The Only State Where Everyone Gets Free Money

[ed. I remember thinking I'd frame my first PFD check because distributing free money to people for just living in the state seemed like a dumb political stunt (and there were many of those back then). It didn't take long to be disabused of that view. All of my son's checks were saved over the years and helped considerably in funding his college education.]

Every year, the state of Alaska hands each of its citizens hundreds to thousands of dollars, no strings attached. The only requirement for receiving the cash is that a person has a) held residence in Alaska for more than one year and is b) alive.

To citizens in the state, the Permanent Fund Dividend is a deeply beloved if sometimes controversial policy. To those outside it, it’s often regarded as a curiosity. The annual payout makes headlines when it happens—Alaska’s giving people free money!—and has, typically, been forgotten just as quickly.

Recent years, however, have seen a groundswell of attention to the underlying concept. Interest in basic income ideas continue to percolate worldwide. As grim studies portend incoming job shortages, as inequality festers, and as automation threatens to throw economies into turmoil, the notion that a state could give a regular, guaranteed income—a minimum salary distributed to every citizen, regardless of age, employment, or social standing—has been sounding better and better. And Alaska’s been doing it for years. A miniature version of it, anyway.

“The Alaska dividend is pretty much the closest thing the world has to a universal basic income anywhere,” Scott Santens, who is perhaps the web’s most active basic income advocate, told me. Not only that, he says, but a basic income could help citizens fight the impacts of climate change. President Obama’s recent trip to Alaska was focused on highlighting the calamity that human-induced warming is bringing to the region; perhaps we should be paying attention as well to a policy, found only here, that may help keep society stable and more equal in the face of a warmer, job-scarce future.

Alaska’s Permanent Fund was established in 1976, in the midst of a black gold rush; the massive Trans-Alaska pipeline was in the process of being built, and the state had reaped $900 million in revenue from the sale of drilling leases in Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America, in a matter of years. In a matter of a few more, it’d spent it. Alaskans soon recognized that their enormous oil reserves were nonetheless limited, so, with a kind of longterm forward-thinking rarely seen in politics today, they voted to add an amendment to the state constitution to establish a fund that would protect a portion of all incoming oil wealth for future generations.

“There was a general recognition that the mineral royalties the state was creating weren’t going to go on forever,” Valerie Mertz, the CEO of the Alaska Permanent Fund, told me. “The idea was to take this nonrenewable resource and turn it into a sustainable resource for the state. A way to lock some money away from a time when the state’s doing well, to save it for a rainy day, if you will.”

The amendment stipulates that "at least 25 percent of all mineral lease rentals, royalties, royalty sales proceeds, federal mineral revenue-sharing payments and bonuses received by the state be placed in a permanent fund, the principal of which may only be used for income-producing investments." The Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-owned corporation, was created to manage and invest that revenue.

The governor at the time was Jay Hammond, a rugged, barrel-chested New York transplant and army vet. As the mayor of Bristol Bay, the story goes, Hammond saw the unfairness inherent in a foreign company coming in and profiting off of natural resources that belonged to everybody. He enacted a three percent tax on fish caught in the area, which was distributed directly to everybody else.

Once in the state’s highest office, according to The New York Times, “Mr. Hammond, a Republican, persuaded voters to approve the establishment of a permanent fund to handle the state's petroleum royalties.” (His original plan, which was passed but ruled unconstitutional, was known as “Alaska, Inc," and was designed to bequeath shares in the fund to every Alaskan once a year.) In 1980, Hammond pushed another amendment to the state constitution, creating the Permanent Fund dividend (PFD) that would pay out a portion of the Fund to everyone. The first payment, of $1,000 to each citizen, was made in 1982.

“Oil is not the most important thing about what's been happening in Alaska since 1982,” Santens says. “The most important thing is that instead of resources being freely given away, rent is instead being earned on shared resources and every resident is receiving an equal share of the fruits of that rent.”

In 2014, the net income of the fund was $6.8 billion dollars and the dividend doled out $1,884 to 640,000 citizens, despite a decline in oil revenues that year. Once the tally for the earnings of the fiscal year is made, the corporation makes a transfer to the state, which determines the size of the dividend. The calculation that figures the amount of the payout in a given year is enshrined in state law and is based on the average cash earnings of the Fund over five years—the whole formula is here—but generally, the higher the earnings of the Fund and the revenue from oil leases, the higher the payout. It's a somewhat confusing process, and even Alaskans are apt to confuse the Permanent Fund, the corporation that manages the oil wealth, and the Permanent Fund Dividend, the annual mass payout by the state.

This year, the payment to every man, woman, and child (yes, children get the payment too, though it is entrusted to their guardians) is expected to surpass $2,000. The Fund, in other words, is huge. Interestingly, Mertz credits the payouts with driving the investment success of the corporation, which now employs 42 people. “It’s been very successful,” she tells me, “the dividend component of the program keeps people tuned into the Fund, and that in turn motivates us to do the best we can.” When it began, the Fund was worth barely more than one billion dollars.

“At the end of the fiscal year on June 30th the Fund was worth $51.2 billion,” Achee says.

by Brian Merchant, Motherboard |  Read more:

Image: via:

How to Use a Looper

[ed. I've wanted one of these for a while but thought there might be a bit of a learning curve. If you'd like to see a Master (Mistress?) of looping, check out someone we've featured here before: Josie Charlwood, Feel Good and Electric Feel.]

Hapa

[ed. Possibly my favorite Hawaiian song.]

A Reporter at Wit’s End: The Firebombing of Japan

On the night of March 9, 1945, American B-29 bombers burned 15 square miles of Tokyo, killing 100,000 civilians and leaving more than one million homeless. It was the greatest of the incendiary air raids, but it was far from the last. On March 11, American B-29s bombed Nagoya; March 13, Osaka; March 16, Kobe; March 18, Nagoya again. Five raids in nine days, 32 square miles destroyed in Japan’s four most populous cities — 41 percent of the area the Army Air Forces destroyed in all of Germany during the entire war, and at a total cost of only 22 B-29s and their crews. General Curtis LeMay, who was in charge, quit, at least for a time. He had run out of napalm. Two months later, his stocks replenished, he systematically burned 62 smaller Japanese cities. (...)

St. Clair McKelway, a veteran reporter for the magazine, had taken a leave of absence from the magazine to serve as a public relations officer in the Army Air Forces (AAF). He was stationed with the Bomber Command in Guam at the time, taking his orders directly from General LeMay, and he fully supported LeMay’s belief that the bombing would bring about a swift end to the war. The New Yorker’s managing editor, Harold Ross, accepted McKelway’s reporting. He should have been cautious for two reasons: first, McKelway was no longer his reporter, but was a lieutenant colonel under military orders. And second, Ross knew that McKelway had a history of playing fast and loose with facts. McKelway twisted the bombing story to match the AAF line, changed dates and facts to put himself at the story’s center and flatter his military superiors. Most importantly, he whitewashed what many now view as a war crime: the US’s concerted strategy of incinerating civilians wholesale in their homes.

McKelway’s deception is a cautionary lesson worthy of coverage in the “Wayward Press” series, but it is also a recurring tale in the media. The New Yorker editors were delighted to find they had a reporter working, living, and relaxing with the commanders and the bomber crews destroying Japan. No other publication had that sort of access. Fifty-eight years later, The New York Times would publish accounts of its own reporter, Judith Miller, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. She based her stories on exclusive access to Ahmad Chalabi and to high-level Pentagon officials, an exclusivity she protected fiercely. Like McKelway, much of Miller’s story proved to be false — a mixture of lies, unverified claims, and vanity. Both McKelway’s and Miller’s editors knew their reporters were personally erratic, but the stories were just too good. They had to be published.

---

Robert Guillain, an eyewitness, wrote of the Tokyo bombing in his book I Saw Tokyo Burning (1981) that the bombers “circled and criss-crossed the area, leaving great rings of fire behind them,” that a house could be hit by 10 or even more small bombs, which scattered “a kind of flaming dew [napalm] that skittered along the roofs, setting fire to everything it splashed.” The houses, made of wood and paper, were “lighted from the inside like paper laterns.”

The hurricane-force winds puffed up great clots of flame and sent burning planks planing through the air to fell people and set fire to what they touched … In the dense smoke, where the wind was so hot it seared the lungs, people struggled, then burst into flames where they stood … [I]t was often the refugees’ feet that began burning first: the men’s puttees and the women’s trousers caught fire and ignited the rest of their clothing. Proper air-raid clothing as recommended by the government consisted of a heavily padded hood … to protect people’s ears from bomb blasts … The hoods flamed under the rain of sparks; people who did not burn from the feet up burned from the head down. Mothers who carried their babies on their backs, Japanese style, would discover too late that the padding that enveloped the infant had caught fire … Wherever there was a canal, people hurled themselves into the water; in shallow places, people waited, mouths just above the surface of the water. Hundreds of them were later found dead; not drowned, but asphyxiated by the burning air and smoke … In other places, the water got so hot that the luckless bathers were simply boiled alive.

And here’s what General LeMay, who had masterminded the raid, wrote in his memoirs (Mission with LeMay: My Story, 1965):

Drafts from the Tokyo fires bounced our airplanes into the sky like ping-pong balls. According to the Tokyo fire chief, the situation was out of control within minutes. It was like an explosive forest fire in dry pine woods. The racing flames engulfed ninety-five fire engines and killed one hundred and twenty-five firemen … About one-fourth of the city went up in smoke that night anyway. More than two hundred and sixty-seven thousand buildings.

He quoted the Air Force history of the war, and he italicized the quote out of pride for what he and his men had done: “No other air attack of the war, either in Japan or Europe, was so destructive of life and property.”

The napalm-bombing campaign worked so smoothly that it had its own momentum, yet it did not receive the press coverage it merited. The bombers’ very efficiency made its operation less newsworthy: there was little to photograph from 30,000 feet, and American military casualties were light. AAF press releases minimized Japanese civilian casualties, and even President Truman seems not to have fully realized what LeMay’s bombers had done. He wrote in his memoirs that the bombing began to do real damage to Japan only in midsummer 1945. Victory in Europe, not the incineration of Japan, was the big story.

by Patrick Coffey, LA Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

And Now I Have to Say Something About Kim Davis

I've pretty much ignored Kim Davis—save the odd tweet—since she first made the news for refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple. Davis is the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, an elected position, and everyone from the governor of Kentucky to the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered Davis to comply with the post-Obergefell law-of-the-land and issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Davis has refused because she's a Christian, you see, and, as a Christian, she believes same-sex marriage to be sinful and unbiblical. Being forced to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples would violate her religious freedom, Davis insists, and lawyers from the odious rightwing Christian special rights group Liberty Counsel have stepped in to protect Davis from the horror of having to do her fucking job.

So, anyway, yesterday afternoon the Supreme Court ordered Davis to immediately start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This morning Davis refused to comply.

In a raucous scene in this little town, two same-sex couples walked into the Rowan County Courthouse, trailed by television cameras and chanting protesters on both sides of the issue, only to be turned away by the county clerk, Kim Davis. As one couple, David Ermold and David Moore, tried to engage her in an argument, Ms. Davis said several times that her office would not issue any marriage licenses. “Under whose authority?” Mr. Ermold asked. “Under God’s authority,” she replied. 

Ms. Davis at first remained in her office with the blinds drawn, while a deputy clerk told Mr. Ermold and Mr. Moore and the other couple, April Miller and Karen Roberts, that no licenses would be issued Tuesday. But the two men began shouting for her to come out and confront them face to face. “Tell her to come out and face the people she’s discriminating against,” Mr. Ermold said. Ms. Davis emerged briefly, and asked them to leave.

Under God's authority.

Davis and her supporters would like to see the "rule of law" replaced with "the rule of your imaginary friends." The trouble with that, of course, is that people have very different ideas about who their imaginary friends are and what their imaginary friends think is sick, sinful, or icky. (Their imaginary friends, in fact, might not think much of your imaginary friends.) So empowering people—particularly public servants—to violate the rights of their fellow citizens based on the opinions of their various imaginary friends is an invitation to civic chaos.

I would say I can't wait for a Muslim county clerk in, say, Dearborn, Michigan (which has a huge Muslim community), to refuse to issue a marriage license to a Christian couple on the grounds that the this kafir couple hasn't been paying jizya... but that's not going to happen. Religious minorities in this country intuitively understand that to empower religious bigots like Davis is to paint bullseyes on their own backs. So the Jesus-freak goons at the Liberty Counsel work to frame discrimination as a "religious freedom" because they're confident that American Christians will be the ones doing the discriminating, not suffering from it.

Anyway, I haven't written much about Kim Davis because I knew how this was going to play out after Davis first made the news: Davis would continue to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, she would disobey multiple court orders, she would take it all the way to the Supreme Court, she would disobey the Supreme Court's order, she would be charged with contempt (her contempt hearing is scheduled for Thursday), she would possibly wind up in prison and definitely wind up losing her job. Then she would "write" a book about her traumatic experiences—that book is doubtless being ghostwritten for her already—and finally she'll spend the rest of her life on the rightwing speaking circuit playing the persecuted Christian martyr lady. I saw it coming and I didn't want to help build Davis up—I didn't want to help cash in—but my efforts to ignore Davis didn't slow her rise to fame. The events this morning in Rowan County have led the news summary on NPR all day and are currently the top story on the homepage of New York Times.

But no one is stating the obvious: this isn't about Kim Davis standing up for her supposed principles—proof of that in a moment—it's about Kim Davis cashing in. There's a big pile of sweet, sweet bigot money out there waiting for her. If the owners of a pizza parlor could rake in a million dollars just by threatening not to cater the gay wedding no one asked them to cater... just imagine how much of that sweet, sweet bigot money Kim Davis is going to rake in. I'm sure Kim Davis is already imagining it.

And speaking of Kim Davis' principles...

by Dan Savage, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Backpack Makers Rethink a Student Staple

The inside of Alejandro Sarete’s backpack is jammed with the objects of a busy student life: smartphone, USB thumb drive, playing cards, lip balm. Cho Young-Uk’s shoulder bag is more minimalist in content: Lenovo laptop and adapter.

Mr. Sarete and Mr. Cho, both students at New York University, have something missing from their stashes: piles of textbooks.

“I don’t really have to carry around textbooks anymore, like I used to in high school,” said Mr. Cho, a sophomore. All but two of his classes — Spanish history and financial accounting — had moved the coursework online.

“I think fewer people have them, for sure,” Mr. Sarete said. “I actually still like physical paper, but I’m an exception.”

As students increasingly go back to school with gadgets instead of textbooks, and no longer need huge backpacks to haul them around, backpack makers in the $2.7 billion industry are rethinking not only the perennial style of back-to-school packs but also the mission of the ubiquitous carrying gear that for decades has been an annual must-buy for students of all ages.

For clues, Eric Rothenhaus and his team at VF Corporation, the apparel giant that owns a leading maker of backpacks, JanSport, sought the advice of some extreme backpack users. They studied mountaineers whose lives can depend on their gear. They talked to the homeless in San Francisco, who live out of shopping carts.

And they visited campuses to observe the habits and habitats of college students, who buy many of the eight million backpacks JanSport sells each year. “We realized we needed to forget everything we knew about the category,” said Mr. Rothenhaus, director of research and design at JanSport.

“We went out to the streets of New York, to San Francisco, to college campuses, and we started to ask: What are the things we carry with us? How do we carry them? And how is that changing?”

Americans bought more backpacks than ever last year— 174 million of them, according to the Travel Goods Association. The bulk of these were purchased during back-to-school shopping season, typically the second-largest sales season for retailers and an important bellwether for year-end holiday sales.

But there is ample hand-wringing within the industry that it is not keeping up with the times. After growing at a fast clip over the last decade, as offices grew more casual and men increasingly switched from briefcases to backpacks, the market for backpack sales in the United States is expected to grow just 3.9 percent this year, according to data from Euromonitor International. That is down from 9 percent five years ago.

“The market for backpacks is becoming saturated and is nearing its peak," Ayako Homma, a Euromonitor research analyst, wrote in an email. Consumers, she said, are “looking for something new and different.”

Those concerns add to pessimism over the entire late-summer shopping season. Consumers will spend about 6 percent less on back-to-school purchases compared with a year ago, the National Retail Federation predicts, in part because there are few new “must have” electronics so far this year.

In backpacks, too, experts say there is a dearth of hits. They say innovation has stalled in a market dominated by VF, which also owns the Eastpak, Timberland and North Face brands and controls 55 percent of backpack sales in the United States. Many packs on students’ backs as they go back to school this week are largely indistinguishable from those their parents carried.

“I think there’s room in the market for something new,” said Lindsey Shirley, a clothing and textiles expert at Utah State University who is developing a new degree in outdoor product design to address a perceived shortfall of fresh talent in the field. “There’s definitely room for innovation.”

by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Shodo Kawarazaki, 1954
via:

Skylake

The sixth generation of Intel’s Core processors, known more approachably as Skylake, will start invading new laptops and desktops over the following weeks and months. With them, they’ll bring a few enhancements you should know about—especially if your current rig is starting to show some rust.

Before we get started, though, it’s probably healthy to manage some expectations. Better processors will always be welcome, but chips aren’t progressing in a way that results in huge performance leaps the way they did a decade ago, says 451 analyst Peter Christy. Rather than raw computing power, the focus has shifted to size and efficiency.

“What you have to do is take these better transistors, which is the right way to think about what Intel does, and purpose them in a different way,” explains Christy. “A way you can purpose them is by shrinking them, or making them cheaper, or more power efficient.”

Fortunately, cheaper, thinner, and more efficient are all traits that are still very much worth chasing. And Skylake should provide all three.

A Big Leap From Your Old Box

Intel has focused its Skylake comparisons on notebooks from five years ago, which is a bit like comparing standardized test scores between a five-year-old and his 15-year-old sister. Even still, the gaps are impressively wide.

Next to those rickety 2010 machines, Skylake delivers more than double the speed, triple the battery life, and wakes up four times faster. It also enables features like WiDi (Intel’s mirroring solution), Cortana, and touch interactions that would not have been possible five years ago.

Of course, all of these specs and facts are also mostly true of Broadwell, last year’s latest and greatest Core processor, next to which Skylake marks far less significant gains; a 10 percent speed boost, the ability to scratch out a bit more battery, and a graphical bump that will mostly be appreciated by serious gamers.

Still, Intel’s choice to point to older machines isn’t simply a marketing ploy, says Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategies. It’s legitimately the most helpful point of comparison for a huge number of people.

“There are literally over 600 million PCs out there that are over four years old,” says Moorhead. “It’s not that people aren’t using their PCs, they’re just using them less because they’re spreading their computing across phones, tablets, and watches.” In other words, the number of people to whom Intel’s gaudier comparisons apply is nearly twice the population of the United States. If you’re one of them, you may feel a bit like Rip Van Acer.

“The right comparison is to look at what those 600 million people are using,” Moorhead continues, citing the bulk and dilapidated batteries of those computational dinosaurs. “What they’re looking at now is for $499 to $699 they can get a very thin PC, with touch, more than likely seven to eight hours of battery life, weigh maybe 40 percent less. It will probably be able to rotate back, if you want to use it as a tablet.” Throw in features like Intel’s RealSense camera, which obviates the need for a system password by logging you in based only on your face, and the convenience factor of fewer cables, and you’ve got a strong case finally to upgrade.

So no, it’s not a surprise that Skylake is significantly better than the Core processors of 2010. What might catch you off-guard, though, is just how much more PCs can do overall.

by Brian Barrett, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Intel

Surprise Military Reunions At NFL Games Reach Peak Bullshit

[ed. See also: ​The NFL's Salute To Service Is Horseshit]

During last weekend’s preseason St. Louis Rams game, a familiar ritual played out: With a stadium full of fans and a television audience watching, Rams cheerleader Candace Ruocco Valentine was surprised by the arrival of her husband August Valentine, a Marine Corps first lieutenant, who had just returned home from service abroad.

As a series of visuals, shown in the video below, it was a sterling example of the genre. The All-American cheerleader literally drops her pom-poms to run toward her husband, relief written across her face as she does; the happy young couple embraces; and Rampage, an anthropomorphic ram, looks on approvingly at their release from anxiety and fear.

As a set of facts, though, the heartwarming moment was basically bullshit, despite which the viral glurge machine went ahead and ran with the story of a joint triumph for the Valentines, the St. Louis Rams, the NFL, and the Pentagon.

by Tom Ley, Deadspin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. This little guy hung out here all night and would not move. Figured he was either intoxicated or trying to sell me insurance.]
photo: markk

Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality

At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our society make up around 5 percent of the enrollments. This meager figure is often explained as the consequence of a regrettable reality: qualified students from disadvantaged backgrounds simply do not exist in significant numbers. But it’s not so. A recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard shows that the great majority of high-achieving low-income students (those scoring at or above the ninetieth percentile on standardized tests, and with high school grades of A- or higher) never apply to any selective college, much less to several, as their better-off peers typically do. Their numbers, which Hoxby and Avery estimate at between 25,000 and 35,000 of each year’s high school seniors, “are much greater than college admissions staff generally believe,” in part because most such students get little if any counseling in high school about the intricate process of applying to a selective college—so they rarely do.

As for the colleges themselves, searching for more qualified low-income students and providing financial aid for them as well as for middle-income students are likely to require compensatory reductions in budgets for competing priorities. Scholarships for needy students can be solicited from donors—but there are “opportunity costs” in the sense that asking alumni to give to the scholarship fund precludes or reduces their giving for other purposes such as faculty chairs or a new dorm or gym. At my own university, which has lately raised billions of dollars in large part to finance a campus expansion, the percentage of college students receiving financial aid has, inexcusably, declined.

Meanwhile, at public institutions, which enroll many more students than private colleges—some 14 million of the roughly 18 million undergraduates who attend nonprofit colleges—subsidies to keep college affordable have also been dropping. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets. Some states have seen a modest recovery since the Great Recession, but recently the governors of Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois have proposed new cuts.

As a result, the cost of public higher education has shifted markedly from taxpayers to students and their families, in the form of rapidly rising tuition. Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of family income required for families in the bottom income quintile to cover the average cost of attending a four-year public institution rose from 39 percent to 55 percent. For top-quintile families over that same period, the corresponding rise went from 7 percent to 9 percent.

The story these numbers tell is of a higher education system—public and private—that is reflecting the stratification of our society more than resisting it. Those students who do get to college are distributed, like airline passengers, into distinct classes of service, but with incomparably larger and lingering effects. In 2010, private nonprofit universities, whose students tend to be relatively affluent, spent on average nearly $50,000 per student—with the wealthiest colleges spending nearly double that amount. At public four-year institutions expenditure per student was $36,000, while community colleges, where minority and first-generation students are concentrated and which stress vocational training and offer associate rather than bachelor degrees, could spend just $12,000 per student. Moreover, while the number of Pell grants for needy students has jumped over the last forty years from half a million to more than ten million, a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.

These numerical disparities have stark human consequences. Getting through college can be a challenge even for confident students with families on whom they can count to cushion the shock if a parent falls ill or loses a job, or if unexpected expenses arise. For students without such a buffer, college can be a very hard road indeed. Yet in our current system the relation between vulnerability and support is an inverse one. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores. In the United States today, three of every five children from families in the top income quartile earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-four, while for those in the bottom quartile the rate is one in four (see Figure 1).

These are indefensible realities in a nation that claims to believe in equal opportunity. Yet some people look at this picture and say that the whole idea of mass higher education was misguided from the start—that the United States should have emulated instead the European model of test-based tracking by which a select few are chosen early in life for university training that leads to public service or the professions, while the rest are channeled into vocational schools or the trades.

by Andrew Delbanco, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Jean Miotte
via:

The Misanthropic Genius of Joy Williams

A few years ago, the writer Joy Williams’s favorite church needed to dispose of a few extra pews after a renovation. Williams attends the church only in April and October, when her frequent cross-country drives take her to Laramie, Wyo., but she wanted a pew anyway. She borrowed a trailer, got a friend to help her load the pew and drove a thousand miles, pulling it behind her enormous Bronco, her two German shepherds in the cab with her. Now the long, dark pew lives in her house in Tucson.

When Williams was a child, her father was a minister at a Congregational church in Portland, Me. ‘‘He gave a beautiful sermon,’’ she said as we hiked through Arizona’s Santa Catalina foothills on trails she walks every morning. I asked if she had ever considered being a preacher like her father: Her stories often reveal themselves as parables, and her writing on the environment is equal parts fire, brimstone and eulogy. ‘‘Oh, no, I’m too shy,’’ she said, before lapsing into a companionable silence, the only sound her Chuck Taylors’ crunch on the trailbed. ‘‘Maybe that’s what I need,’’ she cawed suddenly. ‘‘A pulpit that I take from reading to reading with me.’’

Williams is wiry and tanned, her hands and face biblically wrinkled. She is 71. Years ago, she lost her eyeglasses before a university appearance and had to wear prescription sunglasses at the lectern; appreciating, perhaps, the remoteness they facilitate, she has worn them ever since at all hours of the day and night. Not unlike that church pew in her living room, the sunglasses seem like an act of disregard for everyday comfort, an eccentricity that makes everyone else uneasy but Williams more secure.

It was just after dawn, but already the air was stifling. We reached a summit, and Williams drank from her dogs’ scratched and dented water bottle. Fat black ants swarmed into a crevice near our feet. Atop a nearby hill stood a trio of saguaros, the bottoms of their trunks black from some recent fire or decades-ago disease. Miles away, a single impossible thunderhead dropped rain in curtains over the Sonoran Desert. Nothing we could see cared about us.

To call her 50-year career that of a writer’s writer does not go far enough. Her three story collections and four darkly funny novels are mostly overlooked by readers but so beloved by generations of fiction masters that she might be the writer’s writer’s writer. ‘‘She did the important work of taking the tight, minimal Carveresque story and showing that you could retrofit it with comedy,’’ George Saunders told me, ‘‘that particularly American brand of funny that is made of pain.’’

The typical Williams protagonist is a wayward girl or young woman whose bad decisions, or bad attitude, or both, make her difficult to admire: She drives away while her husband is paying for gas, or ransacks a houseguest’s room to read her journal. In Williams’s precise, unsparing, surprising prose, her characters reach for the sublime but often fall miserably to earth: ‘‘Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness.’’ She has a gift for sentences whose unsettling turns — ‘‘While she was thinking of something perfectly balanced and amusing to say, the baby was born’’ — force readers to grapple, just as her characters grapple, with the way life will do what it wants with you. Other writers I spoke to about Williams’s work expressed a sense of awe at the grandeur underlying her stories of weirdos and misfits. ‘‘She’s a visionary,’’ Karen Russell told me, ‘‘and she resizes people against a cosmic backdrop.’’

This month, Knopf will publish ‘‘The Visiting Privilege,’’ a collection of 46 stories that cements Williams’s position not merely as one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance. The collection’s epigraph is a verse from 1 Corinthians: ‘‘We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’’ When Don DeLillo called to talk about Williams, he quoted that verse back to me. Then he said: ‘‘This is the definition of the classic American short story. And this is what Joy writes so beautifully.’’

by Dan Kois, NY Times Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Raymond Meeks

Google’s Driverless Cars Run Into Problem: Cars With Drivers

Google, a leader in efforts to create driverless cars, has run into an odd safety conundrum: humans.

Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.

Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.

It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book. “The real problem is that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who studies autonomous vehicles.

“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”

Traffic wrecks and deaths could well plummet in a world without any drivers, as some researchers predict. But wide use of self-driving cars is still many years away, and testers are still sorting out hypothetical risks — like hackers — and real world challenges, like what happens when an autonomous car breaks down on the highway.

For now, there is the nearer-term problem of blending robots and humans. Already, cars from several automakers have technology that can warn or even take over for a driver, whether through advanced cruise control or brakes that apply themselves. Uber is working on the self-driving car technology, and Google expanded its tests in July to Austin, Tex.

Google cars regularly take quick, evasive maneuvers or exercise caution in ways that are at once the most cautious approach, but also out of step with the other vehicles on the road.

“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

Since 2009, Google cars have been in 16 crashes, mostly fender-benders, and in every single case, the company says, a human was at fault.

by Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gordon De Los Santos/Google

William Adolphe Bouguereau, Cupid with Butterfly, 1888.
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Thoughts on Trump

To save myself from answering this question repeatedly, these are the thoughts I have had about Trump since he became a presidential candidate, which were partly expressed in a Politico article over a month ago.

First of all, I think his support is firm and shows no sign of diminishing. He has already weathered storms such as his criticism of John McCain that would have doomed any other candidate. Anyone who thinks he is the current version of Cain, Bachmann, Santorum or other nutcase that briefly led the GOP field in 2012 is dead wrong.

Keep in mind also that in primary elections, one doesn’t need majority support to win in a field with multiple candidates. And intensity of support is often more important than the percentage. Support for the designated favorite of party insiders is often exaggerated in polls and I think Trump’s supporters are unusually motivated.

Second, Trump’s positions on the issues are largely irrelevant to his success. None of his supporters care whether a wall across Mexico is remotely feasible or that he regularly flip-flops on the issues. What he is selling is attitude and a certain fascistic form of leadership. He will get things done, his supporters believe. And it’s less important what he will do than that he will do something.

Ironically, Republicans brought this on themselves in two ways. To begin with, they grossly oversold what they could do just with control of Congress. The Republican base really seems to have simply forgotten about the presidential veto or the Senate filibuster. They seem to have thought all they had to do was pass bills with a simple majority and they would magically become law. How else to explain voting over and over and over again to repeal Obamacare. It makes no sense unless my assumption is correct.

Additionally, Republicans are suffering from the gridlock that they themselves caused. We all know that nature abhors a vacuum, but I think it abhors gridlock as well. That has always been the appeal of fascism and it would be very foolish to believe that Americans are immune from its attractive qualities of getting things done that need to get done. And let us not forget that Trump is talking about genuine problems even if his solutions are simplistic or even wrongheaded.

My third point in Trump’s favor is his willingness to fund his own campaign and ability to run such a campaign on the cheap. By the latter, I mean that he started his campaign with close to 100% name ID and he has the amazing ability to get massive free media exposure any time he wants it. The mainstream media seem powerless to ignore the newsworthiness of anything he says about anything at any time in any place. In lieu of a traditional campaign staff, all Trump needs are the PR people he has long employed, a scheduler and a pilot for his plane.

by Bruce Bartlett, The Big Picture | Read more:
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Streets With No Game

Behavioural effects of city street design have been reported before. In 2006, the Danish urbanist Jan Gehl observed that people walk more quickly in front of blank façades; compared with an open, active façade, people are less likely to pause or even turn their heads in such locations. They simply bear down and try to get through the unpleasant monotony of the street until they emerge on the other side, hopefully to find something more interesting.

For planners concerned with making city streets more amenable and pedestrian-friendly, findings such as these have enormous implications: by simply changing the appearance and physical structure of a building’s bottom three metres, they can exert a dramatic impact on the manner in which a city is used. Not only are people more likely to walk around in cityscapes with open and lively façades, but the kinds of things that they do in such places actually change. They pause, look around and absorb their surroundings while in a pleasant state of positive affect and with a lively, attentive nervous system. Because of these kinds of influences, they actually want to be there. And because of such effects, many cities have carefully designed building codes for new construction that dictate some of the contributing factors to happy and lively façades: in cities such as Stockholm, Melbourne and Amsterdam, building codes specify that new construction cannot simply be parachuted into place. There is a hard lower limit on the number of doorways per unit of sidewalk length, and there are specifications for transparency between the building and street in the form of clear windows with two-way views.

In Gehl’s terms, a good city street should be designed so that the average walker, moving at a rate of about 5km per hour, sees an interesting new site about once every five seconds. This does not happen in front of Whole Foods in East Houston Street, nor outside any of the other large, monolithic structures such as banks, courthouses and business towers in cities throughout the world.

If city streets are designed with endless closed façades, such as those seen in supermarkets and bank headquarters, people might feel a little less happy and they might walk faster and pause less. But what is really at stake here? The real risks of bad design might lie less in unhappy streets filled with unmotivated pedestrians, and more in the amassing of a population of urban citizens with epidemic levels of boredom.

Boredom research has, on the whole, been conducted by individuals who were especially repulsed by the feeling. William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, wrote in 1890 that ‘stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience’. In more recent times, serious discussion and measurement of states of boredom and stimulation began with the work of the late University of Toronto psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who argued that much of our behaviour is motivated by curiosity alone: the need to slake our incessant thirst for the new.

To make his case for information-seeking as a prime motivator of human behaviour, Berlyne turned to a branch of applied mathematics known as information theory. This powerful set of ideas, born in the laboratories of the Bell Telephone Company in the 1940s, was designed to help understand the transmission of signals through wires. The unit of information was described as the bit, which could range in value from zero, containing no information, to one, being filled with information. One of the keys to the theory is that elements that don’t occur very often provide more information than those that occur commonly. Imagine you retrieve a garbled message from your voicemail, and can make out only certain words. If you heard the message: ‘. . . the . . . to . . . and . . . you . . .,’ you would learn very little; the bit value of the utterance would be close to zero. But if you heard: ‘I’m . . . way . . . dinner . . . call . . . later,’ you could do a good job of disentangling at least a part of the meaning. In terms of information theory, both utterances contain the same number of words. The difference is that the first contains only words that appear with high frequency in English, and carry few bits of information, while the second message contains words with lower frequencies (hence lower probabilities of occurrence), and more information.

Though it might seem like a stretch, there is in fact a connection between the technicalities of phone transmission and an understanding of urban psychology. According to Berlyne, it wasn’t just signals sent along wires that could be characterised in terms of their information content, but any kind of object that we can perceive, including visual displays such as pictures, three-dimensional objects, even streetscapes.

Now the reason for the dismal recordings of happiness and arousal in participants standing in front of blank façades should be clearer. At a psychological level, these constructions fail us because we are biologically disposed to favour locations defined by complexity, interest, and the passing of messages of one kind or another.

The opposite of this situation translates, essentially, to boredom. Though we might not all agree on a precise definition of boredom, some of the signs are well-known: an inflated sense of the inexorably slow passage of time; a kind of restlessness that can manifest as both an unpleasant and aversive inner mental state but also with overt bodily symptoms: fidgeting; postural adjustment; restless gaze; perhaps yawning.

Some researchers have suggested that boredom is characterised (perhaps even defined by) a state of low arousal. In some studies, it seems that when people are asked to sit quietly without doing anything in particular – presumably a trigger for boredom – physiological arousal appears to decrease. But Berlyne, and recently others, have suggested that boredom can sometimes be accompanied by high states of arousal and perhaps even stress. (...)

Boredom can also lead to risky behaviour. Surveys among people with addictions, including substance and gambling addictions, suggest that their levels of boredom are generally higher, and that episodes of boredom are one of the most common predictors of relapse or risky behaviour.

Merrifield and Danckert suggest that exposure to even a brief, boring experience is sufficient to change the brain and body’s chemistry in such a way as to generate stress. It might seem extreme to say that a brief encounter with a boring building could be seriously hazardous to one’s health, but what about the cumulative effects of immersion, day after day, in the same oppressively dull surroundings?

by Colin Ellard , Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty

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