Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines

[ed. Not often do you see Stephen Hawking as a co-author of an opinion piece, especially one related to a blockbuster movie.]  

As the Hollywood blockbuster Transcendence debuts this weekend with Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman and clashing visions for the future of humanity, it's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever.

Artificial intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy!, and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fueled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.

The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.

Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. (...)

Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organized in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it may play out differently than in the movie: as Irving Good realized in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a "singularity" and Johnny Depp's movie character calls "transcendence." One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilization sent us a text message saying, "We'll arrive in a few decades," would we just reply, "OK, call us when you get here -- we'll leave the lights on"? Probably not -- but this is more or less what is happening with AI.

by Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, and Frand Wilczek, Huffington Post |  Read more:

Image: AP

Linda Christensen
via:

Evan Salmon, Car Carrier in Strong Light II 2014
via:

via:

Jane Evelyn Atwood, Too much time: Women in Prison
via:

Station to Station

On-demand streaming music has been part of the collective imagination for more than a century. It can be traced back to the 1888 publication of Edward Bellamy’s million-selling science fiction novel Looking Backward, in which a man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000. Amidst the mind-blowing technological developments he encounters on his journey is a “music room,” in which 24-hour playlists are piped in to subscribers via phone lines. With no shortage of astonishment, the man proclaims that “an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will” is perhaps the pinnacle of human achievement.

The splashy, celebrity-laden debut of Beats Music earlier this year may not have been accompanied by such gobsmacked wonder, but at the same time, the smartphone-based music subscription service sponsored by AT&T is the latest iteration of Bellamy’s fantastic 19th century notion. Beginning with Pandora’s 2005 launch and dramatically ramping up with Spotify’s controversial 2011 debut, streaming has become the preeminent technological force driving digital music into the 21st century. Though the idea of streaming music pre-dates recordings, the industry’s investments in today’s technology is designed in large part to wrench back control via unlimited access after a decade of ceding power to mp3-downloading fans.

So far, it’s working. According to Nielsen SoundScan’s 2013 report, sales of single mp3 downloads declined 6 percent from 2012, while streaming activity increased by 32 percent. The Recording Industry Association of America’s own data reveals that sales of physical media declined 12.3 percent between 2012 and 2013 while paid subscriptions to streaming platforms increased 57 percent. CDs and mp3s won’t simply disappear—they’re still vital parts of digital music's ecology—but faced with streaming, they feel destined to become the digital equivalents of once-dominant analog predecessors like vinyl records and cassettes.

Though streaming platforms are very much a product of the digital-era presumption that all the world’s information should be accessible with a single click, their form and function derives from another early music medium. A few decades after Bellamy’s book captured the imagination of millions, and at the same time that the business of selling records was taking off, “music rooms” were manifested by broadcast radio. Nationwide, parlors were filled with sound by national radio networks like NBC and CBS, which interspersed music with periodic bursts of news, narrative programs, and advertising. From the 1920s forward, the business of selling and consuming music has been structured by a technological dialogue between programmed music streams and individual recordings.

If the recording industry has its way, music ownership will give way to a model completely based on access, but with an important shift. While radio broadcasts are based on a one-to-many model of transmission, streaming platforms aim to zero in on the tastes of the individual listener. Like many other modern industries, the recording industry is doubling down on big data, giving their catalogs to the coders, and betting on a future of distribution and discovery dictated by quantification. Behind the interfaces of streaming platforms are vast databases of songs coded with pinpoint metadata and matched with freely provided listener taste preferences, an infrastructure designed to execute the recording industry’s century-long mission: suggesting with mathematical detail what a listener wants to hear before they know they want to hear it. Combing through a huge corpus of ever-expanding data for each individual song can be a vastly different undertaking compared to older forms of music marketing and distribution. What used to be a question of persuasion has become a problem of prediction.

Listeners are well-served by streaming platforms, but for artists, they cast the question of compensation in a stark new light. While the value debates that dominated the mp3 moment pitted fans against artists, the emergent streaming era has so far seen the return of corporate exploitation, with a speculative twist: The rich or soon-to-be-rich build innovative products, convince an ailing recording industry to sign over their catalogs, acquiring the bricks-and-mortar of their operations—digitized recordings—for fractions of a penny on the dollar. These operations are mostly funded by venture capital, periodic rounds of investments, or as cogs in vast empires of information, and they can feel overwhelming for fans and artists alike. (...)

As streaming takes center stage for music commerce, questions with long histories must be reframed. In what ways are the non-stop interactions between databases and algorithms shaping our musical tastes? Do streaming platform business models inherently exploit artists when listener choice scales to infinity? Should speculative capitalism be the driving force for large-scale innovations in music technology, and is there a feasible alternative? Are we living in a technological golden age of creative possibility, cross-cultural communication, and sheer abundance, or a surveillance state controlled by privately-held brands promising endless access at the expense of imperceptible control? Answers to these questions are piloting digital music deep into the 21st century, but critically evaluating current technological developments means keeping an eye on the lessons of the past. (...)

More recently, computer engineers have looked to content-based recommendation as a way to address music-as-music, not simply as a generic commodity. Under this heading falls what’s long been called “machine listening”—epitomized most popularly by the Shazam app—in which songs are scanned for musicological factors and matched against those of other songs in infinite configurations. The Echo Nest uses machine listening, but it’s far from the company’s most important innovation. That would be its unique process of data retrieval and curation, which entails scraping information from social media platforms, Wikipedia entries, album reviews, and blog posts, which employees then shape into metadata, attached to songs and artists. When describing this labor-intensive aspect of the coding and recommendation process, Whitman suggests the Echo Nest is a living creature with an endless appetite: “If there’s a new artist, we’ll ingest it and try to learn about it.” (...)

“We don't just see that you have liked a song, we know about that song," Whitman continues. "To us, a song is not just a database entry, it’s the key, the tempo it’s in, the instruments.”

by Eric Harvey, Pitchfork |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

Bizarro World

Does this sound like anything you've ever been told could be called "justice"?

Two weeks ago, a pair of F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced at the door of a member of the defense team for one of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a contractor working with the defense team at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the man was bound by the same confidentiality rules as a lawyer. But the agents wanted to talk. 

They asked questions, lawyers say, about the legal teams for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other accused terrorists who will eventually stand trial before a military tribunal at Guantánamo. Before they left, the agents asked the contractor to sign an agreement promising not to tell anyone about the conversation. 

With that signature, Mr. bin al-Shibh’s lawyers say, the government turned a member of their team into an F.B.I. informant.

Also too, is this ok?

Last year, as a lawyer for Mr. Mohammed was speaking during another hearing, a red light began flashing. Then the videofeed from the courtroom abruptly cut out. The emergency censorship system had been activated. But why? And by whom? The defense lawyer had said nothing classified. And the court officer responsible for protecting state secrets had not triggered the system. Days later, the military judge, Col. James L. Pohl, announced that he had been told that an “original classification authority” — meaning the C.I.A. — was secretly monitoring the proceedings. Unknown to everyone else, the agency had its own button, which the judge swiftly and angrily disconnected.

Last year, the government acknowledged that microphones were hidden inside what looked like smoke detectors in the rooms where detainees met with their lawyers. Those microphones gave officials the ability to eavesdrop on confidential conversations, but the military said it never did so.

There's a term for this:

A kangaroo court is a judicial tribunal or assembly that blatantly disregards recognized standards of law or justice, and often carries little or no official standing in the territory within which it resides. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted". 

A kangaroo court is often held by a group or a community to give the appearance of a fair and just trial, even though the verdict has in reality already been decided before the trial has begun. Such courts typically take place in rural areas where legitimate law enforcement may be limited. The term may also apply to a court held by a legitimate judicial authority who intentionally disregards the court's legal or ethical obligations.

This is why I laugh when people say we need to "trust" the secret intelligence agencies and accept that they are following the rule of law and the constitution. It's probably the most fatuous remark I ever hear from liberals. According to that way of thinking, it's the people who reveal the government's misdeeds, not the misdeeds themselves, that constitutes betrayal of our country. I think that may be just a tiny misunderstanding of the issue.

Digby, Hullabaloo|  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Shopping
via:

The Inside Story Of Nirvana's One-Night-Only Reunion

[ed. I like the image of Krist Novoselic picking up a Nirvana songbook to re-learn his own songs.]

The thought of entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work in Nirvana barely even entered Dave Grohl's head until shortly after he walked offstage at last year's ceremony in Los Angeles after inducting Rush and jamming with them on "2112." "I did a quick interview and someone said, 'Are you excited to be eligible next year?'" Grohl says. "I just hadn't done the math. Then it hit me. But I couldn't imagine they would nominate us in our first year of eligibility."

Groups are eligible to enter the Hall of Fame 25 years after the release of their first album or single, and Nirvana's debut release - a cover of "Love Buzz" by Shocking Blue - hit shelves in the final weeks of 1988. "I found out we were on the ballot right around the same time we were nominated for a Grammy [for the Paul McCartney collaboration "Cut Me Some Slack,"] says Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic. "I was just like, 'Wow!' But it was bittersweet because the ceremony was scheduled for about a week after the 20th anniversary of Kurt's passing. I got anxious about that, but then I thought, 'Well, why don't we just make this a great tribute to him?'"

Most groups inducted into the Hall of Fame perform in one form or another, but the surviving members of the group hadn't played a Nirvana song in public since Cobain's death. "We didn't even start talking about playing until about eight weeks ago," says Grohl. "It just seemed practically impossible. It was hard to imagine jumping onstage and playing those songs. It takes a little bit of musical preparation, and a lot of emotional preparation."

Once they decided to give it a shot, the obvious next issue became finding guest singers. "That was a matter of finding people that we respected and that shared the Nirvana aesthetic," says Grohl. "Whether that's musical or otherwise." The group reached out to a handful of A-list male rock stars, but none wanted to take on the challenge. "Some of them were nervous," says Grohl. "I think some of them were maybe apprehensive because of how heavy the whole thing is."

The first person to agree was Joan Jett. "She took it on like it was her calling," says Grohl. "She got really excited and sent me this flurry of e-mails. She learned every song on Nevermind. She's everything that Nirvana stood for. She's a powerful, rebellious, musical force of nature. We couldn't think of anyone better to join us."  (...)

But the conversation gave Grohl an incredible idea. "We thought, 'Wait, it has to be all women,'" he says. "'Don't even ask anyone else. If we can fill the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance with these incredible women singing Nirvana songs, then we'll have achieved our own revolution.' It also added a whole other dimension to the show. It added substance and depth, so it didn't turn into a eulogy. It was more about the future."

Things moved very quickly from there. "Dave just started rattling off names," says Novoselic. "He was like, 'We should get Kim Gordon! And then someone up-and-coming…Annie Clark from St. Vincent!' I didn't even know who she was, but now I'm her biggest fan. Then we asked Lorde."

The goal was to present the guest singers in chronological order. "Joan Jett, who formed the Runaways, changed rock & roll for women," says Grohl. "Kim Gordon, from Sonic Youth, was this beacon of light in the predominantly macho, male underground punk rock scene. St. Vincent is a wicked musician that's pushing boundaries now. And Lorde has an incredible future ahead of her as a writer, performer and vocalist."

The group came together with Nirvana's former touring guitarist (and current Foo Fighter) Pat Smear at Gibson Guitar's rehearsal space in New York City a few days before the induction ceremony. "We said 'Hi' to everyone and launched into 'Lithium,'" says Novoselic. "I picked up a Nirvana tab book a week before to re-learn my parts, but we weren't up to speed at first. But then it started to flow and it got better and better. Then it hit me and I got kind of somber. I was like, 'Oh my God. I'm playing these songs again.'"

It was equally intense for Grohl. "The first time we played together, it was like seeing a ghost," he says. "The second time, it was a little more reserved. And the last time we played it was like that fucking Demi Moore/Patrick Swayze pottery wheel scene from Ghost. We usually got the song by the third take. It started to sound like Nirvana. Our road crew and some friends were in the room when we launched into 'Scentless Apprentice' for the first time. There were jaws on the floor.

by Andy Greene, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Aereo Case Will Shape TV’s Future

Throughout America’s business history, the victories and spoils went to the visionaries who made all manner of things — actual things like cars, pharmaceuticals and entertainment.

But more and more, many of the splashy business victories are going to companies that find a way to put a new skin on things that already exist. Uber does not own a single cab, yet it has upended the taxi industry. Airbnb doesn’t possess real estate, yet it has become a huge player in the lodging market. WhatsApp remapped texting on existing telecommunications infrastructure and — thanks to its acquisition by Facebook — has as much as $19 billion to show for it. The list goes on, but you get the idea.

Since 2012, Chet Kanojia has been building a business, backed by the media mogul Barry Diller, with ambitions to join that cohort. His start-up, Aereo, uses tiny remote antennas to capture broadcast TV signals and store them in the cloud, where consumers can watch them on a device of their choosing — no cable box, no cable bundle and most important, no expensive cable bill.

Instead, consumers pay $8 to $12 a month to watch almost live — there is a delay of a few seconds — and recorded programs from the major broadcast networks and public television. It’s a threat to both the lucrative cable bundle and the networks that receive rich fees for being part of that cable package. Aereo would give so-called cord cutters the means to assemble a more affordable package of online streaming options like Amazon Prime, Apple TV or Netflix, and still spend a Sunday afternoon watching the N.F.L. and “60 Minutes” immediately afterward. As antenna-driven viewing has dropped and digital consumption has surged, Aereo is a way to put old wine in a new bottle.

It is a crafty workaround to existing regulations, which rides on the Cablevision court ruling in 2008, which held that consumers had the right, through their cable boxes, to record programming. But then, cable companies pay broadcasters billions in so-called retransmission fees while Aereo pays them exactly nothing. (And the case is not just about Aereo — it opens the gate for cable companies or others to build a similar service and skip the billions in payments to the networks.)

The broadcast networks have a technical legal term for this particular innovation — theft — and they have been trying to shut down Aereo from the start.

It all collides on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court will hear the case American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo. It will be up to the court to decide whether the service is a consumer-friendly reskinning of the broadcast universe or just one more example of an Internet pirate trying to loot copyrighted content. In some senses, the case is as big of a deal as the Betamax ruling in 1984, which allowed consumers to record programming.

“This is the Sony Betamax of this century,” Mr. Kanojia said on the phone last week, citing a case that is likely to come up a lot on Tuesday.

The entertainment industry hated the Betamax decision and said it would lead to ruin — it didn’t — and the networks are just as opposed to a federal appeals court ruling last year to let what they see as Aereo’s chronic, classic infringement continue. In the broadcasters’ brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse that decision, Aereo was described as “an entire business model premised on massive and unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works.”

As a matter of copyright law, television programs can be shown only by those who have that right or a license to do so. That’s why bars and hotels must pay a fee for the programming they show on their televisions. And broadcasters say that Aereo is similarly a middleman that should pay for what they consider a public performance.

Aereo was conceived in the belief that because the consumer is the one who is pushing the button to watch live or recorded programming, that transaction is one-to-one and not a public performance. That the DVR is in the cloud and the antenna is remote is, in Aereo’s view, beside the point. In its arguments, Aereo embraces both the past (consumers have been using VCRs and then DVRs to record programming for decades) and the future (everything from Dropbox to Google Drive lets the consumer store what he wishes without any liability on the provider’s part). (...)

I spent time in Hollywood last week chatting with various executives, and Aereo was described variously as “a fencing operation peddling stolen goods” and “thieves masquerading as innovators.” That’s about as friendly as it got: Aereo may be small — Mr. Diller called it “a pimple” — but it represents something mighty important. If Aereo is allowed to store and transmit signals without payment, the television industry will be profoundly reconfigured.

by David Carr, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: G. Giraldo

#Love: I’m Single, Therefore I Tinder

In the game of Tinder, you win or you get bored and give up. That is pretty much standard operating procedure for anyone with a smartphone and a libido.

But what if you’re bad at Tinder?

Naturally, I can’t solve all your problems. But experts from across the country, as well as Tinder’s own Sean Rad, have hooked us up with some solid advice.

Tinder represents a new phase in the era of online dating. At one point, the only real online dating options were eHarmony and Match.com, and their rich, divorced customers were usually looking for something more serious. Then came OkCupid, asking you to browse photos in the cold blue light of your computer.

Now, we’re in the age of Tinder. The Tinder Years. Not only is the app free, but it tries its best to mimic the experience of perusing hotties in a bar, as opposed to surfing pictures on the web like a creep. And that’s the dream, right? To look across a crowded room and see eyes glaring back at you, silently undressing you until numbers are exchanged, and then saliva, and then maybe some token of trust and monogamy. Perhaps, a smartphone password (just kidding).

Tinder wants badly for that to be your experience on the app, which is why it’s an app in the first place. Rather than use it in the cold blue light of your computer screen on lonely nights, the app travels around town with you in your pocket. You may very well be on Tinder, digitally flirting in a bar, while you are actually at a bar. Yet despite their similar characteristics, the two experiences are very different.

The Game

Tinder is far more similar to Candy Crush than it is to flirting in a bar or even using OkCupid. It is a game centered around attraction. You swipe right if you like what you see, and swipe left if you don’t. And, if you prefer, that can be the entire experience.

Waiting for an elevator, or growing bored of your friends’ conversation hanging out, you tap on that little orange flame and sink some time. Left, left, left, right, left. Your thumbs do their own military march to the rhythm of your unending judgement. If you’re lucky, you have some new messages. You are, more than anything, entertained. You are not engaged.

But most of us don’t download Tinder with the hopes of adding a new, judgement-filled game to our smartphones. We download Tinder with the intention to engage with other humans, and all of us with different end goals.

So how do you, as a user, transform Tinder from “playing a game” to “I got game”?

The most prominent answer is that you don’t. To win at Tinder (or, to Winder, if you will) is to first accept that Tinder is a game. Hell, the app even tells you to “keep playing” after every match. It’s a great game. A game you can win.

Once you’ve let go of the idea that your soulmate is one swipe away, you may actually stand a chance at finding him or her. Tinder claims to have received emails on over 1,000 engagements from couples who met on the app, with the app approaching 1.5 billion matches. The founder of the app met his current girlfriend there. The odds are ever in your favor.

Now, you must understand the rules.

With Tinder, there are four important parts of the game to focus on: Pictures, Bio, Messaging, and Timing.

by Jordan Crook, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

Palcohol

Name: Palcohol.

Age: Weeks old, regulation-wise.

Appearance: Illicit-looking white powder.

Is it illicit? Not at all. In fact it's been approved for sale by the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

And what is it, exactly? It's powderised alcohol.

Come again? It's alcohol in powder form. Just add water.

You mean it turns water into wine? It turns water into either vodka or rum, or optional flavours including cosmopolitan, mojito and the Powderita – a powdered margarita.

Move over, Jesus! There's a new miracle worker in town! There is indeed: Mark Phillips, inventor of Palcohol.

Tell me more about him. "Mark is an active guy," according to the Palcohol website. "After hours of an activity, he sometimes wanted to relax and enjoy a refreshing adult beverage."

You know who Mark reminds me of? Me! Mark didn't want to carry bulky bottles of alcohol on his activities, so he invented Palcohol. But it has loads of other handy applications.

Really? I can't think of any. What about adding it to food for an extra kick?

Rum on your cornflakes? The Palcohol website suggested vodka on eggs, but it's the same idea – drinking at breakfast "to start your day off right".

Great thinking! What other advice does the website have? It suggested taking Palcohol into expensive venues to jazz up soft drinks, and mentioned "the elephant in the room".

by The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Chris Collins/Corbis

Alive in the Sunshine

For as long as the environment has existed, it’s been in crisis. Nature has always been a focus of human thought and action, of course, but it wasn’t until pesticides and pollution started clouding the horizon that something called “the environment” emerged as a matter of public concern.

In 1960s and 1970s America, dystopian images provoked anxiety about the costs of unprecedented prosperity: smog thick enough to hide skylines from view, waste seeping into suburban backyards, rivers so polluted they burst into flames, cars lined up at gas stations amid shortages, chemical weapons that could defoliate entire forests. Economists and ecologists alike forecasted doom, warning that humanity was running up against natural limits to growth, extinction crises, and population explosions.

But the apocalypse didn’t happen. The threat that the environment seemingly posed to economic growth and human well-being faded from view; relieved to have vanquished the environmental foe, many rushed to declare themselves its friends instead.

Four decades later, everyone’s an environmentalist — and yet the environment appears to be in worse shape than ever. The problems of the seventies are back with a vengeance, often transposed into new landscapes, and new ones have joined them. Species we hardly knew existed are dying off en masse; oceans are acidifying in what sounds like the plot of a second-rate horror movie; numerous fisheries have collapsed or are on the brink; freshwater supplies are scarce in regions home to half the world’s population; agricultural land is exhausted of nutrients; forests are being leveled at staggering rates; and, of course, climate change looms over all.

These aren’t issues that can be fixed by slapping a filter on a smokestack. They’re certainly not about hugging trees or hating people. To put it bluntly, we’re confronted with the fact that human activity has transformed the entire planet in ways that are now threatening the way we inhabit it — some of us far more than others. And it’s not particularly helpful to talk in generalities: the idea that The Environment is some entity that can be fixed with A Solution is part of the problem.

The category “environmental problems” contains multitudes, and their solutions don’t always line up: water shortages in Phoenix are a different matter than air pollution in Los Angeles, disappearing wetlands in Louisiana, or growing accumulations of atmospheric carbon. So instead of laying out some kind of template for a sustainable future, I argue that there’s no way to get there without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs. And the way to do that is through a universal basic income. (...)

It’s hard to think of many things more disingenuous than arguing that addressing environmental issues will impose unacceptable restrictions on the American standard of living while simultaneously promoting austerity measures — yet that attitude is pervasive in mainstream political discourse.

And while having stuff doesn’t make you a miserable soulless materialist, as some of the shriller anti-consumerist rhetoric would suggest, it doesn’t necessarily make you happier, either. Rather, the “status treadmill” frequently does the opposite: fueling anxiety, inadequacy, and debt under the banner of democracy and freedom. Meanwhile, consumer guilt has led to an explosion in “green” products — recycled toilet paper, organic T-shirts, all-natural detergents — but most do little more than greenwash the same old stuff, bestowing a sheen of virtue on their users, suggesting personal choices will save the planet. But the individual agonizing that constitutes consumer politics isn’t going to get around the fact that the global economy depends on more or less indefinitely expanding consumption. In fact, consumption has come full circle and become virtuous: protesting sweatshops and ranting about exploitation is passé; buying gadgets is the new way to lift people out of poverty. And so it’s not just workers who are threatened with jobs blackmail — we’re all threatened with consumption blackmail, wherein consuming less will put millions out of work worldwide and crash the global economy. Even our trash is creating jobs somewhere. (...)

A “green economy” can’t just be one that makes “green” versions of the same stuff, or one that makes solar panels in addition to SUVs. Eco-Keynesianism in the form of public works projects can be temporarily helpful in building light rail systems and efficient infrastructure, weatherizing homes, and restoring ecosystems — and to be sure, there’s a lot of work to be done in those areas. But a spike in green jobs doesn’t tell us much about how to provide for everyone without creating jobs by perpetually expanding production. The problem isn’t that every detail of the green-jobs economy isn’t laid out in full — calls for green jobs are meant to recognize the fraught history of labor-environmentalist relations, and to signify a commitment to ensuring that sustainability doesn’t come at the expense of working communities. The problem is that the vision they call forth isn’t a projection of the future so much as a reflection of the past — most visions of a “new economy” look a whole lot like the same old one. Such visions reveal a hope that climate change will be our generation’s New Deal or World War II, vaulting us out of hard times into a new era of widespread prosperity.

by Alyssa Battistoni, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Edward Carvalho-Monaghan

In a Hole, Golf Considers Digging a Wider One

Golf holes the size of pizzas. Soccer balls on the back nine. A mulligan on every hole.

These are some of the measures — some would say gimmicks — that golf courses across the country have experimented with to stop people from quitting the game.

Golf has always reveled in its standards and rich tradition. But increasingly a victim of its own image and hidebound ways, golf has lost five million players in the last decade, according to the National Golf Foundation, with 20 percent of the existing 25 million golfers apt to quit in the next few years.

People under 35 have especially spurned the game, saying it takes too long to play, is too difficult to learn and has too many tiresome rules.

Many of golf’s leaders are so convinced the sport is in danger of following the baby boomer generation into the grave that an internal rebellion has led to alternative forms of golf with new equipment, new rules and radical changes to courses. The goal is to alter the game’s reputation in order to recruit lapsed golfers and a younger demographic.

“We’ve got to stop scaring people away from golf by telling them that there is only one way to play the game and it includes these specific guidelines,” said Ted Bishop, the president of the P.G.A. of America, who also owns a large Indiana golf complex. “We’ve got to offer more forms of golf for people to try. We have to do something to get them into the fold, and then maybe they’ll have this idea it’s supposed to be fun.”

Among the unconventional types of golf is an entry-level version in which the holes are 15 inches wide, about four times the width of a standard hole.

by Bill Pennington, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Paul Abell/Associated Press for Hack Golf

Arne Svenson, “Neighbors #5,” 2012
via:

via:

Gustavo Minas
via:

My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin

In the late 17th century, a “panel of experts” answered reader queries submitted to the The Athenian Mercury, on topics ranging from literature to epistemology; the magazine’s spin-off, The Ladies Mercury, was devoted solely to advising “virgins, wives, or widows.” A hundred years later, the Ladies Monthly Museum, a periodical devoted to the “Amusement and Instruction” of polite females, would provide what’s probably the template for the contemporary advice column. Since then, “agony aunts” (and “uncles”) have become staples across media—print (Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Dan Savage), radio (Dr. Drew), online (Cary Tennis)—and the most distinctive voices among them have become iconic.

But why do complete strangers seek advice from people they hardly know? And likewise, how do advice columnists—who are rarely psychologists or ethicists by training—justify their answers?

Hazlitt recently gathered four of our favourite columnists for a round of shoptalk on the ethics and challenges of the advice game. Cheryl Strayed, otherwise known as ‘Dear Sugar’ at The Rumpus, has published two books this year: the New York Times bestseller Wild, a heartrending memoir about her arduous solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of a marriage break-up and her mother’s death; and a collection of her ‘Dear Sugar’ columns titled Tiny Beautiful Things. Cary Tennis writes the ‘Since You Asked’ column at Salon, where his existential musings have offered comfort to readers since 2001. Emily Yoffe is Slate’s ‘Dear Prudence’, while her other writing has appeared in the New York Times and Esquire. Lynn Coady is a former advice columnist for The Globe and Mail and her novel, The Antagonist, was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.

Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?

Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.

Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, “Move forward.” The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of “My husband looks at porn.”

Lynn: With 'Group Therapy,' because of the nature of the column, I got a lot of emotional etiquette questions. It had a jury effect. A lot of people wrote in about some relationship they had, and both parties were hurt and insulted by something the other had done, and the over arching question was “Which one of us is the asshole here?”

Emily: Another thing I’ve learned from the column is write the damn thank you note! This feeling of “I haven’t been sufficiently acknowledged” is really deep. Read the Bible. Cain and Abel. What was that over? God liked this gift better than that gift. They seem trivial, but they’re big.

Cheryl: That’s funny. I hardly get etiquette or work-related stuff. I get a lot of sex and love questions. There are far more 28-year-old virgins out there then I ever would have imagined.

Emily: Don’t you want to put them together?

Cheryl: Introduce them to each other? Yeah. There are several questions from virgins that stump us. I’ve gotten questions from virgins that ask, “How do you get to the point where you have sex with someone else?” I don’t know how to explain that. I always had the opposite problem, like how do you get to a place where you don’t have sex with someone?It’s funny.

Emily: I agree. There’s something heartbreaking about that. I get a lot of “I’m 25, 27, 28. Everyone says I’m attractive. I have a good job, but no one from the opposite sex has ever touched me.” And you wonder. There are some people who miss the boat in high school and they think there’s some kind of magical thing that happened that they missed. And they get older and older and they’re heading toward becoming a 40-year-old virgin.

Cheryl: Well maybe that’s a part of it. They missed that moment where they were supposed to do that thing. And then now they’re on the other side of it and it becomes an issue. Cary, how have you answered this?

Cary: The introversion/extroversion thing is hard sometimes. Some people are deeply introverted and it’s hard to fathom. As my detractors will be happy to note, I don’t always provide answers. Sometimes I’m just writing a thing. I answer a lot of questions that are unanswerable, because I’m not really answering them. I’m like singing a song. I’m trying to say something comforting.

Emily: I think Cary gets to the heart of what makes each of our columns different. What you describe is very different from what I do. I’ve had people say, “I don’t know how you answered that.” I say I only answer the ones I think I can answer! People are looking at these columns for different things.

by Britt Harvey, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Illustration by Andrew Kolb
[ed. Repost August 25, 2012]