Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t

So a cou­ple of months ago Dou­glas Atkin, head of Com­mu­nity and E-staff Mem­ber at AirBnB, took to the stage of the Le Web con­fer­ence in Lon­don (video) to announce the for­ma­tion of Peers: “a grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ports the shar­ing econ­omy move­ment.” I like grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions and I like the co-operative impulse, but this… Well here is his speech in its entirety (in ital­ics) with com­ments from yours truly.

I joined AirBnB about four months ago, but I’m going to talk about a dif­fer­ent organization.

He means Peers.

In fact I’d like to talk about a move­ment for the shar­ing econ­omy. By “a move­ment” I mean exactly that. I mean huge num­bers of peo­ple, with a shared iden­tity, mobi­lized to take action to do two things: to grow the peer shar­ing econ­omy, and to fight for their col­lec­tive inter­ests against unfair and unrea­son­able obstacles.

A grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion with 40 cor­po­rate “part­ners”, with unspec­i­fied but sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing, formed with guid­ance from a set of high-profile “thought lead­ers”, with­out local chap­ters, and with noth­ing much for the grass­roots to do, but with an Exec­u­tive Direc­tor on day one.

Andrew Leonard from Salon has been fol­low­ing the story, and tells us that fund­ing comes from “mission-aligned inde­pen­dent donors”. So that’s wealthy back­ers with a finan­cial inter­est in the shar­ing econ­omy. This is not grass­roots, it’s astroturf.

If there is one thing that makes me angry, it is peo­ple appro­pri­at­ing the lan­guage of col­lec­tive and pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics for finan­cial gain. And that’s one thread of what’s going on here. As we shall see. It does seem that Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Natalie Foster’s heart is in the right place, but that’s one of the tragedies of the shar­ing econ­omy: well-intentioned peo­ple end up con­tribut­ing to immis­er­a­tion and injus­tice when they think they are doing the opposite.

So what we’re talk­ing about here is not just peo­ple shar­ing their skills, or their apart­ment, or their car, but also their col­lec­tive power to expand the shar­ing econ­omy together, and to stand up against entrenched inter­ests who stand unfairly in their way. So “peo­ple power” if you like, or more accu­rately “peer power”.

And what we’re not talk­ing about here is ven­ture cap­i­tal. Going through Crunch­base tells me that the total fund­ing for the 40 part­ners is over $600M. AirBnB has received $120M, includ­ing fund­ing from Andreessen Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Ash­ton Kucher. You know, peo­ple stand­ing up against entrenched interests.

At the end of this post I’ve added a table of what I could find. It tells us that almost all the fund­ing is going to the Bay Area or New York. The non-profits in this orga­ni­za­tion are being taken for a ride by the appeal­ing anti-establishment lan­guage of Sil­i­con Val­ley . They need to take a look at who their bed­fel­lows are and what the real agenda is.

Ven­ture Cap­i­tal funds are not inter­ested in peo­ple power, they are inter­ested in an invest­ment with a good return. The fact that Dou­glas Atkin doesn’t once men­tion the finan­cial moti­va­tions of the forces behind the shar­ing econ­omy is either dis­hon­est or unbe­liev­ably self-deceiving.

Now why would there be a need for such a thing? The shar­ing econ­omy seems to be bar­relling along pretty hap­pily. Why do we need another orga­ni­za­tion? Well, firstly the oppor­tu­nity. This was brought home to me a week ago in San Fran­cisco where I attended a meet­ing of shar­ing econ­omy par­tic­i­pants. So there were dri­vers, pas­sen­gers, hosts, guests, and tour guides from RelayRides, Lyft, AirBnB, Vayable and Side­car, and they were lit­er­ally bounc­ing up and down with enthu­si­asm about the oppor­tu­nity to col­lab­o­rate together — with each other. 

So they were devel­op­ing ideas — bril­liant ideas actu­ally — to share cus­tomers with each other, across ver­ti­cals. One per­son even sug­gested that there could be a peer econ­omy cur­rency — maybe Bit­coin. Or even points to encour­age peo­ple to cross ver­ti­cals and recruit new peo­ple into this new economy.

The lan­guage changes, the mask slips. Par­tic­i­pants become cus­tomers, shar­ing becomes buy­ing. The phrase “across ver­ti­cals” reminds us that Dou­glas Atkin is an adver­tis­ing exec­u­tive. Now the shar­ing econ­omy is about loy­alty pro­grams and cross mar­ket­ing? Not the kind of shar­ing I want to be part of. I don’t have a prob­lem with com­merce, but what I do object to is com­merce wrapped up in, and appro­pri­at­ing, the lan­guage of solidarity.

by Tom Slee, Whimsley |  Read more:

Image: FastCompany

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Prescription Heroin

[ed. See also: Heroin, cocaine and weed are stronger, cheaper and easier to get than they've ever been.]

British Columbia, Canada, has had a heroin problem for years. Statistics are hard to come by, but in 2008, a former user described use of the drug in the province as an "epidemic," and a 2010 BBC story called Vancouver, the province's largest city, the "Drug Central of North America." But a new strategy in the fight against addiction and the host of societal problems that come with it is emerging: let doctors prescribe addicts heroin so they get the drug they need without resorting to crime. Studies have shown this approach can help many longtime users, but the Canadian gonvernment wants it shut down.

Prescription heroin is used in some European countries, including Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, but it's been a long time coming to North America. The first Canadian study that tested the effectiveness of giving addicts heroin under the supervision of doctors was the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI), which started in 2005. It eventually recruited 251 addicts in Vancouver and Montreal who had unsuccessfully attempted to kick smack numerous times. A control group was given methadone, which is commonly prescribed to heroin addicts so they can wean themselves off hard drugs.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009, showed that injectable heroin—known in medical-speak as diacetylmorphine—was a far more effective and efficient treatment than methadone in getting users out of the vicious and costly cycle of crime, infection, overdoses, and hospital visits that are a way of life for those in the grips of long-term, hardcore addiction. Compared to those trying to kick heroin using methadone, participants used street drugs less often, committed fewer crimes, and were employed more often, more connected to their families, and straight-up happier. A "cost of illness" analysis from 2000 found that severely addicted individuals can cost society over $43,000 per year, so getting addicts off the streets and into roles as members of productive society is good for all of Canada.

Dave Murray participated in the study and went on to found the NAOMI Patients Association in 2011. But in 2005 he was in his 50s and addicted seemlingly for life.

“I’m living in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in a single-room-occupancy hotel, I’m down on my luck and I’m down to nothing," he told me over the phone. "I’m dealing drugs to support my habit and committing crimes. Doing various horrible things that I don’t even want to talk about. I often describe the addiction like if you can picture a dog chasing his tail, round and round and round and then finally it falls asleep. And then when it wakes up, and it’s back to chasing its tail around. That’s the stress of addiction. That’s the life of an addict.” (...)

“If you’re going to pull someone out of the ditch, you don’t pull them halfway out and leave them on their own," he said. "You’ve got to pull them out and really start helping them, and you’ll be amazed how resourceful these people are. I mean, think about if you had to go out there and come up with a hundred or two hundred bucks every day without a job, you’re quite a resourceful character—if you can give them some other direction to use that resourcefulness to become successful in some other field other than obtaining enough money to buy their heroin every day, I think you’d be amazed how far some people could go if you gave them a hand.”

by Dave Dean, Motherboard |  Read more:

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Myths of the Golden Age

Over the last 15 years, many people have adopted the view that television has entered a “Golden Age.” This view first emerged in 1999, when The Sopranos made its darkly comedic debut on the subscription cable station HBO, and it gathered strength as The Wire enjoyed its five-series run on the same station. These shows became possible because of dramatic changes in the structure of the television industry, shifts in the character of white-collar work, and the increasing homogenisation of Hollywood films, which opened up exciting new space for artistic ambition on the small screen. On police dramas like The Wire and The Shield, the depiction of violence and moral ambiguity suggested that uncompromising realism had finally made a place for itself on TV, while violent fantasies like Dexter seemed to provide the medium with unprecedented psychological surrealism and depth. These fictional worlds, fleshed out in meticulous detail, populated by minor characters who proved to be as memorable as the protagonists, were immersive and multifaceted in a way that earlier shows, with their casts of rotating, disposable characters, could only dream of. Today, with Mad Men and the violent psychodrama, Breaking Bad, nearing their conclusion, television is widely regarded as the 21st century’s most exciting form of popular art. (...)

The key shows in this new wave have been collectively dubbed “prestige TV,” a term which neatly captures the importance of reputation and cultural cachet to their success. Prestige television’s supporters are fond of the idea that the morally complex protagonists of their favourite shows are unsympathetic, and that it is a testament to the shows’ writing that audiences have always managed to root for them. The typical protagonist of prestige shows is a middle-aged American man, almost always a father and husband, who carries out a semi-secret double life in crime or some other form of deviance, like serial adultery. For all their flaws, these characters have been admired, even loved. The Sopranos made James Gandolfini, with his hulking frame and reedy voice, into a sex symbol, and no amount of lies, alcohol, or moping seems to be able to dim Don Draper’s appeal in the eyes of Mad Men’s fans. The adulterous ad man, the cop who dips into the drug trade himself, the chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer—this kind of protagonist has become so popular that some networks now prefer “anti-heroes” to the more traditional kind.

These characters began to appear precisely when premium cable stations—for which viewers pay monthly “subscription” fees, as with magazines—stopped pursuing the largest possible audience. Instead, as Martin writes, “Networks now targeted specific demographics: rich, young, educated, male, and so on.” An audience that fit this profile could be attractive to advertisers despite its modest size, and so prestige television dramas have all been targeted at educated professionals. These are people who work long hours and invest much of their social identity in their careers. It is not surprising, then, that they have no trouble relating to television’s anti-heroes. These characters, after all, are defined by their intelligence and success at their jobs. Don Draper’s infidelities are forgiven on the grounds of his ability to sell an unconventional advertising slogan to a cigarette company. Breaking Bad’s wildly inaccurate portrayal of the drug trade is overlooked in exchange for the pleasures of watching a middle-class suburban male outsmart scores of adversaries. The truth is that prestige television actually makes its protagonists a little too easy to sympathise with.

But perhaps there is another reason why television’s anti-heroes have been such a hit. In a conversation recently published by the website Slate, Stephen Metcalf proposed a theory about our obsession with the middle class father living a double life in crime. The economic collapse of 2008, he argued, revealed the hollowness of the economic promises made to the middle class. A responsible life of white-collar work no longer guaranteed you a retirement or a house of your own (at least not a house with any value). What’s more, the middle class was destroyed by a group of plutocratic investment bankers whose behaviour is widely regarded as criminal in its own right. With the rules degraded to the point of cruel uselessness, why should it be any surprise that TV viewers find themselves hungry for shows in which middle class dads break the laws that were not really protecting them in the first place?

It’s a compelling argument, but it misses an important aspect of the genre, which is its aggressive and resentful masculinity.

by Richard Beck, Prospect |  Read more:

Image: Breaking Bad

Bruce Davidson
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‘‘It Was the Biggest Game of Chicken I’ve Ever Seen.’’

[ed. From the series: Launch. Hack. Meow.]

In mid-May, a few days before Yahoo announced it would be acquiring Tumblr, there was a housewarming party in Greenpoint. A Tumblr employee was moving into an apartment with a friend who happened to be dating another ­Tumblr employee, and the overlapping social circles resulted in a room full of Tumblr people. It was Saturday night. Late the previous afternoon, a cluster of posts had appeared on tech blogs with the announcement that Yahoo’s board would be meeting on Sunday to approve a $1.1 billion offer for Tumblr, and though everyone at the party had read the posts—or fielded texts from someone who had—nobody had really paid attention. Rumors skittered around the office on a weekly basis. Employees always joked that it didn’t matter what kind of options you had because Tumblr was never going to sell.

Plus: Yahoo? Really? When a similar idea circulated back in 2009, Tumblr’s then–lead developer, Marco Arment, summed up the party line in a scornful blog post: “I hope they let me work on some of the many exciting projects at Yahoo … I want to move to California and get stuck in traffic every day on the way to my midlevel engineering job where I sit in a cubicle all day and can’t make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking.” Thanks, but no thanks. Yahoo was a lumbering Sunnyvale company with irrelevant products that no one used. Tumblr was a nimble startup in the nation’s greatest city with a boy-genius founder. An acquisition wasn’t just unlikely, it was insulting. The only company to whom they might have sold, an early employee said, was Apple (if Apple had asked).

Yahoo’s reputation as a wet blanket may have been allayed by the arrival of Marissa Mayer as CEO, but an acquisition still struck employees at the party as too icky to be true. (One guest summed it up: “No one who works in tech wants to work at Yahoo.”) As more wine and whiskey were consumed, however, the incredulity turned into fidgety speculation. One employee pointed out that Mayer had been dropping into the Tumblr office as far back as December; he remembered peering into the fishbowl conference room to see her meeting with their CEO, David Karp, and head of product, Derek Gottfrid. Nothing secret about it. Other employees were aware that after a hiring spree and floor-to-ceiling office remodel, the amount of cash left in ­Tumblr’s coffers was dwindling. At some point, partygoers who worked on the engineering side began forecasting how shitty the company would become if Yahoo were to buy it, and by the end of the night, guests were running numbers, trying to figure out how much their options might be worth. On Monday, Karp called an all-team meeting to announce the deal.

If low- and mid- and even some high-level employees were shocked—“I don’t think anyone saw it coming necessarily,” says Gottfrid—anyone paying attention to Tumblr’s burn rate should have been expecting an exit. Despite its popularity (it is the fourteenth-most-visited site in the U.S., according to Quantcast, a few slots above Wikipedia), Tumblr was a six-year-old blogging platform with disappointing revenue targets, no clear path to profitability, and alarmingly little cash in the bank (just $16.6 million when it was purchased). To stay afloat without selling, it would have needed a sixth round of funding, which, given the situation, might have led to a “down round,” and to Karp ceding a substantial chunk of his equity. As one person watching the deal unfold put it: “It was the biggest game of chicken I’ve ever seen in a startup. Literally months away from bankruptcy, and he manages to find an angel in Marissa Mayer.”’ (...)

Tumblr’s appeal can be summed up in one word, which is “easy.” If you traveled back in time to 1996 and took a grandmother whose understanding of the web was AOL and wormholed her to 2013, she’d be able to create a Tumblr blog in less than three minutes with no direction. The site’s posting icons are big, the fonts are big, everything is big: The whole thesis is that there’s no fine print and no learning curve. Generating new blogs is so easy that Tumblr limits the number that users are allowed to create in a single day. (The limit is ten.)

If the “easy” mandate feels unimaginative today, it was less so in 2007. Karp has talked a lot about his frustration with tools like Wordpress and Blogger, and he is shrewder these days in his framing of Tumblr as “a novel alternative” rather than a middle finger. Blogging in 2007 required too much work: “I had all sorts of things I wanted to share, but they were screenshots, jokes, poorly formed ideas, videos that I had just watched that were hilarious, and things that I was working on.” Karp’s idea was to create a little portal to Internet heaven, with George Takei videos, Homer Simpson quotes, pictures of Italian luxury cars, dream logs, self-portraits, observations, Lost trailers, and porn (which makes up around 11 percent of the site’s content). The new blogging would be less about writing and more about declaring a personal sensibility. Thanks to an innovation called the reblog, users wouldn’t even need to create anything themselves; they could just post what they scavenged elsewhere and, Karp says, “use that curation to tell their stories.” He sees Tumblr as a tool for “the most talented people in the world.”

by Molly Young, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Platon. Grooming by Marco Braca at Kramer + Kramer.

Let Me Tell You About the Most Heartfelt $200 I Ever Made

Michael Bloomberg’s first term actually ended on February 8, 2004, on the occasion of Sex and the City’s ante­penultimate episode, not long after Samantha pretended to be British to sneak into Soho House, the then-new private club with the kitchen-sponge-size rooftop pool. This was the episode in which gauche, chain-smoking “Page Six” staple “Lexi Featherston” did some coke at a geriatric party, yelled, “This used to be the most exciting city in the world, and now it’s nothing but smoking near a fuckin’ open window,” and then took a header out said window. The “girls” went to her funeral at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, once known as the site of the first performance by Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye and then suddenly an HBO backdrop. Manhattan had become a stage set of itself. Carrie Bradshaw was the Bernie Goetz of the Bloomberg era, shooting at the walls of heartache, bang-bang.

The hook was baited perfectly, and now, for the first time since the O’Dwyer administration—look it up!—more people are coming here than are leaving. But if New York City is better than ever—and we think it is—then why does it suck so bad?

The money, yes. And the cupcakes, and the ATMs, and all these apartments that somehow are in clock towers, which are all also just money. Among the young set, it’s newcomers’ parents paying up at our phantom tollbooth. There is now a class of New Yorkers with the luxury of not just money but also plenty of time. Once you got a crappy coffee at the deli or you didn’t get coffee. Now the city is a wonderland of delicious pour-over. Every day is choose-your-own-adventure when you’re not dying over the rent. Now there’s a substantial population who thinks New York’s a lark, or college 2.0, or an indie-lectual Rumspringa, a lazy not so Grand Tour before packing it in to get married in Dallas. Not to pick on the millennials: The olds aren’t suffering either. Now a vast number of them pretend to live in the city while gardening at their second homes, in the sweet spread from Germantown to Ghent to Kinderhook. The result: New York has fewer who’d bleed for her. Once the city was for people who craved it with the stridency of a young Madonna. The result was entertainment, friction, mayhem, disaster, creation, magic. (...)

Minimum estimates now put the number of New York City millionaires at around 400,000; there could be as many as 650,000. New York City wasn’t the inventor or progenitor of wealth inequality, the great national trend of the last dozen years, but we do it best. It’s a bedrock pillar of nickels and dimes all the way down, a billion fees a second, a burn rate, a waste, a dick joke, a $40,000 storefront in Brooklyn, one more year of fat bonus before you say you’ll finally quit, one more “space” disrupted, a Balthazar breakfast, a billion uniques, a whale, a Citation X, an acquisition, a bomb, a deposition, a bust.

I couldn’t help but wonder, like an aging Carrie Bradshaw: Does everyone else daydream about the New York That Got Away? An afternoon in an art dealer’s enormous apartment, when he carelessly shuffled Warhol Polaroids, and they were all a grand. The apartment in the West Thirties was $380,000, but there were hookers. Now New York seems like every little thing in it is beyond priceless, and nothing will ever be yours. That’s absolutely true, and you never will have the things that you helplessly crave—but also it has always been like that.

by Choire Sicha, NY Magazine | Read more:

Image: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos

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Bill Evans Trio

Million-Dollar Babies

Elisa and Dave Santiago bought a two-bedroom condo with a den in a trendy neighbourhood in uptown Toronto in 2009 with plans to eventually start a family. Then they found out they were pregnant—with twins. When daughters Micah and Yuna arrived eight weeks ago, the joy of becoming new parents clashed with the new reality of what it meant to raise a family in a high-cost city.

As a self-employed naturopath, Elisa, 35, wasn’t eligible for maternity-leave benefits. Dave, 36, had recently left his well-paying accounting job to start his own consulting business, leaving the couple with little in the way of a steady income in the short term. So, four years after they purchased their dream home, the couple put their condo up for sale and moved back in with Elisa’s parents. While Elisa says the decision was largely driven by her need for her mother’s help in raising newborn twins—a huge benefit in a city where daycare costs can reach $2,000 a month per child—the nearly $3,000 a month in mortgage payments and maintenance fees meant their condo had started to look less like a family home and more like a financial burden. “It’s hard to let go of that condo, because I love it,” Elisa says. “But this is the choice we had.” (...)

Exactly how much it costs to raise a child is the subject of much debate. A Fraser Institute study last month pegged it at $3,000 to $4,000 a year—or $72,000 to raise a child to 18. It’s a figure that excludes both housing and child care costs, emphasizes scrimping and saving, government child benefits and borrowing from family or friends. Meanwhile, an analysis by MoneySense in 2011estimated it would cost considerably more: $243,660, or close to the $241,080 calculated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Yet even such huge figures are “woefully insufficient,” says John Ward, a Kansas economist who consults on economic damages for legal disputes, including wrongful death cases involving children. For one thing, Ward says, most of these analyses do not take into account societal costs, such as the property taxes all homeowners pay to support public education. While they do take into account some of the added housing costs associated with growing families, they don’t include a host of other expenses, such as the cost of saving for a university education. Tuition is expected to reach close to $40,000 for a four-year degree in Canada by the time today’s infant heads off to university—or as much as $110,000, including the cost of textbooks and accommodation. Add to this the opportunity costs of raising children: the investment returns that parents could have earned if they had taken the money they spent on kids and saved it instead—at five per cent interest, that comes out to roughly $280,000—and the lost income from having one parent take time off work to care for a child. “If mom was a lawyer and dropped out of the labour force for four or five years, the family gave up the opportunity cost of maybe $60,000 to $100,000 a year in order to bring that child to a point where he could enter the education system,” says Ward. Statistics Canada estimates that even mothers who work full-time stand to earn 12 per cent less over their careers than women who have never had children, a “motherhood penalty” equal to roughly $108,000 over 18 years on a $50,000 salary.

Ward pegs the all-in cost of raising a child to 18 in the U.S. at around $700,000, or closer to $900,000 to age 22, which is a more realistic picture for today’s families. The calculations work out similarly in Canada, where the total cost of raising a child to 18, including lost income, forgone investment savings and the price of a college education, comes out to around $670,000. For those dreaming of two children, that’s likely to cost well over $1 million.

It shouldn’t be a shock, then, that young parents are the most financially squeezed of any families in the country. Statistics Canada estimates that couples with children account for 30 per cent of households, but more than half of all of Canada’s household debt. Two-parent families with children under the age of 24 averaged $157,000 in debt, or $33,000 more than couples without children.

by Tamsin McMahon, Maclean's | Read more:
Image: Evan Kafka / Getty Images

Food Waste: The Next Food Revolution

How are we going to feed 9 billion people by 2050? The answer to this question — or the lack thereof — is one of the biggest issues in agriculture today. Experts estimate that we need to grow 60 percent more food than we currently produce. And as a result, there is a push to constantly create more. More miracle crops. More monocultures. More monocrops. More seeds. More food.

But are we missing the point? Currently, in the U.S., almost half of our food — 40 percent of what we grow— ends up in the garbage. Globally, food waste is rising to 50 percent as developing nations struggle with spoilage and Western nations simply toss edible food away. Instead of turning our food system inside out to meet that 2050 deadline, why don’t we simply waste less? (...)

Farm to Table to Landfill

In Hackettstown, New Jersey, vegetable farmer Greg Donaldson leads informal tours around his fields to show visitors a large rotting pile of mostly edible produce.

The pile is a hub for perfectly good cucumbers (bent), strawberries (overripe but delicious), tomatoes (small blemishes), peaches (bruised) and garlic (split cloves). Stalks of broccoli, ears of corn, full heads of lettuce, eggplants, pears: It’s a perverse cornucopia, left to decay in the sun. At the beginning of summer, the pile fits in a dumptruck bed; By fall, it needs multiple tractor-trailers to haul it away.The sight of so much wasted produce used to eat at Donaldson, make him feel bad. But he and other farmers have learned to live with it as part and parcel of being a farmer. According to the charity Feeding America, more than 6 billion pounds of fruits and vegetables go unharvested or unsold each year. It’s because much of the food on a farm falls victim to aesthetic trifles: the misshapen peach, the tomato too large to fit in a three-pack. Or in an uncertain economy, a farmer grows more than he market demands, then leaves entire fields and orchards unharvested. We are growing more food than we know what to do with.

And this early-stage waste is only the beginning. From transport to processor to retailer to consumer, food waste affects every step of the supply chain between farm and fork. In developing countries, nearly 50 percent of the loss happens early in foods’ life: inefficient harvesting, spoilage, inadequate processing, obsolete transport technologies and other systemic problems. In Western nations, the problems are heavily weighted toward consumer and retail waste. A comprehensive 2012 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found that a whopping 43 billion pounds of food in the U.S. was thrown away just on the retail level in 2008. Reducing food losses by only 15 percent would be enough food to feed more than 25 million Americans each year. But supermarket food is marketed with an eye toward bulk, convincing shoppers to take home more than they can use. “There is a terrible push to make consumers buy more than they need, through family-sized packaging and buy-one-get-one-free promotions,” says Tim Fox, co-author of “Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not,” a report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).

Still, all this pre-consumed food waste doesn’t let consumers off the hook. Think of your own fridge right now — the unappealing leftovers, the wilted lettuce, the expired milk and yogurt. A quarter of those items, according to the NRDC, will ultimately end up in the trash. (...)

The environmental toll for throwing away so much uneaten food is also costly. Of the millions of tons that we waste in America each year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates 96 percent ends up in landfills. And currently, food waste is the number one material taking up landfill space, more than paper or plastic. This produces methane gas, one of the most harmful atmospheric pollutants. It’s true that some food waste is inevitable. There will always be a percentage of food grown that is not consumed. But there are also many ways to prevent unnecessary loss.

by Jesse Hirsch and Reyhan Harmanci, Modern Farmer | Read more:
Image: Grant Cornett

Carl Moser, Pavone con tre ciliegie 1905-06
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The Beatles

Holy Crap

There are a dozen sit-down toilet stalls in the New Braunfels Buc-ee’s men’s room. On a recent Sunday, all of them were occupied, door locks slid to red, even as a good number of urinals—and there are 33 to choose from—went unmanned. The convenience store’s facilities are different from almost every other men’s room in America—not because they’re huge, and not because they’re busy (although both those things are true), but because elsewhere, stalls are usually a last resort. At Buc-ee’s, which prides itself on restroom cleanliness, men use the stalls because they can.

“The Top Two Reasons to Stop at Buc-ee’s: Number 1 and Number 2,” reads one of the company’s many roadside billboards. While there’s no shortage of relief options along Interstate 35 between Dallas and San Antonio, the New Braunfels Buc-ee’s is the reigning champion of the annual “America’s Best Restroom” contest, held by bathroom and service supplier Cintas.

As another sign boasts, these are “Rest-rooms You Have to Pee to Believe.” The men’s urinal area has 28 privacy-walled white Kohlers, and there are 5 more in the stall area. Each urinal is numbered for clean-up purposes (“We need a quick mop under number seventeen!”) and, like each stall, has its own Purell dispenser. All told, the men’s room has eight sparkling sinks, twelve always-humming automated EnMotion towel dispensers, and nine Buc-ee’s beaver–logoed pink-gel-soap dispensers (not to mention six additional public Purells). The floor-to-ceiling stall dividers eliminate the kind of, er, crawl space present at airports, and with four double-rolled dispensers of toilet paper beside each toilet, you’d never have to pass a roll between them anyway.

“People will hold it so they can go here,” said 21-year-old Texas State University student Scott Sommerlatte, one of the five maintenance “associates” in red shirts and khaki pants who man the restroom 24/7.

by Jason Cohen, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Jason Cohen

Stop That Bus (I Want to Get On)

It’s 6:45 on Monday morning in Noe Valley, and, as usual, I’m pumping away on a stationary bike in a storefront gym. The spin class instructor’s iPhone is plugged into a portable speaker, hip-hop lite urging us on. I’m breathing hard. I feel good. Suddenly, light splashes across the room—a bus has pulled up outside, its towering sides reflecting the morning sun. Pure white and spotless. Dark-tinted windows. No label, but an LED sign over the door: “GBUS TO MTV.”

Two or three people in their 20s who’ve been waiting outside, accompanied by their well-behaved dogs, climb aboard. Then the door eases closed and the bus glides away, heading 35 miles south to the immaculate town of Mountain View, to the Googleplex.

I keep on pedaling, going nowhere, nagged by the question that’s been dogging me the past several months: Was that the future leaving me behind?

The corporate perk I just witnessed has become an achingly familiar one in these parts, and a noisy, flashy metaphor for whatever we feel about the tech industry in our midst: annoyance, resentment, paranoia, even something like hate. In the Mission district in May, affordable housing protesters bashed a piñata in the shape of the Bus; in June’s Pride Parade, another group of activists leased a white bus as part of an elaborate, unflattering parody of the techies; and no less a social critic than George Packer in the New Yorker called the Bus “a vivid emblem of the tech boom’s stratifying effect in the Bay Area.” There is nothing like a shining white chariot sailing through the streets to remind us on the sidewalk that we are not the anointed. The implication pisses off a fair number of San Franciscans.

But what if you don’t hate, or resent, or self-righteously mock the Bus? What if you want to be on the Bus? What if, when you are pedaling madly at 6:45 in the morning and watching the Bus pull away, the emotion you feel is not anger, but envy?

My own fixation on the Bus began in April, when I lost my job at age 54. For more than 20 years I’d survived in the tempestuous media ocean by surfing jobs from reporter to critic to editor. For the last dozen years I had been a high-ranking magazine editor—first in the Midwest, then in New York, and ultimately here—helping steer some of the industry’s biggest and most lucrative powerhouses: Better Homes and Gardens, Oprah, Sunset.

I was a success in a profession that was growing less successful every day. Print media, as we all know, is on a downward trajectory, its audiences increasingly distracted, its advertising revenues diverted into all things digital, leaving us print people watching anxiously as our staffs shrink and our budgets crumble. When Steve Jobs held up the first iPad almost four years ago, I got editor goose bumps—that was where everything that I put together, words and images and ideas, would live. That was exciting. But rather than streaming me into a digital expansion, my job more often involved trimming line items and laying people off. Finally, unable to reinvent my calling fast enough, I was shown the door myself.

A New York recruiter I’ve known for years called me when she heard that I was job-free. “Now’s your chance!” she said, meaning that I now had the opportunity to exit the death spiral of print publishing once and for all. She sounded almost jealous. At the time, it made me feel a bit better about getting fired. But I still wasn’t clear on how to turn the situation into some kind of luck. In the old world, I had mastered the rules and the etiquette and the language of career advancement. Now all of that seemed less certain. All I knew was, I wanted to be on the side that is reimagining the new, not defending the old.

by Kitty Morgan, SF Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Dan Escobar

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Leah Giberson, Garden Chairs, April 2003
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