Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Washington State to Start Selling Pot in June
Washington State Liquor Board has received a total of 7,046 applications, with 2,206 for retail which they will limit to 334.
The cannabis will be priced at $3 per gram for producers, $6 for processors and a pre-tax $12 per gram for retailers. “The board anticipates tax revenue of up to $2 billion during the first five years as a result of a 25% tax on each level. That’s right, ultimately this cannabis will have been taxed 75% by the time it reaches the customer.”
The cannabis will be priced at $3 per gram for producers, $6 for processors and a pre-tax $12 per gram for retailers. “The board anticipates tax revenue of up to $2 billion during the first five years as a result of a 25% tax on each level. That’s right, ultimately this cannabis will have been taxed 75% by the time it reaches the customer.”
It's, The Masters!
[ed. I know... you're just as excited as I am, it's The Masters! The one tournament each year when the drama is nearly guaranteed on a hushed and breathless Sunday afternoon at Augusta National Golf Club. The dogwoods and azaleas are in full bloom, commercials are kept to a minimum (4 minutes an hour), and the course is fast and tricky. Can't wait.]
We can always be certain of a few things about the Masters Tournament, which starts Thursday at the Augusta National Golf Club: The azaleas will be in bloom. The course will be pristine. The post-tournament sit-down in Butler Cabin will be awkward. But who will win? Let’s see which factors, if any, correlate with success under the Georgia pines.
Full disclosure: Attempting to forecast the outcome of any single golf tournament is, in many ways, a fool’s errand. The PGA Tour’s leading winner in each season since 19801 has averaged 4.6 victories in 21 events, a rate of just under 22 percent. Even Tiger Woods, who may be the greatest golfer of all time, has won only 26 percent of the tournaments he’s entered. The field regularly beats the best golfers in the world, and this is especially true in the tiny sample of a four-round tournament.
Complicating matters, the Masters (one of the more prestigious of the four majors) has seen plenty of fluke winners in recent years, at least based on their perceived status the year before they won the tournament. Going back to 2003, the earliest year for which the PGA Tour website has end-of-year Official World Golf Ranking data, only U.S. Open winners have a lower end-of-year OWGR point average2 than Masters champions in the season before their major victory.3
But despite the inherent uncertainty of golf and especially the Masters, some numbers emerge as predictors of success at Augusta. Specifically, long hitters appear to have an advantage — and pure ball-strikers less so — than would be expected from their performance across all tournaments.
To isolate those predictive factors, I borrowed a technique I first used for last year’s NCAA Giant Killers project at ESPN.com. The idea is to start with a base rating for each player that loosely represents his talent level relative to others’ in the field. Then I look for discrepancies between what that measurement predicted and what happened, and try to determine whether those gaps are related to a particular attribute of a player’s game.
by Neil Paine, 538 | Read more:
Image: Getty Images
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Why Buying a Corporate Jet Pays for Itself
Lots of American companies have private jets, and the government gives them a pretty good reason to buy one: They can pay for themselves in just a few years.
The reason is that the American government pretends a jet only lasts five years, when in reality you can use it for decades. The government is pretending that other long-lived corporate investments—train cars, broadcast antennae, oil rigs and satellite tracking equipment—will also become useless far sooner than they will, five or seven years into a much longer working life. This willful blindness is an attempt to fool businesses into buying more expensive stuff, thus goosing the economy, but there’s not a lot of evidence that it actually works.
“As a result, businesses holding these assets are able to recoup the entire cost of acquiring the asset long before it’s ceased to produce value,” Dean Sonderegger, an executive at Bloomberg BNA who builds software that allows companies to track these write-offs. “Take private jets, for example, which have an IRS-specified useful life of five years, allowing firms to write off 70% of their cost within the first three years.”
The term of art here is depreciation, and it serves a useful purpose. You shouldn’t have to pay taxes on your necessary business expenses, but it doesn’t make sense to let companies deduct the entire cost of something they buy in the first year if it will last for years. So companies are allowed to deduct a percentage of the equipment’s cost over time, as its value depreciates. But when these rates were set in the 1986 tax reform, they were, for some reason—probably last-minute political horse-trading—often based on lifespans much shorter than the real ones.
Today, businesses can also add in bonus depreciation—who doesn’t love a bonus?—that was first instituted as stimulus after the recession in 2000, renewed and subsequently increased in the years that followed; it currently speeds up depreciation by 50%.
The reason is that the American government pretends a jet only lasts five years, when in reality you can use it for decades. The government is pretending that other long-lived corporate investments—train cars, broadcast antennae, oil rigs and satellite tracking equipment—will also become useless far sooner than they will, five or seven years into a much longer working life. This willful blindness is an attempt to fool businesses into buying more expensive stuff, thus goosing the economy, but there’s not a lot of evidence that it actually works.“As a result, businesses holding these assets are able to recoup the entire cost of acquiring the asset long before it’s ceased to produce value,” Dean Sonderegger, an executive at Bloomberg BNA who builds software that allows companies to track these write-offs. “Take private jets, for example, which have an IRS-specified useful life of five years, allowing firms to write off 70% of their cost within the first three years.”
The term of art here is depreciation, and it serves a useful purpose. You shouldn’t have to pay taxes on your necessary business expenses, but it doesn’t make sense to let companies deduct the entire cost of something they buy in the first year if it will last for years. So companies are allowed to deduct a percentage of the equipment’s cost over time, as its value depreciates. But when these rates were set in the 1986 tax reform, they were, for some reason—probably last-minute political horse-trading—often based on lifespans much shorter than the real ones.
Today, businesses can also add in bonus depreciation—who doesn’t love a bonus?—that was first instituted as stimulus after the recession in 2000, renewed and subsequently increased in the years that followed; it currently speeds up depreciation by 50%.
by Tim Fernholz, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Reuters/Gene Blevins
I'm a Raccoon
i’m a raccoon. i like going through the garbage. i like washing discarded things, i like loving unbeloved ideas...
~ Ariana Reines
Fake Hawaii: Your American Jungle
Hawaii is an ocean apart from the continental U.S., in the margins of the coastal media outposts and the peripheries of social-justice Twitter monitors. The voice of Hawaii and its people (locals!) is often muted. But maybe the Hollywood-media complex doesn’t think it needs to be accountable in its accuracy of Hawaii because, for the most part, it depicts the islands as a mellow, chill, pina-colada-slurping, spam-barbecuing paradise where everyone wants to vacation forever, right?
Not exactly. Hawaii's had a big year. Four shows have aired in the last season that are 100 percent set in the islands—"Hawaii Five-O," four seasons and running; and "Hawaii Life," "Wild Hawaii" and "American Jungle"—with a fifth show currently being shot, tentatively titled "The Ark." And not all are glowing or accurate. (...)
Before the flawed and filthy rich, or the flawed and bumpkin-like, became TV’s bread and butter, there was the idyllic and the cookie-cutter. Hawaii was both the symbol of serene beauty and American-suburban escape. It was a safe exoticism, our country’s pit-stop paradise, saved for sitcom vacation episodes or tiki murder mysteries, packed with luaus, shirtless dudes saying "brah" and flirtatious hula dancers. In film, it provided the backdrop for a long history of easy-breezy surf movies—from "Blue Hawaii" and "Gidget Goes Hawaiian" in the 60s to "Blue Crush" and "Soul Surfer" in the aughts—because Hawaii is the place where you Hang 10, pray to the Big Kahuna and avoid the kooks. Hawaii didn’t become a national television staple until the original "Hawaii Five-O’"s 12-year run, paving the way for everyone’s favorite ’80s hunk, "Magnum P.I.," both of which were kind of hokey and not necessarily ethnically accurate but harmless nonetheless, and then there was my fave in high school, "Byrds of Paradise," starring a teenage Jennifer Love Hewitt as a Hawaii transplant, Timothy Busfield as her dad and a lot of young, local eye candy in between (fun fact: a friend of a friend took J.Love to prom). Then the reality shows arrived: "The Real World Hawaii," a.k.a. the one with Ruthie, which, like all the other seasons, no one expected to be real; MTV’s "Maui Girls," as vapid and phony as "The Hills"; and, of course, the original local-trash reality show, A&E’s "Dog the Bounty Hunter." "Dog" may be the least flattering to local life, but in some ways it was the most accurate of the bunch, as meth is no joke in islands; not every nook and cranny comes up desirable. But mostly, I give whatever sensationalism Dog provided a pass because any right-minded viewer could see that the most ludicrous things about the series were the non-natives—the overly tan, navel-bearing bounty hunter and his wife with the ginormous breasts. Compared to "American Jungle," "'Bounty Hunter' wasn’t that much better," Aila said. "But at least, conceptually, it employed someone who was bounty hunter mechanically correct."
I can think of only one mainstream film that has done a fair-enough job in portraying the complications of race, culture and how people live in Hawaii while capturing the islands’ natural beauty—2011’s The Descendants. Beneath a universal story of loss, there were the quiet politics between native Hawaiians, locals, local haoles who’ve lived there for generations but still don’t feel totally local, and the people who move there but never quite get the culture. Based on generation, time-and-place appropriateness and socio-economics, pidgin was spoken accordingly. Locals were cast as extras. Set designers added touches like Hawaiian sea-turtle quilts and shoyu bottles on restaurant tables. The whole thing was done quite thoughtfully because the director, Alexander Payne, worked closely with Kaui Hart Hemmings, the island-born writer of the book he adapted, to ensure accuracy in the details.
by Jessica Machado, The Awl | Read more:
Image: AP
Monday, April 7, 2014
Why It Is Not Possible to Regulate Robots
If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I believe two things about computers: first, that they are the most significant functional element of most modern artifacts, from cars to houses to hearing aids; and second, that we have dramatically failed to come to grips with this fact. We keep talking about whether 3D printers should be "allowed" to print guns, or whether computers should be "allowed" to make infringing copies, or whether your iPhone should be "allowed" to run software that Apple hasn't approved and put in its App Store.
Practically speaking, though, these all amount to the same question: how do we keep computers from executing certain instructions, even if the people who own those computers want to execute them? And the practical answer is, we can't.
Oh, you can make a device that goes a long way to preventing its owner from doing something bad. I have a blender with a great interlock that has thus far prevented me from absentmindedly slicing off my fingers or spraying the kitchen with a one-molecule-thick layer of milkshake. This interlock is the kind of thing that I'm very unlikely to accidentally disable, but if I decided to deliberately sabotage my blender so that it could run with the lid off, it would take me about ten minutes' work and the kind of tools we have in the kitchen junk-drawer.
This blender is a robot. It has an internal heating element that lets you use it as a slow-cooker, and there's a programmable timer for it. It's a computer in a fancy case that includes a whirling, razor-sharp blade. It's not much of a stretch to imagine the computer that controls it receiving instructions by network. Once you design a device to be controlled by a computer, you get the networked part virtually for free, in that the cheapest and most flexible commodity computers we have are designed to interface with networks and the cheapest, most powerful operating systems we have come with networking built in. For the most part, computer-controlled devices are born networked, and disabling their network capability requires a deliberate act.
My kitchen robot has the potential to do lots of harm, from hacking off my fingers to starting fires to running up massive power-bills while I'm away to creating a godawful mess. I am confident that we can do a lot to prevent this stuff: to prevent my robot from harming me through my own sloppiness, to prevent my robot from making mistakes that end up hurting me, and to prevent other people from taking over my robot and using it to hurt me.
The distinction here is between a robot that is designed to do what its owner wants – including asking "are you sure?" when its owner asks it to do something potentially stupid – and a robot that is designed to thwart its owner's wishes. The former is hard, important work and the latter is a fool's errand and dangerous to boot. (....)
Is there such a thing as a robot? An excellent paper by Ryan Calo proposes that there is such a thing as a robot, and that, moreover, many of the thorniest, most interesting legal problems on our horizon will involve them.
As interesting as the paper was, I am unconvinced. A robot is basically a computer that causes some physical change in the world. We can and do regulate machines, from cars to drills to implanted defibrillators. But the thing that distinguishes a power-drill from a robot-drill is that the robot-drill has a driver: a computer that operates it. Regulating that computer in the way that we regulate other machines – by mandating the characteristics of their manufacture – will be no more effective at preventing undesirable robotic outcomes than the copyright mandates of the past 20 years have been effective at preventing copyright infringement (that is, not at all).
But that isn't to say that robots are unregulatable – merely that the locus of the regulation needs to be somewhere other than in controlling the instructions you are allowed to give a computer. For example, we might mandate that manufacturers subject code to a certain suite of rigorous public reviews, or that the code be able to respond correctly in a set of circumstances (in the case of a self-driving car, this would basically be a driving test for robots). Insurers might require certain practices in product design as a condition of cover. Courts might find liability for certain programming practices and not for others. Consumer groups like Which? and Consumer Union might publish advice about things that purchasers should look for when buying devices. Professional certification bodies, such as national colleges of engineering, might enshrine principles of ethical software practice into their codes of conduct, and strike off members found to be unethical according to these principles.
by Cory Doctorow, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Blutgruppe/ Blutgruppe/Corbis
Practically speaking, though, these all amount to the same question: how do we keep computers from executing certain instructions, even if the people who own those computers want to execute them? And the practical answer is, we can't.Oh, you can make a device that goes a long way to preventing its owner from doing something bad. I have a blender with a great interlock that has thus far prevented me from absentmindedly slicing off my fingers or spraying the kitchen with a one-molecule-thick layer of milkshake. This interlock is the kind of thing that I'm very unlikely to accidentally disable, but if I decided to deliberately sabotage my blender so that it could run with the lid off, it would take me about ten minutes' work and the kind of tools we have in the kitchen junk-drawer.
This blender is a robot. It has an internal heating element that lets you use it as a slow-cooker, and there's a programmable timer for it. It's a computer in a fancy case that includes a whirling, razor-sharp blade. It's not much of a stretch to imagine the computer that controls it receiving instructions by network. Once you design a device to be controlled by a computer, you get the networked part virtually for free, in that the cheapest and most flexible commodity computers we have are designed to interface with networks and the cheapest, most powerful operating systems we have come with networking built in. For the most part, computer-controlled devices are born networked, and disabling their network capability requires a deliberate act.
My kitchen robot has the potential to do lots of harm, from hacking off my fingers to starting fires to running up massive power-bills while I'm away to creating a godawful mess. I am confident that we can do a lot to prevent this stuff: to prevent my robot from harming me through my own sloppiness, to prevent my robot from making mistakes that end up hurting me, and to prevent other people from taking over my robot and using it to hurt me.
The distinction here is between a robot that is designed to do what its owner wants – including asking "are you sure?" when its owner asks it to do something potentially stupid – and a robot that is designed to thwart its owner's wishes. The former is hard, important work and the latter is a fool's errand and dangerous to boot. (....)
Is there such a thing as a robot? An excellent paper by Ryan Calo proposes that there is such a thing as a robot, and that, moreover, many of the thorniest, most interesting legal problems on our horizon will involve them.
As interesting as the paper was, I am unconvinced. A robot is basically a computer that causes some physical change in the world. We can and do regulate machines, from cars to drills to implanted defibrillators. But the thing that distinguishes a power-drill from a robot-drill is that the robot-drill has a driver: a computer that operates it. Regulating that computer in the way that we regulate other machines – by mandating the characteristics of their manufacture – will be no more effective at preventing undesirable robotic outcomes than the copyright mandates of the past 20 years have been effective at preventing copyright infringement (that is, not at all).
But that isn't to say that robots are unregulatable – merely that the locus of the regulation needs to be somewhere other than in controlling the instructions you are allowed to give a computer. For example, we might mandate that manufacturers subject code to a certain suite of rigorous public reviews, or that the code be able to respond correctly in a set of circumstances (in the case of a self-driving car, this would basically be a driving test for robots). Insurers might require certain practices in product design as a condition of cover. Courts might find liability for certain programming practices and not for others. Consumer groups like Which? and Consumer Union might publish advice about things that purchasers should look for when buying devices. Professional certification bodies, such as national colleges of engineering, might enshrine principles of ethical software practice into their codes of conduct, and strike off members found to be unethical according to these principles.
by Cory Doctorow, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Blutgruppe/ Blutgruppe/Corbis
Portraits of Reconciliation
NZABAMWITA: “I damaged and looted her property. I spent nine and a half years in jail. I had been educated to know good from evil before being released. And when I came home, I thought it would be good to approach the person to whom I did evil deeds and ask for her forgiveness. I told her that I would stand by her, with all the means at my disposal. My own father was involved in killing her children. When I learned that my parent had behaved wickedly, for that I profoundly begged her pardon, too.”
KAMPUNDU: “My husband was hiding, and men hunted him down and killed him on a Tuesday. The following Tuesday, they came back and killed my two sons. I was hoping that my daughters would be saved, but then they took them to my husband’s village and killed them and threw them in the latrine. I was not able to remove them from that hole. I knelt down and prayed for them, along with my younger brother, and covered the latrine with dirt. The reason I granted pardon is because I realized that I would never get back the beloved ones I had lost. I could not live a lonely life — I wondered, if I was ill, who was going to stay by my bedside, and if I was in trouble and cried for help, who was going to rescue me? I preferred to grant pardon.”
Last month, the photographer Pieter Hugo went to southern Rwanda, two decades after nearly a million people were killed during the country’s genocide, and captured a series of unlikely, almost unthinkable tableaus. In one, a woman rests her hand on the shoulder of the man who killed her father and brothers. In another, a woman poses with a casually reclining man who looted her property and whose father helped murder her husband and children. In many of these photos, there is little evident warmth between the pairs, and yet there they are, together. In each, the perpetrator is a Hutu who was granted pardon by the Tutsi survivor of his crime. (...)
At the photo shoots, Hugo said, the relationships between the victims and the perpetrators varied widely. Some pairs showed up and sat easily together, chatting about village gossip. Others arrived willing to be photographed but unable to go much further. “There’s clearly different degrees of forgiveness,” Hugo said. “In the photographs, the distance or closeness you see is pretty accurate.”
In interviews conducted by AMI and Creative Court for the project, the subjects spoke of the pardoning process as an important step toward improving their lives. “These people can’t go anywhere else — they have to make peace,” Hugo explained. “Forgiveness is not born out of some airy-fairy sense of benevolence. It’s more out of a survival instinct.” Yet the practical necessity of reconciliation does not detract from the emotional strength required of these Rwandans to forge it — or to be photographed, for that matter, side by side.
At the photo shoots, Hugo said, the relationships between the victims and the perpetrators varied widely. Some pairs showed up and sat easily together, chatting about village gossip. Others arrived willing to be photographed but unable to go much further. “There’s clearly different degrees of forgiveness,” Hugo said. “In the photographs, the distance or closeness you see is pretty accurate.”
In interviews conducted by AMI and Creative Court for the project, the subjects spoke of the pardoning process as an important step toward improving their lives. “These people can’t go anywhere else — they have to make peace,” Hugo explained. “Forgiveness is not born out of some airy-fairy sense of benevolence. It’s more out of a survival instinct.” Yet the practical necessity of reconciliation does not detract from the emotional strength required of these Rwandans to forge it — or to be photographed, for that matter, side by side.
by Susan Dominus, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Pieter Hugo
Building the Facebook of Neighborhoods
[ed. I've thought for a long time that something like this would be useful, if for no other reason than to share information about crime in our neighborhoods (and, wondered why the police didn't take the initiative to create neighborhood web sites themselves). This is more elaborate].
Having her bike yanked from the utility closet of her San Francisco apartment building reminded Sarah Leary why she had spent the last three years building an online social network for neighbors.
"I put out a message saying, ‘Here’s what my bike looks like,’” says Leary, co-creator of Nextdoor, “and I had three or four people chime in with just, like, ‘I’m so sorry that that happened.’” (She added that those few posted words alone “made her feel known and loved and supported.”) Other neighbors were more practical. One insisted that she file a report so that the police might add it to the stats used to track local bicycle thievery.
Oh right, Leary, a Massachusetts native and tech world veteran who now lives in the Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood, recalls thinking. I’m supposed to do something about this for my neighborhood in real life, not just gripe about it online.
The site co-founded by Leary is a simple enough idea. We’ve become acclimated to using Facebook to connect with friends and family. LinkedIn for work. Twitter for our interests. Yet in 2014 there is no go-to online social network for the people we live among. "And that," Leary says while sitting in Nextdoor’s suite of offices, "is kind of crazy."
The Nextdoor team, Leary says, draws some of its inspiration from Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who concluded in his 2000 book Bowling Alone that "social networks in a neighborhood" make crime go down and test scores go up. Even more fundamentally, our neighbors would be the first to dig us out from the rubble after an earthquake. But today, we don’t know them that well. Nearly a third of Americans can’t pick out a single person in their neighborhood by name. For all the talk about technology driving us ever further into our personal bubbles — Putnam used “social networks” in the pre-Facebook sense — Nextdoor’s gamble is that the Internet can, in fact, be the missing bridge between us and the people with whom we share a spot on the map. (...)
The ultimate goal is to make information shared on Nextdoor so valuable that people don’t want to miss it — a bet on the notion that far more people care about, say, what happens at community meetings than attendance numbers suggest. It’s a vision of Nextdoor less as a social network than as a social utility.
Having her bike yanked from the utility closet of her San Francisco apartment building reminded Sarah Leary why she had spent the last three years building an online social network for neighbors.
"I put out a message saying, ‘Here’s what my bike looks like,’” says Leary, co-creator of Nextdoor, “and I had three or four people chime in with just, like, ‘I’m so sorry that that happened.’” (She added that those few posted words alone “made her feel known and loved and supported.”) Other neighbors were more practical. One insisted that she file a report so that the police might add it to the stats used to track local bicycle thievery.Oh right, Leary, a Massachusetts native and tech world veteran who now lives in the Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood, recalls thinking. I’m supposed to do something about this for my neighborhood in real life, not just gripe about it online.
The site co-founded by Leary is a simple enough idea. We’ve become acclimated to using Facebook to connect with friends and family. LinkedIn for work. Twitter for our interests. Yet in 2014 there is no go-to online social network for the people we live among. "And that," Leary says while sitting in Nextdoor’s suite of offices, "is kind of crazy."
The Nextdoor team, Leary says, draws some of its inspiration from Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who concluded in his 2000 book Bowling Alone that "social networks in a neighborhood" make crime go down and test scores go up. Even more fundamentally, our neighbors would be the first to dig us out from the rubble after an earthquake. But today, we don’t know them that well. Nearly a third of Americans can’t pick out a single person in their neighborhood by name. For all the talk about technology driving us ever further into our personal bubbles — Putnam used “social networks” in the pre-Facebook sense — Nextdoor’s gamble is that the Internet can, in fact, be the missing bridge between us and the people with whom we share a spot on the map. (...)
The ultimate goal is to make information shared on Nextdoor so valuable that people don’t want to miss it — a bet on the notion that far more people care about, say, what happens at community meetings than attendance numbers suggest. It’s a vision of Nextdoor less as a social network than as a social utility.
by Nancy Scola, Next City | Read more:
Image: Nextdoor
Sunday, April 6, 2014
The New Normal
[ed. Remember folks, you heard it here first.]
2. A sociocultural concept, c. 2013, having nothing to do with fashion, that concerns hipster types learning to get over themselves, sometimes even enough to enjoy mainstream pleasures like football along with the rest of the crowd.
3. An Internet meme that turned into a massive in-joke that the news media keeps falling for. (See below).
A little more than a month ago, the word “normcore” spread like a brush fire across the fashionable corners of the Internet, giving name to a supposed style trend where dressing like a tourist — non-ironic sweatshirts, white sneakers and Jerry Seinfeld-like dad jeans — is the ultimate fashion statement.
As widely interpreted, normcore was mall chic for people — mostly the downtown/Brooklyn creative crowd — who would not be caught dead in a shopping mall. Forget Martin Van Buren mutton chops; the way to stand out on the streets of Bushwick in 2014, apparently, is in a pair of Gap cargo shorts, a Coors Light T-shirt and a Nike golf hat. (...)
A style revolution? A giant in-joke? At this point, it hardly seems to matter. After a month-plus blizzard of commentary, normcore may be a hypothetical movement that turns into a real movement through the power of sheer momentum.
Even so, the fundamental question — is normcore real? — remains a matter of debate, even among the people who foisted the term upon the world. (...)
Like a mass sociological experiment, the question now is whether repetition, at a certain point, makes reality. Even those who coined the phrase concede that normcore has taken on a life of its own. “If you look through #normcore on Twitter or Instagram, people are definitely posting pictures of that look,” said Gregory Fong, a K-Hole founder. “Whether they believe it’s real or a joke, it’s impossible to say, but it’s there and it’s happening.”
It certainly seems to be. Sort of.
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
“It is an interesting subject: superfluous people in the service of brute power. A developed, stable, organized society is a community of clearly delineated and defined roles, something that cannot be said of the majority of third-world cities. Their neighborhoods are populated in large part by an unformed, fluid element, lacking precise classification, without position, place, or purpose. At any moment and for whatever reason, these people, to whom no one pays attention, whom no one needs, can form into a crowd, a throng, a mob, which has an opinion about everything, has time for everything, and would like to participate in something, mean something.
“All dictatorships take advantage of this idle magma. They don’t even need to maintain an expensive army of full-time policemen. It suffices to reach out to these people searching for some significance in life. Give them the sense that they can be of use, that someone is counting on them for something, that they have been noticed, that they have a purpose.”
Ryszard Kapuściński, from “Problem, No Problem.”
Photography: Judy Dater
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