Saturday, September 7, 2013
All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go
In reality, though, the job seeker tends to experience the insular world of LinkedIn connectivity as an irksome ritual of digital badgering. Instead of facing the prospect of interfacing professionally with a nine-figure user base with a renewed spring in their step, harried victims of economic redundancy are more likely to greet their latest LinkedIn updates with a muttered variation of, “Oh shit, I’d better send out some more résumés.” At which point, they’ll typically mark the noisome email nudge as “read” and relegate it to the trash folder.
Which is why it’s always been a little tough to figure out what LinkedIn is for. The site’s initial appeal was as a sort of self-updating Rolodex—a way to keep track of ex-coworkers and friends-of-friends you met at networking happy hours. There’s the appearance of openness—you can “connect” with anyone!—but when users try to add a professional contact from whom they’re more than one degree removed, a warning pops up. “Connecting to someone on LinkedIn implies that you know them well,” the site chides, as though you’re a stalker in the making. It asks you to indicate how you know this person. Former coworker? Former classmate? Fine. “LinkedIn lets you invite colleagues, classmates, friends and business partners without entering their email addresses,” the site says. “However, recipients can indicate that they don’t know you. If they do, you’ll be asked to enter an email address with each future invitation.”
You can try to lie your way through this firewall by indicating you’ve worked with someone when you haven’t—the equivalent of name-dropping someone you’ve only read about in management magazines. But odds are, you’ll be found out. I’d been confused, for instance, about numerous LinkedIn requests from publicists saying we’d “worked together” at a particular magazine. But when I clicked through to their profiles, I realized why they’d confidently asserted this professional alliance into being: the way to get to the next rung is to pretend you’re already there. If you don’t already know the person you’re trying to meet, you’re pretty much out of luck.
This frenetic networking-by-vague-association has bred a mordant skepticism among some users of the site. Scott Monty, head of social media for the Ford Motor Company, includes a disclaimer in the first line of his LinkedIn bio that, in any other context, would be a hilarious redundancy: “Note: I make connections only with people whom I have met.” It’s an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder.
On one level, of course, this world of aspirational business affiliation is nothing new. LinkedIn merely digitizes the core, and frequently cruel, paradox of networking events and conferences. You show up at such gatherings because you want to know more important people in your line of work—but the only people mingling are those who, like you, don’t seem to know anyone important. You just end up talking to the sad sacks you already know. From this crushing realization, the paradoxes multiply on up through the social food chain: those who are at the top of the field are at this event only to entice paying attendees, soak up the speaking fees, and slip out the back door after politely declining the modest swag bag. They’re not standing around on garish hotel ballroom carpet with a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay in one hand and a stack of business cards in the other.
by Ann Friedman, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: J.D. King
Gut Bacteria From Thin Humans Can Slim Mice Down
[ed. The microbiome -- exciting new frontier in medical diagnosis and treatment.]
The trillions of bacteria that live in the gut — helping digest foods, making some vitamins, making amino acids — may help determine if a person is fat or thin.
Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon, left, and Vanessa K. Ridaura are two members of a scientific team whose research shows a connection between human gut bacteria and obesity.
The evidence is from a novel experiment involving mice and humans that is part of a growing fascination with gut bacteria and their role in health and diseases like irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease. In this case, the focus was on obesity. Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.
The study, published online Thursday by the journal Science, is “pretty striking,” said Dr.Jeffrey S. Flier, an obesity researcher and the dean of the Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with the study. “It’s a very powerful set of experiments.”
Michael Fischbach of the University of California, San Francisco, who also was not involved with the study, called it “the clearest evidence to date that gut bacteria can help cause obesity.”
“I’m very excited about this,” he added, saying the next step will be to try using gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.
“I have little doubt that that will be the next thing that happens,” Dr. Fischbach said.
But Dr. Flier said it was far too soon for that.
“This is not a study that says humans will have a different body weight” if they get a fecal transplant, he said. “This is a scientific advance,” he added, but many questions remain.
Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, the senior investigator for the study, also urged caution. He wants to figure out which bacteria are responsible for the effect so that, eventually, people can be given pure mixtures of bacteria instead of feces. Or, even better, learn what the bacteria produce that induces thinness and give that as a treatment.
While gut bacteria are a new hot topic in medicine, he added that human biology is complex and that obesity in particular has many contributors, including genetics and diet.
In fact, the part of the study that most surprised other experts was an experiment indicating that, with the right diet, it might be possible to change the bacteria in a fat person’s gut so that they promote leanness rather than obesity. The investigators discovered that given a chance, and in the presence of a low-fat diet, bacteria from a lean twin will take over the gut of a mouse that already had bacteria from a fat twin. The fat mouse then loses weight. But the opposite does not happen. No matter what the diet, bacteria from a fat mouse do not take over in a mouse that is thin.
The trillions of bacteria that live in the gut — helping digest foods, making some vitamins, making amino acids — may help determine if a person is fat or thin.
Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon, left, and Vanessa K. Ridaura are two members of a scientific team whose research shows a connection between human gut bacteria and obesity.The evidence is from a novel experiment involving mice and humans that is part of a growing fascination with gut bacteria and their role in health and diseases like irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease. In this case, the focus was on obesity. Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.
The study, published online Thursday by the journal Science, is “pretty striking,” said Dr.Jeffrey S. Flier, an obesity researcher and the dean of the Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with the study. “It’s a very powerful set of experiments.”
Michael Fischbach of the University of California, San Francisco, who also was not involved with the study, called it “the clearest evidence to date that gut bacteria can help cause obesity.”
“I’m very excited about this,” he added, saying the next step will be to try using gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.
“I have little doubt that that will be the next thing that happens,” Dr. Fischbach said.
But Dr. Flier said it was far too soon for that.
“This is not a study that says humans will have a different body weight” if they get a fecal transplant, he said. “This is a scientific advance,” he added, but many questions remain.
Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, the senior investigator for the study, also urged caution. He wants to figure out which bacteria are responsible for the effect so that, eventually, people can be given pure mixtures of bacteria instead of feces. Or, even better, learn what the bacteria produce that induces thinness and give that as a treatment.
While gut bacteria are a new hot topic in medicine, he added that human biology is complex and that obesity in particular has many contributors, including genetics and diet.
In fact, the part of the study that most surprised other experts was an experiment indicating that, with the right diet, it might be possible to change the bacteria in a fat person’s gut so that they promote leanness rather than obesity. The investigators discovered that given a chance, and in the presence of a low-fat diet, bacteria from a lean twin will take over the gut of a mouse that already had bacteria from a fat twin. The fat mouse then loses weight. But the opposite does not happen. No matter what the diet, bacteria from a fat mouse do not take over in a mouse that is thin.
by Gina Kolata, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dan Gill
Friday, September 6, 2013
Can the White Girl Twerk?
There’s a famous scene in the 2004 Wayans brothers’ comedy White Chicks: The opening bars of piano introduce Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” and the car full of white girls squeals in delight before launching into the cloyingly earnest lyrics. Later a black man sings the song and, that’s it, that’s the whole joke.
Like the late aughts’ “hipster,” “white girl” is a label applied either dismissively or self-consciously. The tastes, habits, and concerns of the white girl, like those of the hipster, are often punch lines used as self-evident definitions for the label. Like a hipster’s, the white girl’s class status goes without saying—there is no Twitter account for PoorWhiteGirlProblems.
Historically, white girlhood stood for the preservation of whiteness. Not just reproductively but as future missionaries, schoolteachers, moral custodians of the dark frontier—Columbia leading the way. Today the symbolic potency of white femininity is shifting.
Only outprivileged by white men, the white girl’s assumed universality lets us project onto “white girl” our attitudes about race, gender, class, and the behavior appropriate within those parameters. The girlhood implied by the label is central to understanding how it regulates not only white girls’ behavior but everyone else’s too.
The straight American “white girl” serves as the normative gender performance, the femininity from which all femininity deviates, through which all women of color are otherized. As the default, heteronormative white femininity must provide the ultimate foil to patriarchal masculinity. The “white girl” is vulnerable, trivial, and self-involved. Above all she is mainstream, either by consumer habits or design. Any resemblance to real-life white girls doesn’t matter; all exceptions are exempt from consideration. For every witchy, androgynous Rooney Mara, there’s a Taylor Swift, a Zooey Deschanel, and a Miley Cyrus. At least, there used to be a Miley Cyrus.
Her loyalty to the white girlhood she was born into via Hannah Montana is under scrutiny. No longer confined to a Disney contract, she dresses in cropped shirts, leather bras, and bondage-inspired Versace. She’s taken cues from Rihanna and hip-hop culture at large and added gold chains, even a grill. Sixteen-year-old Miley had never heard a Jay Z song (despite the name-check in her hit single “Party in the USA”). Twenty-year-old Miley tweets screengrabs of her iPhone, boasting songs from Gucci Mane, French Montana, and Juicy J. She’s recorded with the latter two.
It would be unfair to demand Miley remain faithful to her teenage aesthetic when no self-aware person does. And it would take a dull palette to assume she couldn’t sincerely recognize the appeal of rap music and gold accessories. Her sincerity, however, is irrelevant. Charges of cultural appropriation and the rampant slut shaming she now faces draw a narrow lens to her actions. In truth, Miley exemplifies the white impulse to shake the stigma its mainstream status affords while simultaneously exercising the power of whiteness to define blackness.
She ties a bandana across her forehead like Tupac, or struggle-twerks—her ever-present tongue lolling out in challenge as she looks back at us. Each time it’s a statement declaring this is cool because it’s atypical, and it’s atypical because according to her, it’s black. Miley’s look exists because racial drag carries cachet in cultures that commodify difference.
For all its black performers, the rap industry has been run by the white establishment and caters to the white consumer. The commercial success of gangsta rap wouldn’t be possible without North America’s largest demographic buying in. The commercial demand for sexually aggressive and violent rap is appreciably shaped by white teens in the suburbs looking to live out their fantasies via imagined black bodies. And in guiding the market, white consumers dictate the available imagery of blackness.
Like the late aughts’ “hipster,” “white girl” is a label applied either dismissively or self-consciously. The tastes, habits, and concerns of the white girl, like those of the hipster, are often punch lines used as self-evident definitions for the label. Like a hipster’s, the white girl’s class status goes without saying—there is no Twitter account for PoorWhiteGirlProblems.Historically, white girlhood stood for the preservation of whiteness. Not just reproductively but as future missionaries, schoolteachers, moral custodians of the dark frontier—Columbia leading the way. Today the symbolic potency of white femininity is shifting.
Only outprivileged by white men, the white girl’s assumed universality lets us project onto “white girl” our attitudes about race, gender, class, and the behavior appropriate within those parameters. The girlhood implied by the label is central to understanding how it regulates not only white girls’ behavior but everyone else’s too.
The straight American “white girl” serves as the normative gender performance, the femininity from which all femininity deviates, through which all women of color are otherized. As the default, heteronormative white femininity must provide the ultimate foil to patriarchal masculinity. The “white girl” is vulnerable, trivial, and self-involved. Above all she is mainstream, either by consumer habits or design. Any resemblance to real-life white girls doesn’t matter; all exceptions are exempt from consideration. For every witchy, androgynous Rooney Mara, there’s a Taylor Swift, a Zooey Deschanel, and a Miley Cyrus. At least, there used to be a Miley Cyrus.
Her loyalty to the white girlhood she was born into via Hannah Montana is under scrutiny. No longer confined to a Disney contract, she dresses in cropped shirts, leather bras, and bondage-inspired Versace. She’s taken cues from Rihanna and hip-hop culture at large and added gold chains, even a grill. Sixteen-year-old Miley had never heard a Jay Z song (despite the name-check in her hit single “Party in the USA”). Twenty-year-old Miley tweets screengrabs of her iPhone, boasting songs from Gucci Mane, French Montana, and Juicy J. She’s recorded with the latter two.
It would be unfair to demand Miley remain faithful to her teenage aesthetic when no self-aware person does. And it would take a dull palette to assume she couldn’t sincerely recognize the appeal of rap music and gold accessories. Her sincerity, however, is irrelevant. Charges of cultural appropriation and the rampant slut shaming she now faces draw a narrow lens to her actions. In truth, Miley exemplifies the white impulse to shake the stigma its mainstream status affords while simultaneously exercising the power of whiteness to define blackness.
She ties a bandana across her forehead like Tupac, or struggle-twerks—her ever-present tongue lolling out in challenge as she looks back at us. Each time it’s a statement declaring this is cool because it’s atypical, and it’s atypical because according to her, it’s black. Miley’s look exists because racial drag carries cachet in cultures that commodify difference.
For all its black performers, the rap industry has been run by the white establishment and caters to the white consumer. The commercial success of gangsta rap wouldn’t be possible without North America’s largest demographic buying in. The commercial demand for sexually aggressive and violent rap is appreciably shaped by white teens in the suburbs looking to live out their fantasies via imagined black bodies. And in guiding the market, white consumers dictate the available imagery of blackness.
by Ayesha Saddiqui, TNI | Read more:
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Ditch Your Loyalty Cards
I carry a tiny wallet. It can hold only my driver’s license, MetroCard, three credit cards, and about $100 in cash. My friends wonder how I get by with so little carrying capacity. Answer: I don’t participate in customer loyalty programs. No cards that earn me coupons from drug stores, no key fobs for discounts on groceries, not even a little piece of paper with stamps that entitle me to a free sandwich. Loyalty cards are usually a bad business strategy. They’re either a creepy way to monitor and exploit your habits or a desperate gambit by weak retailers to distract you from their own shortcomings. Most companies use loyalty programs as a crutch when they’re out of ideas, and, therefore, these schemes are ultimately bad for customers as well. If a cashier tries to shove a loyalty card into your hand, it’s a good indicator that you should be taking your business elsewhere.
A brief history of the customer loyalty program shows why. In 1981, American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall made three observations about his industry. First, a tiny proportion of customers were responsible for a huge percentage of revenue. At the time, more than half of American Airlines’ customers took just one flight per year, whereas the top 5 percent flew 20 or more times. Second, business travelers, who made up the bulk of that top 5 percent, cared very little about the price of any individual ticket. Finally, airlines are all basically the same.
As much as people tout the quality of a few airlines, Crandall’s assumption that his competitors offered the same levels of service, safety, and timeliness is beyond serious dispute. A 2010 study showed that a mere 5.5 percentage points separated America’s most on-time airline (Southwest) from its 10th best (JetBlue). Flight safety experts insist there is no way to statistically separate the safety records of major airlines, because accidents are so rare. As for service, I don’t need to hear curated house music while I put my bag in the overhead bin, nor do I fully appreciate the value of a warm towel.
Since Crandall couldn’t compete on quality and his biggest customers didn’t care about price, he made a novel offer: Choose American Airlines over our identical competitors, and we’ll toss in a free flight every now and then or bump you up to first class. It was called AAdvantage, and most management experts agree it is the father of the modern customer loyalty program.
Here’s the takeaway: Loyalty programs only make sense in industries in which a company can do nothing to differentiate itself from its competitors, and customers lack either the motivation or the price sensitivity to shop around. Those descriptors apply to very few businesses. In addition to airlines, the programs probably make sense for car rental companies, newsstands, and possibly a few others. In most industries, though, companies that think they can’t compete on service or quality are not trying hard enough.
Take a look at grocery stores. A few chains, including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, attract customers through superior quality or unique products. It’s no coincidence that these stores don’t have loyalty programs. They don’t need them, because they’ve given you a compelling reason to shop with them. Grocery outlets with harsh lighting, cheap flooring, and signs handwritten in marker—you know the ones I mean—almost always have some kind of club program, because they can’t think of any other reason for you to walk through their noisy, unresponsive sliding doors. (Wegmans is alone among premium-quality grocery chains in having a loyalty program, but it dates back to 1990, before the chain surged past its humdrum upstate New York competitors.)
Business management scholars have written piles of studies on customer loyalty programs, and virtually all of them reach the same conclusion: In most industries, they’re hopelessly mismanaged. It’s not that the programs don’t work; it’s that they work too well. Customers become so well trained to follow loyalty discounts that they won’t buy without them. According to a 2002 article in the Harvard Business Review, many retailers now offer such extensive rewards for loyalty that they’re no longer making money on their top customers—the very people the programs are supposed to entice. In addition, most customers engage in what researchers call “polygamous loyalty,” which is a creative way of saying disloyalty. The overwhelming majority of fliers, for example, belong to multiple rewards programs. It’s a race to the bottom, as companies are so afraid of losing customers to their competitors that they destroy their own profitability and forsake strategies to attract customers in novel ways.
Those rare loyalty programs that management researchers favor lock customers into uncomfortably personal relationships with a grocer, airline, or clothing store. Take, for example, the widely celebrated program launched by the British grocery chain Tesco. The more often a customer shopped at Tesco, and the more high-profit-margin products he purchased, the more coupons he received in the mail for more high-margin products. In other words, Tesco trained its customers to buy pasta with a larger markup, like dogs that salivated at the sound of a bell. In addition, Tesco monitored its customers’ buying habits closely. When a loyal shopper who visited the store weekly suddenly missed a couple of weeks, the chain feared that one of its sheep was straying from the herd and dispatched some coupons to shepherd him back. Maybe you’re comfortable with that relationship, but I don’t want a large grocery chain tracking my weekly movements, and I’m willing to forgo 40 cents off of Greek yogurt to avoid it.
A brief history of the customer loyalty program shows why. In 1981, American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall made three observations about his industry. First, a tiny proportion of customers were responsible for a huge percentage of revenue. At the time, more than half of American Airlines’ customers took just one flight per year, whereas the top 5 percent flew 20 or more times. Second, business travelers, who made up the bulk of that top 5 percent, cared very little about the price of any individual ticket. Finally, airlines are all basically the same.As much as people tout the quality of a few airlines, Crandall’s assumption that his competitors offered the same levels of service, safety, and timeliness is beyond serious dispute. A 2010 study showed that a mere 5.5 percentage points separated America’s most on-time airline (Southwest) from its 10th best (JetBlue). Flight safety experts insist there is no way to statistically separate the safety records of major airlines, because accidents are so rare. As for service, I don’t need to hear curated house music while I put my bag in the overhead bin, nor do I fully appreciate the value of a warm towel.
Since Crandall couldn’t compete on quality and his biggest customers didn’t care about price, he made a novel offer: Choose American Airlines over our identical competitors, and we’ll toss in a free flight every now and then or bump you up to first class. It was called AAdvantage, and most management experts agree it is the father of the modern customer loyalty program.
Here’s the takeaway: Loyalty programs only make sense in industries in which a company can do nothing to differentiate itself from its competitors, and customers lack either the motivation or the price sensitivity to shop around. Those descriptors apply to very few businesses. In addition to airlines, the programs probably make sense for car rental companies, newsstands, and possibly a few others. In most industries, though, companies that think they can’t compete on service or quality are not trying hard enough.
Take a look at grocery stores. A few chains, including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, attract customers through superior quality or unique products. It’s no coincidence that these stores don’t have loyalty programs. They don’t need them, because they’ve given you a compelling reason to shop with them. Grocery outlets with harsh lighting, cheap flooring, and signs handwritten in marker—you know the ones I mean—almost always have some kind of club program, because they can’t think of any other reason for you to walk through their noisy, unresponsive sliding doors. (Wegmans is alone among premium-quality grocery chains in having a loyalty program, but it dates back to 1990, before the chain surged past its humdrum upstate New York competitors.)
Business management scholars have written piles of studies on customer loyalty programs, and virtually all of them reach the same conclusion: In most industries, they’re hopelessly mismanaged. It’s not that the programs don’t work; it’s that they work too well. Customers become so well trained to follow loyalty discounts that they won’t buy without them. According to a 2002 article in the Harvard Business Review, many retailers now offer such extensive rewards for loyalty that they’re no longer making money on their top customers—the very people the programs are supposed to entice. In addition, most customers engage in what researchers call “polygamous loyalty,” which is a creative way of saying disloyalty. The overwhelming majority of fliers, for example, belong to multiple rewards programs. It’s a race to the bottom, as companies are so afraid of losing customers to their competitors that they destroy their own profitability and forsake strategies to attract customers in novel ways.
Those rare loyalty programs that management researchers favor lock customers into uncomfortably personal relationships with a grocer, airline, or clothing store. Take, for example, the widely celebrated program launched by the British grocery chain Tesco. The more often a customer shopped at Tesco, and the more high-profit-margin products he purchased, the more coupons he received in the mail for more high-margin products. In other words, Tesco trained its customers to buy pasta with a larger markup, like dogs that salivated at the sound of a bell. In addition, Tesco monitored its customers’ buying habits closely. When a loyal shopper who visited the store weekly suddenly missed a couple of weeks, the chain feared that one of its sheep was straying from the herd and dispatched some coupons to shepherd him back. Maybe you’re comfortable with that relationship, but I don’t want a large grocery chain tracking my weekly movements, and I’m willing to forgo 40 cents off of Greek yogurt to avoid it.
by Brian Palmer, Slate | Read more:
Image: Joe Logon/Flickr via Creative Commons
Want to Disappear Completely? Step 1: Find a Desert Island
And when Dave swung the dinghy wide around the cape, his customer at last caught sight of the island, a shark’s tooth of sand and grass jutting from a small mountain of impenetrable bush. Heaven! Dave said to himself.
Heavy seas shouldered the tin boat sideways. Up front, mate! Dave shouted over the bee-loud motor. His customer clambered forward and sat himself backward on the bow, twisting at the waist to keep his eyes on the islet. The evening sky behind it was striped orange to purple.
The customer was thinking about how a guy can’t get himself shipwrecked anymore. Can’t one day discover that his storm-tossed ass has been beached upon a refuge, where he’s free to wile away life, alone with the Alone. It’s impossible now. All the deserted but potentially habitable islands are privately owned, or secret naval bases, or satellite tracking stations. Among other reasons.
Head on a swivel! Crocs! Dave sang out, his hair a white pennant behind him. Soon to be 70, Dave Glasheen was the smooth sienna of well-oiled and -kept things. He had been living on this outlying island for more than 15 years. We wouldn’t want to swim this at night, no we wouldn’t, he said. The water leaking into the bow rose above his customer’s ankles.
Hours earlier, Dave had picked him up from a World War II–era airstrip many miles distant in the mainland’s thick jungle. This intra- Australian airfare, as well as all sea transport, had been included in the $3,100 Dave charged for his two-week desert-island experience. The customer had wired the money directly into Dave’s bank account, as instructed. Also as instructed, he’d brought salamis, two loaves of good bread, coffee, and little else.
This was like a vacation but not. The impulse was the same, maybe. Long had the customer been shopping around for a space that was remote from the world. A spot where, he hoped, everything had been got rid of except for whatever couldn’t be lived without. What the smart set’s always wanted from their getaways.
The customer had inquired after fire towers and bathyspheres, deep caves and sensory-deprivation chambers. Idaho. The Arctic. He even looked into elective lobotomies and self-trepanation, just to see. Then— of course. The desert island came to him one winter Saturday. He had been in the bathtub, apocalyptically hung over. He was paddling warm water against his face and wondering, Just what the fuck is it I’m doing here?
The question was not new. It was what his mind reset to whenever he stilled himself, stopped diverting. For instance, he would close the browser on other people’s Twitter feeds and Instagrams (he was dependent on the Internet), finally put down the book, or, yes, wake up cottonmouthed in a spinning chamber of shame—and then it would begin to materialize: WTF, man? The question wavered in his mind’s eye before tightening into painful clarity, as vision tends to do after hard blows to the head.
The truth was that most things for him had turned into giant, squawking question marks. He was living far from home in an unfashionable part of New York City, uninsured and friendless (but for the roaches). He was a relatively young man, yet even a young man’s bliss had not been his. He’d loved little but had his fill of a hell of a lot. Had indulged himself, in fact, to where he made himself sick. Now he hid from the everyday melee of competing agents and material forces whenever he wasn’t scheduled to work. Should he have to take the subway somewhere, he found himself blinking back tears. What attempts he made at meeting new people were pre-written and floated into online ether, like bottled messages. He almost wished he’d knocked somebody up.
Instead, he decided to venture to a desert island off the edge of northeastern Australia. It was at least the first step, he figured. If a boat is foundering, you dry-dock it for repairs. Likewise, if you suspect your heart has a hole in it—take yourself out of the world. (...)
Restoration Island is a speck, a seventh of a square mile sitting only a few hundred meters offshore of the Cape York Peninsula. But the island is far removed, closer to Papua New Guinea than it is to any Australian city.
It got its name from William Bligh, the commanding lieutenant of the HMS Bounty. In 1789, Bligh’s crew mutinied after he refused to grant them a return to Tahiti, to the idyllic life (and easy natives) they imagined to be waiting for them there. The mutineers set him adrift in an open boat with a handful of loyal men. Left for dead, Bligh nonetheless managed to navigate to this island, where he and his crew scrounged food and recuperation. “Restoration Island,” they called it. They found a couple of huts, but no people. (...)
A decade ago, this island was kempt, civilized. The grass was mown and the buildings had doors. But now it abided nothing man-made. This disrepair embarrassed Dave. It made it seem as though he, too, was deteriorating. Past retirement age he might be, but he was just starting his life. He saw it all so much clearer now.
The tiki bar on the south shore, for instance. Now it had crumbled into the surf. But in 2003, he had used that tiki bar to entertain Fred Turner. Fred Turner, the McDonald’s chairman. In the midst of a fishing trip, Fred flew in on a helicopter to see the island and have a beer—and he had such a lovely time that he came back to camp on Resto with his executives and their families. Fred sat Dave at his right hand during dinners; once, he asked him to give a speech. Fred’s a hero, Dave made sure to mention in his address. Fred’s the college dropout who put the Golden Arches in 118 countries, the visionary who thought up the Chicken McNugget and the Drive-Thru and the whole standardized dining experience.
Oh, Dave hated the product, dearly. But no great man was more forward thinking than Fred. He got his millions, and then what did he do? He founded the Ronald McDonald House charity. Dave admired Fred’s class of corporate don best of all, the altruistic blokes who make it their business to help even after they’ve gathered their brass. He bet most of them were good people. How else could they have become so successful?
He explained this to his customer as they breakfasted on Cheerios and kiwis. Then Dave took him on a tour of the bush. Do you know the Google guys? he asked as they entered the jungle behind the clearing. What kind of blokes do you reckon they are?
Heavy seas shouldered the tin boat sideways. Up front, mate! Dave shouted over the bee-loud motor. His customer clambered forward and sat himself backward on the bow, twisting at the waist to keep his eyes on the islet. The evening sky behind it was striped orange to purple.
The customer was thinking about how a guy can’t get himself shipwrecked anymore. Can’t one day discover that his storm-tossed ass has been beached upon a refuge, where he’s free to wile away life, alone with the Alone. It’s impossible now. All the deserted but potentially habitable islands are privately owned, or secret naval bases, or satellite tracking stations. Among other reasons.Head on a swivel! Crocs! Dave sang out, his hair a white pennant behind him. Soon to be 70, Dave Glasheen was the smooth sienna of well-oiled and -kept things. He had been living on this outlying island for more than 15 years. We wouldn’t want to swim this at night, no we wouldn’t, he said. The water leaking into the bow rose above his customer’s ankles.
Hours earlier, Dave had picked him up from a World War II–era airstrip many miles distant in the mainland’s thick jungle. This intra- Australian airfare, as well as all sea transport, had been included in the $3,100 Dave charged for his two-week desert-island experience. The customer had wired the money directly into Dave’s bank account, as instructed. Also as instructed, he’d brought salamis, two loaves of good bread, coffee, and little else.
This was like a vacation but not. The impulse was the same, maybe. Long had the customer been shopping around for a space that was remote from the world. A spot where, he hoped, everything had been got rid of except for whatever couldn’t be lived without. What the smart set’s always wanted from their getaways.
The customer had inquired after fire towers and bathyspheres, deep caves and sensory-deprivation chambers. Idaho. The Arctic. He even looked into elective lobotomies and self-trepanation, just to see. Then— of course. The desert island came to him one winter Saturday. He had been in the bathtub, apocalyptically hung over. He was paddling warm water against his face and wondering, Just what the fuck is it I’m doing here?
The question was not new. It was what his mind reset to whenever he stilled himself, stopped diverting. For instance, he would close the browser on other people’s Twitter feeds and Instagrams (he was dependent on the Internet), finally put down the book, or, yes, wake up cottonmouthed in a spinning chamber of shame—and then it would begin to materialize: WTF, man? The question wavered in his mind’s eye before tightening into painful clarity, as vision tends to do after hard blows to the head.
The truth was that most things for him had turned into giant, squawking question marks. He was living far from home in an unfashionable part of New York City, uninsured and friendless (but for the roaches). He was a relatively young man, yet even a young man’s bliss had not been his. He’d loved little but had his fill of a hell of a lot. Had indulged himself, in fact, to where he made himself sick. Now he hid from the everyday melee of competing agents and material forces whenever he wasn’t scheduled to work. Should he have to take the subway somewhere, he found himself blinking back tears. What attempts he made at meeting new people were pre-written and floated into online ether, like bottled messages. He almost wished he’d knocked somebody up.
Instead, he decided to venture to a desert island off the edge of northeastern Australia. It was at least the first step, he figured. If a boat is foundering, you dry-dock it for repairs. Likewise, if you suspect your heart has a hole in it—take yourself out of the world. (...)
Restoration Island is a speck, a seventh of a square mile sitting only a few hundred meters offshore of the Cape York Peninsula. But the island is far removed, closer to Papua New Guinea than it is to any Australian city.
It got its name from William Bligh, the commanding lieutenant of the HMS Bounty. In 1789, Bligh’s crew mutinied after he refused to grant them a return to Tahiti, to the idyllic life (and easy natives) they imagined to be waiting for them there. The mutineers set him adrift in an open boat with a handful of loyal men. Left for dead, Bligh nonetheless managed to navigate to this island, where he and his crew scrounged food and recuperation. “Restoration Island,” they called it. They found a couple of huts, but no people. (...)
A decade ago, this island was kempt, civilized. The grass was mown and the buildings had doors. But now it abided nothing man-made. This disrepair embarrassed Dave. It made it seem as though he, too, was deteriorating. Past retirement age he might be, but he was just starting his life. He saw it all so much clearer now.
The tiki bar on the south shore, for instance. Now it had crumbled into the surf. But in 2003, he had used that tiki bar to entertain Fred Turner. Fred Turner, the McDonald’s chairman. In the midst of a fishing trip, Fred flew in on a helicopter to see the island and have a beer—and he had such a lovely time that he came back to camp on Resto with his executives and their families. Fred sat Dave at his right hand during dinners; once, he asked him to give a speech. Fred’s a hero, Dave made sure to mention in his address. Fred’s the college dropout who put the Golden Arches in 118 countries, the visionary who thought up the Chicken McNugget and the Drive-Thru and the whole standardized dining experience.
Oh, Dave hated the product, dearly. But no great man was more forward thinking than Fred. He got his millions, and then what did he do? He founded the Ronald McDonald House charity. Dave admired Fred’s class of corporate don best of all, the altruistic blokes who make it their business to help even after they’ve gathered their brass. He bet most of them were good people. How else could they have become so successful?
He explained this to his customer as they breakfasted on Cheerios and kiwis. Then Dave took him on a tour of the bush. Do you know the Google guys? he asked as they entered the jungle behind the clearing. What kind of blokes do you reckon they are?
by Kent Russell, New Republic | Read more:
Image: Brian Cassey
Soylent Dreams for People
[ed. From the four-part series Nothing but the Soylent.]
Soylent creator Rob Rhinehart was kind enough to sit down and talk with me for a bit on the Ars Soylent experience. He answered some of the questions that came up in the comments over the past several days.
The one I most wanted him to elaborate on was on the why of it all. The comments on the past pieces in this series have been brimming with folks who can't (or won't, perhaps) see the point of Soylent. Whether it's because they love cooking too much or they can't understand why someone would drink a nutrient slurry in place of food, some people were not at all on board.
"Soylent is supposed to be like an ultimate staple meal," began Rhinehart. "When you think about food, a lot of people immediately jump to the best aspects, which are great—eating for recreation, eating with people. This is an important part of life and food is intimately tied with culture and tradition."
But not every meal is artisanal, fresh, and healthy; Soylent aims to fill in those gaps like a utility. "People will talk about beer and wine and gourmet coffee, but most of the time they're drinking water. By focusing on Soylent as a staple, fool-proof meal, this could do a lot more for health than some new recipe based on lettuce or something."
The name
The name itself, "Soylent," has drawn fire—but that's part of the reason why Rhinehart chose the name in the first place. "For food, a lot of people tend to react quickly and not give it a lot of analysis. Piquing curiosity is very important here, and giving the product some kind of flashy marketing name would kind of—people would miss it quickly. But the name 'Soylent' is really good for encouraging further discussion and thought. Clearly, I'm wanting someone to investigate it a little deeper if I'm calling it 'Soylent.' It doesn't seem very marketable!" The name serves several purposes—it catches the interest of geeks as almost an inside joke ("IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE!"), and it's remarkably sticky.
Hasn't this been done before?
This, though, leads into another topic that readers commented repeatedly on: Soylent's originality, or its perceived lack of. Meal replacement products aren't anything terribly new, and there are products both in the consumer space and also in the medical and healthcare space that can be substituted in for solid food. Soylent is billing itself as a revolutionary product. Is it?
"From the consumer standpoint, those things aren't designed to be sustainable or really even that healthy," Rhinehart said, referring to things like Carnation Instant Breakfast and Slim Fast and other common off-the-shelf meal replacement shake-style drinks. "They're certainly not something you'd want to run your body off of—a lot of fructose, simple sugars, and by calorie it's really expensive. We've reached a point of calories-per-dollar and sustainability and nutrition where we're really trying to compete with groceries."
On the medical side, products like Jevity and Nestlé's entire line of liquid tube feeding products are in a separate league from Soylent. "We're not making any medical claims, other than it being safe for consumption," clarified Rhinehart. Additionally, from a perspective of calories per dollar, both the consumer and the medical liquid nutrition products are outside of what Rhinehart wants to target for Soylent. Rhinehart wants Soylent "to compete with rice and beans," he explained. "The routine meals that a lot of people are eating—that's what we want to compete with, especially if we can displace fast food."
This, though, leads into another topic that readers commented repeatedly on: Soylent's originality, or its perceived lack of. Meal replacement products aren't anything terribly new, and there are products both in the consumer space and also in the medical and healthcare space that can be substituted in for solid food. Soylent is billing itself as a revolutionary product. Is it?
"From the consumer standpoint, those things aren't designed to be sustainable or really even that healthy," Rhinehart said, referring to things like Carnation Instant Breakfast and Slim Fast and other common off-the-shelf meal replacement shake-style drinks. "They're certainly not something you'd want to run your body off of—a lot of fructose, simple sugars, and by calorie it's really expensive. We've reached a point of calories-per-dollar and sustainability and nutrition where we're really trying to compete with groceries."
On the medical side, products like Jevity and Nestlé's entire line of liquid tube feeding products are in a separate league from Soylent. "We're not making any medical claims, other than it being safe for consumption," clarified Rhinehart. Additionally, from a perspective of calories per dollar, both the consumer and the medical liquid nutrition products are outside of what Rhinehart wants to target for Soylent. Rhinehart wants Soylent "to compete with rice and beans," he explained. "The routine meals that a lot of people are eating—that's what we want to compete with, especially if we can displace fast food."
by Lee Hutchinson, ARS Technica | Read more:
Image: Lee Hutchinson
The Boredom Room
For more than two years, he has come to a small room, taken a seat and then passed the time reading newspapers, browsing the Web and poring over engineering textbooks from his college days. He files a report on his activities at the end of each day.
Sony, Mr. Tani’s employer of 32 years, consigned him to this room because they can’t get rid of him. Sony had eliminated his position at the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which in better times produced magnetic tapes for videos and cassettes. But Mr. Tani, 51, refused to take an early retirement offer from Sony in late 2010 — his prerogative under Japanese labor law.
So there he sits in what is called the “chasing-out room.” He spends his days there, with about 40 other holdouts.
“I won’t leave,” Mr. Tani said. “Companies aren’t supposed to act this way. It’s inhumane.”
The standoff between workers and management at the Sendai factory underscores an intensifying battle over hiring and firing practices in Japan, where lifetime employment has long been the norm and where large-scale layoffs remain a social taboo, at least at Japan’s largest corporations.
Sony wants to change that, and so does Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. As Japan’s economic recovery slows, reducing the restraints on companies has become even more important to Mr. Abe’s economic plans. He wants to loosen rigid rules on job terminations for full-time staff. (...)
Sony said it was not doing anything wrong in placing employees in what it calls Career Design Rooms. Employees are given counseling to find new jobs in the Sony group, or at another company, it said. Sony also said that it offered workers early retirement packages that are generous by American standards: in 2010, it promised severance payments equivalent to as much as 54 months of pay. But the real point of the rooms is to make employees feel forgotten and worthless — and eventually so bored and shamed that they just quit, critics say.
Labor practices in Japan contrast sharply with those in the United States, where companies are quick to lay off workers when demand slows or a product becomes obsolete. It is cruel to the worker, but it usually gives the overall economy agility. Some economists attribute the lack of a dynamic economy in Western Europe to labor laws similar to Japan’s that restrict layoffs. (...)
Critics of labor changes say something more important is at stake. They warn that making it easier to cut jobs would destroy Japan’s social fabric for the sake of corporate profits, causing mass unemployment and worsening income disparities. For a country that has long prided itself on stability and relatively equitable incomes, such a change would be unacceptable.
by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ko Sasaki
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