagi (sweet fried dough), grilled teri-beef and -chicken skewers, musubi (rice balls wrapped in dried seaweed), and stir-fry noodles. The menu is intends to both nourish dancers and raise money for the host hongwanji. So, bring your appetite. You may want to try all of it.

by Maureen O'Connell, Hawaii Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Michael Keany (2013 Schedule)

Leo Kottke

After Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg, whose third and final term as mayor of New York expires at midnight on December 31st, keeps a digital clock running in reverse in his City Hall office, counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left in his term. He remains one of the wealthiest men in the city—his fortune is estimated at twenty-seven billion dollars—but this seems of limited comfort to him. In 2008 and 2012, he considered running for President, as a moderate Republican or as a self-financed third-party candidate, but he was eventually persuaded that he couldn’t win. Now he is clearly vexed by the challenges of envisaging his own future and a City Hall without him.

Bloomberg is seventy-one and conspicuously vigorous. He does not intend to retire. Yet he has told friends that he does not know what he will do next. “I can tell you what I want to do,” he said to me in late July. We sat at a tiny conference table in a cavernous office on the second floor of City Hall, which he shares with fifty members of his staff. He had taken off his charcoal suit jacket. “I haven’t had a vacation in twelve years,” he said. He imagined a week of skiing and a week of golf. “After that, I’d go ballistic.”

Bloomberg does not plan to return to running his business, Bloomberg L.P. Kevin Sheekey, who has been one of the Mayor’s top political strategists for the past twelve years, said that he expects Bloomberg to go through a sort of “re-start,” as he did when he left Wall Street, in 1981, and when he entered politics, in 2001.

Bloomberg has pledged to give away most of his fortune before he dies. That effort is under way. In 2011, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported, Bloomberg donated more money to charity than all but four other Americans: Margaret A. Cargill, William S. Dietrich II, Paul Allen, and George Soros. He has a foundation, which every year gives away several hundred million dollars to a range of causes, with an emphasis on public health, government innovation, the environment, education, and the arts. The foundation has pledged a hundred million dollars to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative; six hundred million to combat smoking overseas; fifty million to support family planning; and another fifty million to the Sierra Club’s drive to reduce the nation’s reliance on coal plants. Bloomberg himself has reportedly given three million dollars to help establish Mayors Against Illegal Guns—one of many contributions he has made to advance gun-control laws—and $1.1 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. Nevertheless, he said, “I don’t see myself as a full-time philanthropist.” (...)

It is hard to imagine the endeavor that would sufficiently command Bloomberg’s restless ambition and vanity. He is an outsized character: the biggest plutocrat in a plutocratic capital, a creature of Wall Street who, flagrantly and legally, tapped his limitless bank account to become, and remain, mayor. Seeking a third term required him to ask the City Council to amend the City Charter on his behalf, about which he is unapologetic. “I can tell you that when it came to a third term the City Council majority thought it was good to change” the charter, he said. “And the public elected me.”

In private and in his natural social milieu, in the town houses and penthouses of the Upper East Side and Central Park West, Bloomberg is voluble, self-absorbed, brilliant. At dinner parties, while drinking copious amounts of wine, he makes plain his contempt for the New York Times, the media property friends say that he covets but most likely cannot own, and for President Obama, who occupies the office he craves but will never achieve.

by Ken Auletta, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Pari Dukovic

Hyperloopy

"The whole arrangement is as cozy and comfortable as the 

front basement dining room of a first-class city residence."

~ Scientific American, 1870

Is there anything that is not deserving of disruption by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs? Last week the world came to understand that in addition to pretty much everything else, high-speed rail is heading for a makeover. The irrepressible Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, unveiled, in a somewhat anticlimactic press conference, what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube for people. Also known as the Hyperloop, it intends to shoot people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in something like 35 minutes, at a top speed of nearly 800 miles per hour. Remarkably, Musk declared that he has no intention to build the thing; as John Oliver said on the Daily Show, "That's like saying ‘Hey, you know what we should do? Find a vaccine for cancer…Someone get on that! I'm just the ideas man.'" I suppose this is the flipside of what Musk generously termed the "open source" nature of the project. However, the proposal is worth examining both for its implicit attitudes towards what is being designed, and what the real purpose of the Hyperloop might be.

Once Musk had finally opened the kimono, the critics naturally pounced. It's easy to dish on a multi-billion-dollar design proposal that is all of 57 pages, and contains such breezy gems as: "short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky" (p3). Tricky, indeed.

But it's not so much the technology, or Musk's indifference to building it, that is at issue here. Most of this has been developed and is fairly uncontroversial. In fact, the idea of using some combination of air or vacuum to propel people through tubes was successfully prototyped back in the 1870s. Of course, the issue of scale will certainly produce its own set of challenges, but this will arrive in due time. Nor is the cost "where things get tricky," either: even though critics have called out the $6bn price tag as laughably low, since when has an infrastructure project ever been priced realistically?

What is more interesting to me is the way people themselves are considered in the design proposal.

You would think that the experience of traveling this way would be a key consideration. And there are plenty of assumptions, some stated and some not, that provide us with a glimpse of how the designers view their human charges. Here is the proposal's description of passenger accommodations:

The interior of the capsule is specifically designed with passenger safety and comfort in mind. The seats conform well to the body to maintain comfort during the high speed accelerations experienced during travel. Beautiful landscape [sic] will be displayed in the cabin and each passenger will have access their [sic] own personal entertainment system. (p15)

The obvious haste with which this copy was put together isn't very encouraging. But the message is clear: strap in and stay still. There are no bathrooms, since anyone should be able to hold it in for 35 minutes, right? Besides, no one really has any business getting up and walking around while they are traveling at 790 mph.

by Misha Lepetic, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Carine Brancowitz, Vertigo / House of Mystery
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Jarek Puczel, Romans
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The Wind Rises

20/30 Vision

Early one morning this summer, a gaggle of fresh-faced twentysomethings streams into an elevator at the Puck Building on Houston Street. “I like your shoes,” one girl tells another, smiling with a first-day-of-school shyness. They could be mistaken for NYU students—the university has space on the building’s second and third floors—but they all exit on floor five, at the bright white offices of Warby Parker, where two of the company’s founders, Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, are preparing to kick off their weekly companywide meeting. Dressed near-identically in the uniform of the New York start-up entrepreneur—tailored button-downs, dark jeans—the pair look as streamlined as a couple of smartphones and operate just as efficiently, waiting for fashionable backpacks to be dropped into chairs and Fage yogurts to be procured until precisely 8:30 a.m., when Blumenthal, tall and dark-haired with a voice that recalls Ira Glass, calls the meeting to order.

First on the agenda is the online retailer’s new stores in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, the opening of which came as a surprise to the industry, since Warby Parker has fashioned itself as a pioneer in the new wave of e-commerce. The founders take a kind of fatherly pride in maintaining transparency with their employees, and so Blumenthal walks them through the reasoning. “One of the things we’ve learned is that if you really want to be a dominant player, you need to have a presence in both online and brick-and-mortar,” Blumenthal tells the group. “Especially in categories like fashion. Other categories, like toilet paper or diapers or paper towels, those are going to shift online more dramatically.” He goes on to cite an example: “My wife and I have actually never bought diapers in a store, which is kind of amazing,” he says. “There are probably a few other people here that have also never done that.”

There’s a pause, then a wave of laughter as Blumenthal realizes his mistake: No one in this audience is buying diapers. Blumenthal, 33, and Gilboa, 32, are pretty much the oldest people at the company.

After that, various departments offer presentations to the class: The social-media coordinator introduces a new strategy; representatives from marketing show off the company’s recent video collaboration with the designer Chrissie Miller, a soft-focus seventies-­style short of a Coney Island dance-off inspired by The Warriors and West Side Story. There is a lot of up-talking? That manner of speech in which you phrase a fact as a question? It seems contagious? Especially among the newer employees? Many of whom still have, stuck to their chairs, balloons with an image of a cow saying nice to meat you. “This is actually our biggest number of hires in one week,” Blumenthal tells his employees, whose numbers have swelled to 250. “Come on up,” he says, Ira Glass morphing into Bob Barker, “and give us your fun fact!”

Fun facts are a Warby Parker tradition, a getting-to-know-you exercise that upholds one of Warby Parker’s eight core values, written on the wall of the kitchen: “Inject fun and quirkiness into everything we do.” While no one has managed to top one early hire’s mind-blowing revelation that she once held Michael Jackson’s infant son Blanket, the newest additions to the team are unlikely to disappoint—the company employs a “cultural swat team” that weeds out dullards in interviews with questions like “When was the last time you wore a costume?”

First up is Kate, from product strategy, who describes herself as a rodeo enthusiast. “Actually, a champion barrel racer?” Next is Priyata, who recently returned from a trip to war-torn Syria, “where we heard missiles but survived?” Natalie, from customer experience, was a “fan dancer” for Beyoncé in the Super Bowl halftime show? Julie lost her sense of smell crowd-surfing at 16? Ryan was the vocalist in a metal band? Emily recently rode an elephant named Pancake?

Blumenthal closes the meeting by talking about upcoming opportunities to volunteer with nonprofits like Venture for America and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. (“Do good” being another one of Warby Parker’s core values, not to be confused, Blumenthal will tell you, with “Don’t be evil”: “Doing good is proactive—‘How can we make this world a better place?,’ not ‘How can we prevent doing something bad?’ ”) He announces a new employee happy hour, “for those of you that can drink.” Then Gilboa proffers one final thought. “We’re very happy to announce that this is the first time a sun SKU—the Downing in walnut tortoise—has made it into the top five best-selling glasses for the month,” he says.

Oh, right! The glasses.

by Jessica Pressler, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Shea/New York Magazine

Why Can't My Computer Understand Me?

Hector Levesque thinks his computer is stupid—and that yours is, too. Siri and Google’s voice searches may be able to understand canned sentences like “What movies are showing near me at seven o’clock?,” but what about questions—“Can an alligator run the hundred-metre hurdles?”—that nobody has heard before? Any ordinary adult can figure that one out. (No. Alligators can’t hurdle.) But if you type the question into Google, you get information about Florida Gators track and field. Other search engines, like Wolfram Alpha, can’t answer the question, either. Watson, the computer system that won “Jeopardy!,” likely wouldn’t do much better.

In a terrific paper just presented at the premier international conference on artificial intelligence, Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist who studies these questions, has taken just about everyone in the field of A.I. to task. He argues that his colleagues have forgotten about the “intelligence” part of artificial intelligence.

Levesque starts with a critique of Alan Turing’s famous “Turing test,” in which a human, through a question-and-answer session, tries to distinguish machines from people. You’d think that if a machine could pass the test, we could safely conclude that the machine was intelligent. But Levesque argues that the Turing test is almost meaningless, because it is far too easy to game. Every year, a number of machines compete in the challenge for real, seeking something called the Loebner Prize. But the winners aren’t genuinely intelligent; instead, they tend to be more like parlor tricks, and they’re almost inherently deceitful. If a person asks a machine “How tall are you?” and the machine wants to win the Turing test, it has no choice but to confabulate. It has turned out, in fact, that the winners tend to use bluster and misdirection far more than anything approximating true intelligence. One program worked by pretending to be paranoid; others have done well by tossing off one-liners that distract interlocutors. The fakery involved in most efforts at beating the Turing test is emblematic: the real mission of A.I. ought to be building intelligence, not building software that is specifically tuned toward fixing some sort of arbitrary test.

To try and get the field back on track, Levesque is encouraging artificial-intelligence researchers to consider a different test that is much harder to game, building on work he did with Leora Morgenstern and Ernest Davis (a collaborator of mine). Together, they have created a set of challenges called the Winograd Schemas, named for Terry Winograd, a pioneering artificial-intelligence researcher at Stanford.

by Gary Marcus, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Arnold Roth

Hempfest 2013

[ed. Ahh, the sweet smell of dope in the morning. Smells like...Victory.]

Hempfest 2013 certainly had a reason to celebrate this year with passage of Initiative 502 legalizing the distribution and personal use of marijuana throughout the State of Washington. And celebrate they did although I've never seen a more laid back, courteous and cheerful victory celebration than this one. The pungent air wafting along the coast and across the beaches carried an easygoing vibe that made everyone seem like a long-lost friend. I also heard snatches of conversations that were truly borderline zen in their cosmic weirdness. Anyway, without further commentary... enjoy the pictures.

by markk

The Magic Bus of Merry Prankster's fame.

 The now infamous Doritos that were passed around by cops to needy fairgoers.

Collector's item

Having a blast

Fuyo [1864-1936] Snowladen Reeds and Kingfisher 1923
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[ed. Haven't got to this yet.]
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Winslow Homer - The Fog Warning, 1885
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The Notorious MSG’s Unlikely Formula For Success

In the last three years, perhaps the boldest thing Chef David Chang has done with food is let it rot. In his tiny Momofuku research and development lab in New York’s East Village, Chang and his head of R&D Dan Felder have obsessed over the many delicious things that happen when molds and fungi are treated like gourmet ingredients rather than evidence that you need to clean out your fridge.

Without fermentation, we would live in a sad world without beer, cheese, miso, kimchi, and hundreds of other delicious things humans have enjoyed for centuries. But in the carefully labeled containers stacked around the cramped confines of their lab, Chang and Felder have been fermenting new things. They’ve turned mashed pistachios, lentils, chickpeas, and other legumes into miso-like pastes Chang calls “hozon” (Korean for “preserved”). They’ve created variations on Japanese tamari — a by-product of miso production that’s similar to soy sauce — with fermented spelt and rye they call “bonji” (“essence”). They’ve even replicated the Japanese staple katsuobushi (a log of dried, smoked, and fermented bonito that’s shaved into bonito flakes) using fermented pork tenderloin instead of fish.

The flavor Chang and Felder are chasing in creating these new fermented products is umami — the savory “fifth taste” detectable by the human tongue along with salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. When bacteria and fungi break down the glucose in foods that are fermenting, they release waste products. And the waste valued in Momofuku’s lab above all others is glutamic acid, the amino acid that creates the taste of umami on our tongues.

Also on the shelf in Chang’s lab, underneath the jars containing foods in various states of controlled spoilage, is a giant tin of monosodium glutamate, more commonly known as MSG — perhaps the most infamously misunderstood and maligned three letters in the history of food. It just so happens that inside that tin of MSG is the exact molecule Chang and his chefs have worked so hard for the last three years to tease out of pots of fermenting beans and nuts. It’s pure glutamic acid, crystallized with a single sodium ion to stabilize it; five pounds of uncut, un-stepped-on umami, made from fermented corn in a factory in Iowa.

We’ve only known for sure that our tongue has specific taste buds for glutamic acid for 13 years. So for chefs like Chang, the Fat Duck’s Heston Blumenthal, Umami Burger’s Adam Fleischman, and many others around the world, umami’s flavors have become one of cooking’s most exciting new frontiers. The new flavors they’re creating use advanced methods to expand on what millions around the world (but especially in east Asia) have known for centuries — that foods rich in glutamic acid are delicious, and we want to eat them.

For these chefs, the path to understanding umami inevitably leads them to MSG, which is chemically identical to the glutamic acid they’re creating from scratch. And yet Chang wouldn’t think of using MSG in his restaurants today. He told me he doesn’t even use it at home, despite being a professed lover of MSG-laced Japanese Kewpie mayo. After decades of research debunking its reputation as a health hazard, and uninterrupted FDA approval since 1959, MSG remains a food pariah — part of a story that spans a century of history, race, culture, and science and says more about how we eat today than any other.

by John Mahoney, BuzzFeed |  Read more:

Image: uncredited